Perpetural Motion Squad

After the closure of Ensemble Studios I was cast back into the pond of job hunting.

After taking a bit of time off and enjoying my new daughter, I started into job hunting sometime in mid-April, and after 4 full weeks of phone calls, tech interviews, and 24 hour plane flights, I have accepted a position at Blizzard Entertainment Where I'll be working on something that I can't tell you about yet, but I can tell you that I think it's going to be much, much bigger than my previous project.

Interviewing is always a difficult process. As the interviewee, you've got such a small window of time to prove your mental metal, and a massive deck of problems already stacked against you. On top of that, a significant portion of the companies I interviewed with still used the arcane concept of "white board interviewing."

First, I will admit, I am quite horrible at white board questions. My skillets focused in standing in front of a group of people, and coding on a large dry-erase board have never been developed. Especially when the peanut gallery likes to talk, distract, and try to correct you mid-thought process. I understand the "logic" behind white boarding, generally that someone who's good at answering those types of questions will be good at any skill set;(which in itself is a good deduction to make) but the problem arises when you docking your interviewee for things that they would normally rely on a compiler to check for them. (Semicolons, spelling, etc). At some point you have to ask the question "what are we really testing this person for?"

Through it all, I came out with one horror story I'll share:
After passing the phonescreen and written test, I flew out and interviewed at one company that had a standard "casual interview" format, where you'd meet the team in a semi-formal setting, and they would ask questions and have talks face to face. This is pretty common from what I've seen, (although a couple companies didn't even have me meet the rest of the team, I only spoke with the leads..) Before all that though, they started off the day with the white boarding session. I entered the room with all the interviewers waiting for me already. two out of the five said hello, while the other three continued on with a conversation about their cool new iPhone features event, and avoided eye contact.

After standing there for a good 2-3 minutes, waiting for the group to finish side conversations, one of the more senior gentlemen started the process. "We'll ask you some questions, answer as best you can, try to show your work and talk through the process. We want to know what you're thinking, just as much as what you're doing. If you get stuck, we'll try to help out to get you on the right path."

Boilerplate statement. I nodded in agreement, as the first question was tossed out to me.

I started off outlining the problem and running through a few examples to attempt to derive a general algorithm for. (standard fodder if you've ever read this book.) Every now and again I would look over my shoulder, or turn around to point out a specific comment or design choice I had made. And what I noticed during the process was quite alarming; The entire time, the interviewers were texting, carrying on side conversations, and surfing the web. In fact, I would stop every now and again during their conversations and ask if I had missed something, or if they had a comment on what I was working on. (This was met with angry looks and rolling eyes each time I did it.)

I know it's a common stage to try to put too much pressure on your interviewee. Some companies pride themselves on it. It's a weird balance between YOUR ego, and trying to interview the candidate. But half way through the 2nd question, I was just pissed off. If my bald ass has to stand up and put on a dog-and-pony show, the least you can do is act like you haven't seen the goddamn problem 50 times before.

After the hour was up, I left the room with a horrible taste in my mouth. Not because of my answers to the problems, but more so because of the realization that if these jack offs didn't show enough respect for me to give-a-damn during my interview, I'd never get that respect if I'd accepted an offer there. The last thing I want in a company is MORE ego to deal with. [[EDITED]]

Remember kids, Interviewing is a 2 way street. Yes, one side holds the gate keys, which grants them specific powers of Asshole-ness, but be warned that you're not the only show in town.


Anyhow, onto a different topic.

After my previous GDC talk, I drummed up a few bits of research that never made it fully into production, and have caught on to another talk at Austin GDC.

So what's next then? Who knows. Right now I'm just trying to find a decent priced home in the Irvine CA area, and trying to sell a home in BEDFORD TEXAS.

Which, oddly enough, has nothing to do with programming...

~Main