I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Jane Street in Mar 2017
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter, and we set up a phone interview with a developer at Jane St. I solved the question, but had a lot of help, so I received a rejection in two business days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a matrix of chars from the set {"u", "l", "d", "r", "x"}, where the matrix is guaranteed to have one "x," and each of the other chars represent a direction up, down, left, and right, and a point on the matrix, write a function that returns true if "x" can be reached by following the specified path.
It was a very quick and painless process. Recruiter very responsive, kind interviewers. High implementation and difficult problems, so failed onsite after 3 interviews and a Question and Answer Session.
Did not pass the initial coding round. I tried to explain my thought in details to the interviewer but failed to translate my thought into code. So far interviewer is very nice.
I applied online. I interviewed at Jane Street (New York, NY)
Interview
My experience interviewing at Jane Street was definitely challenging, but also surprisingly collaborative. Instead of focusing only on whether I could get the right answer quickly, the interviewers were much more interested in how I approached problems and explained my thinking. I worked through a few coding questions involving data structures and algorithms, and there were also some probability-style questions that tested logical reasoning. The interviewers were clearly very sharp, but they were also approachable and encouraged me to talk through my thought process the entire time. When I got stuck, they would sometimes guide me with small hints so we could keep exploring the problem together. Overall, it felt less like a typical high-pressure interview and more like a thoughtful technical conversation with experienced engineers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
“What is the expected number of coin flips needed to get two heads in a row?”
