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Comment by mrshoe | Hacker News Reader

Nice try, finance guys. 3 hours in a small room with "an asshole" doesn't sound like fun, but it's still not nearly as challenging as an interview at Google or Apple (I've interviewed at both). Those companies require 6 to 10 hours of grueling interviews and the real questions are much more difficult than the ones listed in the previous Business Insider article on the topic (at least for programmers). They couldn't list typical technical questions in that article because 99% of their readership wouldn't even understand them.

I've never been a fan of this kind of blind arrogance in the finance industry. I hoped the recession would at least have some effect on that, but it probably won't. Engineers don't have nearly enough power in this society.

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I'm curious - have you interviewed at a financial company too?

I know for a fact that most public accounts of Google interviews are wrong. I have no reason to believe that public accounts of financial company interviews are right. I just assume that everything I read on the Internet is wrong until proven right. ;-)

FWIW, my Google interview was much harder than my two interviews with financial software startups. But I'm not certain if those startups are representative of the financial industry as a whole. Things might be different at Goldman, or hedge funds, or PE.

I would hope that engineering positions at financial companies require an interview process similar to that of Google's (although in practice my hunch is that they're not as strenuous, like you said), but my comment and the article aren't referring to engineering positions.

The simple truth is that people like the interviewee in the article just don't work on nearly as hard of problems as do Google engineers. Being an engineer myself, I've never had a finance job, but I've had plenty of friends and roommates who have. They need to know some math and have some Excel skills, but most of their time is spent on phone calls and Powerpoint decks. That's why even an easy first question in an interview for an engineering position (e.g. write a C function that reverses a string) is more difficult than the questions asked of these guys. Just look at the example of the most grueling question in the article. Describe the process of a leveraged buyout? That doesn't really require any analytical skills, creativity, or problem solving.

I really think it's suboptimal to have finance people running our businesses, Wall St., and our economy. In my experience, they have a hugely inflated sense of self-worth, which is based mostly on their hugely inflated salaries.

Heh. Writing a C function which reverses a string is something that sounds easy, but is actually very difficult to get right, depending on what the encoding is.

I've interviewed with plenty of financial firms (large banks, asset management companies, smaller trading software firms, etc.) for engineer positions. The interviews are focused more on concurrency primitives, language features (knowing your tools), and database features (it's just too important in the financial world), with a bit of puzzles and basic computer science thrown in. It's not super hard, but it's also not a walk in the park. The questions are slightly different because of a different culture, but I can't say that it's radically different from a tech company interview, nor is it significantly easier.

Wait, you mean financial software positions. The linked article is about interviews for analysing firms or how to execute deals.

Yes, I mean financial software - I should have clarified it better. The discussion turned to a general "which interview is harder" question, so I thought I'd chime in. I have no idea what high powered analysis interviews are like - I don't know anything about this. I do know that I've met some incredibly smart analysts, so I can't imagine them being easy.

"I know for a fact that most public accounts of Google interviews are wrong."

Out of interest, how do you know this for a fact? I presume you were actually at most of these interviews?

Eh...I doubt you or I would understand the financial and legal considerations involved in taking a public company private. While I share your view about engineers not having enough power, you might want to consider that LBO deals and the like are basically 'financial engineering' and it's pretty technical...there's a lot more to it than the popular conception of 'take the CEO out for a round of golf, offer to double his pay if he recommends it to the shareholders, call up some rich people to throw in the capital and PROFIT'. The hardcore financial types I know work their asses off, have really good analytical skills, and know their calculus.

You do not need to know calculus to run a LBO model. Writing one is easy enough and most of the time the firm you are with has a few dozen variants that have been prebuilt for you. The analytical portion of PE isn't the hard part.

I think you're (drastically) under estimating the difficulty of passing a series of interviews at the tops banks or PE firms. For example, in many cases Goldman's have interviewed candidates more than 20 times before giving them a job. Recently someone I know got a summer internship as a trader at GS, on her interview panel there were 4 interviewers and each one was asking her questions in a different language (english, french, german and russian). Finance jobs or interview aren't easy.

Really 20 times? That seems completely unreasonable. Do they start paying the interviewees to come in?

While it was not a private equity firm, a trading company called Chicago Research and Trading would interview people more than 20 times more often than not.

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