After a technical phone screen/chat with one of the lead engineers, I was asked to come in for a day of onsite interviews with 4 Technical Leads and one person that didn't really have an art or engineering background but was somehow suited to manage between employees of both disciplines. They all ranged drastically in age, skillset and demeanor. Seismic operates across several buildings spread out across LA, but I only visited their primary "office", which is more or less concrete warehouses with desk partitions. The first (and probably most Senior) Lead I was scheduled to interview with didn't even show as he was off at another site. At the end of the day after I had finished with the other interviews they asked me to wait around for another hour to do a phone interview with the Lead that didn't show, but this never happened and I could have avoided LA rush hour on my way home altogether. The interviews were scheduled for most of the day in a second floor conference room with no air conditioning, which grew increasingly hotter throughout the day, and while my interviewers were wearing a comfortable shorts and t-shirt and commented about the heat themselves several times I was wearing a full suit.
Much of the current senior engineering staff was absorbed from Beachhead (formerly an Activision studio that worked on Skylanders) after its demise. None of them were prepared or had looked over my resume/portfolio previously, except for the one that interviewed me over the phone. They all made up their technical questions on the fly. Overall I found the experience to be jovial and smooth enough, but my impression after having visited Seismic and played their premier mobile and VR products is that this is another Unity only game development firm that regards themselves as low level graphics, mobile and VR experts, but have never actually developed anything for these platforms natively or with APIs such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Metal or Direct3D outside of Unity. Moreover, there are countless shortcomings with using Unity for AAA game development over a native API but IMO the biggest problem to date with game development using COTS engines like Unity and Unreal is the lack of synchronization between audio and generated frames. This is extremely evident in current popular titles such as Fortnite (e.g. footstep audio doesn't sync with walk/run animation at all), but really filters down to all Unity and Unreal developers adopting the same mentality, and IMO this is not okay when you claim to be a AAA game development firm. All of the engineers agreed over lunch that they didn't care about synchronizing audio in their products and one of them even made a derogatory comment about audiophiles which I felt showed an extreme lack of professionalism and care in a field that is all about soft real-time latencies. They all agreed that several frames of delayed audio was acceptable, but could never really state what the acceptable limit was in terms of an exact number of frames based on a given framerate and its pretty clear that they didn't care enough to even employ a testing mechanism to try to determine what those actual latencies might be. They made arguments about latency of human perception and the speed of light vs sound, but when observing audio from 10 feet in a simulated environment such arguments are negligible and have nothing to do with a footstep sound not syncing with its animation. I pray these guys never get contracted to work on a title such a Rock Band or Guitar Hero.
After 3 weeks I received a very short email from the girl in HR that scheduled my onsites, which essentially boiled down to "Your interview was favorable, but we don't think you have enough mobile graphics experience", which I am willing to eat but it is largely unhelpful given the depth of the feedback, and feels a little insulting given that and I have spent my entire career developing native cross-platform OpenGL/D3D desktop and mobile apps with OpenGL ES and/or Metal, and I have run my own boutique software dev firm for the latter for the last 4 years and Seismic just develops with, well, Unity, but whatever, this is unfortunately what most game dev firms have become. Recently I learned that Seismic was assumed Niantic and the position is still open, so there is a distinct possibility be that I was never going to be legitimately considered for hire given that an overnight buyout was in the works at the time I interviewed.
