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Java Developer Interview (with Quant) Questions?

nns

Joined
6/13/13
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11
Hello All !

I have a telephone interview with a Sales Specialist from Quantitative Research department of a leading Trading Technologies company. And I am a bit confused as to what questions he might ask?
I dont have a Quant background and the job I am being interviewed is that of a Developer.

Thanks!
 
expect questions that deal with multithreading and garbage collection.
 
According to my experience mostly professional interviewers ask question about the post. you will be hired and they will require so you should expect the questions like that. and be prepared for such questions to avoid extra stress and pressure. Best of luck.
 
Depends how advanced you are expected to be. At the basic level they will certainly expect strong familiarity with Java collections. You would be expected to know the performance tradeoffs of using one type of data structure versus another, e.g. array of ints versus an ArrayList of Integers, HashMap versus ConcurrentHashMap. Of course you'd also expect to be able to handle standard coding and conceptual questions.

At an intermediate level, I would think they would ask you some questions about concurrency/multithreading. There are standard interview problems here regarding deadlock, setting up a publishing queue, etc., which you can find on the Internetz. I suppose familiarity with keywords like "volatile", "synchronized", and understanding their use would be expected here also. There are a number of 'gotchas' in this area. For example, is a read/write operation to a primitive variable atomic?

At a more advanced level (especially if you are dealing with a trading system), they would expect you to be familiar with HotSpot JVM and how it does garbage collection, and how to tune it to minimize gc pauses.
 
The above post is correct. All the questions will be on Collections, Multi-threading, and search and retrieval algorithms.
None of the standard Java questions on Spring, Struts, Hibernate, Design Patterns, Web Services.
For Goldman-Sachs in Jersey City, you can expect the initial screening questions below:
What are the alternatives to a Synchronized Map?
Differences between a Stack and a Heap.
Algorithms and speed of search and retrieval from Binary Trees.
Two ways to start a thread.
ArrayList vs. Vector vs. Binary Tree for speed of storage and retrieval of data.
basically you need to study in-depth on Collections, Multi-threading, Search and Retrieval Algorithms.
 
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