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Diablo 3 Job Interview for Programmers
- jboggan 14y agoLife imitates The Far Side, only 7 years too late! http://imgur.com/gallery/RgqxZ http://imgur.com/gallery/RgqxZ
- fredoliveira 14y agoThis is quite sad. Signs of a company struggling to be relevant, and failing terribly.
- Alterlife 14y agoThey want recruit somebody who enjoys gaming to build (or maintain) games. I think that's a pretty smart and blindingly obvious approach. They'll probably be flooded with applicants hopefully some of them are actually coders. I do think they'll end up with a majority non-coding turnout though. Is this the first time this kind of thing has been attempted?
- txttran 14y agoI don't think you need to go through all of this to weed out gamers. I'm sure P[enjoys games | is a programmer] is pretty high.
- Alterlife 14y agoI'm pretty sure the company is doing this mainly for publicity among gamers. I wonder though: will they actually be able to find a good developer to hire.
- podperson 14y agoI think you want & . The problem is P[gamer] / P[gamer&coder] You're better off looking for coders and weeding out non gamers.
- emef 14y agoThat's what he wrote, the | meaning "given that". P[enjoys game | is a programmer] filters gamers from a population of programmers.
- loup-vaillant 14y agoShouldn't we look at the reverse? P[programmer|gamer]? Because with this process, you'll only get gamers. The trick will be to find programmers among them. Now, there's also the self selection bias. So it's more like P[Programmer | Gamer & Has Read Hell of a Job & Followed Through]…
- gfosco 14y agoSurprising lack of information about the company, or the job. Sounds cool, but they should really have limited it to people who realistically would re-locate to Israel and have experience. Otherwise, it's just a PR stunt.
- Useful_Idiot 14y agoBBR Saatchi Israel is on the hunt for a great programmer, and it's taking its recruiting to the place where most of them are hanging out: in the realms of 'Diablo 3.' http://creativity-online.com/work/saatchi-saatchi-israel-job-interviews-in-diablo-3/28310 http://creativity-online.com/work/saatchi-saatchi-israel-job... Actually, this is quite genius: PR company links itself to a market leader that's doing an awesome job of totally fucking up merging a P2P micro-payment model with a traditional single player game, snarkily hinting that some decent PR would smooth things over (especially with its history of nation re-branding, couldn't go amiss with said relations with the Korean and now German and French governments ~ http://saatchi.com/news/archive/mm_award_success_for_kosovo_young_europeans_campaign http://saatchi.com/news/archive/mm_award_success_for_kosovo_...) thus pitching a meta-advertisement to Activision / Blizzard's huge marketing budget (roughly ~$550mm according to the last company papers). Or it could be a move totally lacking in irony and just plain "Get down with the kids" painful. Jury is out: however, I'd suspect that Tel Aviv's thought processes are somewhat more sophisticated... this the modern version of "a nice game of chess".
- Useful_Idiot 14y agoAh, this place really has become Reddit. Within 7 minutes, a down-vote, while the comment "fredoliveira 25 minutes ago | link This is quite sad. Signs of a company struggling to be relevant, and failing terribly." that displays a lack of awareness of the company is left alone - although the company has had its problems, the Tel Aviv department won the 2012 Cannes Lions placement for "Blood Relations" (http://www.canneslions.com/work/2012/direct/entry.cfm?entryid=2882&award=99&order=7&direction=1 http://www.canneslions.com/work/2012/direct/entry.cfm?entryi...) which suggests that they're anything but creatively bankrupt. But, go on... Downvote ALL the content, especially the stuff you don't like, that's what popularity contests are for!
- kylemaxwell 14y agoEh, I figure the downvote brigade hits stories quickly and the rest of us who read things thoughtfully and don't have time to check constantly will get to it after a few minutes and issue corrective votes. ;)
- trotsky 14y agoHaving worked at a high end ad agency for a bit a long time ago my first reaction to this is to feel really bad for their customers. If they're willing to squander this level of their own resources on something so random they're almost assured to be doing ten times worse to their client accounts.
- Useful_Idiot 14y agoHow so? Retail Diablo III ~ $60 <strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr 1,000,000 Diablo III gold ~ $4 Cheap Chinese Sword ~ $96 Single / static webpage ~ $200 57 seconds Video using a)existing office, b) in game footage but with voice over ~ $100 4 x evenings of <strike>CEO</strike> HR department online interviews: $included in their salary Potential for the CEO to be exposed as totally incompetent at playing Diablo III, and a huge gaff as he's trolled by the fetid swamp of D3 players, thus generating vast swathes of "the internet is a bridge full of trolls" tutting from places such as metafilter.com: priceless. I can think of many criticisms, but cost / level of resources is hardly massive, unless I'm missing something... could you expand?
