You know you are getting robbed when the bid-ask spread is high. I'm getting emails from recruiters presenting themselves like: "I am Mediocre Nobody finance recruiter drone based in London. I work with tier 1 investment banks and hedge funds, such as JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, to name a few. [blah blah blah]". So what do we have here: Mr. Zero, "recruiting" for Corporation Infinity. Nothing smelly about this astronomical spread, not at all something that will rob you of your time, money (opportunity cost on the time wasted with these useless piece of shits) and self-esteem (essential for carrying on in this business).
Take some automated coding challenge (most despicable since it burns none of their time so they can pit you against 10,000 college kids who train for this sort of stuff). Online whiteboard interviews otherwise, a little bit better since there's a guy on their side wasting his time too, hardly paying attention among sounds of keyboard clicking and talking with other guys in the office. And give you the sort of relevant problems that you face as a quant dev, like finding find how many permutations do you need to make a word an anagram of the other or count all palindrome sub-strings in a string. And if you don't do it fast enough as having seen the problem before but not looking like you seen it before, you're disqualified. And even if you actually solve it in the half an hour to an hour that you have but you haven't solved it *optimally* as the well-rested guys with lots of time to burn on stupid problems have eventually come upon after months of mingling and tweaking, then you're also disqualified.
It appears that the OP was trying to tell the following story. While being interviewed for a quant position at an investment bank, he was asked to write a program to count the palindromes in a given word. The night before, the OP did not sleep well, and on the day of the interview, he felt antagonistic towards his potential employer, on the basis of "if you are a first-rate bank, why are you using a third-rate recruiter?" Predictably, the OP's disposition towards the interview process made him fail the test. The position was offered to another candidate, whose program counted the palindromes in an efficient and elegant way, and who did not complain about how the interview process was conducted. Not much of a story, if you ask me.
thank you for your reply. if not for the fact that you offered a clue by creating the thread in the programming forum how would someone understand what you are referring to? i read your post and the title and understood it to be related to trading financial instruments.
Well, it's related to programmers. I thought of renaming the thread to "Bid-ask spread in recruiters" but it's too late now.
The proposed new subject, "Bid-ask spread in recruiters" still does not make any sense. Following the OP's venting, I suppose the appropriate subject would be "Why are top investment banks not using top recruiters?".
No, it's a bid-ask spread analogy. On the markets you get burned when you enter trades where the bid ask spread is too high. Zero working for infinity is a similar situation.