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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

#131

Post by sixothree »

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…

This is exactly why I don't play games like factorio or tis-100. It's too much like work for me.

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

#132

Post by ericbarrett »

lacksconfidence wrote: post #60
zionic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on this. I could never get into Factorio with the simple graphics and 2D top-down. Satisfactory is freakin incredible and it is easily the best new game I have played in the last 10 years.

If you enjoyed Satisfactory you might also want to try out Dyson Sphere Program. It doesn't provide the veritical building but it is a different take on the factorio/satisfactory style of gameplay.

I tried DSP, very fun game but the performance is terrible. i7-9700K and RTX2080 and I get 20 FPS before using even 1/10th of the first planet. Can't recommend it currently.

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

#133

Post by dang »

neogodless wrote: post #67
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #25

Click-Bait title, and judging by comments here everyone went for the click-bait. The author doesn't actually use factorio for interviewing, and thinks it world be a bad idea to do so. A more accurate title would be "Comparison between Factorio and Software Engineering Concepts" - but that wouldn't have gotten it to the top of HN so fast, nor gotten so many comments so quickly.

I believe we may be at a point where it is understood that headlines are created with the goal of attracting readers to the article, and it may no longer be necessary to point this out for each article we come across.

It's their job to sex up the headline and ours to deflate it to size.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I've replaced the title with representative language from the article body.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&sor...

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

#134

Post by nicklecompte »

oauea wrote: post #72
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…

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

I think Satisfactory is “nicer” in that it’s prettier and more user-friendly, has higher production values, etc. Not to speak for the parent comment but I took “nicer” to be a very deliberate choice instead of “better.”

It is true that Factorio is currently a better game and I suspect that will be the case even when Satisfactory is complete. I don’t really think it’s intended to be a 3D Factorio (even if that’s the easiest way to describe it): it seems that the design is to be less intricate as a construction management game, but with more details in the world design and player exploration: there are elements of No Man’s Sky or Astroneer that are absent in Factorio. So I am still curious to see where the devs will take it.

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

#135

Post by draw_down »

Yes, everyone has their own obscure way of doing phrenology to decide if you have the right kind of engineer brain. I'm sure asking me to play this game will tell you so much more than asking me to figure out how many golf balls will fit in a 747.

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

#136

Post by cwhiz »

francisduvivier wrote: post #6

How can this not have a huge bias in favor of gamers? Might work for them because that's the kind of culture fit they need, but I doesn't look all that generalizable for other companies.

It might, if they were actually suggesting this. Title was intended to race to the top of Hacker News.

>What's the takeaway from this? I don't know. We certainly can't switch to using Factorio as an interviewing method - you might as well just give a candidate a take-home assignment.

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

#138

Post by kevincox »

lghh wrote: post #116
kevincox wrote: post #12

I seriously think that "personal projects" are very underrated when it comes to hiring. If I see that someone has a lot of personal projects and has lots of time in Factorio they probably know how to code. I'm not sure you can rank them as Junior/Senior too effectively as these two things don't require much leadership, but you can basically skip the trivial phone interview questions at this point.

I doubt jobs for urban planners ask what cities you design in your free time. I doubt jobs for lawyers ask what cases you've argued in your free time. Why do we ask what software you've built in your free time for software engineering interviews?

Because in software personal projects are easy to do. It just takes drive and skill, which are both relevant skills. Passion as also valuable, it tends to show that people are willing to learn and have interest in the type of work that they will be doing.

Artist and even urban planners regularly have a portfolio, I don't see how this is any different.

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

#139

Post by billfruit »

kentonv wrote: post #58

We used this a couple times at Sandstorm back in the day. At the end of the interview the candidate would play Factorio cooperatively with the team for a while. I think it is remarkably effective at identifying the kinds of skills and personality traits that a software engineer actually needs to have in day-to-day work. You can find out if someone is self-directed, how fast they work, whether they produce clean desig…

While I get some of this sentiment, wont some sort of social deduction game like 'Throne of Lies' be better at identifying potentially good team members?.

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

#140

Post by EveYoung »

plank_time wrote: post #73
kentonv wrote: post #58

We used this a couple times at Sandstorm back in the day. At the end of the interview the candidate would play Factorio cooperatively with the team for a while. I think it is remarkably effective at identifying the kinds of skills and personality traits that a software engineer actually needs to have in day-to-day work. You can find out if someone is self-directed, how fast they work, whether they produce clean desig…

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.

You can only do this if you have the name recogition and compensation to attract enough candidates who are willing to take this risk. Plus, if you have long on-boarding processes this could become quite expensive.
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