Blizzard Entertainment Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions

The interview process was as follows: 1. Basic screening 2. Hour long personality interview with members of the team 3. Longer technical interview 4. "In-person" interview which was virtual for covid 5. Get ghosted because of systemic incompetence (happened twice :), I'm sure that gives away who I am; don't care) 6. Realize applying for Blizzard was a complete waste of time because they don't respect your time enough to even tell you they went with someone else, twice

Run as far away from Blizzard as fast as you possibly can. Don't even bother applying if you are not a die hard BLIZZARD GAMER. They don't want good software engineers, they want die hard gamers and coding is an after thought. Even casual gamers are instantly rejected. Interviewers are arrogant and rude as well. Had a guy ask me about what I thought made a good SQL design... I answered consistent naming conventions (no reserved words, etc), proper indexes, FK relationships, etc. Normalized data. and the guy stopped the interview and hung up on me!

The best interview I've ever had. Everyone is a joy to talk to and truly wants to get to know you. The teams are made of clever and kind people who are very passionate about the products they work on and the teams they collaborate with.

I submitted my resume to Blizzard career website at the end of 1/2020. A few days later, I got a phone interview from the company's recruiter. However, he informed me that the position had been filled. Three months later, I got an email from him informing me about a new opening and arranged for a video conference interview. There were 3 technical managers in the panel. In the first part, I just told them about my work and experience. In the second part, they asked detailed questions about advanced features of C++ and C++ development.

Everyone was friendly and professional throughout the process. Recruiters did a great job communicating with me. Blizzard places a strong emphasis on culture fit and passion for games, so be prepared to talk about both. My process started with a 1 hour phone call with a recruiter, which was mainly walking through my past experience. Afterwards, I had a 1 hour technical phone call with the leads of the team I would be joining, which was more in-depth to make sure that my skills matched the job description. Then, I took a short programming test at home, which tested basic programming knowledge in game development. Finally, I visited Irvine for a full day onsite interview with multiple rounds, which covered a wide variety of skill and culture fit questions.

The entire process took just over 2 months to complete. This was delayed a bit due to Thanksgiving break and Blizzcon occurring during my interview process. I applied on linkedIn after seeing a job posting and then was reached out to by the in house recruiter a few days later. We had a 30 minute phone call going over what the roll would entail. At the end of the call the recruiter told me the next step would be a technical phone interview. A few days later I had the technical phone interview. I was interviewed by the hiring manager on the team and a developer that I would potentially be working with. This lasted 70 minutes and the questions consisted of material related to the job I was applying for and cultural fit questions. Following the phone interview, the next step was having an in person interview with members of the team. Before coming in I was asked to complete a small project that would take no longer than 3 hours that they could look over before I came into the office. The in person interview consisted of 4 sets of 1-1.5 hour meetings with differing members of the team and took most of the day. The first interview was a technical interview with 2 members of the team I would be working directly with. They asked me questions related to the language we code in, and had me do a whiteboard problem with them. Second was a lunch interview with 3 members of the team. This was a chance to see my cultural fit with the team and also gave them and myself a chance to ask questions to each other. Third was a coding challenge where I was given a task and a laptop and asked to code in front of the hiring manager and a fellow developer. Lastly was with a director and senior engineer asking architecture related questions, which included whiteboard drawing out a mock application. A week after the in person interview I received a call from the recruiter with an offer.