AVOID. This joke of a company expected me to waste my weekend doing a coding challenge (with a question which had nothing to do with the role applied for) before they would grace me with their time for a real interview. This is despite my extensive open source contributions, which they were welcome to review and which would probably take less of their time to review than a coding challenge.

Thoughtless people. Companies like this, who don't respect your time before you have even interviewed there, are not going to respect your time when you do work there. So just say no to these stupid take-home exercises (especially when you already have a portfolio of work to back yourself up with).

The initial conversation that led up to this was a chat with the hiring manager. To me, he sounded like the usual hands-off, middle management, technically incompetent type you find all over these hedge funds, who got in before the hiring process became totally ludicrous and unreasonable like it is today.

Coding challenge: Implement an order limit book management system with bids and offers in a serialized format.