
Diablo 3 Job Interview for Programmers - avirambm
http://hellofajob.co.il/?lng=eng
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jboggan
Life imitates The Far Side, only 7 years too late!

<http://imgur.com/gallery/RgqxZ>

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Alterlife
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
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.

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

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

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emef
That's what he wrote, the | meaning "given that". P[enjoys game | is a
programmer] filters gamers from a population of programmers.

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loup-vaillant
Shouldn'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]…

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gfosco
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.

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trotsky
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_Idiot
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?

~~~
trotsky
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.

~~~
Useful_Idiot
Thank you, I understand the metric used now, although I'd say you'd have to
offset the costs against traditional print advertising (e.g. 1/2 page advert
in Guardian / Ha'aretz jobs section etc).

~ This begs the question, which I assumed (down thread): if the CEO is the one
actively engaged, and he looked rather uncomfortable / wooden in the video,
then there surely _has_ to be some kind of agreement with Activision/Blizzard
to use their Brand like this. i.e. Any and all such arrangements for third
parties __must __have sign off by them (or "why can't I use the D3 franchise /
name to sell my porn parody", see[http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Inworld-
Employment/Still-...](http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Inworld-
Employment/Still-hiring-ESCORTS-AND-OR-DANCERS/td-p/1574829) for reference).

Thus, I tend towards the meta position I mentioned below: that the real cost
is being born by that ~$500mm advertising budget, not Saatchi & Saatchi, and
this is meta-advertising.

Jury's out: whether or not this is as clever as I'm imagining will be born out
in the next few nights...

~~~
trotsky
That certainly would make a bit more sense, but I'm not sure how likely it is
- It doesn't seem like Blizzard has a relationship with S&S and it seems
unlikely that they'd hire creative so far away from their offices in
California.

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jmduke
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.

~~~
patio11
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
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.

~~~
tptacek
Diablo 3 is a racist sexist video game?

I think we may be a little far 'round the bend here.

~~~
loumf
The original comment was

> players exploit the veil of anonymity to be sexist, racist, homophobic, etc

Not that the game was racist or sexist. Not a gamer, but have heard that the
verbal communication on some networked games is rough.

Not sure if that should reflect on the game, though. It's a phenomenon of
anonymous systems (see chat roulette for example)

~~~
trafficlight
That's not related to any specific game. It does show up exponentially more in
games where you are paired up with an anonymous matchmaking system. The
majority of online games on consoles use that type of game finding.

Alternatively, games like Counterstrike or Minecraft are made up of servers
that are privately run. Most of these are actively moderated by the owners
and/or a consistent group of players. If you don't follow the rules and
guidelines of the server you are kicked and banned. It can take a while to
find a server you like, but once you do, the gameplay experience is vastly
better.

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

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joshu
What the actual fuck?

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

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guard-of-terra
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?

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

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guard-of-terra
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.

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grout
Fuck Diablo. My interview will be in Alpha Centauri.

~~~
guard-of-terra
It's going to take a few months! That's the problem with strategic games over
'net.

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Yarnage
Dumb

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Useful_Idiot
_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...](http://creativity-online.com/work/saatchi-saatchi-israel-job-
interviews-in-diablo-3/28310)

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_...](http://saatchi.com/news/archive/mm_award_success_for_kosovo_young_europeans_campaign))
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
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...](http://www.canneslions.com/work/2012/direct/entry.cfm?entryid=2882&award=99&order=7&direction=1))
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
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. ;)

