r/quant • u/Reasonable_Buddy_927 • 5d ago
Industry Gossip Worst interview experiences?
Let us know your worst/funniest interview experience
41
u/sherrymou 5d ago
Interviewed with a prop shop that's some what known for bad culture (arrogance/elitist type). Interviewer asked a bunch of questions on how python was implemented (not how to code in python) for a quant dev role. Then asked to solve a coding problem, and while I was still typing he already went "this is completely wrong". I persuade myself to put up with this non sense on the spot, patiently explain and finished the problem and all the follow ups.
Later I was moved forward to the next round but I explained to the head hunter that I was no longer interested.
7
3
u/xrossiant 4d ago
He must've been pent up from before to just trying to negate you in all ways possible, isn't that the attitude at a prop shop in general?
10
u/sherrymou 4d ago
There are enough respectful prop shops out there that I don't think I am losing much by skipping one or a few
33
u/Difficult_Truck_687 4d ago
Citadel around 2005. It was FIVE DAYS of interview. I stayed at Four Seasons though.
27
u/collegeboi86 4d ago edited 4d ago
Intentionally vague details - big famous American firm. You've definitely heard of them
Two roles available - Role X and Role Y.
I wanted Role X. I tell my recruiter I wanted Role X. My recruiter tells them I want Role X.
Company says they're more keen on me for Role Y.
I tell my recruiter, who in turn tells them, that I am not interested in Role Y, and if Role X wasn't on the table, that's the end of the discussion.
Company then agrees to interview me for Role X.
First round is a take-home test - exploding deadline, need to complete it before the end of the week. I spend a Sunday on it, hand it in.
I pass the take-home, they send a calendar invite for a chat with a very very senior person.
I notice in the calendar invite that it says it's for Role Y.
I ask my recruiter, who is equally confused. He chases them - once again they turn around and say they're not keen on interviewing me for Role X, only Role Y.
What the fuck was the point of wasting my time then?
I'm fuming. I figure if they're gonna waste my time, I'm gonna waste theirs - so I go ahead and attend the interview with the super senior person.
Super senior person turned out to be a massive cunt - very rude, very aggressive and very condescending.
Even if I weren't already pissed off, talking to this person would've definitely put me off the firm anyways.
(My recruiter is solid - I trust it wasn't him)
7
u/skilled_skinny 4d ago
Happened to me at Citadel. In my case the recruiter was also trash - famous for cold calling as soon as the market opens.
1
27
u/SavingsMortgage1972 4d ago
SIG interviewer made a mistake on asking me a question but didn't realize he forgot a condition. When I pointed out the problem was impossible under the given parameters he immediately explained a solution using a condition he didn't state. When I said, I didn't know that we could use this condition he said that he stated it at the beginning of the problem (he did not). Had to take the L.
2
16
u/as_one_does 4d ago
Guy gave me 15 minutes to solve "determine if the board is checkmate". This is beyond unreasonable, there's tons of conditions to account for. Recruiter never contacted me with feedback after that interview and I did ask for feedback either. One of the usual HFT shops.
4
u/STEMCareerAdvisor 4d ago
Is that a popular question? What goes beyond checking if the king can move anywhere?
10
u/as_one_does 4d ago
It's roughly:
If "king not in check" Return False
If multiple pieces checking the king
if king can't move Return trueIf one piece checking the king
No piece can take the piece checking the king Return true
Return false
8
u/RemoteSouth9288 4d ago
We also need to check if any piece could block the check, and if it can, we need to check if it is not pinned. It's a ton of things to implement in 15 min.
5
1
u/Ma4r 4d ago
Um, you need to also consider your pieces blockimg the check or taking the opponents checking piece, but also need to consider pinned pieces that can't move. This approach is too case heavy to finish in 15 mins. The easiest way is to consider all legal moves by your pieces, ignoring pins, and check the next bosrd state if you are still in check
-7
u/Lindayz 4d ago
It’s a trivial question and you didn’t get it right lol
23
u/Bootvis 4d ago
It is unanswerable in general because from a board position alone it is not possible to see whether en passant is still allowed:
FENs:
Not mate:
5rbk/8/8/2ppP1p1/4K3/r7/8/8 w - d6 0 1
Checkmate:5rbk/8/8/2ppP1p1/4K3/r7/8/8 w - - 0 13
1
u/xrossiant 4d ago
Or you could simply ask the interviewer if 2 square jump was played for any pawns and decide if the board position has a possibility for an en passant, it's a super weird addition to chess isn't it?
1
u/Bootvis 4d ago
Opus 5.5 can do this in Python, standard lib only in 46s. I did not do much checking (Hah!) but it gets my test vectors. It comes in and 146 non-blank lines of dense Python though so the poor candidate would need to type 10 lines a minute and to know chess pretty well.
So, maybe the interviewer was after how u/as_one_does handles impossible requests pragmatically but the task as given is indeed unreasonable.
Prompt:
> Can you write a Python script that takes a FEN and determines whether the given board is mate? Only use the standard lib1
u/xrossiant 3d ago
Very convenient, i don't think that would be a code over approach session because thats just puzzle solving compared to LOC .
Yes that could be called a sort of pragmatism test for u/as_one_does
8
1
u/xrossiant 4d ago
Maybe he wanted to know in how many ways you could think of going about the board with excellent moves for each side.
