In particular, companies are in some sense bluffing with the "Didn't Qualify" category. I've seen hiring situations where nobody qualifies but they actually need to fill the position - they hired someone who didn't qualify and trained them up. They did a great job. "Didn't qualify" is only a real category for the most demanding jobs. Software is just not one of them, nobody has any idea if dev is going to be good or not before they hire them. Companies often have a hard time picking which devs are the productive ones when they've already hired the dev.
So we've got an article about a process used to rank devs, and no particular evidence of whether the dev hired is actually very good. Which is fine, still an interesting read. But it is good to keep a clear perspective. This is one of those situations where doing big parts of the process by fair dice roll is not necessarily an inferior approach.
The best dev for the job may have been 'unqualified' given that they were looking for "a generalist who can do both Unity and services coding."
This is to the point that it's not "bluffing" but simply "how the world works." What's unfortunate is that many new grads (and some veterans) live with the impression that they need to meet (or lie about) all these "requirements". When the real world never operated like that.
Still, some job ads are written to show both "essentials" and "nice to have".
Recruiters hiring for a Java role will pass on a candidate with 10 years of C# experience, or other similar tech-stack-swapping scenarios where the skill set is 95% transferable because they don't know anything about the actual technologies or understand the work.
And of course, the lack of honest feedback makes the whole system inscrutable. Did you get ghosted because the job was fake? Because your resume lacked some key words? Because they had a referral? Because they preferred more diverse applicants? Because they never even looked at your resume? Because you have too many years of experience? Too few? Who knows!
I feel like the "respectful of applicants' time" thing to do would be to state a salary range in the posting.
"Since we are focused on efficiency, we need to respect people’s time as much as our own". How exactly does this process respect the candidates time?
Firstly, for 99% of appointments they usually don't care how good of a developer you are. You may have invented 10 new technologies and have revolutionized the field, if you can't show them a portfolio of games you have shipped then they don't care. They don't hire you for a developer/code role because you're a great developer, they hire you because you've shipped some games before (which is totally a different metric). For whatever reason the whole industry is stuck in this mentality, they can't differentiate between the metrics of appointing a great developer vs trying to find someone that can ship titles.
Asking for expected salary is a pretty quick way to filter because no one ever lists their requirement in their cv. If the job listing included their range then they might have gone with just assuming that the applicants would be within that range, but it doesn't hurt to check.
The test itself is quite easy and straightforward, if anything the real gotchas around it would be to stand out significantly from everyone else.
As for the take home, I'd take it or any other kind of non-conventional question that allows me to show me my skills, rather than the usual interview where your interviewer gives you an algorithm or system design question they couldn't solve themselves, with the occasional smirk as they watch you fumble through that question.
Where I live (BC, Canada) actually has a law requiring all employers to list the position's salary range, which is great for cutting down on the "expected salary expectations" dance.
I don't like take homes as it's (highly likely) a one way time commitment and if you're truly looking to show off your skills it would take you hours.
Then, when they give me the take-home, I would ask how many other people are in the stage with me. If it's 20, with only one candidate getting hired, forget it. My expectation in such situations would be that they won't be able to trim the pipeline as much as they will need/want to by applying purely objective/rational criteria, and I'd end up getting rejected on grounds of "inability to mind-read subjective preferences".
This is toxic to you???
- Apply online
- Initial screening with recruiter if they like your resume (book a 45 mins slot)
- Take home assignment or online assessment (2 -4 hours)
- First technical screening interview (1-1.5 hours)
- Second technical interview (system level, deep dive, 1.5 hours)
- Product manager interview (1 hour)
- Senior leadership interview (1 hour)
- Final offer
Between all these rounds, you need to book meetings and it usually takes 1-2 weeks between rounds.
When a recruiter reaches out to me, my first response is my resume and expected hourly compensation (I primarily do consulting/contract work).
I provide different numbers based on whether WFH, Hybrid, or In-office, and for any type of commuting, I figure that out and work it into my day, so if I'm looking for $150/hr, and the commute is 1 hour each way, that is an extra 2 hours per day in the office, if I'm in the office for 3 days a week, that is 46 hours of billable time (to me), but still only 40 to the employer, so my $150/hr becomes $172.50/hr.
This seems to imply that there is a significant causal link between a developer’s salary and the quality and quantity of their output, and I just don’t think that’s true in the general case.
The one who doesn't have a lot of skills or any deep knowledge will also be in self doubt and is much more likely gonna accept a lower offer, but a high skilled one will take it as an insult.
In any case, he went on to work on a game, and kept doing so for years. He hired artists etc. but did the core development himself. Released the game, which has now sold over 150k copies since the release last year. Obviously not crazy numbers up in the millions or tens of millions, but impressive for a first release, and from a dev basically learning as he's moving along, with a regular 9-5 job and family - doing it purely for the love of the game.
Makes me wonder if he'd ever have gotten the chance, had he first tried to join some small indie studio, rather than the DIY route.
My experience is that a lot of the traits highlighted above make for brilliant innovators and creators, but actually end up being stifled/stopped by leads within a company. Having this kind of vision and passion is brilliant until it collides within what the founders vision is.
I'm happy that I'm working for a marketing department nowadays and when they need someone technical or someone on business insights, they come to me.
