I was contacted by an external recruiter via LinkedIn. The job seemed interesting, with their game studio. Supposedly they're working on some kind of super-secret project over there that not even a signed NDA can loosen their lips about.

But they reassured me this wasn't a typical games job and that generalists were welcomed.

The initial phone screen was pleasant but quite tough. We mostly talked about C++, STL containers, and 3D game math.

To my surprise, I was invited for a face-to-face interview. So I brushed up on my game theory, C++, algorithms, data structures, and so on.

On the day of the interview, I arrived at their location, which had a very nice setup. I was basically grilled for six hours, but not on the subjects I expected. It was mostly questions I'd typically find asked for a game programming job. There was one linked list question, one for sifting through badly written D3D code, and another was a puzzle question.

Basically, I was given the boot the following Monday. I received the standard corporate rejection letter for my trouble. Still, I felt I performed well at the interview. I did experience Seattle's LOVELY weather and Friday afternoon getaway rush hour... NOT!

But it shows me yet again that game jobs that say they are looking for non-gamer blood, but do the exact opposite, is why I don't pursue game dev jobs as a rule.

How to determine if two linked lists are merged at a common node in O(n) time.

Construct a data structure that, given a dictionary of words, can form all words while traversing a Boggle grid.