It required me to go look up the Poisson distribution in my stats book.

ooh. yeah that definitely comes under the esoteric category.

the job ad says they are looking for someone to develop fraud-detection algorithms. the poisson distribution is not esoteric in that context.

Would you have known it without having to look it up? I'm just saying that there is some reasonable limit to what you should be expected to know offhand.

For our startup we tend to look a lot more for general intelligence and ability to figure things out fast rather than rote memorization of formulas. I know somebody who is smart can look that up in a book and figure it out.

I think it is totally fair that they expect somebody to have a good comprehension of stats for what they are working on, maybe even to be a stats master, but I know people who have majored in math and are very smart that would still have to look some of that stuff up.

I'm just saying that the style of the technical questions they asked may filter out some great candidates.