Having to work on other peoples ideas, or in regards to constraints other people have set for me completely kills the joy of doing the work.
Let me explore stuff and Ill be a happy little worker bee, give me deadlines on features I consider bs ill procrastinate forever.
Is this normal in Seattle? That’s a tonne of applicants especially on what seems like a niche job site. Are they mostly junk offshore applications or bots?
Interesting that out of that it looks like 90% were late applications or not qualified and only 17 total completed the take home.
If there is at least a recruiter screening first, I’ll apply and ask about “Bring Your Own Code Examples”, mostly when their daily work would use tools that I have some code published.
Exactly this.
It costs a company nothing to give you a take-home, but it will cost you (the candidate) potentially many hours. On my last job search, I got burned a number of times where I'd work for hours on a take-home only to get ghosted. I don't think they even looked at my solution.
Now I have a personal policy where I will refuse to do a take-home unless the interviewer sits there with me while I do it. This demonstrates to me that the interviewer is actually serious and respectful of my time.
They will need to review your submission, which absolutely does take time.
Isn't that a dark pattern (in addition to being a time saver for everyone)? It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't kind of thing.
This is an adversarial question in a process which needs to be ruthless against the time-wasting applications, but also needs to be cooperative with future co-workers.
If you are open to a broad range of salary in exchange for perhaps working at a super exciting place, then there is no good answer. Even "I'm open to a broad range of salary if that's needed to work at a super exciting place" is not a great answer.
Leaving it to the legal requirement of posting an expected salary range and negotiating from there might be a better way.
There is something that feels very cursed to me about a team of size 2~10 for game dev. At this point I'd much rather go solo or join a team of 100+. Zero structure or a lot of structure. A medium amount of structure seems to bring the maximum amount of entropy.
Very small teams can be great - so long as you are able to focus on building a game, not building a company. You need to treat it more like a game jam, at least in the early stages of a project. Just make things, see what works, rapidly prototype and iterate.
But you probably all need to be equal partners in the project from the start for it to work well. It's not so good for creative work when there's a management/employees 'them and us' divide from the start.
If you’ve never run a hiring process, it’s hard to get a feel for just how difficult and time-consuming it is.
And risky - hiring someone wrong for the role is very expensive and disruptive. And yet more likely to happen that you’d think, even with a rigorous selection process.
I get icky feelings about these. Clearly, 18 out of 20 submitted something so I guess most people go along with it and perhaps I'm an outlier.
I wish more companies understood this. In all my years of interviews I never got a coding interview or take home programming assignment that even remotely resembled the work they needed.
You couldn't even do the INITIAL / quick triage for those 46? You couldn't even just spend 20 seconds on each to see if they were remotely qualified to be considered or not? It would have taken one person 15 minutes. You instead just threw away all those applications without even glancing at them? In addition, these were applications that people got in before the deadline, before you closed the application process, they applied correctly, and you just threw them away without even glancing at them?
"Late applications" though: Wouldn't it be very wasteful though, to dismiss a third of candidates simply because late application when the posting was live just two days? As admitted, the hiring process is time consuming. It seems wasteful then to filter on "available during the 2 day posting window"! That availability was not a serious job requirement.
The best predictors of job performance are a simulation of the job and past performance. This is not new research or a secret.
Chances are, you're going to see applicants with combinations of skills you couldn't even have imagined.
Humans are complicated.
An interview is a two way street. I'd like the company to present itself authentically so that I don't waste time if they eventually turn out to have a culture I don't like, e.g. demanding LLM coding assistent use.
Game dev is... different. Game devs fancy themselves more as artists, and using generative AI is an affront to those sensibilities.
Even if you are primarily using codegen, your own coding ability, taste, problem solving, etc. are still deciding inputs to the quality of the final result. And it’s much easier to assess these things in an hour when a human is writing and debugging a relatively small amount of code.
AI tools just produce too much code in a short time. It’s hard to assess what the candidate’s quality bar and attention to detail are really like when there’s so much code to wade through. Anyone can vibe code, but not many can do it without creating mountains of tech debt… the ones who can are usually good programmers with or without AI.
Let's say we care about the potential employee's needs, most people want to feel like they're making a difference at work and build something that matters. I have never had a job interview where I was able to discuss this topic. It's just "are you good enough to work for us?" while the entire company is falling apart in the background.
Do you actually want to improve your company, or are you just looking to share more workload? Because those are two different things. I'm not looking to join your bike-shedding business
Every non-junior dev/coder should already have at least some indicators out there showing how they code - GitHub, a personal site or any other resources. For juniors or CS graduates there might be bit of a grey zone, but even then, with how widely available web space is nowadays, there’s really no excuse not to have something out there if you are serious about the "love for coding".
So the sentence “we need to respect people’s time as much as our own” seems flawed to me, because you obviously don’t respect the time of the candidates who coded for nothing for you.
To me, that is also a huge red flag when considering a position.
Important should be assessing someone’s theoretical knowledge of software patterns, principles and architectures ..just getting a feel for their nerd level. Seeing how much they actually care about code and details, whether they can really express themselves and if they could communicate a problem clearly.
For a 3 people team this 4 weeks hiring process is too tedious.
