Last Monday I flew to Seattle to interview for software development positions at the Empire. Over the course of two days, I interviewed with the DirectX team, the Halo 2 Vista port team, and Microsoft Games Studios. Game programming is not something I ever thought I would do for a living, since the industry is notorious for overworking poor schlubs who are willing to work 18 hour days for next to nothing as long as they are realizing their lifelong dream of being a game developer. Still, it could happen.
I was kindof disappointed at my MS interviews. I thought that MS had a reputation for asking ridiculous questions during their interviews (of the brainteaser variety), but I actually spent most of my time demoing Euclidean Crisis for people. The programming questions that people did ask were pretty mundane. “Here’s a tree with some nodes, write code to do such and such a thing recursively…” I’m pretty suspicious of any job that they ask you more coding questions than algorithm questions during the interview. Clearly, the less design and more grunt coding a job entails, the more interested the potential employer is in knowing whether you can dehydrate a bitpacked trie using a recursion (which makes no sense to begin with).
I found that the above ad slogan for Vista and Office 2007 really made me think. In particular, I was wondering whether its purpose was to sell these MS products or to defame them.
One night I hung out with Doug, Henry, Blackman, Texan Dave Kent, Jasmine, and Michael – it was totally sweet. Doug & Co. live in a really bizarre apartment. The building itself is called “Site 17″ and its brand-new. However, it takes the artistic direction that could be called “Direlique” (a la Zoolander), being internally and externally decorated to look like an abandoned industrial building. So there are exposed concrete walls and steel girders and a character actor in the hallway of the first floor pretending to be a bum. I’m kidding about the character actor.
The conversation naturally turned, at some point, to mankind’s greatest game of wits: Rock, Paper, Scissors. We played a couple of rounds of RPS 25, but found that the game was unbalanced because it was too fun to make the sponge gesture.
Rounding out my Seattle trip, I had lunch with Jasmine the day I left at a Mexican place that served up burritos the size of a large baby. I mention this mainly because I thought the that donkey they gave us to mark our table was cute/ridiculous.
Microsoft was nice enough to fly me down to LA instead of back to SFO, so I’ve been hanging out down here with Jo, driving around and trying to not get carjacked.
