In This Economy

Written by Felix Mao from Rye Country Day School, New York, USA

The receptionist glanced up as I entered the office.

“Name?” she asked.

“Sam Jones,” I said, calm, cool, and collected, just like I had been taught.

She then handed me a number and directed me to sit in the interview room. I took a seat and saw I had been handed the number 01. First. An average person might feel anxious at this position in the queue, but I was not an average person.

As I waited, other applicants entered the room after me until we eventually totalled nine. As I watched the parade of people prance into the room, two particular applicants stood out.  First – a woman in a white blazer, high heels, and large gold earrings. Sitting on the opposite side of the room, she pulled a deck of flashcards from her purse, presumably filled with questions, and began silently mouthing what seemed to be answers, worry and fear creasing her scrunched eyebrows.

A couple of minutes later, the second hurried through the door – a tall man in a grey blazer attempting to cover his wrinkled button-down shirt, a pen in his ear, and a folder that held countless, disorganized papers. As he shuffled to the seat next to me, the pen from his ear fell to the floor. When he bent to pick it up, the folder tipped, spilling its innards all over. 

“Sorry…” He looked sheepish. 

I couldn’t help but chuckle. This was my competition? These were the best humans for Wall Street jobs in 2050?

The tall man sat next to me after all that chaos and opened his mouth as if to introduce himself, but the door banged open again before he could. 

The new arrival stood in the threshold between the hallway and the waiting room. “Hi! My name is Sarah Thompson, HR Director for JP Morgan, and I would like to thank you all for coming today. We appreciate the effort you’ve put into your applications. You should all be proud to have made it this far in the process. When your number is called, please follow me into the interview room for a 10-15 minute discussion. Afterwards, you’ll return here, where you’ll wait for everyone else to finish, and for our team to finalize your scores. Is that all clear?”

The three of us shook our heads in agreement. She then gave a small nod and said, “Applicant 01?”

That was me. I stood up.

“Good luck!” The tall man said as I followed Sarah’s steps out of the room.

She led me into a modern room with bright lights and a white meeting table in the middle. 

“Welcome, Sam, to the JP Morgan interview process!” Sarah said, shaking my hand. “ It is nice to finally meet you. Please take a seat here.”

“Thanks for giving me this opportunity,” I responded, having prepared my response to such niceties countless times, and sat in the chair as instructed, right in front of my interviewer. 

“So, let’s begin. First, you wrote in your interest form that you’re keen to work in model development and the LLM field of our company. Can you tell me why?”

On the surface, I still maintained that stern look, but inside, I smiled. This was a question I had accounted for in my prep. It helped me prepare for these types of inquiries by considering the most extreme variants and different scenarios, and I knew exactly how to answer them all by now.

“I like to solve complex problems, and since AI is so relevant nowadays, I feel really passionate about it. In terms of its appeal in the context of your company, well, I feel that’s sort of obvious. Just imagine how much more we might invest when backed up by the robust knowledge of AI.”

Judging by the slight smirk and nod by the woman, I’m pretty sure that it was a perfect answer. In fact, I know it was. It was exactly how we had practiced.

“Alright,” she said, after jotting down some notes. She crossed her legs and leaned forward.  “Let’s get a little deeper. Since teamwork is a key to working here, describe a time when you had to collaborate with someone different from you. Explain, please, the challenges you faced and how you overcame them.”

That question.

The one I had dreaded. Now, don’t get me wrong, I had an answer, but I just didn’t have that many experiences working with others. My answer, one might say, was more hypothetical than lived. I took a breath and then proceeded. 

“I collaborated on a math modelling project last spring with my peers. We all had different styles and problem-solving methods, but in the end, we were able to solve the issue using our strategy, and we won the competition as well.” 

Sarah’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “Could you maybe elaborate a little more? That is all a little vague, I think. You have also not answered all of the questions posed.”

“Sure” I said, launching into the details just like how I had been trained to. From how we split responsibilities, to how we coded all the models, to the approach we used to find data, I told her every little (unlived) detail. “For example, there was a problem where one of us coded part of the model in Python, while another teammate coded his part in Java, despite us making it perfectly clear which model we preferred. Unifying the code took quite some time, but in the end, we got it done. At that stage, we learned just how important teamwork was.” 

When I finished, she sat back, jotting something down on her notepad. She was noticeably intrigued, I thought. But from previous reactions, concerns started forming. The lifted eyebrows: was that a sign that she was on to me? Her tone seemed…flat? It seemed that she perhaps wasn’t totally moved by my responses.

“Impressive, you seem…really prepared.” 

That put me at ease again. Why had I worried even slightly about that question? I had run through every scenario in my head and knew how to respond to anything. Then, something clicked. I almost forgot. I couldn’t be too perfect. No one was perfect, well, besides me, of course, but I couldn’t show that. 

