Interview or Test, Can’t sleep

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Ok so I got “interviewed”/tested by game company X at around 3am today (due to the difference in timezones)… and now it’s 5:30am and I can’t sleep because I’m still running on “MUST STAY AWAKE!” fuel.

I was totally expecting a voice interview via Skype with verbal technical questions and discussions, and perhaps a few tests or assignments. I was preparing my microphone, and video camera just in case, warming up my voice and drinking hot chocolate. Few hours ago I reviewed multi-threading, network programming, animation, shaders, the whole thing..

But, what I got was something that took me completely by surprise. First, it wasn’t a voice interview like I thought, only text chatting.. and between windows updater which repeatedly wanted to restart the computer the moment the “interview” started. and how funny I must’ve looked running around tripping on everything looking for pencils/pens and WHERE THE HELL DID I PUT THAT A4 PAPER PACK!! All of these are ok, they are part of the thing, the real surprise was that immediately after: Hello how are you? I get multiple questions in 3D Math, C/C++ and Data structures (some are a little tricky) with a time limit that only the interviewer knew (few minutes for every question), reminds me of university midterms and believe me.. my brain doesn’t like time limits like these, I just freeze and stare at nothing for most of the precious minutesesss.. usually

And that’s exactly what happened, I was like -_- for most of the time lol. I’d say I did pretty good in half the questions, and I have no idea how bad I was at the other half, but it was bad. I couldn’t have prepared better because there is no way I’d know this was supposed to be a pure coding test!

So, in conclusion, today I discover that preparing for inter-personal communication, and trying to write a hashmap implementation in 5 minutes using C/C++ without STL are entirely two different mindsets… I might have lost the job because of this, but next time it might happen, I’m going to be ready flame-balls-fire-from-eyes

Next job interview going to be around Action Script 3. I love that thing it’s so easy to work with.. :D

now.. for MOAR SKYRIM!