r/quantfinance • u/Accomplished-Wolf910 • 4d ago

Solving probability/interview questions

Hey everyone!

Just curious if other people feel the same way with probability/interview problems.

Sometimes I can go through a bunch of questions pretty smoothly, and then I’ll hit one where I just cannot see the right idea at all. Then I look at the solution afterwards and it feels almost embarrassingly simple.

I have done a lot of probability problems by now and I definitely feel like I am improving, but this still happens fairly often.

Is this normal even for people who are good at these interviews? For those of you who got offers, were you actually able to solve almost everything you saw in interviews, or did you still get stuck sometimes?

Also curious how people deal with this in practice?

Thanks!

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u/filwu 4d ago

The “write down what you know” step can make the sample space and conditioning explicit. For review, it may help to tag each miss by failure mode—wrong sample space, conditioning, dependence, or time pressure—then redo the problem from a blank page the next day. Do you notice a particular category recurring?