Diablo 3 Job Interview for Programmers

http://hellofajob.co.il/?lng=eng

by avirambm • 14 years ago

38 44 14 years ago

hellofajob.co.il

jboggan• 14 years ago

Life imitates The Far Side, only 7 years too late!

http://imgur.com/gallery/RgqxZ

fredoliveira• 14 years ago

This is quite sad. Signs of a company struggling to be relevant, and failing terribly.

Alterlife2• 14 years ago

They 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• 14 years ago

I 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.

Alterlife2• 14 years ago

I'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• 14 years ago

I think you want & . The problem is P[gamer] / P[gamer&coder]

You're better off looking for coders and weeding out non gamers.

gfosco• 14 years ago

Surprising 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_Idiot7• 14 years ago

BBR 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...

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_...) 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_Idiot7• 14 years ago

Ah, 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?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• 14 years ago

Eh, 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. ;)

trotsky3• 14 years ago

Having 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_Idiot7• 14 years ago

How 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?

codesuela2• 14 years ago

the sword costs less than 100k in game gold which would be 40 cents

trotsky3• 14 years ago

I understand why you're confused, that seems like a rational (if rather lowball) understanding of the resources you'd use. In reality an agency used a team: brainstorming sessions with senior staff + one or two graphic artists doing multiple concepts and then multiple revisions of the final, a copywriter, one or two doing the video work + outsourced voiceover + a creative director half time + senior staff/ceo sign off + ceo diablo training + analysis of metrics and a post campaign review. And don't forget the time that's being spent on outside pr.

When you are completely based on billable hours (like all ad agencies) you need to consider internal projects as using resources like they were client billed. So the CEO is ~$300-$450/hr, CD ~$200-$300, tech & art $100+. Time isn't free if people are salaried in any business.

Oh and that's going to be the CEO online because this is going to attract other industry folks, some of which will know him personally.

maayank• 14 years ago

"<strike>CEO</strike> Intern getting to level 60 ~ 12 or so hours @ $0 / hr"

I'll just note that while I did saw unpaid internship posts in other countries, I never saw it in Israel. It is definitely unheard of in the high tech industry, but as I've never heard of unpaid internships in any other sector I'd bet it is not the norm in other sectors as well.

codesuela2• 14 years ago

1.000.000 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-terra8• 14 years ago

They only need one. Makes sense to try and tap this source.

joshu• 14 years ago

What the actual fuck?

Yarnage• 14 years ago

Dumb

jmduke• 14 years ago

This 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• 14 years ago

They 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

There'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.

roguecoder• 14 years ago

It isn't that cultural signifiers of geeky tech guys are demonized; it is that racist and sexist video games like this are grossly inaccurate signifiers of geeky tech guys. Equating the two unfairly tars us with the brush of every foul-mouthed 17-year-old on XBox live.

guard-of-terra8• 14 years ago

Some players also happen to be fun, helping and nice.

Some more players like to look tough but they're good people underneath.

If you're expecting everyone in the world to behave, like if they still were in a boring classroom, and is going to discriminate them otherwise - this is not good then.

guard-of-terra8• 14 years ago

By 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-terra8• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Everyone who is serious about the game plays on the US realms.

guard-of-terra8• 14 years ago

Disregard 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_Idiot7• 14 years ago

Traditionally Israel is counted as nominally European for this type of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Israel

Note: this might be a little too meta for HN

guard-of-terra8• 14 years ago

I 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/ 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• 14 years ago

Fuck Diablo. My interview will be in Alpha Centauri.

guard-of-terra8• 14 years ago

It's going to take a few months! That's the problem with strategic games over 'net.

Diablo 3 Job Interview for Programmers

Related Stories