404 Frequently Asked Questions In Quantitative Finance
applied — if you can’t get eyeliner on straight, don’t put
it on, and never wear nail polish if there is any chance
it will chip before the interview.
What People Get Wrong
Zeroth law of holes When you find yourself in a hole, stop
digging. You will be asked questions for which you can’t
think of any answer at all. Some interviewers make the
questions harder until that point is reached. The trick
is to cut your losses. With any luck they will just move
on, unless it’s a critical topic. Of course if it’s critical
then it’s game over anyway. What you must avoid is
wasting time wandering like the lost spirit of ignorance
over a vast formless expanse of your incompetence. A
good response is to look them in the eye after a little
thought, then simply say ‘‘don’t know, sorry.’’
The exception to this are the ‘‘all the tea in China’’ ques-
tions where you are asked to estimate some quantity
like the number of bull testicles consumed by McDon-
alds customers per year. You aren’t expected to know
the answer to these, indeed knowing it would seem
rather strange. They want to see how well you can
estimate an unknown quantity and how you think.
But the biggest hole catches people who get very ner-
vous when things go wrong. This is about the most
negative personality defect you might have in a bank.
When you realize you’ve said something dumb, stop,
say something like ‘‘let me think about that for a sec-
ond,’’ and correct yourself. Make the pause work for
you. Think the answer through, and show that you are
capable of recovering. Remember that no one can talk
about things at the edge of their competence for 4–5
hours without saying something silly. You don’t have
