HRT algo dev onsite, cut before lunch

HRT algo dev onsite, cut before lunch

Just finished my HRT onsite for the algo dev track, 4 rounds split AM/PM with company lunch in between, and got cut before the afternoon rounds even started.

Phone screen a couple weeks earlier was all coding, no BQ, which caught me off guard since I'd prepped a bunch of C++ trivia expecting the usual 八股 style. Interviewer just read the problem out loud, no shared doc, so I was scrambling to take notes the whole time. Got the watcher problem, players moving right on a 1D line while a watcher blocks them depending on which way it's facing, definitely not something you can pattern match to LC.

Onsite morning was a programming round (extending an existing C++ trading system codebase, mostly reading and adapting the existing add/cancel pattern) and a data analysis round in a Jupyter notebook, some tabular prediction task with pandas. Felt okay on the coding, kind of slow on the pandas side since I don't touch notebooks much day to day.

Got pulled aside right before lunch and told they weren't moving forward, so no system design or math round for me. Stings a bit but at least it's a fast no instead of dragging on for weeks.