300k per year Quant Job Interview Reaction

i checked my email a few days later for
any follow-ups from the recruiter and
oh man it's so relatable
[Music]
what's up phonies today i've got a
reaction video for you guys
all right i came across this really cool
click bait video it's a
interview 300 000 per year job
it's a real software engineering
interview for a 300k per year developer
job and this guy recorded
his interview which i mean that sounds
pretty awesome if you actually did that
so let's get to it hey what's up guys
i recorded my interview for a software
engineering position at a hedge fund in
chicago the interview is for
a junior position with two to three
years of experience
and has a salary of three hundred
thousand dollars this was my first
interview in a while but i'll be doing a
few more and posting them on here as
well so if you want to stay tuned
make sure you hit that subscribe button
and yeah let's see how this goes
this is all right so first impression i
already liked the dude he has a
really likable persona so all right
let's see
where this goes that's what my setup
looks like i have zoom in one monitor
and quarter pad in the other all right
so
uh he's using a macbook pro
i'm not going to judge him on that even
though i'm a windows guy pc person
you guys can hate on me if you want but
whatever let's keep going
a recruiter reached out to me on
linkedin and since i lost a lot of money
to these guys buying gamestop
i thought i'd try to get it back by
getting a job with them usually how
these software interviews go
is they'll have three steps first
there's a call with a recruiter to
briefly go over the position
and your resume and i already did this a
few days ago
and now i'm doing the second step which
is a video call with an
engineer to go over your resume again
then solve a technical coding question
and if you pass this round you move on
to the final round which is usually four
or more
technical coding questions back to back
to back to back
i don't know about four or more yeah so
here he says on-site interviews have
four back-to-back-to-back coding
problems and maybe that's the case for
these quant firms
both my experiences with uh fang and
other some other tech companies
it's three back-to-back-to-back code
problems and then
a design problem so
maybe they do it differently i don't i
don't know let's just keep going
here yeah the moment before the
interview starts is always the worst
like
i always try to get in a couple minutes
early and i'm usually doing exactly what
he's doing just like uh
what am i like there's really nothing to
do
you can really do for a couple minutes
you know
good how are you nice to meet you i took
out the audio for privacy
but we chatted about the position and
what type of work the team does
and then i was asked a few questions
about my background
tell me about your background and
highlight one or two projects you're
really excited about
what languages and technologies that you
use in that project
can you think of an example at work
where you've had to analyze
quantitative data and make a
recommendation
and lastly the dreaded technical
question
it's funny for me the dreaded question
is actually um
what was your was the most recent
challenge
that you've had at work and i'm just
like challenges like
everything's just it doesn't really feel
challenging
you can't just say like oh i uh deleted
the code base you know like what are you
that was always difficult for me yeah
also what are your strengths and
weaknesses stuff like that
but yeah let's keep going to this code
question
[Music]
design an algorithm which takes a
positive integer
which represents a length of rope and
this length of rope can be divided into
smaller lengths
where the smaller lengths are also
integers and we want to return the
largest number we can get
by multiplying the smaller lengths
together for example
given a rope length of 5 we can split
this
a bunch of different ways five ones two
ones and a three
a two and a three two twos and a one but
eventually you'll find that the largest
product you can get is six
so the algorithm should return six first
i wrote out a few examples to try to
visualize the problem
i tried to look for patterns but i got
confused so i ended up writing a
recursive algorithm
that brute forces all the possibilities
at least you can do recursive algorithm
that's like the weakest thing i
i've got in my toolkit to return the
maximum
and that worked but the algorithm was
extremely slow
and after watching me struggle the
interviewer finally gave me the hint
that my brute force algorithm didn't
need to try all the possibilities
it only needed to split the number into
twos and threes
every positive integer larger than one
can be broken down into a sum of twos
and threes
and the product would be greater or
equal than the number let's run through
an example
say you're given an input of 11. you
notice that breaking it in the middle
will give a pretty large product so we
try
5 and 6 but notice that 5 can be broken
into 2
and 3 and 6 can be broken down into 3
and 3
and those products would be larger than
the product of 5 and six
so the answer for eleven yeah it's
really great that he's breaking it down
like this and
just reviewing because making this video
honestly it's probably gonna be
a great time investment for him because
he he really knows how to do the problem
now and i'm sure next time he comes
across something like this
he's gonna think back in his head to the
video that he made
the mistakes that he made in the you
know the phone in the technical
interview
and just nail it next time and would be
two times three times 3
times 3 which is 54. but how do you know
how many 3s
and how many twos to break it into you
want to break it into as many threes as
possible
and only use twos to fill in any
remainders now i was finally able to
write a more efficient algorithm but i
needed way too much time and too many
hints
i checked my email a few days later for
any follow-ups from the recruiter and
oh man it's so relatable
but it's all good that just means i
gotta practice more lead code
if you guys want to practice this exact
same question yeah it's a
really bad thing that recruiters are
doing these days they just like pray and
spray
uh for applicants and then they don't
they don't take the time to
follow up with you and especially like
amazon they don't even let you
know any feedback which i mean at least
in my experience with amazon they didn't
go ghost me afterwards
i've only been ghosted by some startups
actually
thankfully but it really sucks when
you're just sitting there waiting
and you never really get that closure
that you got rejected
yeah i feel for the guy i'll leave a
link to the leak code down in the
description below
and yeah i hope this was insightful and
thanks for watching
yes i'm really glad that he made a video
like this someone was brave enough to
make a video of themselves you know not
succeeding
whereas a lot of other youtubers are out
there like making these
oh i just got accepted by
so-and-so company making eight thousand
eight hundred thousand dollars a year
like you know but this guy
you know he's on his grind and he's he's
shown us what it looks like
to be doing the work right and i looked
into his background a little bit
and he works at microsoft already so
he's already doing very well
and he's just looking to do better or
you know maybe just making some content
either way i think it provides a lot of
value for the
software engineering community because
we need more content like this versus
you know just a total compensation for
uh not just like total compensation porn
that's
just making everyone have fomo you know
if you like content like this my channel
is code phony i do
code content and code adjacent content
you know sometimes some funny skits
so if you like this kind of stuff hit
that like and subscribe button i really
appreciate it
i'll see you guys next time peace