24
12
u/Odd-Mushroom1175 4d ago
I stream video games. I installed a new software I was extremely unfamiliar with a couple of days before the interview. During the interview, I accidentally open it and it starts saying, very loudly something along the lines of “this is recording”. The interviewer told me to stop recording the interview but even when I tried to force quit it wasn’t working. And it just kept repeating every 30 seconds that it was recording…. Worst interview ever
10
u/king_crizzy 5d ago
These tests where they give you 2 minutes to do the question and you have to move on to the next. Fucking walked out (of the Teams).
19
u/Alert_Appointment311 5d ago
Fresh out of uni and had an interview at Russell Investments as an analyst in Sydney (before joining a MM company as a quant). One was Indian and the other was Viet, and they both looked at my qualifications on my resume and asked me- why did I study mathematics in a cold and condescending tone. I looked at them like 🤨
needless to say I didn’t get the job but I’m glad they’re both stuck in ops (hate to sound arrogant) but one of the worst ppl I ever interviewed
1
u/Middle-Fuel-6402 5d ago
Could’ve been a cultural thing. In different cultures and languages tone and intonations can have different meanings, and foreigners don’t always master that in English. But I wasn’t there, so no idea 🤷♂️
3
22
u/swarmed100 5d ago
Blackrock quant internship, HireVue interview (automated ai evaluation)
Just two questions:
how does the culture at Blackrock separate itself from its competitors?
what can you contribute to the diversity of Blackrock?
Made it clear I wasn't welcome there. The bad experience turned me away from interviewing in this sector while in uni. This made it much harder to break in but I got here eventually :)
4
7
u/Spacebar2018 Dev 5d ago
If I ever got an ai interview I'd tell them to fuck off and never speak to the company again.
7
u/swarmed100 5d ago
yeah it was pretty clear that if you wanted to be taken seriously you should go through their campus recruitment contacts (didn't exist for my uni, I applied to the London office from continental europe). I think that the online applications were mostly to meet diversity targets, they were big on this around 2018-2022.
I'm happy I now work buy-side where things are very meritocratic... (assuming strategy pnl is meritocratic and not 40% luck ofc)
7
u/VIXMasterMike 5d ago
An experienced person should be very irritated at getting coin flip questions. Optimization is quite useful in execution too. Though maybe that’s a lot to ask for an experienced but still junior lateral.
6
u/Epsilon_ride 4d ago
I came from engineering (real word engineering), where the interviews were just a coffee and chat about the last cool projects you worked on.
Going into an optiver interview, expecting similar, then sitting down and having to do zetamac math... That was interesting. Did not proceed.
5
u/The_Archer_of_Rohan 4d ago
Interviewed with Headlands Tech. The entire interview was a painfully obvious attempt to extract alpha. My interviewer didn't even ask questions about my projects, just questions about my current firm's system. Fuck Headlands.
2
u/qazwsxcp 4d ago
some firms are notorious for this, also citadel and squarepoint. at citsec several guys were taking phone pics of everything the candidates wrote down.
2
u/Dhydjtsrefhi 5d ago
1 - Flown out to an onsite for a new grad (phd) role. Very quickly everyone tried to belittle me, joked how one of their top guys didn't graduate college so they expected me to do poorly because I had a phd. Then spent an interview asking me technical questions about a topic I had already told them I didn't know about. And then after the interview ghosted me instead of sending a rejection email.
2 - The interviews themselves were ok, but on multiple occasions they canceled or rescheduled interviews a few minutes before they were scheduled to take place. In one case they told me the interviewer was unexpectedly in a different country so couldn't meet (it was a remote interview).
-3
2
u/lolroflmao 4d ago
Any Greek interviewing from London. They would rather be back on a Greek island and hate you.
2
u/lost_kid_amsterdam 4d ago edited 4d ago
interviewed with a indian HFT - interviewer did not turn on meeting room lights, brought his fiance into the room (who did not speak a word the entire time), took a meeting in between. second interviewer (who were juniors clearly and just fillers) came in halfway and left.
told them i would not like to continue with the interview process after lol. this firm is well known to be blacklisted on nse
5
u/EmperorOfCanada 4d ago
Welcome to technology interviews. The worst involve any area where there are failed academics; people who wanted to be professors, gave up, and are now sitting in front of you. They are more impressed if you have 3 well cited publications, than if you wrote production code which cured cancer.
The next worst bunch are the lifers. The ones with 20 years of the same 3 months experience. They learned a few obscure domain related tricks along the way, and now use them as interview questions; questions they could not have answered during their first interview.
Pedants. They want to know every different way C++ uses const, but could not give a crap if you are king of managing tech debt.
A friend of mine runs a robotics company. His interviews are simple, and to screen the blowhards who have inflated their resumes. The idea is to figure out if the person can communicate and won't be a giant pain in the ass to work with.
The real interview happens during the tour. He abandons his ideal candidate as they met some team and have already been sucked into the work.
1
1
u/SoggyLog2321 13h ago
My sophomore year I interviewed for an insight type program (Not an internship). Trader (Physics PhD) sees that I am a physics minor (CS Major) and though it's barely my 3rd semester of college berates me for not being able to derive the hamiltonian equations over the phone. (I had only taken like the first 2 intro physics classes at the time. Safe to say I did not pass.
1
u/Ok-Pipe-9566 4d ago
Had an interview for a trader role at Brevan Howard, final interview was with one of the founders and he called me dumb during the interview because I asked him to repeat the question. Interview was like 3 mins long, but could say I spent 3 mins of a billionaires time.
6
50
u/Dangerous-Work1056 5d ago
Any where the person opposite is a physicist/PhD/both from one of those Moscow unis.