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I met this guy who became a game dev later in life, as in his 30s. He has quite the non-traditional resume as far as devs go, with no formal CS education. 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…
Can you share the game? Thanks
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.
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.
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.
I met this guy who became a game dev later in life, as in his 30s. He has quite the non-traditional resume as far as devs go, with no formal CS education. 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…
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.
Why not list the salary up front? That reduces the number of people with wildly different remuneration expectations?
I met this guy who became a game dev later in life, as in his 30s. He has quite the non-traditional resume as far as devs go, with no formal CS education. 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…
The thing is - would he have prospered within a small indie studio? 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.
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.
The perspective here is subtly baised - look at the diagram down the bottom and realise that they were always only going to hire 1 person, so all the reasons that they give for not hiring the person are, in fact, not reasons that the person filtered out wasn't hired. They are processes to rank the applicants. If there were more candidates they'd add more reasons not to hire most of them, if there were less candidates…
"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?