Workplace reviews and discussion: Garena_台灣競舞娛樂有限公司

The HR attitude was very good

Premise: Garena HR proactively contacted me through 104 and invited me to an interview.

First round: HR + hiring manager screening questions. It mainly consisted of casual conversation with HR, while the hiring manager briefly asked about the programming languages and DB tools I used. The total duration was about one hour. I had heard that Garena cared a lot about whether candidates had experience playing games, but it was confirmed at this stage that this would not be a major technical issue. There were no other major problems.

Second round: Technical exam. I went to the office in Xinyi District for live coding and technical Q&A. The live-coding task involved using PySpark to load log files into a database, and ChatGPT was allowed. The technical questions concerned the HADP cluster ecosystem. It was confirmed again that not having a habit of playing games would not affect the interview.

Third round: Technical Q&A with the Shanghai data team. The questions again focused on the HADP cluster ecosystem, as well as some batch and streaming experience. Since I had experience in all of these areas, I passed smoothly.

Fourth round: This was where the problem occurred. A DA+DE lead from Singapore conducted a fit assessment. It consisted of casual conversation and a simple logic question. There had been no major issues up to this point, but the problems were:

1. When asked about my interests after work, I answered that I work out. The interviewer then jokingly demanded that I show my muscles.

2. Before asking the logic question, the interviewer asked whether I knew the game LOL, then jokingly mocked me: “So you don’t play games—do you know the rules? What’s the score? How do you win?”

3. Although Garena had proactively contacted me to participate in the interview, after I passed the technical interviews, I was questioned about why I was interviewing if my current company was not pushing me to leave. The interviewer also made inappropriate comments such as, “We don’t work from home here; you definitely won’t adapt,” and similar remarks.

4. The interviewers in the earlier rounds already clearly knew that I did not have a habit of playing games, yet the interviewer explicitly told me: “If there were two Bennys with the same technical ability, I would choose the Benny who plays games! Oh, don’t tell HR.” This is an inappropriate selection criterion that disregards the results already known from the earlier interviews and the time the candidate invested in the preceding stages.

The whole process treated the interviewee like a fool. If this was so important, why wasn’t it mentioned in the earlier rounds? I applied to be a Data Engineer, not to play League of Legends. When I asked the manager for their views on AI and cloud technologies, they were only resistant and unreceptive. I do not understand how someone like this can lead a technology-oriented team. I absolutely do not recommend this time-wasting interview.