Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation Interviews

1. Feb 15, 2023

   Game Designer Interview

   Anonymous Employee in Romania

   No Offer

   Neutral Experience

   Difficult Interview

   Application

   I applied online. I interviewed at Valve Corporation (Romania) in Jan 2023

   Interview

   Applied online and got an interview withing a week. Somewhat weirdly enough I interviewed with 2 engineers instead of game designers (one from the Engine team, one from AI). The interview was pleasant and was split into 2 parts. For the first part, the main focus being on my career/CV and my personal contributions to the projects that I had worked on. A set of follow-up questions came from the team, particularly revolving technical contributions of mine from the past and some game design. The second part was a technical test, where I was provided with a programming exercise via a CoderPad link, where I was supposed to write code live. While the exercise was not at all difficult, I definitely stumbled a lot here, since I haven't coded in many years. Afterwards, the two gentlemen were very kind to allow me to ask questions and even stayed an extra 25 minutes over the time allocated to answering my questions. I did not move forward and was provided ample and constructive feedback, stating that the company requires game designers to be proficient with at least another production skill aside from just game design (so you'd be looking at Game Designer/Programmer, Game Designer/Artist, etc.). While I appreciate and understand this decision and I can not comment on the company's requirements/standards, I do have small concerns in regards to this, because while someone that is "dual-classing" can be very useful, there is also a point to be made that someone that has invested years and years in perfecting their craft, which would be game design, would be equally useful. All in all, it was a pleasant experience and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have interviewed for this role. I can't help but wonder how different this would have been if the panel would have been formed out of game designers though.
   

   Interview

   1. Tell us about your career focusing particularly on your personal contributions on your projects? 2. How did you achieve X or Y (from the projects that I worked on) and what were your personal contributions? 3. (Coding exercise) Given a string that contains a number, how would you convert the number within the string and output it as an integer?

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