Interviewing with Nvidia next week, what to expect?

[OneOfTheseDays]

It's for a software engineering position. It's been about 4 years since I've graduated so I'm extremely rusty on all of the topics I know they will try and grill me on.

I took a peak at some sample interview questions and was pretty alarmed at the difficulty of some of them. I anticipate it's going to take me about a week of intense studying just to prepare for this damn thing.

Am I overreacting here or are the interviews really that tough at Nvidia?

 

[surfsatwerk]

Just don't use "lol" "lawlz" "lollercopter" or any other variant during the interview process.

 

[bignateyk]

They are gonna try to offer you a free ATI card during the interview. Make sure you decline. It's just a test of your loyalty.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Just remember that peak != peek (or pique, applique).

 

[Leros]

The Nvidia recruiters at the latest career fair were sort of jerks.

 

[Hacp]

The Nvidia recruiters at the latest career fair were sort of jerks.

You'd expect them not to be? They have their pick of millions of Chinese and Indian engineers on the cheap. Why would they want to hire an American?

 

[IronWing]

When they ask if you have any question, tell them that you read their processor road map on the intratubes and you were wondering why it led to China?

 

[SamurAchzar]

I'd certainly not want to find myself at the wrong end of an interview nowadays. Now is the time of the assholes to rise with their stupid riddles. I'm sure the Riddler would have done very well as a recruiter.

Good luck OP.

Do you have a link to some of those sample interview questions?

 

[techs]

Try not to mention that AMD processor in your home computer.

 

[Leros]

Try not to mention that AMD processor in your home computer.

I did that in an Intel interview. The interviewer and I both had a good laugh.

 

[ViRGE]

It's going to depend on which specific team you're going to be in? Driver development? Their demo development team? Freelance development to help game devs? Tool development (i.e. Nexus)? Etc.

Some of those tasks require you to just be a competent game programmer, others require you to have a scary level of understanding of CUDA and PTX.

 

[Fritzo]

When talking during the interview, stop speaking every 15 seconds, then start again. After a couple of minutes, say "Can you hold on a second? I have to reload my drivers."

 

[Zstream]

It's for a software engineering position. It's been about 4 years since I've graduated so I'm extremely rusty on all of the topics I know they will try and grill me on.

I took a peak at some sample interview questions and was pretty alarmed at the difficulty of some of them. I anticipate it's going to take me about a week of intense studying just to prepare for this damn thing.

Am I overreacting here or are the interviews really that tough at Nvidia?

Check the resume for grammar mistakes like peak/peek

Make sure you are calm and do not sweat during gotcha type questions. Most of the time it appears they are trying to get you to admit something you are not comfortable with.

Understand the terms for the job. If you are doing software, then be damn well sure you know it. Being rusty is not the best thing, you should have been programming since out of college. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Tell them Rollo sent you.

 

[PsiStar]

The interview is worth all the study & prep that you mention. Read what is going on in the stock markets & any business related topics.

Will the job involve knowing anything about CUDA & GPGPUs? You don't need to know how to program them *now*, but knowing the concept would be a good thing at least.

 

[secretanchitman]

Tell them Rollo sent you.

lmao, i was thinking the same thing...

 

[Lonyo]

I did that in an Intel interview. The interviewer and I both had a good laugh.

Did you say "I'm too poor to be able to afford an awesome Intel processor, so I had to go cheap and get AMD, but if you give me this job I'll be able to buy some Intel quality and junk this old thing"?

 

[chusteczka]

When they ask if you have any question, tell them that you read their processor road map on the intratubes and you were wondering why it led to China?

... with a large speedbump at Rambus ...

 

[chusteczka]

I do not know anything about nVidia or graphics programming but I would expect some questions on basic operating systems concepts; such as processes, memory management, semaphores, and mutex's. Hopefully, you have a solid understanding of computer hardware and know how a northbridge chipset relates to a graphics processor.

 

[Leros]

Did you say "I'm too poor to be able to afford an awesome Intel processor, so I had to go cheap and get AMD, but if you give me this job I'll be able to buy some Intel quality and junk this old thing"?

I said something about at the time of building my computer, AMD was the best performance per dollar. But now, Intel was the better option. The guy agreed with me.

 

[vshah]

when I interviewed they gave a pretty tough C quiz...lots of tricky questions about pointers