71–80 of 300 posts
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I have been interviewed at Google and I was given a brainteaser. "Can you estimate Google AdWords revenue for Italy - B2B?"
"Estimating it from the taxes paid to the state, I would say 0€." (Yes, that’s not the kind of expected answer)
I interviewed a full day at a mathematical hedge fund. Not exactly brainteasers, rather a barrage of good, solid math and stats questions. Such a day is exhilarating (like skiing the Olympics) but truly exhausting, and only partially related to whether one gets an offer. My advice to anyone doing this would be to give up the last 10% of performance in order to focus some on contextual awareness. These puzzles are a f…
where did you find examples to practice - im horrible at these types of questions but would like to get better.
That being said if you're just talking about mathematics and statistics problems the more mainstream hedge funds like to ask their quant candidates, read Crack's Heard on the Street, Joshi-Denson-Downes' Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers, and Zhou's A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews.
The single most effective interview question I ask: "What do you want to do?". I drill down on that to a granulator level as I try to make sure the tasks, duties and overall position matches what the candidate really wants for themselves. Its followed-up with a "How would you do it?", again persisting in the discussion (not interrogation) until we both are comfortable with the sensibility and symmetry of the answers.
Very few people will know exactly what they want to do in the next few years. There is only what you as the employer need to get done and what they as an employee are willing and able to do.
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Would you say the questions that fund asked you are relevant to the work you do (or would be doing) there? I think that's the core criticism most people levy against the "high tech" interview questions.
People that don't get the offer tend to complain about such things. They are asking questions to measure how you think, to measure your potential, to see how you handle stress. If you are stressing over an interview, what will you do when you lose $1 million in 10 seconds?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you say the questions that fund asked you are relevant to the work you do (or would be doing) there? I think that's the core criticism most people levy against the "high tech" interview questions.
People that don't get the offer tend to complain about such things. They are asking questions to measure how you think, to measure your potential, to see how you handle stress. If you are stressing over an interview, what will you do when you lose $1 million in 10 seconds?
This reminds me of Jewish Problems[0], designed to "prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade" at the entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…
I will say that out of my loop, there were only 2 interviewers that came across as intentionally mean, the rest were genuinely wanting to see how I solved problems and understand what my thought process was, which is what most interviewers should be attempting to assess.
The intentionally mean ones need to be culled from your interviewer pool though. Does it really do a service to Google or to the candidate to stump them, and also humiliate them for not knowing the answer you were hoping to get from them? There are ways to make a candidate feel good about failing an interview despite not making the hiring bar.
And remember, these candidates are still your customers, and human beings. They will remember how they were treated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you say the questions that fund asked you are relevant to the work you do (or would be doing) there? I think that's the core criticism most people levy against the "high tech" interview questions.
People that don't get the offer tend to complain about such things. They are asking questions to measure how you think, to measure your potential, to see how you handle stress. If you are stressing over an interview, what will you do when you lose $1 million in 10 seconds?