I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2012
Interview
Zynga has a great interview culture - one of the best I've ever been exposed to. Things started with a call from an internal recruiter, who had been poked by a friend of mine. He arranged a phone screen, which served as a poseur filter ("Reverse a linked list!", "DFS a tree!"), and was efficiently conducted. I was brought in just a few days later for in-person interviews, which worked through issues at the operational ("How would you handle proactive hardware provisioning for a giant web application?"), strategic ("Sketch a million-user presence system!"), and tactical ("Implement a distributed hash table!") levels. Every interviewer was on-time and showed evidence of having read my resume and thought it through. That level of preparation warmed my heart, since I had been the "tech interview guy" for years at a previous employer, and finally got a little karmic reward.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
How would you proactively provision hardware for a large LAMP application? Discuss monitoring, cost planning, and how you'd estimate the marginal value.
Suppose you need a chat system with 10M concurrent users, with a dense adjacency matrix. How would you implement a presence and chat system that scales to that kind of user base? Discuss tradeoffs among reliability, complexity, latency, and cost.
Implement a distributed hash table. Discuss how it will scale horizontally, how it might implement redundancy, and what kind of reliability guarantees it can make.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zynga (Vancouver, BC)
Interview
A bunch of system design, leetcode and behvaiour based questions. The people interviewing were overall very nice and made me feel comfortable during the interview. However the recruiter was horrible, never heard back from her. Tried reaching out but did not respond to emails/phone calls.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Zynga in Mar 2023
Interview
Applied through a referral for central tech team. Recruiter contacted me within 2 days. Scheduled an hour interview with the hiring manager. We talked about project experiences, tech stack, one coding problem. I passed this and get scheduled for 4 rounds of virtual interviews. 2 panel interviews about 1:30 hrs each (1 coding and 2 system design), 30 min cultural fit interview with senior director, and 45 min cross functional interview with program manager. All folks were on time and were very friendly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Manager screen: Arrays vs linked list, microservices architecture, container orchestration etc. Program to find the squareroot of a number rouned to the nearest integer. Leetcode word search Design a web crawler Design a bidding/auction system
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Zynga (New York, NY) in Mar 2022
Interview
I dropped out after the initial phone screen. I have six years gamedev experience and over a decade in web development with experience in multiple languages, but they started with "what is the difference between an object and an interface" and proceeded to move through comp Sci 104 for a principal level position.
Change your process, maybe recognize you shouldn't be presenting your higher level candidates with junior-at-best level questions
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
what is the difference between an object and an interface
