I recently got thrown (unwillingly) into the interviews market since my employer fired everyone. IT recession is a bitch. Anyway, there's a type of interview that I loathe: the take-home interview. You have a vaguely defined problem, noone to talk about it with, no criteria for "pass" or "fail" and you're supposed to invest two or three days grinding on it before sending the finite product into the black hole for evaluation. 99% of the times nothing gets out of the black hole, otherwise it wouldn't deserve it's name. The 1% of the time you do receive "feedback" (like I did), is along "not good enough, we decided to move along with someone else". No explanation, no compensation for the time wasted. Motherfuckers are getting better at wasting your time! Gone are the times when you got a massive hole into your time budget before ever even speaking to a human agent. They figured out the "sunken cost fallacy" soon enough so they play this game. It's standard recruiter "game". They "call" you although it's got zero relevance, because if they get you to spend half an hour into talking with them, you're already invested. Half an hour is gone, is it lost forever or you continue standing in the queue? Because it's always a queue, a very long queue with very low chance of getting anything solved (getting hired). I'm attaching a local meme which refers to interacting with the state bureaucracy, which involves long preparations followed by long standing in lines for the chance to face a disgruntled employee who tells you to fuck off. Translation says:" "When you're feeling down think that right at this moment, someone stands in the queue of a physical bureaucracy office and thinks they have all the required papers upon them!". So long gone are the times when a machine asked 8 investment hours from you before you even saw a human. This time the UK fuckers had me waste 30 minutes on a HR call, 30 minutes on some "manager" call, 1 hour on a technical evaluation and then only then, fuckers asked for three days of work upon implementing a "homework", all for the chance of working two full time jobs, a developer and a quant, paid $300,000 base + $300,000 bonus in the US, but in my case only getting £30,000. I wasted an opportunity to tell them to 1: print the homework on a piece of paper, 2: position it below their cruch and between their legs and finally 3: beat if off their dick. Instead of asking them my full rate for 3 days (€750), I actually invested an hour for free into making a proof of concept of the thing they asked, document myself on the algo (first time hear about it), copy best implementation from stackoverflow, test it briefly, build a C++ multithreaded proof of concept around it, zip it, make a Zoom recording on how to compile, build and generally use the whole thing and send it to them. I was also pretty wasted from the day before so maybe my voice in the Zoom recording didn't sound all that rehearsed and I was too exhausted by the end of the hour to record again, with a script this time. Sent them the whole pack, got about a week of ghosting followed by a predictably uninformative "you failed". Well they can go fuck themselves, if I wasn't already explicit enough on my interaction with them already.
Better you start to make an income from trading. There are many good threads to start with. Do some research. Coding and backtesting should be then no issue for you. Then you are completely independent when you can generate trading gains. Do not be a slave forever. It is not worth your time in the end.
So you went through an hire process and at the end you didn't get the job and now you're mad and you think they made you lost your time and they are all muddafukka. ....ok.
Precisely, it's a failure of estimating the probability of success on my side. As a trader, that's my number #1 edge in this world. I NEVER ENTER A TRADE WHERE I DON'T ALREADY HAVE THE EDGE. Inevitably shit happens but as long you can keep Reward * ProbabilityOfReward > Loss * ProbabilityOfLoss, you're good. Just saying that homeworks are effectively locking yourself into a loss. Very low reward (20x less than market rate) multiplied by near zero (0.02% probability) of getting a successful trade. My usual approach is near 100% probability multiplied by a a tiny differential amount above market rate. Failed to apply it this time and statistics striked.
My condolences on being laid off. It's rough out there for IT folks. You guys do get paid a lot though, so now they're realizing they can't afford to keep all you bastards on the payroll. So now they gotta decide whehter they should hire John A (not very experienced but trainable but lower salary reqs) or John B (very experienced but expensive). I mean how do you stand out from thousands of applicants??
>> I mean how do you stand out from thousands of applicants?? Maybe the smartest guy in the country but sshhh, don't tell anyone. Life is hard yes, what can you do? Trying to get along, trying to make a living.
I loved these case studies. Learnt tons from it, and they always took me to the next round. But my case studies were different - company valuations, credit risk, financial statements analysis, etc. For most difficult one, which took me two weeks I invested first week in a coursera course, like a proper nerd I enjoyed every minute of it haha