I applied through college or university. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Zynga in Jun 2012
Interview
Started with a 30 minute phone interview. A few technical questions, but mostly general questions about experience and recent projects. Couple of weeks later received the invitation to interview on-site. Setting up the flights was quick and easy. There were 3 technical interviews and a couple more general interviews plus a lunch break. Plenty of opportunities to take breaks and grab snacks. Everyone was really nice, especially the HR person. Took about a week to receive the final decision. HR called directly to deliver the news.
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
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.
