I applied through university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Zynga
Interview
Was contacted after attending a career fair and scheduled a 30 minute interview on-campus. The interviewer was friendly and ran through 2 questions, 1 about design choices and another that involved a logic question. I was sent a rejection email the following week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The main question the interview asked was a riddle/logic question about 5 pirates and 100 pieces of gold. The pirates were ranked and the master pirate (the pirate ranked # 1) was in charge of splitting up the 100 pieces of gold. The master pirate had to split up the gold in a way that the majority of the pirates agreed with him (the master pirate could vote as well). If the majority didn't agree, they would kill the master pirate and the next pirate in line would become the master pirate and have to split up the gold. The pirates are perfectly locigal.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zynga in Oct 2019
Interview
Recruiter reached out to schedule 45 minute first round interview at a conference since they saw my resume in conference's resume database. They never responded (>1 month) with moving on to next round nor a rejection.
Coding question was on a laptop with paper notepad available. It was difficult to explain my code during the interview since it wasn't a shared coding environment, just one laptop. My interviewer was across from me, so they couldn't follow my code easily.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
Had a one technical phone screen, then went on-site to SF. Had 4 interviews, one of them with a director of engineering. Everyone there seemed very passionate about games and surprisingly all very pleasant and friendly. Onsite, 3 of the interviews were technical and 1 was behavioral.
Still deciding whether to accept the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Collision detection, prime factorization, OOP class design, basic O(n) hashmap algorithms
I applied through university. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2013
Interview
It seems in light of their recent struggles, Zynga may not receive the number of applications they once did. They've abandoned technical phone screens and now promote new grad engineer applicants directly to the onsite round after a recruiter screen.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Three rounds of technical interviews and two fit/behavioral interviews. Typical CTCI problems, the hardest of which were:
1. Turn a binary tree into a Linked List
2. Find the largest contiguous subsequence of an array of ints
3. Print all permutations of a string
In the fit interviews, they want to see a passion for gaming as well as large group project experience. Interviewers were mostly friendly. Play a few Zynga games and be ready to talk about why you like them.
