I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Jane Street
Interview
The questions they ask are in multiple steps. Make sure you make it to the final step if you even want a chance to proceed. Anything about how you communicate and knowing what it's like to work with you is at best secondary. The company claims to take a "holistic" approach to interviewing but at the same times values "complete and correct code" without allowing the interviewee to run their code for correctness. Running and debugging code is essential to software development which makes their approach contradictory and eliminates possible candidates who debug or analyze code in a different way. Thus, you will not know what it's like to work with me if you prevent me from doing something I would otherwise do.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode style questions that this industry is plagued with
It was a very quick and painless process. Recruiter very responsive, kind interviewers. High implementation and difficult problems, so failed onsite after 3 interviews and a Question and Answer Session.
Did not pass the initial coding round. I tried to explain my thought in details to the interviewer but failed to translate my thought into code. So far interviewer is very nice.
I applied online. I interviewed at Jane Street (New York, NY)
Interview
My experience interviewing at Jane Street was definitely challenging, but also surprisingly collaborative. Instead of focusing only on whether I could get the right answer quickly, the interviewers were much more interested in how I approached problems and explained my thinking. I worked through a few coding questions involving data structures and algorithms, and there were also some probability-style questions that tested logical reasoning. The interviewers were clearly very sharp, but they were also approachable and encouraged me to talk through my thought process the entire time. When I got stuck, they would sometimes guide me with small hints so we could keep exploring the problem together. Overall, it felt less like a typical high-pressure interview and more like a thoughtful technical conversation with experienced engineers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
“What is the expected number of coin flips needed to get two heads in a row?”