Hi all,I was wondering if anybody here has interviewed for quant/trader roles at the D.E. Shaw group and, if so, do they have any pointers they would like to give to prospective interviewees? Also, I would be interested in getting people's views on this firm's standing etc. Any comments welcome.Thanks,E

Just dont mention resetable Japanses cbs

I thought this bank was sold to Bank of America then after major losses it was then sold to KBC financial products which is a Belgian bank.They have the most testing and gruelling interview sessions out of most of the banks.All these guys who work there are top notch people invariably with Phd's from well known uni's.I was interviewed several years ago so I don't know what it's like now,but went in at 8:30am and came out at 6pm with one hour luch break.Many questions for the quant developer role that I was being interviewed for were basicall puzzles/teasers that made you think on your feet.I mean on guy who had done his Phd under Knuth (he of Numerical algorithms vols 1-3 fame from Stanford Uni) started asking me obscure space/time complexity algorithms on little code snips he'd make up on the spot.They were in fact questions that Knuth himself posed to his doctoral students and I was expected to solve some of them in the space of a couple of minutes.This bank is seriously IT-driven and it shows in the quality of it's developers and their questioning which also covers practical software related questions.They can give you a ten thousand line code sample on say Java or C++ which doesn't contain a single comment and leave the room for you to browse over it for say 30 minutes and then come back and start to grill you over the code in terms of function,use,design,improvements etc and can form the basis of a protracted discussion.For the quantitative aspects, you can only really look through some of the postings given on wilmott for potential interview questions for a quant role as the range of questions span the gamut of brain teasers to rapid fire mental computation (e.g.,what is eight raised to the power of five minus one?), through to finding the escape velocity from planet earth of a projectile following a randomised trajectory, which would involve modelling the scenario as a sde and then solving it (in this case with paper and pencil).Now with such an in depth interview process you would expect a special salary package.And, indeed, this bank (KBC) does pay among the highest salaries and exceptional bonuses to it's employees.

Thanks for that.