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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

erikmcclure.com

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Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#101

Post by qw3rty01 »

danaris wrote: post #83
oauea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying satisfactory is a nicer factorio is ignoring everything that makes factorio a good game.

As someone who has played a bunch of Factorio but only heard about Satisfactory: Can you elaborate on that?

The simple answer is scale. The recipes in satisfactory and factorio are pretty similar in complexity, but the production chains in factorio are quite a bit larger. Also a lot of complexity comes in with scaling production up in factorio, since you largely have to scale horizontally, but in satisfactory, most of the scaling is vertical. Later, you can do more horizontal scaling, but even into the mid-game, you're pretty constrained by the amount of resource locations you have access to.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#102

Post by Iv »

lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

I think that's why I dont want to get into these games. They feel like work!

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#103

Post by qw3rty01 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #95
lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

The major difference between Factorio and software is you can't refactor in Factorio. Your options are to spaghetti or start fresh. You can't really pick and choose good pieces of your layout because of physical restrictions and the game is a giant math equation, and you want inputs to match outputs at every step of the way - if you don't have the space to do this you don't have the space. It's like if in the softwar…

You can absolutely refactor in factorio...in fact you have to refactor as you get access to better technologies. Just like software, refactorability is largely dependent on how well you design your base at the beginning. If you leave plenty of room for expansion and compartmentalize different production areas, it makes it extremely easy to upgrade with minimal disruption to the factory. And also like software, if you don't put any thought into the design at the beginning, it will probably be easier to start from scratch than try to redesign on the fly.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#104

Post by tomc1985 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #66
kleff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satisfactory is really great, highly recommended from me as well. I think the verticality really adds a lot of fun over Factorio where you are restricted to keeping everything on the same level. Can make some really confusing spaghetti though...

Yeah, I love both factorio and satisfactory, but factorio ended up being the one I dumped more hours into. Satisfactory ended up hiding too many details as you move around - the first person view and the very large structures made it really hard to untangle the mess. Satisfactory felt like writing regexes - Basically write only, hard to read and parse afterwards. That said, man the first person view is fun when you'r…

Don't know if I agree on the height issues... every machine has ladders, they give you a tower fairly early on, and you can always walk on conveyors

As for debugging, I've found that planning a build on paper, keeping in mind production ratios, eliminates the need to experiment and debug, and then building simply becomes figuring out how to route conveyors

I've never had issues troubleshooting by getting to a high place and looking at the big picture, but to be honest since I started planning my builds on paper it barely even comes up

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#105

Post by Toutouxc »

minikites wrote: post #56
Toutouxc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only have to understand how to move your character using WASD, the concept of Inventory and pointing at different places on the ground with a cursor. Failing to understand this simple set of rules would disqualify a person from most jobs ever invented.

>Failing to understand this simple set of rules would disqualify a person from most jobs ever invented. I think you dramatically over-estimate most people's literacy with games and movement in a virtual space, let alone most people's hand-eye coordination. How many people can touch type these days?

You literally only place your fingers on the WASD keys and you move your character in a 2D (!) virtual space. With Minecraft it would be a completely different story, but Factorio is really accessible.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#106

Post by tomc1985 »

hobs wrote: post #90
danaris wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has played a bunch of Factorio but only heard about Satisfactory: Can you elaborate on that?

Factorio is very much like programming on a good team, automation, expansion, refactoring, tooling used to solve your problems. Satisfactory is cool, but at no point do you get the "ok so I built this entire factory and now I can just replicate it modularly" - no, just place every, single, block, by, hand. To me factorio is a rethinking of the RTS game, satisfactory is like a really nice minecraft mod.

Factorio didn't have blueprints either, early on. I suspect Satisfactory will add them as it is still in early access

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#107

Post by benlivengood »

I'm looking forward to "10 years experience with Factorio" appearing on job postings. Does 891 hours count?

One downside is that Factorio is almost immediately rewarding whereas programming generally takes a lot more effort for mediocre payoffs; hiring good factorio players will bias you toward people with enough focus for high reward behavior but maybe not so much for standard software engineering.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#108

Post by markus_zhang »

For anyone interested in Factorio as well as the technical notes of optimization. I highly recommend another game: Daison Sphere Program.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog...

The leading programmer uses some sophisticated ways of optimization, including:

- DOP instead of OOP

- Leveraging GPU for parellely calculating certain stuffs

- Using a GTX 660 Ti for development

Here is a technical post but in Chinese. Lemme know if you are interested and maybe I can do some translation.

https://www.zhihu.com/question/442555442/answer/1711890146

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#109

Post by bcrosby95 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #100
bcrosby95 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major difference between Factorio and software is you can't refactor in Factorio. Your options are to spaghetti or start fresh. You can't really pick and choose good pieces of your layout because of physical restrictions and the game is a giant math equation, and you want inputs to match outputs at every step of the way - if you don't have the space to do this you don't have the space. It's like if in the softwar…

But you can refactor... you can clear away everything and you get back 100% of materials

Demolishing your base and building a new one is not anything like refactoring.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#110

Post by namdnay »

inetknght wrote: post #86
plank_time wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hire quickly and fire quickly with a generous severance. That’s the only method that I’ve seen works effectively. Netflix does more with 2000 engineers that companies with 10-20x that. This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren’t “perfect” but had a lot of positives to offer.

> hire quickly and fire quickly This kind of mentality is not conducive to a well-functioning nation with people who have dependents and need stability.

If the nation is well-functioning, getting fired isn’t the end of the world. If your job is independant of your healthcare and you have several years of allowance to seek another one it’s fine to try out a few jobs before finding what sticks
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