nomura final round technology

hi, i was wondering if anyone had any information on what Nomura's final round of interviews for technology analyst (ny) would be like? the interviews are supposed to last at least two hours.

what should i expect - especially what questions?

thanks in advance for any answers/advice.

 
Best Response

I used to work for a firm that Nomura recruited a lot of folks from. One of my old friends is now the head of Fixed Income Analytics there.

Pretty standard stuff. You will be asked questions about data structures, algorithms, order-of-complexity reduction strategies, and various language questions. You might get a random question on Patricia trees or red-black trees. Linear algebra, numerical methods, and stats/probability are all fair game for analytics interviews. Threading is also obviously fair game- I haven't seen anyone I knew who's at Nomura ask threading questions, but I wouldn't be surprised by the producer-consumer problem or dining philosophers.

I know it sounds crazy, but try not to pretend you know any languages all that well. Otherwise, if you say you know java, you will get a question on JNIs. If you say you know C++, you'll start getting asked details of the gcc compiler. Most of your interviewers are programmers and they might get annoyed if you claim to be proficient in a specific area of technology that they've had a lot more experience with than you have and ask a real doozy of a question. So it's best to play dumb.

 

thanks so much for the thorough answer! i wonder how your friend likes it there so far? some say working at a japanese bank still feels very different.

the actual position title was supposed to do something more with technology management and i was told it was less about technology but more about finance and management. in light of this, do you still expect there to be heavy technology questions?

also, since the interview is supposed to be 2+ hours though they said this is because they wanted us to network at some point, could it be that they're going to be doing group and panel interviews?

thanks again.

 

Ah, it sounds like you're more of a business analyst or program manager. You sure you still want to do that? Basically, you'll be the administrative assistant to the programmers, not a manager. I think a lot of the guys at Nomura- at least in the groups you'd want to work in- are quant programmers who've picked up a lot of aggressiveness and decisiveness from the traders. When I was in analytics, we had some business analysts come in a few years ago to "manage" the process and they quickly got co-opted to filling out paperwork and handling administrativia for the programmers by the more senior guys.

You want to spend your first few years in a hard technical role (technical not necessarily meaning technology, but something specialized and mathematically oriented.) Program manager is a very soft-skills oriented role- as much as sales or investment banking. It is difficult to move out of soft-skills roles and get into the front office without going back for a graduate degree, though a few of the creme-de-la-creme make it into the front office basically acting as research/analysis assistants to division heads and liasing with some of the technology groups. It's much easier to make it into the front office from your programming skills, though.

That said, the interview will likely focus on MIS questions then and ask generic stuff about how a system might get built, how much you enjoy doing paperwork, and if you've ever worked with Concur, expense reporting systems, Excel, and other stuff.

 

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