This will describe my interviewing experience with Optiver to the weary reader.
If you are not weary now, not to worry, you will be when you finish reading this!
First was an HR phone interview with a nice young guy, which I'll call A for the narrative. Interview was standard behavioral questions: why move, where do oyou see yourself in 5 years etc.
Second stage was a technical coding test consisting of 3 coding problems and a timer that spans 8 hours. Since I had lots of time I spent 6 hours on it though 3-4 would be enough. Described in QnA.
Thirs was skype interview with D. I was told by my agent B that the it will be about the coding test I did. So I made sure to go over my solutions, think how to explain the recursive calls, the complexity etc. Waste of time. The interview focused almost solely on Concurrency concepts, specifically in C++. Also throughput, latency, client/server connectivity. Some topics I did not know well were memory barriers, CPU Caches, System Calls. But I still passed.
At that point the astute and not too weary reader may think, wow, 3 stages, hr, technical, long coding test – there must be an offer in the offing! Well, think again.
The last stage is a grueling whole day, consisting of back-to-back interviews at Optiver’s premises, from 10:00am until 17:45pm unless you are shamefully sent back home prior (which I was, after 5 hours roughly). Before the day A sent me an itinerary providing details about the day, so let’s just go through it - I added the relevant stage to the Question section before the question itself.
10:00 – 12:00: Technical ‘CV Deep Dive’ Interview
12:00 – 12:30: Lunch
That part at least was accurate – at lunch you eat with two other employees, let’s call them J and B2, and you get to know each other. Anyway, they were really nice, and the Korean beef was also quite good. I should add perhaps that Optiver has their own Food/Catering and a coffee machine with a barista. I should also mention that the barista/coffee closes at 12. Lastly, Optiver has a deal with the coffee shop across the road, so one can buy it for 2 dollars or so, so not too bad...
12.30 – 14.30 Technical Interview, Coding Test
15 Minute Break
That one did happen
At that point I felt I did well, so let’s get to the feedback part.
14:45 – 16:15: Behavioural Interview
Interviewers: C and L
The expectation was this:
“This interview will be focused on your previous history, how you work within a team, what your motivations are, and several other behaviour-based questions. Some questions will require you to give examples of circumstances you have had in your previous roles, how you approached them and what the results were, where other questions may take the form of a hypothetical (i.e. What would you do if…?). The purpose is to assess your culture fit for both our company and the team you would work in if successful.”
Unfortunately, I only met C, who told me I did not do as well in the technical phases.
For the first interview, I was told my examples were not complex enough... one may wonder how is it that I was given to solve these issues at work after previous developers failed to fix it, while I managed to solve them. One might also wonder why the interviewers did not tell you they would like more complex example(s) at the time of the interview, or how they managed to raise so many questions for 2 hours straight on such so called simple problems.
For the second technical interview, I was told the feedback was that I did not look curious enough about the problem, not asking enough “Why“ questions... well, ok, I do have some why questions:
• Why do you think I cannot solve the problems that your employees do after I passed the coding test and some other hurdles? Obviously you imagine yourself to be better than me... however, in all my experience no one complained about my technical skills, and in fact, C told me that someone who was my manager many years before in Deutsche also attested that I am very strong technically. This person is one of the most accomplished people I met in my long career and is by far to my mind smarter than those that interviewed me, so possibly his opinion should have counted for something.
• Why did you ignore my expert skills in C++? There were rarely any questions about it, even though this is the main language used by Optiver! Is it because the choice of interviewers was not the right one?
• Why do you think the feedback provided is in any way useful for finding out what was really wrong and how to improve? It is rarely that I feel I did well and get negatively surprised. I could go on, but by now I should have succeeded to make any reader weary to the bones.
Lastly, the last 2 items on the original agenda, which for obvious reason I have not managed to attend would have been:
16:15 – 16:45 – 30 min break
16:45 – 17:45 - Final Interview
I truly feel that if anyone failed here is Optiver, not me!
