Difficulty of SWE interviews

Question

I was wondering if anyone has any insight on the difficulty of SWE interviews at top HF/trading firms as compared to tech. Would you say interviews at Citadel, Jane Street, Two Sigma, HRT, IMC, Optiver, SIG are significantly harder than FAANMG or other high comp tech like Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Square etc?

Andy0909 · Accepted Answer

I work in HF for 4 companies in last 15 yrs. The main differences are here.

1. HF uses old tech because they cannot afford deploying financial applications on the latest software builds like JAVA or . Net or python or anything.

2. HF focuses on clients and not technologies. U will have less exposure to latest tech .

3. HF are more driven by financial business analysts and not tech people.

4. If u are pure tech, HF is not a good place IMHO as u second important team after business knowledge people.

5. Most of the time the growth will depend on ur financial industry knowledge. Which I personally dont kike it.

6. Tech companies have a very higher pay as compared to HF. So choose wisely.

7. Most HF dont allow trading, so u will not be able to take advantage of ur financial knowledge anyways.

8. In CAP theorem.
HF work on Consistency+ performance.
Tech firms work on Perfomance+ availability.

Final thought.. IMO.. HF is a good place to work. I would prefer a tech firm if u are a pure techie guy. New tech, tech oriented, past paced, updated industry, good pay and better future growth

madscience · Answer

I wouldn't say they're necessarily harder, but I'd think they're different for sure. Some of my friends have said those companies will hone in on performance and detail since they work in a highly regulated space and it requires them to understand regulatory specifics while also making sure they don’t create million dollar bugs. Non-fintech companies can be much more forgiving of production bugs.

olofraf · Answer

I mainly asked because some of the best SWE I know work at HFs, competitive programmers pretty much. And also know some people that got rejected at trading firms and then easily landed top tech jobs somewhere else.

vbdata · Answer

I recently interviewed at an HFT in India (very few of them here). First of all, all the companies you've mentioned have tough interviews for sure. But particularly in my experience, once the OA was done, in every round, they were more interested in giving me specific use cases related to their everyday problems and evaluated my ability to solve those usecases. This was good in the sense that these rounds were not tough. I had an OA, coding round, system design, director round and then HR called. Since this is a small HFT (300 empl), they are focused on hiring candidates who are a good fit.

psidev · Answer

I’ve worked in tech and financial (but strictly tech, not anything to do with finance) The interviews were a total breeze for the finance companies. Andy’s answer is pretty spot on- they only care about speed, consistency and deliverables, where as in tech your knowledge, awareness, and teamwork matter more. If your in a finance company and you pump out mediocre quality at a high rate you will rise above those who spend more time and focus on quality.

Difficulty of SWE interviews

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