- codesuela 14y agothe sword costs less than 100k in game gold which would be 40 cents
- Useful_Idiot 14y agoAh, I apologise - I thought they were offering a real-world replica. I'm also fascinated on how they're going to do this: I'll offer good money that says within 5 minutes of logging on they're either town-PK griefed, chat channels are flooded by gold-selling bots or their account is banned for non-RMAH advertising within the game. [Disclosure: I do not own a copy of D3, nor have I played it]
- klausa 14y agoYou can't kill other players in D3 (yet, there is upcoming PvP patch, although that will be arena-bound, so you still won't be able to kill other players while in PvE mode).
- codesuela 14y ago1.000.000 Gold is 2-3 USD/EUR, the sword is worth nothing. Pretty cheap for a programmer lead. Also being a developer, I have not once met another hacker. Not that devs don't play games but so do tons of other people as well. I think it's a false assumption that you are going to find more programmers ingame.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoThey only need one. Makes sense to try and tap this source.
- joshu 14y agoWhat the actual fuck?
- Yarnage 14y agoDumb
- jmduke 14y agoThis is the problem. Tech monoculture is going to persist so long as you have stuff like this be exalted, rather than condemned. Of all the cultures for this industry to embrace, gaming -- where players exploit the veil of anonymity to be sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. -- is one of the poorest choices. I like programming, a whole lot. I don't really like gaming . That shouldn't be a problem.
- blindhippo 14y agoThey are pre-screening - they aren't looking for you. So it's only a problem for people who don't like gaming. If the entire tech world did this, then yes, it would be a problem. I like gaming - but I really don't want to work for a place where gaming dictates the conversation. So in this case, I know I wouldn't want to work at this outfit... so for me it's not a problem, it's helpful information.
- praxulus 14y ago>Of all the cultures for this industry to embrace, the internet -- where users exploit the veil of anonymity to be sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. -- is one of the poorest choices. FTFY You're saying that just because other gamers are sexist, racist, and homophobic, the entire tech industry has to avoid any mention of it even if they genuinely find the games fun and entertaining? The advertisement itself isn't offensive, so your argument is just as absurd as berating tech companies for recruiting on online forums, or even the internet in general. Companies have cultures that might not be all-inclusive. I heard of a company (I want to say Palantir, but don't quote me on that) where breaking the build required taking a shot. Non-drinkers wouldn't fit in very well, but while the company was still small it was worth it to have a strong culture and keep their existing employees in a close-knit group. Like my sibling said, you wouldn't like working here anyway, and I'm sure there are places with a strong culture that you would fit into, and that I might not.
- patio11 14y agoThere's enough actual sexism/racism/etc in the industry to worry about that, rather than worrying about totally innocent things which enjoy massive support from a lot of people, including people of good will whose ears you will require the next time actually outrageous behavior happens. If one were, hypothetically, of the mind that the cultural signifiers of geeky tech guys needed to be demonized to avoid scaring e.g. women out of the profession, one would be advised to tiptoe around that conclusion and avoid explicitly linking those cultural signifiers to evil behavior, because one will shortly be forced into making arguments like "Mentioning Diablo 3 in a job interview is spiritually akin to sexual harassment." One will lose those arguments, in a flamboyantly destructive fashion, and the next time one makes well-founded arguments such as "Corporate outings at a strip club are not appropriate", one will be remembered as some variant of an "implacable harpy who would be equally offended if the meeting had mentioned Dungeons and Dragons." P.S. I am probably not the guy who you'd want as your #1 ally on this issue, but I know that guy, and he literally has Warhammer tattoos. If you're making an anti-Xism movement which can't accept him as an ally because he's culturally alien to you, your anti-Xism movement will have less success than you probably want it to have.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoBy the way I wonder how Diablo fares in Israel. It has no localized version right and no native offering? Do you get served by eu.battle.net for euros? us.battle.net for $$$? Is it popular? Do people play much in Israel?
- guard-of-terra 14y agoI don't see the mention of the realm on which the character ought to be created. Is it Europe? US? Asia maybe? That's, like, the most important bit.
- dsl 14y agoEveryone who is serious about the game plays on the US realms.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- guard-of-terra 14y agoDisregard my previous comment since I misunderstood which one of my comments you were replying too. My apologies. Do you have the choice? When you type battle.net, where do you land by default? This is meaningful since european version is like 30% more expensive compared to US version so having the "choice" is nice.
- Useful_Idiot 14y agoTraditionally Israel is counted as nominally European for this type of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Israel Note: this might be a little too meta for HN
- guard-of-terra 14y agoI don't think we're hurting anybody with our little talk at the edge of comments. http://diablo3-arena.com/new-diablo-iii-global-play/ http://diablo3-arena.com/new-diablo-iii-global-play/ Europe - For players in the European Union, Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, and Middle Eastern countries such as Israel and the United Arab Emirates. I see what they did here. Still I wonder why no Diablo in Arabic. All work and no play does make Jack a dull boy.
- grout 14y agoFuck Diablo. My interview will be in Alpha Centauri.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoIt's going to take a few months! That's the problem with strategic games over 'net.