How I Got My Job at Nvidia

How to Hunt Bugs

Q: How do you hunt out and verify bugs so that you can eliminate them?

We really do see all kinds of things come up, and we know that if an issue affects even just one or two people in a studio, it’s bound to be affecting someone else out there, so we try to rope in every possible issue we have a reproduction case for and drive it through to a fix as soon as possible. It genuinely bothers me to know that issues exist, so I file bugs against everything I find and try to find a solution for developers anywhere possible.

In the past, if we can’t reproduce a problem in-house, I’ve even driven over to local developers offices and grabbed a machine that shows some issue that we need to get to the bottom of. Some might call it an obsession!

I’m a gamer myself, so I’ll sometimes stop in the middle of a 2am gaming session (currently I’m playing a lot of Modern Warfare 2) and file bugs, enhancement requests, or shoot off an email to someone in the company, asking, ‘Is this an issue we know about?’ Like anybody else, I want a perfect product in my home rig. I think genuinely caring about the experience is important, and it can’t be just viewed as a chore, otherwise you’ll never do it well enough.


I’m also guilty of scouring forums (they provide us valuable feedback) on the hunt for multiple confirmations of issues, creating a list of problems with our driver releases, and sending it to our QA and driver release teams. We then try to go through and compare against bugs we know about, and file and reproduce the ones we don’t. It doesn’t do any good to say that everything’s perfect all the time if that keeps people from being driven towards perfecting the product. You need to be honest with yourself and colleagues.

Everyone I work with approaches this with a similar mindset. I really enjoy and appreciate that, and their tireless efforts make all this work we do possible. At the end of the day, we desperately want to build cool stuff and do the right thing to make games run better, look better, and play better.

Q: You seem to be involved in events a lot - is there any chance we’ll see an Nvidia games-related event in the UK any time soon?

These days I haven’t been to as many events, but I am typically asked to go to events based on whether my presence is useful or not. I’m not aware of any events in the UK but I’d also say that anything’s possible... We certainly haven’t ruled it out.

[Nvidia spokesperson Ben Berraondo later said, ‘Regarding NVIDIA games-related events in the UK – it’s looking very likely you’ll be able to find us at the Eurogamer Expo 2010.’]