Alright, here I am. It’s taken a non-trivial combination of hard work and luck, but I have finally landed myself a chance to write about my summer for Insight. The experience itself? Secondary. My name is Harsh Poonia. I was bitten by a radioac- nope, sorry. I am a fourth-year CS UG and spent this summer working as a tech intern at Optiver.
Let’s get the boring but useful stuff out of the way. Optiver comes in through campus internships and hires for roles of Quantitative Trader, Researcher, and Software Engineer. I was a little unsure of the trader profile because trading at Optiver is not completely based on machine learning algorithms; it is semi-automated, which means traders constantly provide their inputs to make decisions. This didn’t feel like something I would want to do every day, so I put the software internship at the top of my preferences. I was keen to get to know what systems at a quant firm look like. To me, it seemed like the place where every single line of code would be optimised to the last millisecond to squeeze every bit of performance. This looked a lot different from a software internship I tried in my second year, which I did not enjoy much and felt like a really long and meaningless software lab. My search for greener pastures led me to aim for all the companies that potentially had something more fun to offer, and Optiver stood out with lucrative pay and an amazing Amsterdam sales pitch.
Optiver has one of the most ingeniously creative tests I gave throughout the season. There’s just so much on there, and even I couldn’t list all the specifics, but there are reaction and trading intuition games with a mental maths dash (both of which are not part of the software internship assessment). The coding test has a standard competitive programming component, with a couple of other debugging/software completion components (pardon me for not remembering the specifics, it might have something to do with giving an average of 3 tests everyday for a week with little to no breaks between them, sometimes overlapping test windows and just the overall dread all of which leaves you with a hazy recollection at best of what happened). There was a behavioural component where they might as well have asked for your favourite breakfast. The competitive programming component was slightly tougher (I’m not going to give a CF rating comparison because CF contests and intern tests two seem not very correlated to each other, and an obsession with solving a particular rating might work against you), and overall the test was well rounded and a pleasure to give amidst the monotony that is the intern season. The interview tested your software writing and system design skills as opposed to chucking a random leetcode problem at you.
And the greatly anticipated summer day came when I first arrived in Amsterdam, and you know it is really happening when the cold Dutch wind has you looking for a spot to stand in the sun. Optiver has objectively one of the best, most well-structured, well-executed, and thought-out internship programs among companies, not just in quant but any domain for that matter. The internship program is organised with a great deal of planning for both the tech and trading cohorts. One week of trading and options theory kickstarted our journey. I have so much appreciation for all the intense, interactive, and knowledge-packed classes (knowledge which I never used again, but the joy of it all transcends utility) that week; their nature was exactly to my liking, and I found myself excited before every lecture. The material was interesting enough to make me want to understand every concept, knowing full well that this would be redundant (nothing ever truly is, but effectively).
The programs for trading and tech interns diverge here-forth, with traders manning the trenches that were the markets and us tech interns retreating to our desks to work on our project. I do not remember signing any NDA, but I will still not disclose details of the project (you may stop reading now, see you!) because I am a mysterious man (jk lol, pretty sure I signed something to that effect). An excellent thing about Optiver intern projects is that all they get deployed to production (at least mine did :P), and not some obscure thread no one has picked in years. It is entirely your project, so you are expected to take full ownership and make decisions that need to drive the project forward. We had lectures throughout on various divisions of the massive technological effort that makes a quant firm – all from hardware, infrastructure, trading tech, networks, and others. It is awe-inspiring how so much tech infrastructure and support is needed to make trades happen, you can’t just sit with buddies and buy-low-sell-high your way into finance.
Amsterdam as a city is remarkably well planned. It is an almost perfect blend of urban skyscraper-dense areas and quite laid-back parks, with shops and cafes in the cliche old European aesthetic. Dutch cycling culture is beautiful, it is refreshing to see how you can visit the entire city (and the countryside, for that matter) so conveniently on a bike without being honked at and not trying to suffocate from vehicle exhausts. Public transport covers every part of the city, so much so that many people simply do not own cars because they never felt the need for one! There are plenty of scenic spots and places to visit in and around the city, and intern outings are organised, which were surprisingly very fun. For me, the only real challenge of living in the city was not having enough time to explore all of it. If you plan your weekends right, you can go on trips to other dream destinations – I could make a visit to Norway, Belgium, Switzerland. I’ll spare the details for another blog 😃
The internship was a lot more hectic than I had thought it would be, and that pattern was true for most of the tech cohort. I walked into the internship, envisioning a great balance between work hours and evening hours where I could just do my own thing. That unfortunately did not happen, and I had to put in a lot more hours than your typical software intern. I am not sure I would have wanted to know this beforehand, the anticipation of a dreamy summer just could not be diminished by the reality of long workdays with a monotonous routine. Having built your own solution end-to-end, with all the design decisions taken along the way and pushing production-ready code within a short period really instils a certain confidence about being able to do this comfortably, whenever, wherever and if you choose to do so.
Was the internship experience and my work everything I had imagined it to be? Did I get to work in an environment that was as collaborative as I had wished? Did I get to work on something I thought was cutting-edge in terms of implementation? Did I have the satisfaction of solving an incredibly hard problem that required me to learn more in the internship than I would have in an entire year at college?
No. But that is what internships are for. For you to find something you might be passionate about and enjoy for years, not a few weeks. As an introduction to general software development and painting a picture of what a career in here could look like, the experience held up to my standards. An objectively well-designed program with one of the brightest peer groups across the world, a comfortable office space, and enjoyable outings can still sometimes have you wanting a little more. It might still not be what you want for yourself, and that is completely okay. You learn a lot from the experience itself at any internship, and even more so when you get to live a completely different culture than what you’re used to, and gain a fresh perspective on life.
Final words? Don’t stress too much about the intern season. There are so many good companies and so many good offers; you’re not at any disadvantage if you mess up even a dozen IAFs. At the end of the day, it will not be the intern you bag or the stipend you make that will make you happy. Your confidence in dealing with tough situations, like this season, will. Knowing that you put in all this effort and discipline into the process, and your capability is the main takeaway.
