Abstract
Problem: What do the worst job interview experiences of a veteran game developer look like, and what do they reveal about the industry?
Approach: Tim Cain shares two personal stories — one from the start of his career in 1991 and one from near the end in 2018 — contrasting very different kinds of bad interviews.
Findings: The first interview was an interrogation disguised as a hiring process; the second was a case of mistaken identity that deflated weeks of excitement. Both left lasting impressions for very different reasons.
Key insight: Bad interviews aren't always hostile — sometimes the worst ones are the ones that expose your own assumptions and vulnerabilities.
The 1991 McDonnell Douglas Interview
In 1991, Tim decided to leave graduate school to make games. His PhD thesis adviser disapproved and insisted he at least interview for a "real" job, setting him up with an interview at McDonnell Douglas.
Tim arrived in a borrowed Italian suit, eager and smiling. What he found was unsettling: three exhausted-looking interviewers in a bare room with exposed framing, no drywall, and a single incandescent bulb hanging from a wire. Their "conference room" was under construction, so they had cleared out a janitor's closet.
The Interrogation
After a brief review of Tim's thin work history, they zeroed in on his graduate AI research — graph traversal and integrated learning. Their questions became intensely specific: What if you had to schedule trucks and planes to deliver packages across the continental United States?
Tim recognized this as a version of the Traveling Salesman Problem — NP-complete, with no polynomial-time exact solutions, but approachable with heuristics. He began describing simulated annealing, a then-novel technique involving hill climbing in a search space with random jumps that gradually decrease in distance, analogous to cooling metal into a strong lattice structure.
The interviewers scribbled furiously. One looked up and asked, "How do you spell annealing?"
Tim stopped and demanded to know what was going on. They admitted they had taken on a contract with FedEx to improve their package scheduling and were failing. They weren't interviewing him — they were mining him for solutions.
The FedEx Problem
Tim knew FedEx's famous approach: fly all packages to a single hub (Atlanta), sort them there, then fly them back out for local truck delivery. This counter-intuitive method — sending a package from LA to San Francisco via Atlanta — was faster because centralizing sorting optimized for time, not distance. FedEx's overnight guarantee depended on it.
McDonnell Douglas offered Tim a job. Interplay also offered him a job — for less money and with the caveat that he'd "have to prove himself." Tim chose Interplay because he wanted to make games.
The 2018 Mystery Lunch
Fast forward to late 2018. Tim was at Obsidian working on The Outer Worlds when he received an email from a senior figure at a major, well-known company with many famous IPs. This person wanted to meet for lunch to discuss "a big opportunity."
Tim spent days fantasizing. Would he get to work on one of their legendary franchises with massive resources? Or create an entirely new IP backed by a powerhouse publisher? Some of their work was adjacent to his own — it seemed perfect.
The Offer
At lunch, the executive — who didn't remember having met Tim once before — made his pitch: he wanted Tim to be their localization producer.
Tim went silent. He sat there, stunned, cycling through thoughts: Did I misread this? Am I so egotistical that I assumed he'd know who I was?
The executive noticed something was wrong. Tim explained his history — Fallout, Arcanum, WildStar, The Outer Worlds, plus his contributions to Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny. A light went off. The exec apologized, said there must have been a mix-up with his assistant, and offered to just have a friendly lunch and trade industry stories.
Driving Home
Tim quotes directly from his unpublished memoir:
"Driving home I was having trouble processing how I felt. I wasn't angry. I wasn't disappointed. I wasn't sad. I finally realized how I felt: I was embarrassed. I had let myself think for a few days before that lunch that someone had finally recognized my work — that someone powerful had seen the IPs I worked on directly — Fallout, Arcanum, WildStar, Outer Worlds — and those that I helped create — Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny — and thought, let's back this guy and see what he can do with a huge set of resources under his control. And I had fantasized about what kind of game that would be. I had lots of ideas, lots of notebooks filled with potential new IPs. But no. He asked me to be a localization producer. He had no idea who I was or what I had done. I spent a few happy days thinking he did, and now I was just embarrassed."
Two Kinds of Bad
The two interviews bracket Tim's career and represent very different failures:
- 1991: An aggressive, exploitative interview where the company used the hiring process to extract free consulting on a failing contract.
- 2018: A well-intentioned meeting derailed by mistaken identity, exposing Tim's own vulnerability and desire for recognition after decades of work.
Neither involved the sexist remarks or exploitative design tests that colleagues had shared, but both left deep impressions — one for its absurdity, the other for its quiet sting.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Naig0iJ_E9E