TL;DR at bottom. [quote]OK here's the story of the interview that still makes me physically ill when I think about it - I've always been married to games, as long as I can remember its what I wanted to do with my life. Fast forward past college and I've had my first gig at a studio but its on contract and I'm not really digging the studio culture so I'm looking for something more permanent. I send a bunch of resumes out, some of them to studios that I think are attainable and one or two to studios that are like pie in the sky this-will-never-happen studios. One of those studios, Bungie, replies! Now I spent most of my teenage years playing Halo. Every day after school my friends and I would get together. We played local tournaments. I played in MLG with a local team for a while and went to MLG Vegas / Chicago. I paid for laundry in College by beating people in Halo who bet they could take me. Halo was my lifeblood and here, Bungie, my dream studio is actually taking an interest in me. The promised land was before me! I aced the programming test and I'm talking ACED. I nailed that thing and there were some really hard problems on it. I was really proud of myself. I got through 4-5 phone interviews with a mix of technical / personal screening and then the call came back - they wanted to fly me out! My god you should have seen my face when. I was dying inside, couldn't believe what was happening. Now comes the fun part. I was super serious about this. This is everything I ever wanted. I had to throw everything I had at it. No screwing around this time no half-assing it. So I bought 2-3 books about prepping for programming interviews and contained "hard" programming interview problems that people ask so that I could be ready. I nailed these things night after night in preparation. I was pretty confident I could handle myself. So it began. The day I was to fly out some guy backs into my car at the airport parking lot. I'm 45 minutes from departure. -blam!-, this guy is going to cost me my dream job because I have to sit here fiddling with insurance. Screw it, he looks like he doesn't want to deal with it either lets exchange information and just go. So I did! Plane ride is long, nose buried in programming books, stomache fluttering. I land and get to the hotel and I"m feeling really uneasy. They've put me up in the swankiest hotel I've ever been in. Really nice stuff, offered to rent me a car, set me up for a tour of the area. I felt undeserving really. Either way, I got in around midnight so I'm really tired and red eyed ( big mistake ) but I'm still restless up so I decide to take a walk to the studio ( which is right down the street ) just to make sure I don't get lost in the morning. Come back, finally fall asleep around 1:30 - interview is at like 8am next day. Now I'm thinking - what do I wear? I would normally just throw on my jeans and a t-shirt because thats what I normally wear and I know how this industry is. But no - this is the big leagues, I have to do it right. My mom always told me you have to dress up for interviews. I told her she doesn't understand my industry, but not this time - I'm going to listen to her. I can't take any chances. What could it hurt? So I put on business casual - a nice top, dress pants, and dress shoes and I start walking to the studio. As I get there I realize... I haven't worn these dress shoes since college... and shit.. they've eaten my heels raw and I'm bleeding. Whatever, march on. I hobble into the lobby and its like someone had just shot the piano player and the record at the party skipped, everyone went quiet and slowly turned toward me in my business casual - they in their shorts, sandals and bungie t-shirts... I stuck out like a sore thumb. "Can I..... help you?" "I'm here for an interview!" "Oh... really?" -blam!-. Now I go into freak out mode. Strike one, they're judging me, my idols are judging me! In the lobby are life size statues of chief and ODST guys.. in the interview room are replicas of the brute hammer and plasma rifle... holy shit this is cool. Beginning to freak out more. First guy comes in to interview me, lets call him Mike, shakes my hand and lets me know he's one of the original programmers on halo out of five or something. My mind boggles "There were only five programmers??" I stammer out, now I'm starstruck. Next thing he says "Lets see how your 3D math is." -blam!-. Shit. -blam!-. In all my preparation I had skipped math problems completely. All the books had were algorithms and brain teasers... now I'm blindsided. I know I'm dead in the water. He says "Given a point and a plane, find a line between them and calculate the distance." At this point I'm hardly listening to the words he's saying because inside my head I'm freaking out screaming at myself. Its not a tough problem but I can't get out of my head. Suffice to say I can't answer most of the questions he asks me. I can tell he's not too happy. The next interviewers come in and I have to ask them if its ok if I ask the receptionist for a band-aid because my heels are bleeding. Sure, I go get one, next interview goes pretty well until they ask me a brain teaser that I KNOW and have SOLVED many times from one of the books I bought. So instead of thinking of how to solve it on the board now I'm trying to recall the solution in my head but since I'm so messed up it won't come to me. So I stand in front of these guys tapping the marker on my arm, paralyzed, what do I do. I KNOW this problem! I can't REMEMBER the solution! Try and figure it out. NO! Its a brain teaser you'll just waste your time... -blam!- what was the answer... suffice to say I stumbled through it and the next brain teaser as well. I'm not doing good at this point. The next interviewer asks me a really straightforward question about programming. Write a function to do this. Write a class to do this. Fine fine. Then he says write a function to do X. I say ok here's the brute force. He says ok, how do we optimize? I'm thinking... you could just divide.. so I say aloud "Well I could just divide... but no... that won't work.." because I'm so -blam!-ed in the head I'm thinking 3/2 is going to equal 1.5 when it will REALLY be 1 because its division by an integer and THATS the optimization. Yeah. I couldn't even figure out how to divide. So now its lunch time and the guy takes me out for lunch and I can tell I'm dead. I've thrown it. Dead interviewee walking. He says "How do you think you're doing?" I say "Probably not well." he says "Hmm.". He knows. I get back to the office and one of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life goes down. The HR woman is standing there, the woman I failed because she had brought me all this way, and she's got a consolation gift for me. A backpack and a hoodie. Sorry she says, we think you may have been too nervous today. One of the guys said you couldn't even divide. I bowed my head... yeah.. She says they're stopping the interview early sinec they've made a decision. Holy crap I've never been kicked out of an interview early... that hurts.. and then I walked out. I walked back to the hotel and called my brother and cried. And cried some more. I could hear the guys from the studio walking past the hotel on their way back from lunch. Thoughts going through my head of how they must all think I'm a fake now and how I embarassed myself in front of all of my idols and how ANGRY I was with myself because I KNEW I had the chops but I screwed up so hard that they wouldn't give me another chance so I could make them believe me. I went over the questions they asked me in the interview over and over and solved them all. I know them by heart now. When I got back from the interview I couldn't play halo anymore. Looking at the games gave me a queesy feeling. I felt like I didn't deserve it. Or maybe that they would know, somehow, and dissaprove. I bough Halo 4 and tried to get myself back into it but I just have this pavlovian reaction now which I can't beat. Its not all bad though. I had a long summer of interviews in which I realized all the brain teasers and algorithm problems are pretty universal ( people must look up interview questions on google 5 minutes before the interview ) so I started to get sick of the process and solving the same problems over and over again and I found the less I cared the better I fared in the interviews - life lesson for all you budding engineers out there. I got into a good studio that summer and after a couple of years there I got hired at a god-tier studio equivalent to Bungie that I had always wanted to work for since I was a young one. It numbs the pain a little to know that I'm able to stand amongst my idols at this studio but I'll always be shy around Bungie employees as if they might remember haha. Its silly. Man, brains suck. Wow that felt good to get out![/quote] [quote]TL;DR; Crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion in an interview for my dream job by psyching myself out and ended up basically mute and unresponsive. Sit-com style tragedy ensues including a permanent complex on my psyche.[/quote]