
You Think The Google Interview Is Tough? Try Getting A Job At A PE Firm - daniel-cussen
http://www.businessinsider.com/you-think-the-google-interview-is-tough-try-getting-a-job-at-a-pe-firm-2009-11
======
mrshoe
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
coffeemug
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.

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

~~~
coffeemug
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.

------
neilk
All this posturing about interviews is ridiculous. They are a very flawed tool
at best. Whatever happened to actually learning what people were capable of?

The best hires are always the people that you've worked with in the past, or
who come personally recommended.

Google's dick-swinging about its interviews is IMO not really one of their
strong points. The interview process can eliminate some complete losers, but
it probably also eliminates lots of people who would have been great on the
job.

I have some empirical backing for this. During my brief tenure at Google our
team worked with a lot of interns, and we made our recommendations for
extending offers. Then, suddenly someone made a new rule that outgoing interns
should be re-interviewed by members of a completely different team, I guess,
for objectivity. And a lot of them were rejected through that process.

So we had people who had _proved_ themselves in an initial interview, and
during many months of on-the-job contributions, getting rejected because some
wanker asked them some question about missionaries and cannibals or some other
useless puzzle question.

And yeah, it was that sort of thing -- I remember one intern trooping
dejectedly back into our offices and I and the tech lead tried to figure out
what the hell the answers were to the question(s) they got asked. We couldn't
figure out those puzzles either.

------
gxs
Actually this is in no way surprising. I just graduated from school and let me
tell you that the real brain drain is in our smartest students defecting to
finance.

Why would someone with a 4.0 in a hard, rigorous subject go into engineering
for a measly 60k a year starting salary + 20% raises when he can work in a
finance industry where the top talent makes in the hundreds?

I had a lot of friends in the math department that were double business
majors. I imagine that at least for quantitive finance positions, interviews
such as these (if not way harder) are a must to separate the top talent from
the elite talent.

~~~
rantfoil
60k starting? That sounds low, even for 6 years ago when I graduated in CS.
Google/Microsoft paid 80K starting for college grads back then -- have no
doubt it is > 100K or more now.

~~~
smanek
I can confirm that Microsoft still started at 80K last year. I've heard Google
is a bit higher, but still under a 100K.

A trader at a top tier firm, on the other hand, might have a $150K+ base first
year out of school. Adding on bonuses, it isn't unusual for them to be making
$1mil/year within 3-5 years (although the vast majority don't make it five
years ...). A quant programmer (slightly less competitive/stressful) can
expect to be making $200K/year+ within five years at a top tier quant firm.

It isn't really fair to compare programmers to bankers since the hours aren't
really comparable. But the traders/quant-programmers I know (usually) only
work about 60 hours a week.

All based on my relatively limited experience (~5 people/company - although I
have no reason to suspect bias in my sample).

------
slpsys
Uh, I still do? The person writing the article seems to think that if you can
approximate how many piano tuners there are in New York, you automagically get
that Google dream job. They're both tough, but very different, processes. I
can only hope the author doesn't work in the business side of software, as
they clearly suffer from Shit's Easy Syndrome.

~~~
kurtosis
Sorry for asking, but what's "Shit's Easy Syndrome"?

~~~
slpsys
it's a term I lifted from steve yegge's [long-winded] software blog (RIP) -
[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-
legali...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-
marijuana.html)

------
ig1
I think people are over-estimating the difficulty because they're thinking
about how difficult it would be for them to pass this interview.

The typical background for someone applying for this sort of job would have
5-10 years spent at a management consultancy firm, maybe a few years at an
investment bank and an MBA. They'll have read thousands of business case
studies and written dozens or hundreds themselves.

They'll have seen a number of LBO/IPO deals and will have spent hundreds of
hours studying how these are structured.

These are the kind of people who when they read about a company automatically
start thinking about market sizing and modelling.

Not being able to do a case study in an interview would be like a programming
interviewee not being able to solve a trivial problem like FizzBuzz.

And as for the timing, it's just testing something that anyone with the
appropriate background should be able to breeze through. If you're meeting
with a C-Level client, running over your allocated time is incredibly rude, if
you can't manage your time in an interactive discussion situation then you
don't belong in the industry.

The whole article just sounds like it's based on the rants of a candidate who
wasn't capable of doing the job they were applying for.

------
physcab
This sounds a lot like how my PhD oral qualifying exams went. Except I got 30
minutes of highly technical questions from all 6 committee members and then
sat outside for 40 minutes while they deliberated if they should let me stay
in graduate school (they did). After that I got to have two more personal
interviews with more in-depth questioning. The whole ordeal lasted somewhere
around 5 or 6 hours.

------
joshu
Dunno about PE firms, but the Google engineering interview was roughly
comparable to my interview at Morgan Stanley. (The second was slightly
rougher; one of the interviewers printed out the code they were currently
debugging and asked me to find the bug.)

------
MikeMacMan
I wouldn't think you would need to be that selective in private equity. How
hard is it to buy a healthy company with borrowed money, run that company into
the ground, and then flip it a few years later?

------
etherael
I must admit, with the world fiat economy slowly eating itself alive, too big
to fail, massive TARP bailouts left right and center, entire middle eastern
fiefdoms just saying "Hey sorry about that 60 billion IOU but we're going to
have to put an indefinite hold on it".

Financial professionals whining about how much it takes to make the wheel turn
in their industry strike me as about as honest and reality based as dressage
shops for unicorns trying to make a case for why their particular brand of
mastery ought to sit at the top of human endeavour.

