Getting to the interview was a bit of a mess. Several of my communications with the recruiter about my goals for the interview were seemingly ignored. This meant I was shoehorned into an interview that was not the best match for my skills and goals.

The phone interviews were direct, no-nonsense affairs that seemed to work well as a first evaluation.

The on-site interview itself was efficient. There was a programming quiz in the morning, then an afternoon debrief and multiple interview sessions. The people were friendly and all were gamers. They asked good questions about all aspects of game development and made sure I had time to ask my own questions.

They made it pretty clear that they thought a person was lucky to have the opportunity to work for Blizzard. I unfortunately got the sense repeatedly throughout the day that my individuality would not be valued or respected, but that instead I would be added as a mere cog in the machine.

The programming test defined a data structure incorrectly. I solved the problem as defined, but the debrief ran into a roadblock because the programmers were expecting a solution based on a different definition of that data structure. Once I realized that had happened, I tried to come up with a solution on the spot. This was a good opportunity to show my ability to think on my feet, but involved some awkward back and forth as neither set of folks realized the disconnect right away.