Yesterday (Monday) I started my round of job interviews.
On the same day I had a phone interview and a physical one. The phone interview was for a big foreign company, the other one was for a relatively small but rather active Japanese developer.
There are a lot of game developers in Tokyo, but I actually aimed first at those two companies. There are probably a lot of nice opportunities out there, but given what I know (I’m not really well informed nor connected), my gut feeling is with those two companies for now.

I was a bit scared of the first interview cause I was worried that I’d receive the personality profile sort treatment. Big companies are famous for employing dedicated personnel for screening potential employees with trick questions.
As it turned out, it was a rather short layd back chat with an actual potential boss. Big relief !

I went into the second interview prepared to have to do it in Japanese but the person interviewing actually made me choose between Japanese and English. I bravely picked Japanese knowing that I could easily throw an English word here and there.
The second interview was not so long but definitely a lot more indepth. I was told that, as is often the case with not very large dev studios, I would have to assume more than one role, not just 3D. I was also told that R&D was mostly about development and not so much about research (fair enough).
When it came to questions, I asked about work time and specifically on the more or less expected (unpaid) overwork. The answer (if I understood correctly) was that the company isn’t a sweatshop, but of course one has to be ready to work late hours around milestones (fair enough, again).
I asked about Internet security. Apparently security is pretty strict. I asked if I could chat with my mother on lunch break (!) and the answer was “yes, if it’s lunch break…”. Well frankly was a somewhat dumb question to ask to your potential CEO ! But I wanted to raise those issues.

In any case it seems that network security has been tightened more and more recently. I have a friend working in a large company that can’t chat anymore, can’t use GMail, and to move files on a company laptop needs go through some hops on some encryption server.
I understand that one is paid to work, but it’s also nice to stay in the office if one can use a distraction from time to time. It’s a bit as if with the advent of the Internet we’ve all given a cubicle next to a window, and now we are being forced to close the blinds. You can take a peek perhaps but you definitely aren’t supposed to enjoy the view.

The position at the large company is about helping other local developers, rather than doing direct development of a title. This could be potentially quite interesting, perhaps a chance to break the long term project work and to face a variety of problems, plus of course the recognition that comes from working for a large company.

ummmmmmmmmmmmm

Posted by Davide Pasca in Society, Diary