I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver in Oct 2018
Interview
The position was popped up on Stackoverflow, I sent the application and two days later I got a call from the recruiter saying that I need to do a test, I finished the online test during the weekend, which was a test on Hackerrank, relatively complicated and I spent about four hours finishing the test, I got a full score.
The next day, the recruiter said we need a Skype interview with her, we planed the interview the same day at 6PM, and at 6:02PM the recruiter sent me an email saying that she could not attend the interview so we rescheduled the interview to the next week.
The recruiter has no technical background at all and she asked what kind of achievements of my current position I'm most proud of, I gave her an example, which was about video compression, she seemed not understanding it at all the in the end she asked what is video compression. The other questions were just some general textbook interview questions which had nothing to do with programming and totally useless.
The next day she sent a pre-written email saying thank you for my interests.
The company first asks candidates to do a complicated test first and then talk to a non-technical person who asks things useless, so when you are asked to do the test, try to have that interview first, otherwise it's most likely that doing the test is a waste of time plus the recruiter is not a on time person at all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is a creative developer(all such kinds of questions).
A bit anxiety inducing, there were two developers observing and asking questions. Real-time problem solving required, conducted on Hacker Rank virtually, video and mic enabled - quite nervewracking to say the least
I had one round, which was an online HackerRank test. I wasn’t able to pass all the test cases, and as a result, I did not progress to the next stage of the process.
A lot of interviews. Started off with a call, then some online tests. Then a technical interview. Then a live coding interview along with a architecture interview. Last step would have been final day interview but I did not get that far.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How many bits do you need to store a number up to X. And how can you represent that.