Interview at China Game Companies, Part 2
On the same day as the In-fusio interview, I had another interview with another company in the evening.
Virtuos Games is a game studio made in China, with a twist of French. Of four of the founding fathers, all four of them were former Ubisoft Shanghai employees, and three of them mainland Chinese. The odd one out, the French CEO, is a game industry heavyweight. He was the Worldwide Managing Director of ubi.com, Ubisoft's online division.
Virtuos Games is taking advantage of China being the number one outsource destination(heck, even India is outsourcing to China), and have services ranging from programming, art, level design to QA. Their development team skilled across multiple platforms, from Xbox, PS2 to PSP.
Now for the meat. The interview started with an old-fashioned self introduction. Soon after, as expected, a programming test is conducted. The interviewer passed me a piece of paper, and uttered a few Chinese technology jargon that sounded more like Martian. I suspected he meant "Single Linked List", he noded.
He wanted me to write a program to reverse a single linked list. Not a big problem, I still have a vague memory of the concept. On a piece of paper. Piece of cake. Here's the interesting part: He aint leaving. I have never felt comfortable coding in front of people, let alone strangers.
Here's the next blow: He wanted pointers. Being a java programmer, I was never a master of pointer/reference operations. In other words, I couldn't blindfold myself and unleash a steady flow of pointers and references, I got to do that alone, while nobody's watching, with a handy internet connection. Too little too late to regret sleeping through that C/C++ class now. Under his watchful eye, I scribbled some code, asked him for comments, and the cycle repeated for a few rounds before he was finally satisfied(or gave up on me). When I thought it was over, he requested me to change my recursive function to a simple loop. That was so icing on the cake. In total, I took about half an hour to code a simple linked list. Shame on me.
Here's an advice: Get to know linked list operations like its your daddy! Ask yourself "who's my daddy?" before any programming test. Slap yourself if you answered your surname. Linked lists have always been a very popular topic for programming tests. Oh yeah, get your real life daddy to watch behind while you code too.
Anyway, I thank the interviewer, which turned out to be the programming director of the company, for being so patient(or pretty apt at disguising his annoyance) with me.
After the blunder, a desperate attempt to salvage the sinking ship was inevitable, and I showed him my past works. From then onwards, he was friendly and smiling throughout, but in the end, I still don't know whether have I done enough to reverse the bad impression I gave him initially.
My favourite part of the interview? The interviewer asked me what games have I been playing lately, and asked me to describe them. I gleefully answered Katamari Damacy, and seeing that he had never heard of the game before, I went ahead and described all the rolling, rolling, rolling. In jaywalker's lingo, its cock talking. Yes, that was my favourite part.
Virtuos Games is a game studio made in China, with a twist of French. Of four of the founding fathers, all four of them were former Ubisoft Shanghai employees, and three of them mainland Chinese. The odd one out, the French CEO, is a game industry heavyweight. He was the Worldwide Managing Director of ubi.com, Ubisoft's online division.
Virtuos Games is taking advantage of China being the number one outsource destination(heck, even India is outsourcing to China), and have services ranging from programming, art, level design to QA. Their development team skilled across multiple platforms, from Xbox, PS2 to PSP.
Now for the meat. The interview started with an old-fashioned self introduction. Soon after, as expected, a programming test is conducted. The interviewer passed me a piece of paper, and uttered a few Chinese technology jargon that sounded more like Martian. I suspected he meant "Single Linked List", he noded.
He wanted me to write a program to reverse a single linked list. Not a big problem, I still have a vague memory of the concept. On a piece of paper. Piece of cake. Here's the interesting part: He aint leaving. I have never felt comfortable coding in front of people, let alone strangers.
Here's the next blow: He wanted pointers. Being a java programmer, I was never a master of pointer/reference operations. In other words, I couldn't blindfold myself and unleash a steady flow of pointers and references, I got to do that alone, while nobody's watching, with a handy internet connection. Too little too late to regret sleeping through that C/C++ class now. Under his watchful eye, I scribbled some code, asked him for comments, and the cycle repeated for a few rounds before he was finally satisfied(or gave up on me). When I thought it was over, he requested me to change my recursive function to a simple loop. That was so icing on the cake. In total, I took about half an hour to code a simple linked list. Shame on me.
Here's an advice: Get to know linked list operations like its your daddy! Ask yourself "who's my daddy?" before any programming test. Slap yourself if you answered your surname. Linked lists have always been a very popular topic for programming tests. Oh yeah, get your real life daddy to watch behind while you code too.
Anyway, I thank the interviewer, which turned out to be the programming director of the company, for being so patient(or pretty apt at disguising his annoyance) with me.
After the blunder, a desperate attempt to salvage the sinking ship was inevitable, and I showed him my past works. From then onwards, he was friendly and smiling throughout, but in the end, I still don't know whether have I done enough to reverse the bad impression I gave him initially.
My favourite part of the interview? The interviewer asked me what games have I been playing lately, and asked me to describe them. I gleefully answered Katamari Damacy, and seeing that he had never heard of the game before, I went ahead and described all the rolling, rolling, rolling. In jaywalker's lingo, its cock talking. Yes, that was my favourite part.
posted by killarkai at 5:13 PM
3 Comments:
Bad boy! You should have paid attention in your C++ classes last time. And luckily, it was only linked-list and pointer references, at least you could cooked up some vague ideas about it. Imagine he slaps you with a "who's my neighbour?"-class abstraction problem. The only way out left would be to show him some of your infamous freekicks on Fifa2005.
Looks like this company wants hardcore programmers...
This coming from an IT lecturer, I could only say... "GUILTY AS CHARGED!"
You are right, at the end of the interview I felt too that I wasn't their cup of tea, still very much a softcore programmer.
Another class that I regret sleeping through is Computer Graphics. I did suffer the consequences in later stages in the Uni, namely the directx class(game programming 3). Now in the working world, I wish I had more strength in 3D concepts and programming.
You meant "In the Waking world..."
:-D
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