I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zynga (Bengaluru) in Jan 2016
Interview
This company not known for great experience.
But contrary to that I had great experience with both HR and Engineers.
Interview was conducted for Gaming service team. 2 online rounds where I was asked 1) Linkedlist 2)BST and 3)Distributed top K questions
After that I was invited to Bangalore. First round was DS and Algo. Second interview conducted by Tech Director of Farmville 2 and he asked only one question of converting Roman Number to Decimal. Third round with Country Manager with usual questions.
Lunch was there(heard good things about their lunch) with Fish, Chicken, WaterMelon, Papayya, Paneer, Chapati, Rassam etc
Finally they offered me good compensation.
ZYNGA is sinking ship but holds i) Cash of > $1 Billion and ii)Confidence of making big in Mobile mkt. They have one game "Dawns of Titans" waiting to be launched in 2016. I wish it changes the Fortune of Zynga(because Zynga known to reward employees with open hands).
I had great experience with both Engineers and HR. But I felt very bad when I declined their offer as I was uncomfortable to shift to Banaglore
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
convert roman number to decimal...Half of ans given by interviewer himself :)
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2012
Interview
Zynga has a great interview culture - one of the best I've ever been exposed to. Things started with a call from an internal recruiter, who had been poked by a friend of mine. He arranged a phone screen, which served as a poseur filter ("Reverse a linked list!", "DFS a tree!"), and was efficiently conducted. I was brought in just a few days later for in-person interviews, which worked through issues at the operational ("How would you handle proactive hardware provisioning for a giant web application?"), strategic ("Sketch a million-user presence system!"), and tactical ("Implement a distributed hash table!") levels. Every interviewer was on-time and showed evidence of having read my resume and thought it through. That level of preparation warmed my heart, since I had been the "tech interview guy" for years at a previous employer, and finally got a little karmic reward.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
How would you proactively provision hardware for a large LAMP application? Discuss monitoring, cost planning, and how you'd estimate the marginal value.
Suppose you need a chat system with 10M concurrent users, with a dense adjacency matrix. How would you implement a presence and chat system that scales to that kind of user base? Discuss tradeoffs among reliability, complexity, latency, and cost.
Implement a distributed hash table. Discuss how it will scale horizontally, how it might implement redundancy, and what kind of reliability guarantees it can make.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Zynga (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2011
Interview
Standard stuff. prelim screening, then on-site - 4-5 1hr interviews.
You gotta be good at interviews. Wrote a hashtable implementation on the board (can you code).
Solved a few distributed systems problems - bank of webservers, tiers of caching, dealing with connection fan-in, etc (do you understand systems and networks, not just FOR loops).
Few other questions - interviewers were pretty good at it. I learned a few things to use in my own interviews.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Huge bank of servers is pounding data layer with connections. What do we do?