Why not list the salary up front? That reduces the number of people with wildly different remuneration expectations?
Because they hope that someone gives them a number that is lower than the salary they had in mind.
Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
41–50 of 114 posts
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#42The 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…
I think the article was more about the gates in the applicant 'funnel' rather than describing their method of ranking applicants as suitable developers.
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."
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#43I am impressed with the extent of the effort here. I struggle with the notion of working with just one other person on a game. Building an entire hiring pipeline and documenting it seems like something that would immediately kill the dream for me at this scale. 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 str…
> There is something that feels very cursed to me about a team of size 2~10 for game dev.
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.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#44Why not list the salary up front? That reduces the number of people with wildly different remuneration expectations?
Because they hope that someone gives them a number that is lower than the salary they had in mind.
Bingo. Discussing salary is a game and the first person to say a number loses.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#45This sounds like an incredibly toxic hiring process and not a company I'd ever want to work for. So you apply for a job and in response they (maybe) email you back asking for your expected salary (great way to filter out anyone worth hiring btw) and if you're cheap enough they then ask you to do work on a take home assignment. Everyone here thinks that this is okay and they want to be interviewed this way? "Since we…
For the game industry this is practically amazing.
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.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#46This sounds like an incredibly toxic hiring process and not a company I'd ever want to work for. So you apply for a job and in response they (maybe) email you back asking for your expected salary (great way to filter out anyone worth hiring btw) and if you're cheap enough they then ask you to do work on a take home assignment. Everyone here thinks that this is okay and they want to be interviewed this way? "Since we…
A few paragraphs below, the article answers that the company can't afford to pay as much as some others; I assume if you are being already being paid way over the market rate you should keep working at the place you're at.
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.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#47I 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.
This is what I experience too. I'm a lot like that person and I clash with this side of me towards upper management when they feel that things ought to be done a certain way.
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.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#48One note that might be good to highlight in the article is that the take-home is expected to be 2 hours long. From my experience, they are much longer so I was initially surprised to see take-home's being given before an initial call until I looked at the assignment itself.
I can see both perspectives. If you are a skilled hiree, this seems like a waste of time. But if you are hiring online, you will inevitably get a lot of terrible candidates and you need to filter them out. If you are a small team, you can't spend weeks interviewing randos with little to none coding experience for a SE role. The problem is that online hiring is full of noise, but both sides suffer from the expenses this creates.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#49This sounds like an incredibly toxic hiring process and not a company I'd ever want to work for. So you apply for a job and in response they (maybe) email you back asking for your expected salary (great way to filter out anyone worth hiring btw) and if you're cheap enough they then ask you to do work on a take home assignment. Everyone here thinks that this is okay and they want to be interviewed this way? "Since we…
A few paragraphs below, the article answers that the company can't afford to pay as much as some others; I assume if you are being already being paid way over the market rate you should keep working at the place you're at. 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 o…
I might be a masochist, but I actually enjoy system design interviews and they're quite formulaic. Resources like "System design in a hurry" are great for narrowing down the formula.
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.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#50> Work with Indies — no formal connection, but the results were great! –. Our listing went live at 11:30 AM on October 15th, and we had to ask them to shut it down by 6:30 PM on October 17th because we had too many candidates. In the end, we collected 159 applications. 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…
It’s not a niche site within its market.