I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at ION Trading in Jul 2012
Interview
The process started off with a pre-interview coding test. Nothing out of the ordinary, just writing a Java class for checking whether two strings are anagrams and another that implemented a HashMap that doesn't allow duplicate values. It took me maybe an hour to finish.
About a week later, their recruiter called me back to tell me I'd passed the pre-interview test, and that next would be a phone interview with the team lead. Another week or so later, the team lead called me. No interview scheduled, he just called me out of the blue at 4:50 on a Wednesday.
Aside from that, he was unbelievably rude: it was less an interview than him berating me for not being smart enough, in his eyes, to work at ION and ranting about how amazing and smart he and his team were. After about 10 minutes of him talking about how smart he thinks he is, how hard their tech interviews are, and how he doesn't think I could pass them, I reminded him that I passed their coding test and asked if I actually was going to have the technical interview, which made him say something like "you know what? You aren't worth my time" and hang up. Good riddance, especially considering how he acted towards me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a UniqueHashMapClass, which should extend the regular HashMap class with the added condition that no value appears twice in a UniqueHashMap.
I applied through university. I interviewed at ION Trading
Interview
I was asked to do a three step interview, after a simple phone interview; a coding test and two face by face interviews. All three steps were clearly explained and as expected; the coding test, in particular, took a couple of hours of work to be completed in its entirety.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Develop a data structure with particular operations
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at ION Trading (Pisa) in Mar 2012
Interview
I applied online sending an email. They contacted me back through phone and, eventually, they sent me a test to be performed at home in 2-3 days. The test involved two exercises in C++, regarding the implementation of an interface for a basic agenda and of a particular platform to provide requests/offers of stocks. They took at least one week to review the code and eventually, they arranged a interview on site. The interview lasted roughly three hours, in 3 different stages
- a conversation with the HR rectruiter, where I described the resume and my background
- a technical conversation with a senior engineer, where we revised the home exercises and he asked me additional questions about the C++ and basic data structures (arrays, trees, hash tables)
- a conversation with the manager for the group where I should have been displaced
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
they carefully check the code of your exercises, asking fro very subtle behaviours