The interview continued smoothly, like a well-scripted conversation. I tried mimicking her movements, such as moving my chair, subtle coughs, anything to make me seem natural. I kept telling myself: be perfect, but not too perfect.

That was key. But then came her last question.

“What would you say is your biggest weakness?”

My mind screeched to a stop as if a driver slammed his brakes at an unexpected stop. What? I never practiced this. This must be a glitch, a missing sample. What was I supposed to do?  

“Take your time,” Sarah said in a nice tone, but I could tell from her facial expressions that I was losing her support and raising her suspicion, especially because of how fast I answered the other questions. 

I went through all the lines of thought in my head. The more I waited, the more exasperated Sarah looked. Finally, I came up with a generic answer.

“My biggest weakness…is that I get too caught up in small details.” Sarah sighed deeply.  She wasn’t buying this. I continued: “Sometimes, I just need to keep the bigger picture in mind. I’ve had managers tell me this in the past.” I could tell by a shift in her eye contact that she was no longer listening. She looked at her fingernails and then back up at me. 

I tried to deliver my answer with confidence, enthusiasm, and ‘genuine’ humanity, but for the first time in the interview, she didn’t smile. There was no nod, no smirk, only silence and a deep, penetrating look at me. One of those looks that tried to tell me “okay, you’re good,” but secretly wanted to say so much more.

In the strange silence, I asked myself: did I mess up? Did I miscalculate? 

No, it couldn’t be. Of all the responses so far, I felt this one was truly the best it had given me. But I made a mental note to improve the algorithm's overall humanity for future interactions like this.

Finally, after closing her notebook, Sarah stood up and said, “That concludes your interview. Mr. Sam Jones, thank you very much for your honesty today. We at JP Morgan really appreciate it.” 

She gestured for me to stand too. “Please return to the waiting room, and we’ll let you know the results shortly.” 

I shook her hand and walked out of the door, returning to the room where I had begun. To the same tall man and the same woman reading her flashcards. But now there were others. Presumably more applicants for the job. Yet I couldn’t help but notice how imperfect they looked. Untucked shirts, messy note cards, a woman even had lipstick on her teeth. 

“How was it?” The tall man asked me as I sat down. He leaned over to my chair nervously, clutching his crumpled folder like it was his life vest, saving him from the tsunami of interview questions waiting for him. 

“What did she ask? Was there any questions about writing code?”

He tried to sound composed, but the sweat on his forehead and his shaking knee suggested anything but that. Obviously, he was searching for answers, anything that could help him. 

I shrugged. “Just the usual. If you’ve practiced enough, you’ll be fine.”

As he sulked away, looking defeated that I didn’t leak any answers, I couldn’t help but feel a little…what would one call it? Bad? How was he going to pass? He’d basically failed before he started. 

I looked up at the TV screen that now flashed a new message: 

NOW INTERVIEWING: APPLICANT 02

“Oh! That’s me.” The woman with flashcards said, quickly rising and hurrying into the interview room. 

During the wait, I went through a strange experience of second-guessing myself. I kept thinking: was that too fake? I must have been too perfect. I told myself that if I hadn’t been selected, next time, I had to make myself more human. 

But then I’d shift in my attitude again – no, I had calculated it. I would succeed. The algorithm said I would. But just in case, I scanned quickly around the room, jotting down the behavior of those around me. The silent nervousness of the woman, the bold clumsiness of the man, any behavior that showed human imperfection.

As I sat in the waiting room, time decided, at that juncture, to become a Formula 1 race car. Before I knew it, the participants completed their interviews, one after another, until it was the nine of us again, sitting in the waiting room, in the same exact spots, though, at this time, we were nervous for different reasons.

Eventually, the doors kicked open again, and Sarah walked in with her notebook.

“Thank you all for coming today! You did great, but unfortunately, we can only accept one of you.” She stared into the eyes of each and every person there, and finally smiled. “That being said, we have chosen to accept: Sam Jones.” 

Of course this was expected. For someone of my calibre.

Between the sighs of the man, the sobs of the woman, and the visible frustration of the other participants, I stood up to greet Sarah.

“Congratulations and welcome to the company!” 

 I reminded myself how to react to this success and grinned. “Thank you! You won’t be sorry.”

She turned to the receptionist. “Katie, please help Sam with his introductory paperwork, and when that is completed, guide him to the next steps.”

“Yes, no problem.”  

With that, the HR Director left. Katie looked up at me, no eye contact, and I couldn’t help but smirk. 

But Sam Jones wasn’t the only one smirking. A couple of blocks away from this very skyscraper, a group of AI engineers celebrated in front of a TV that displayed Sam Jones’ interview.  And a couple of blocks away from that, the board members of Goldman Sachs celebrated the success of infiltration.

They had begun Project Storm, a fitting name for the storm about to ensue in JP Morgan.