Dealing with (Interview) Rejection and Reflections
Just yesterday, I completed my superday at Hudson River Trading. Unfortunately, I did not do as well as I thought I would and kind of bombed it, which led to my rejection the same day of the interview.
Here are my thoughts about the experience, reflections and what I would do differently.
I am gonna try to keep this shorter than my Microsoft Blog post but please bear with me.
Experience
Section titled “Experience”The novelty was nice. Being flown to NYC and housed in a fairly expensive hotel is something few people get to experience. The problem is I was coming straight off my flight back from Egypt, which made the trip feel more like a chore than a reward. I did get to see friends I hadn’t seen in close to a year, but they booked me for only 3 days including endpoints, so there were only so many things I could do.
HRT’s office is in WTC 3, and I could see the city from an angle some locals probably never have. They also had the infamous David protein bars, which I liberally took 3 of.
The reception though were another matter.
Nobody received me at the entrance, and nobody was there when I got all the way up to floor 70-something either, so I had to awkwardly stare at the receptionist until I got in. Not a real problem, but it set the tone. To be fair, she did seem like she was expecting me, which at least told me someone was following the process.
Overall, it made me feel that I was another number on a dashboard, a packet waiting to be received and could be dropped. Not saying this was the case, but it did make me feel like that.
After that, I met with a full-time employee who I think was formally assigned to accompany me, let’s call him A. He was nice overall, and showed me around the office. At this point I was getting nervous, so I think I came off a little meek and uninterested.
There were places I wanted to check out but didn’t, such as the ping pong table (I play a lot of ping pong), but I guess I only have myself to blame for that.
After that, I was led to a room and told all my interviews would be conducted there. I sat and waited.
Interview
Section titled “Interview”Obviously I can’t talk about the questions that I had. I don’t have a Better Call Saul type of lawyer to protect me from HRT’s retaliation, so I will keep it high-level.
The first interview was two hours of coding on a problem that was more algorithmic in nature than system-design-y, which came as a surprise since I was expecting something like design an orderbook or design an auction.
My interviewer was nice, very nice, and just as smart I am sure. The only problem is that I don’t think we were compatible, which made me a little nervous.
And then something happened that I genuinely did not see coming. My typing fell apart. I type fast, it is one of the few things I never have to think about, and in that room I was staring at the keys. I started reaching for the mouse to do things I have muscle memory for. I would type a line, see a typo, delete the whole line and start over. There is no point in having a high typing speed if it abandons you the one time it counts.
That is what I keep coming back to. I had prepared for the possibility that I would not know the answer. I had not prepared for the possibility that I would know the answer and my hands would not cooperate. My thought process was fine, I think, but I was abnormally slow getting anything onto the screen, which left me very little time to actually code.
After the two hours, I had lunch, which is its own story to unpack.
I was assigned two software engineers for lunch. One of them was from Northwestern, and since the first question he asked me was where I was flying from and what school I go to, I don’t think that was a coincidence. We will call him B. The second was some guy who was an ex-Microsoft intern 🤔. We will call him C.
Since I am also an ex-Microsoft intern, I kind of wonder how many coincidences (or how much planning) are in effect here.
B was nice, though we did not connect that much. C was a lot of things, but I can’t say nice was one of them.
He definitely came off as the classic pretentious hedge fund/HFT SWE who thinks he is super smart.
I got the feeling he does it ironically, but it doesn’t really matter.
They both seemed fairly smart and intellectual to be honest, but the conversation turned weird for a few reasons. The biggest one is that B made it feel like a casual lunch while C made it feel like a behavioral round. I still don’t know which it was, though I decided to go with the casual lunch approach.
It was going well until C randomly dropped the fact that China can probably 10x the number of drones the US can make.
Why someone would mention something war-adjacent to a nervous Egyptian interviewee who had just come back from seeing his family in Egypt is beyond me, but I guess most smart people are eccentric in their own way. I did notice the ring on his finger, and assuming he is married, I am kind of curious what his wife is like, but I guess we will never know.
Review
Section titled “Review”After lunch came the review, and I was able to spot some bugs in my own code, which obviously wasn’t ideal. At this point, I started to realize how smart and capable my first interviewer actually is.
It lasted only about 30 minutes and ended on not-so-good terms, since I knew I hadn’t coded the first part well at all.
System Design
Section titled “System Design”After that was some time where I assume they were deliberating on continuing or cutting it short. I think I was on the hinge since it took a while, but I eventually got my next interviewer for system design.
The guy was nice, charismatic and easy to talk to. He reminded me of a lot of people I admire. We talked for more than an hour about designing a particular system and it was a very nice experience. I had some hiccups but nothing major. In my mind it was a fairly productive talk.
Unfortunately, I did not make the next round which was a bummer.
The end was fairly abrupt. A, the same guy who gave me the tour that morning, came into the room and basically told me I did not make it and had to leave. I did like the no-bullshit approach ngl,
I would’ve hated it more if they told me something like we went in another direction. It was disheartening but expected after my first interview performance, in my opinion.
I did not forget to take one more protein bar on the way out though, which is a win.
Reflections
Section titled “Reflections”There were a lot of things I did wrong in my opinion.
First is planning. Scheduling my interview right after two 12-hour flights, jetlagged and fresh off finishing my summer course, was definitely a bad move. However, I did wanna get it out of the way before school, so there was little I could do.
Second is that I underestimated how nervous I would be, and more specifically what nervousness actually does. I always thought of interview nerves as a mental thing, something you push through by thinking clearly. Nobody tells you it shows up in your hands. I have done plenty of remote interviews and I do think I usually hold a pretty strong mental state in them, but every one of those was at my own desk, on my own keyboard, with nobody sitting three feet away watching the cursor. Take those away and it turns out a chunk of what I thought was composure was just familiarity.
That is the part I actually want to fix, because it is the part I can fix. I can’t practice being smarter under pressure, but I can practice being somewhere unfamiliar with someone watching.
Third is that I think I overfitted to the wrong type of problem. Overfitting is an ML term for when a model does well on the data it trained on and poorly on everything else. I was focusing on finance and trading and didn’t focus as much on CS fundamentals, which I should have.
Finally, there is the fact that I did not meet the bar, and that’s okay. I am simply not good enough at this particular point in time, and there is no shame in that. It is a strange thing to write down and mean, because the whole flight home I was trying to find a version of the story where it wasn’t about me: the jetlag, the mismatch with my interviewer, the two hours of algorithms I wasn’t expecting. All of that is true and none of it is the reason. I was slower than the bar on the day, and they measured it correctly.
What I don’t accept is that the preparation was wasted. The hours are still in me somewhere, just not in a form that shows up on a rejection email. Next time the room will be less novel, the keyboard will be less foreign, and whoever is sitting across from me will be less of an event. That is the only part of this I get to control.
That is it, overall grateful to even do it. Thanks to HRT for hosting me.
