To be honest, though, Turbine is a brutal place to try to find a job. When I was out of work a couple of years ago, I made a pretty serious play there: my background in multiuser social environments is super-strong, and I've got a pretty good resume for multiplayer games in specific. So Turbine was an obvious place to try.
But it's *really* tough. First off, they advertise every position far and wide, and don't put any restrictions on headhunters re-advertising them, so every open req appears to get at least several hundred applicants.
Second, they have the most extraordinary technical screening. On the one hand, I kind of appreciate that: it was one of the very few places that asked technical questions at the screening stage where said questions weren't totally idiotic. But damn -- I spent something like 2 full days just answering the damned thing. The complexity and depth involved were comparable to a strong CS take-home final exam. (Four separate "tests", each requiring major thought and design, not to mention a good deal of code.)
Third, follow-through was pretty weak. I can sympathize with that -- if they're trying to wade through hundreds of applications, and asking even a good fraction of those people to deal with that screen, the amount of work involved in reviewing the answers must be unbelieveable. Still, I got the distinct impression that they had a process that they were having trouble supporting.
In the end, the position wound up getting withdrawn, which was mighty frustrating, given the amount of work I'd put into applying for it. It was a bit of a longshot, to be fair -- unlike alexx_kay, I can't really claim to be a hardcore computer gamer per se, and that's shot me down at more than one company. (It's almost a shibboleth these days: if you don't play computer games for multiple hours a day, they don't want to hear from you.) Still, it was an annoying way for the process to end...
Re: Turbine
Okay, that definitely raises an eyebrow.
To be honest, though, Turbine is a brutal place to try to find a job. When I was out of work a couple of years ago, I made a pretty serious play there: my background in multiuser social environments is super-strong, and I've got a pretty good resume for multiplayer games in specific. So Turbine was an obvious place to try.
But it's *really* tough. First off, they advertise every position far and wide, and don't put any restrictions on headhunters re-advertising them, so every open req appears to get at least several hundred applicants.
Second, they have the most extraordinary technical screening. On the one hand, I kind of appreciate that: it was one of the very few places that asked technical questions at the screening stage where said questions weren't totally idiotic. But damn -- I spent something like 2 full days just answering the damned thing. The complexity and depth involved were comparable to a strong CS take-home final exam. (Four separate "tests", each requiring major thought and design, not to mention a good deal of code.)
Third, follow-through was pretty weak. I can sympathize with that -- if they're trying to wade through hundreds of applications, and asking even a good fraction of those people to deal with that screen, the amount of work involved in reviewing the answers must be unbelieveable. Still, I got the distinct impression that they had a process that they were having trouble supporting.
In the end, the position wound up getting withdrawn, which was mighty frustrating, given the amount of work I'd put into applying for it. It was a bit of a longshot, to be fair -- unlike