It has been 6 month since my last interview at Optiver, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to forget this frustrating experience. Here’s a little bit about myself: junior, top cs school, GPA 4.0 +, has interned at 2 other well-known companies before. The interview framework is listed below:
8:45am - 9:00am CST: Recruiting Welcome
9:00am - 10:00am CST: Technical Interview
10:00am - 11:00am CST: Design Interview
11:00am - 11:15am CST: Break
11:15am - 12:00pm CST: HackerRank Discussion
12:00pm - 12:30pm CST: Group Info Session - with our Leadership Team
12:30pm - 12:45pm CST: Recruiter Wrap Up
Technical interview: essentially the same as the OA question at akuna. Yet the interviewer was super unclear about the specifications, and kept changing them all the time. When I asked for some clarification questions, he answered “it’s your choice to decide”. While I was coding my internet was out for around 5s, and I dropped out of the zoom meeting. It took my another 10min to get back because I was stuck in the waiting room, and when I contacted the HR (zoom meeting host) it took her forever to reply.
Design Interview: I met the rudest interviewer ever in my life. I have to admit that I’m not super great at system design interviews, but the disrespect I received from the interviewer was beyond acceptable. I could see him rolling his eyes multiple times during the interview, and he kept walking in the room so the camera was shaky, and noise was disturbing. Also, once he asked me if I am familiar with TCP/UDP, and I said no (yes I didn’t know what they are at that time). Then he proceed to ask me a question that I couldn’t comprehend. What’s the point of asking a TCP/UDP question if I don’t even know what it is?
HackerRank Discussion: the interview was nice, compared to the previous two. The only problem I have with him is that he looks a bit sad and miserable, yet I haven’t figured out if it’s because of me, or he’s just having a bad day
Group Info Session - with our Leadership Team: had a talk with the CTO and 2 other candidates. The CTO was extremely rude. He would asked us questions, and we take turns to answer. One question was “why did you choose optiver”, and I said something like “i haven’t interned at a trading company before, and would like to see how it compares to other traditional tech companies”. Then he proceeded to say their bar is quite high and they usually don’t hire a lot. Honestly I just didn’t get the point of saying something like that during an interview. Also, he just completely ignored me for the last two questions, in the sense that he didn’t wait for me to answer at all.
Overall, will never consider an internship at optiver, would not recommend either.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A coding question about trading, and sending offer to the exchange
system design question
hackerrank discussion