First step was HR phone interview. HR was quite nice. We chatted for more than one hour and she suggested me to consider two roles. Second step was an on-line C# programming test. I only spent 1/4 time limit and got it done.
What made me frustrated was the third round. I thought it would be a face to face interview. But Optiver wanted a skype interview although we are in the same city. I couldn't find a quiet room in my company's building so I had to take one day leave for the one hour interview. I believe I applied a C# programmer role. However, the interviewers didn't ask me any technical questions about C#. Instead, they spent all the time to ask what I am doing in my current job. I believe I answered their questions clearly and I emphasized the time requirement and the efforts/solutions I made to satisfy these requirements. But I got the following feedback from them:
"(He) was a strong communicator and was able to clearly describe the solution he had developed. Good knowledge around pricing algorithms.
Unfortunately he wasn’t able to articulate the business drivers behind the solution he developed.
He did not seems to understand the full business intent and his solution was to automate an inefficient business process, without questioning the process."
The above feedback really shocked me. First, I did emphasize my current project is to automate the business process and time requirement is critical. How could the interviewers say I don't understand the full business intent? As a developer with more than 15 year experience and one year deep involvement within this project, how could I carry out my work without knowing what destination I am targeting?
Second, I am a developer and I am applying for a senior software developer role. I understand that in a waterfall software development model, requirement analysis is important and developers have to closely cooperate with BAs at this stage. However, BAs, instead of developers, should focus more on this analysis and document the business intents and drivers. If Optiver does want a BA, please say this clearly in the first place.
Moreover, when I took over my current project, it had been going on for three years. In other words, requirement analysis phase had passed. I really don't understand why the interviewers were entangled in the business intents instead of challenging me in the solution design and/or technical details.
Anyway, this is their decision. The lesson I learned from the interview process is that they actually didn't care about candidate's programming capability although they claimed that they were looking for a good software programmer.
