Tag: Sony
Interviewing with two game console dev support teams
by Travis Johnston on Jul.27, 2010, under Graphics, Programming
Some time ago I interviewed at Sony based on the recommendations of a friend who had joined their R&D department and was really loving his new job. Their R&D department at the time only need a hard core graphics specialist but they had some other positions that they wanted to interview me for. So I took a day and went to see what things were all about at Sony. Most of their jobs were doing some sort of lead tech support for other developers so I expected I would get grilled on:
- Tech & coding skills
- Customer support
- Documentation
- Time management skills
After an entire day of interviews I had not had any questions on anything that was not tech & coding. In fact many of the questions were so esoteric that I do not believe they were really looking for a programmer but a PS3 manual with a better personality.
eg. Interviewer: How many instructions would this take on the cell processor
float temp = (bool) 0;
Me: Not sure, why would you ever cast a bool to a float?
Interviewer: You wouldn’t, but if you did how many instructions would it be?
Me: Not sure, on the PS2 they had an Zero register so it would have been 1 instruction but since your asking I am sure that is no longer the case.
Interviewer: See he does not know.
This in my mind clears up a lot of stuff, if they do not value customer support, documentation or coding samples to even ask about it in a interview then it is no wonder they are so badly know for the poorest developer support in the industry.
Contrast that to the interviews at Microsoft I recently went through for similar positions. The first half of the day was all about tech and coding but they asked relevant questions about algorithms, error checking, comments and architecture. Second part of the day was all about dealing with customers, creating white papers, writing good sample code and other tasks. Last part of the interview was about what makes great games and user experiences, tech trends and how it will shape the games of the future and last how to communicate and let people know how to take advantage of it.
Perfectly clear why in one generation Microsoft has taken over the console market, they understand what is real dev support is and know that supporting the dev teams has to be the one of the core’s pillars in getting the best games.
