I spoke with an engineer in Austin regarding the expansion of their New York office and equities trading.

He spent most of the time asking about my work history and technical questions.

He allocated about 10 minutes at the end for a fairly simple coding question, but that's where the trouble began. The platform was extremely broken:

• There was a checkbox to turn off autocomplete, but it didn't work. The editor kept overwriting what I typed.
• Compiler errors and warnings were not highlighted in either the editor or the output window, so I had to spend a lot of time squinting at verbose g++ output (with line wrapping) to find the line number for each error.
• Segfaults did not show the line they occurred on, so I had to spend excessive time bisecting with printf statements to find the problem.
• printf also didn't work because the environment didn't have flush on newline enabled, making even the bisection process harder than it needed to be.

Ten minutes was insufficient to address all these editor bugs, so I failed the assessment.

I sent them an email with videos documenting these issues in the test environment, but they ghosted me.

I do not feel this was a fair assessment of my abilities whatsoever, and frankly, they wasted my time.

Optiver has a reputation for blacklisting candidates who do not perform well. Therefore, I would recommend not engaging with them as long as they are using a shared coding web interface.

Write a queue in C++ using their horribly broken interface.