There are hundreds of blogs on interview technique, but very few on which companies you should apply to in the first place, or even which position you should choose.
Back in the day, when we were running the Kx Systems sales office in New York we ran a stealth competition to find the best software developer on Wall Street. At that stage ‘we’ was Paul Mullan and I. Paul was a bit of a genius; an exceptional software engineer, with a math degree from Oxford, he was VP Engineering at First Derivatives and the first person in a decade that Arthur Whitney (CTO and lead developer of KDB) allowed to work on the Kx source code. I, on the other hand, knew just enough about programming to know that Paul and Arthur were world class.
Over a 12-month period we managed close to 50 ‘proof of concepts’, encompassing all the top Wall Street prop trading shops and hedge funds. At the time, the killer (for our prospective customers) was navigating the KDB C API (in lay persons terms, connecting to the database from C/C++). The API was a nightmare. It was terse, full of one-letter function names and had zero documentation. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. And this is how we planned to find the best developer on Wall Street. Assess how quickly folks from the various firms came to terms with the API.
Most struggled, despite our best efforts to support them. A few got there with a bit of coaching, and one or two managed to figure it out by themselves. After a year, the clear winner was a young guy from a tech firm recently acquired by Bank of America, Andrew G. It took a year but we had finally found the best developer on Wall Street, or so we thought…
Thanksgiving Day 2002 saw Paul and I supporting an Australian dude from a small vendor called Wombat. Ron Verstappen had been sent our way by Simon Goddard from Lehman and wanted to mock up a quick feed handler to push data into KDB. We sent him over the database, a license key and the C API expecting a torrent of questions to follow.
Nothing happened, nothing at all. Then an hour later Ron sent us an email. It read, to paraphrase, “Your API is crap, I wrote a script to re-write it, the new file is attached. Going forwards it might be an idea to use this version with your customers.”
As so often is the case in life, you spend a long time looking, then exceptional just steps forward and slaps you in the face.
Roll forward nine months and I had three job offers on the table, one with a leading hedge fund (and enterprise Kx user) with a guaranteed first year package of $500,000 (ten times what I was paid in FD), a second offering $200,000 plus equity as the CEO for Europe for an emerging OMS provider, and a third offer of $75,000 to become the second employee with a tiny vendor called Wombat. The third came with 7% commission on any business I closed and the promise that I’d get the chance to run the company one day if I delivered.
It was a no brainer really – don’t bet on average, go for exceptional every time!
Cheers,
Danny
Where Are They Now?