Wizards of the Coast

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Wizards of the Coast (Renton, WA) in July 2017.

Interview

This Release Management group has most likely already decided on someone but has continued to advertise their job description with every third-party recruiter in the area to apparently scrape information from candidates to help themselves personally.

External recruiter contacted me for my resume, then scheduled a phone interview with the hiring manager. Recruiter seemed nice and followed up regularly whenever she received an update. She called me on a Friday and told me she thinks my phone interview will be the following Monday at 11am (the hiring manager had given her the date for Sunday), but she will confirm and get back to me.

Recruiter called me the next day (yes, she was working on a Saturday) to say that the manager didn't get back to her but that I should plan for Monday. I asked her if it was possible to push it back to another day, since I had an important class during that time. She told me the hiring manager was in a hurry to fill the position, since she would be traveling to India at the end of the month. Ok fine, I agreed to do what she needed. (I really regretted this after the "interview".)

The recruiter suggested I look up the manager's LI profile in preparation for the interview. It was the most falsified LI profile/resume I have seen to date with duplicate degrees listed with words transposed to appear to be different degrees and major overlaps and duplicates of work experience. It is really irksome to hear about how a great many people lie on their resumes and then repeatedly witness people who seem to get away with the dishonesty for 3-4 years at a time at each company they finagle. It's a cycle of bad hiring managers who hire more bad hiring managers and employees.

They called a few minutes late on Monday. There were three people total on the phone but one was completely silent. I was asked a lot of specific questions about the release process. When the "Do you have any question for us?" part came up at the end, I asked when they expected to make a decision there was a strange pause as if they were unprepared to answer such a common question and eventually said by the end of the week. I found this strange and thought this may not be a legitimate open position. I then asked how do they work with the development and QA teams. They replied that you would be working for the Release Management team. I replied, ok but release management usually requires a lot of interaction with other teams. When the manager started answering, the line went dead. They called back a minute later to say they didn't know what happened and that they were just calling back to thank me for my time. I said I did want to ask my questions that got cut off before and asked about what they do for the Maintenance end of the SDLC. They repeated back bits and pieces of my own wording from the detailed line of questioning they had asked me about my experience in release management, then quickly said the line was going bad again and hung up!

I did read through some of the Glassdoor reviews for WotC before the interview. I give merit the ones that appear to be written by genuine and knowledgeable employees (the ones who have been there a while and are not just writing fluff). Given the depressed salaries and the lack of being competitive in the software industry (no one in the Greater Seattle area talks about this company's software, and this is a very tech rich area with plenty of tech talk about almost any company), these interviewers seemed to be acting out of some sort of desperation executed in a highly unethical (but probably not uncommon) manner. They very clearly had no interest in doing a quality interview or finding a quality candidate, they were information gathering and collecting verbiage to help themselves.

There's no way that someone who would put together such a sloppy LI profile would be good at release management. It seemed apparent by their lack of ability to answer my questions (or lack of attempt to even try to be courteous about answering my questions) that they probably don't know what they're doing. Maybe they've reached the 3-4 year mark that it takes most companies on average to figure out when they've hired a BS artist. My conclusion is that the interview by this team was a sham designed for them to collect information they can use for their own future interviews - using these interviews to receive free interview answers customized and specific to their functions. If they collect enough information, they can interview for themselves and pretend to have skills that they don't but can repeat answers from their previous "interviewees".

Interview Questions