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I once was interviewing for an internship at a quant firm in Chicago (I was in my Sophomore year I think at UIUC) and my interview went pretty well up to the point of my second-last interview of the day. Then, I sat down with the VP of engineering, and he opened the interview with "so, what do you think it is we do here?" And I naturally stuttered through a canned answer about how they use arbitrage opportunities in…
Canonical. Their desktop experience had already lost its shine (and, effing snaps), but I made the mistake of believing that they might be cool anyway, without doing my research. Intelligence test? Story about high school? Reflex test? The actual red flag for me was their final admission that they require an unpaid internship in the form of "community participation." https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/tkc348/my_…
Knowing this stuff makes me feel weird about people who still ended up working there. Idealism? Very good pay?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious what the answer was. I've read plenty about how the boutique finance sector is basically a parasite that only benefits a small cohort of already wealthy individuals, would like to hear what the other side has to say.
Right? Like, I tried really hard to prepare a very neutral answer focusing on taking advantage of arbitrage and fixing over- or under-priced securities, which I think is the closest thing to a benefit you could come up with. And that apparently wasn't good enough for this guy.
Sounds like you gave an answer that didn't mention that at all, and may have presented the firm as merely taking advantage of other people's mistakes to make profit. Clearly that's not how he saw it, and the VP correctly guessed from your social media that you may not actually have understood the part of the finance industry that you were applying to work for. The question was to check whether you'd actually be enthusiastic about the work you were doing and you did indeed fail it.
This would be like if you turned up at Google and an interviewer said, "What do we do here" and you said "exploit data to profit from people's ignorance" and when they gave you a second chance you couldn't answer.
Frankly you can't get a job at most firms if you can't explain why you think the company should exist.
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Re: shorting. If people who believe a company is undervalued are allowed to trade based on that belief then people who believe a company is overvalued should be allowed to do the same.
Are shorting and longing symmetric? IE, do they influence the market in the same way? They seem much more complicated than straightforward stock purchase and fractional ownership.
I once was interviewing for an internship at a quant firm in Chicago (I was in my Sophomore year I think at UIUC) and my interview went pretty well up to the point of my second-last interview of the day. Then, I sat down with the VP of engineering, and he opened the interview with "so, what do you think it is we do here?" And I naturally stuttered through a canned answer about how they use arbitrage opportunities in…
I asked this exact question ("what is the net benefit of currency arbitrage") and nobody has been able to articulate is. Stock markets, I can see- they existed and exist to share risk and profit. But shorting and arbitrage, it's much harder for me to understand those. (and yes, that VP was a sociopath)
It means you can actually ask the question "how many dollars is a pound worth" and get a meaningful answer.
If arbitrage wasn't possible for some reason, and it's a natural phenomenon so that would have to involve pretty horrific levels of state-backed control, then the answer would be:
"It's $X in London and heading down, was $Y in New York yesterday and heading up, and $Z in Chicago but you probably can't get an account there because it takes ages and requires special paperwork, and "
You would then spend the rest of the afternoon attempting to figure out how the hell to do a basic international trade or FX transaction and by the time you'd finished reviewing the prices they'd have all changed again.
Arbitrageurs seek out and correct fixable price disparities, thus enabling you to talk about one global price for a particular type of trade. This has tremendous value for everyone.
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....what was the lead up to that statement? "I'm autistic" "Oh, you don't seem autistic"
So the story here is that the CEO's brother is Autistic, and was one of the major inspirations for the company. Being "out" about my disability, I thought it was really cool at the time and mentioned that I'm Autistic, and seeing her embrace her brother as part of the core mission of the company was inspiring.
The fashion for high functioning, highly articulate individuals calling themselves "autistic" is relatively new. To the vast majority of people the word autistic means severe disability that requires constant care, involves repetitive stimming motions and often is directly visible via an abnormal facial structure.
In this conventional usage of the term autistic people don't turn up to job interviews and say "Oh your brother is autistic, cool that it inspired you, I'm autistic too!" because they don't turn up to job interviews at all. Depending on how severe her brother's condition is she may well have been quietly offended that you were trying to pass yourself off as having a similar problem.
This was a long time ago and for a large scale internship programme for teenagers (18-20) at a once-big tech firm that shall remain nameless. The goal appeared to be seeing how we worked together under pressure or something that, so after a while I guessed that the puzzle might not have a solution at all, as if it did some groups would finish a lot faster than others and then they wouldn't be able to watch us for the same length of time in each group. But none of the other kids had seemed to realize that. When the girl started to cry she was really sobbing and saying stuff like "we're not making any progress", so I said something like "yes that's true but bear in mind there might not be an answer" and she stopped crying immediately. I had to spend the next five minutes explaining this idea to the group and then the five after that convincing them that we had to keep working on the puzzle anyway, because even if the guess was right it didn't make any difference to the correct course of action.
The whole exercise struck me as needlessly cruel for teenagers who were probably in their first job interview ever. Like, if you're recruiting for a serious job where you need to make fast decisions under pressure then fine, but putting kids through that? Later I became an interviewer for big tech myself and never saw anything similar. I must have been right though because I got an offer, but turned it down in favor of a more interesting company that had used a more individualized interview process.
Very long take-home assignments, I was interviewing with a startup for a backend position. they gave me 5 days to build a Cinema Ticket Reservation API, this by itself was long since it required managing 5 to 6 tables with it corresponding crud and business logic of each one (and also tests) but apart from that they wanted to see complex data structures, design patterns, caches strategies, be able to "scale", a desig…
I ended up interviewing with a company that did contract work for software in government agencies, like DMVs. It sounded so depressing. Their technical screening was checking if a number is prime. I was familiar with checking all number up to the square root of the target number to see if they divided evenly from when I was a kid. Always knew it from some math or computer book.
After implementing that, I began to be investigated if I had done interview prep where I found this. I honestly told them that I hadn't but this back and forth went on for a few minutes of disbelief over something that shouldn't have been a big deal in the first place (considering how esoteric the problem they gave me was anyway).
Fast forward to the end of the interview, they ask me what my GPA was. I told them it was 2.98. They said that they couldn't accept anything below a 3. My GPA was going to get a massive bump at the end of the semester but they didn't care. A company that will flat refuse a candidate over two hundredths of a number (low because I didn't care of philosophy or other non CS classes) means they will be just as irrational during your employment.
I ended up finding a much better job with a much better culture the next week which lead me down what's been an excellent career so far. I'm terrified what would have happened if I ended up working there.
When I was in my last semester of college and looking for jobs, I just needed to find something but it was so hard to get someone to an interview phase. I always had good luck once I at least got an interview but it was an odd job market at the time. I was desperate to find _something_ so that I could start paying my loans and then looking for something better if need be afterwards. I ended up interviewing with a com…
For all people saying that philosophy is not important for engineering/cs grads - here's the proof it is!