The interview process started with a phone screen, a CoderPad assessment, and finally a multi-hour onsite interview (this was for Marquee).

Generally speaking, the people were nice, but I noticed that all of them seemed insanely proud of themselves and exuded quite a bit of self-importance. Each interview was a 2-on-1.

They pretty much all progressed the same way:

• Walk me through your resume.
• Some idle chit-chat about how great GS is and how they're shooting to be the "Google of Wall Street."
• Technical questions.

Every single tech question was virtually identical—algorithms and complexity. Despite discussing all the different types of roles and responsibilities, they were not interested in anything but complexity. They felt like the seagulls from Finding Nemo: "O(n)? O(n)! O(n)!"

I tried talking about, well, literally anything else, given that the roles I was applying for would only use those concepts about 1% of the time, but it didn't matter. This was all pen and paper; they didn't even have a whiteboard on their floor.

At some point, they showed me a product demo that they had spent years on. What I saw was a terribly archaic layout, with text spilling out of text boxes, and the one stock price graph they demoed never even actually loaded.

Oh well. At least it (didn't) load in linear time.

All in all, I got a free lunch and a decent laugh.

Explain complexity.

Move all zeroes to the beginning of a given array. This needs to be done in linear time.

Explain again why linear time is literally the only important thing in the universe. Feel free to take your time if it gets you too hot.

What is your favorite type of complexity and why is it O(n)?