I applied through university. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Zynga
Interview
After an info session at my school, I submitted a resume. They quickly got back to me that I had an on campus interview. I interviewed a couple weeks later with the same person from the info session. He seemed to think I met the criteria they were looking for. A few days later I received an e-mail that said I had been selected for an on-site interview in San Francisco. The HR people were nice, and I waited about a month to go.
Once I arrived, there was a lot to do. 5 interviews back to back. Nothing very interesting was discussed, and I was expected to have a strong passion for their games. The questions in the first 3 interviews were typical of what I expected, but the 4th interviewer had something to prove. He had a laptop with more than a dozen technical questions. I didn't appreciate this very much as I'd already been plagued with 3 hour long interviews as well as a 30 minute pre-interview with my HR representative for the day.
Afterwards was an interview to place me, but I had lost interest after having lunch with a not-very-enthusiastic person. Most people seemed to love Zynga because it wasn't a very demanding environment. I was looking for something a little more technical in terms of the overall product.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
What's 2^10. This guy had tons of questions that he expected quick answers to. None of your answers are good enough for him.
You have a deck of cards and randomly draw two cards at a time. If you get 2 blacks, black gets a point. If you have 2 reds, red gets a point. If you have red and black, neither get a point. What is the percentage chance that both score the same.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zynga in Oct 2019
Interview
Recruiter reached out to schedule 45 minute first round interview at a conference since they saw my resume in conference's resume database. They never responded (>1 month) with moving on to next round nor a rejection.
Coding question was on a laptop with paper notepad available. It was difficult to explain my code during the interview since it wasn't a shared coding environment, just one laptop. My interviewer was across from me, so they couldn't follow my code easily.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
Had a one technical phone screen, then went on-site to SF. Had 4 interviews, one of them with a director of engineering. Everyone there seemed very passionate about games and surprisingly all very pleasant and friendly. Onsite, 3 of the interviews were technical and 1 was behavioral.
Still deciding whether to accept the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Collision detection, prime factorization, OOP class design, basic O(n) hashmap algorithms
I applied through university. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2013
Interview
It seems in light of their recent struggles, Zynga may not receive the number of applications they once did. They've abandoned technical phone screens and now promote new grad engineer applicants directly to the onsite round after a recruiter screen.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Three rounds of technical interviews and two fit/behavioral interviews. Typical CTCI problems, the hardest of which were:
1. Turn a binary tree into a Linked List
2. Find the largest contiguous subsequence of an array of ints
3. Print all permutations of a string
In the fit interviews, they want to see a passion for gaming as well as large group project experience. Interviewers were mostly friendly. Play a few Zynga games and be ready to talk about why you like them.
