Best job interview experience I've ever had. I interviewed with their Havok team.

• Phone interview with an internal recruiter. A small chat to understand what I wanted to do; everything was fine.

• Take-home quiz, just to be sure that you know the basics. It doesn't matter that you complete all of it, but try anyway. Try to do it by yourself; copy-pasting from somewhere won't help during the next phone session.

• If you did well, you will receive a call from one of their managers to assess your skills. Given the nature of the Havok product, we went over literally everything from 3D graphics to physics to coding. It doesn't matter that you know everything, but you should be able to cover as many topics as possible.

• On-site interview in Dublin, split into two sessions:

  • Live coding test: You're left alone with a simple exercise, with no pressure at all (aside from reasonable time restrictions). This is a real coding test; it has nothing to do with memorizing code or lengthy complex algorithms that you will never use in real life. You cannot cheat your way through this. If you have real experience, it's extremely easy; otherwise, it's impossible, no matter how many corner cases of BFS, DFS, Dijkstra, binary search, and whatever else you memorized. It's a coding test for real coders.
  • Present something you did and you're proud of. You're free to talk about whatever you want, as long as it's something interesting. Usually, they will listen carefully to what you present and ask questions.

Then a final chat with the managers so they get a better idea of you.

Received a very, very good offer without even negotiating, which unfortunately I had to decline because I received another one just as good and it did not require relocation (housing in Dublin is insane).

Overall, a very pleasant experience. Everyone was friendly, and I really had a great impression of the team.

This is how job interviews should be conducted. Please stop the insanity of phone-live coding sessions with shared screens or whiteboard coding. It's useless and only asserts that someone can open several tabs and copy-paste from them or memorize thousands of lines of code.

None that I can speak of.

Signed NDA as usual.

Just know your stuff about 3D graphics, math, physics, and coding.