Phone Screen with Naughty Dog

I had the opportunity to interview with Naughty Dog for a Game Programming position, and it was completely different than  what I thought it would be. I had two technical interviews for internships at EA and Amazon, and it consisted of the standard questions: "Tell me about yourself", talking about game projects I made, and technical questions about data structures, algorithms, and c++ technical questions. That's what I was studying for when preparing for this interview, specifically talking points about myself, abilities, and my experiences at EA Tiburon. When the phone interview came up, I did not realize that a technical phone screen was completely different from a technical phone interview. After a quick introduction, he went straight into the technical questions. This threw me off a bit as I was expecting the "tell me about yourself" question first.

Even though being thrown off, I was thinking that I would still be fine by not trying to sell myself and stick to the technical which is my strength. A question about dot product comes up which I knew, then he asked an alternative equation for dot product. That is where I started to freeze up, I didn't know. Then he asked me how to find the angle between two vectors, again I struggled to find an answer until I could say that it included dot product. This is where I started to tense up and stress out. The rest of the linear algebra questions only went down hill. When asked how to find the normal vector given three points, I completely forgotten about cross product and was able to google the answer by given the equation. When pressed what the name the matrix was, I couldn't answer. I'd forgotten cross product, one of the simplest concepts of linear algebra. I was only able to have some relief when he started asking about data structures which I felt good on.

It has been a little less than a year since I last needed to do linear algebra, and it didn't cross my mind to refresh my knowledge of it. Linear Algebra was my favorite subject in math, and I consider myself really good at it. After the interview, I was able to look up the concepts and could then answer the questions. My failure to refresh myself on basic linear algebra concepts cost me the opportunity to prove my knowledge of linear algebra and be able to, possibly, continue on the interview process at Naughty Dog. While I haven't heard anything yet about my application and the next steps, I have little hope that I will continue through. All I can do is continue to put applications in to other game studios and when I get the opportunity to interview again, I know what to expect with a phone screen and to add linear algebra to a list of subjects to study and refresh myself.