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I learned Unity the wrong way

darkounity.com

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Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#41

Post by altmanaltman »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #38
HauntingPin wrote: post #6

Thanks for sharing your story, it was an engaging read. The part about filters in interviews resonated with me because of a recent experience. The place I work has been interviewing for new developers and the team lead asked me for my opinion on one of them. Overall seemed like a good candidate. But when I took a closer look at the assignment and the solution, I noticed that while technically the solution was good, t…

Ugh... I've had two bad hires in two years that were exactly like this - if you can't follow simple instructions, how have you survived in this career for this long?

I mean the only other alternative, since they survived this long and it happened two unique times in a year, is that you are the problem.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#42

Post by thaumasiotes »

bilekas wrote: post #34
DonHopkins wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, now anyone can ask AI to explain Queue . On the other hand, most people aren't curious enough to ask.

And that kicker has been around since salaries have been high. I've interviewed people who flat out had zero interest outside of work in the field. Who only took a degree because of the salary. It's incredible how a creative field that also happens to be critical to so many things can be infested by people who just don't care.

> It's incredible how a creative field that also happens to be critical to so many things can be infested by people who just don't care.

Huh? Those aren't unrelated facts. The people who don't care are there because the field is critical to many things.

If it wasn't, they'd leave, because they don't care.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#43

Post by pjmlp »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #12
andai wrote: post #5

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…

> The most beloved games have the shittest code Do you have data supporting that? My favorite games (Factorio, Noita, Song of Syx to name a few) all share in common devs' passion and expertise. I don't have any example of a good game with shitty code.

Hunt for Postmortens at GDC magazine or GDC Vault.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#44

Post by lossyalgo »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #38
HauntingPin wrote: post #6

Thanks for sharing your story, it was an engaging read. The part about filters in interviews resonated with me because of a recent experience. The place I work has been interviewing for new developers and the team lead asked me for my opinion on one of them. Overall seemed like a good candidate. But when I took a closer look at the assignment and the solution, I noticed that while technically the solution was good, t…

Ugh... I've had two bad hires in two years that were exactly like this - if you can't follow simple instructions, how have you survived in this career for this long?

Ugh... we have a new colleague who does this repeatedly. Most recently, I said in order to build, you need to do this:

- git clone

- git clone

- git clone

What do they do? git clone repo1, 2, 3 without giving parameter, which clones into default folders named after the repos. Build fails of course because repo1 depends on repo2 and 3 being named specifically. He sends me the error log (remote colleague, yay) and I say: you gotta rename those folders. Instead of renaming them, tries other things for hours, then comes back and shows me other build errors. I look over the errors and realize, again, the folders are still named incorrectly. Rinse and repeat 2 more times before finally the build process works. Lost a few hours to this. This kinda stuff keeps happening with this colleague. It's really a huge time-sink. If I had more time, I would do remote call and watch over them, but I'm so deep in my own stuff that I don't have time to babysit (not to mention calls take 1-2 hours with this person just trying to explain really basic things, over and over and over again).

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#45

Post by onli »

lossyalgo wrote: post #44
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh... I've had two bad hires in two years that were exactly like this - if you can't follow simple instructions, how have you survived in this career for this long?

Ugh... we have a new colleague who does this repeatedly. Most recently, I said in order to build, you need to do this: - git clone - git clone - git clone What do they do? git clone repo1, 2, 3 without giving parameter, which clones into default folders named after the repos. Build fails of course because repo1 depends on repo2 and 3 being named specifically. He sends me the error log (remote colleague, yay) and I sa…

If he is young enough he probably did not know how the file systems worked (and I mean: what a directory is, what files are). Supposed to be quite common now for people using only mobile devices. So he lacked the fundamentals to understand what you wanted.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#46

Post by lossyalgo »

onli wrote: post #45
lossyalgo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh... we have a new colleague who does this repeatedly. Most recently, I said in order to build, you need to do this: - git clone - git clone - git clone What do they do? git clone repo1, 2, 3 without giving parameter, which clones into default folders named after the repos. Build fails of course because repo1 depends on repo2 and 3 being named specifically. He sends me the error log (remote colleague, yay) and I sa…

If he is young enough he probably did not know how the file systems worked (and I mean: what a directory is, what files are). Supposed to be quite common now for people using only mobile devices. So he lacked the fundamentals to understand what you wanted.

That's definitely a valid argument, but I highly doubt it since they know their way around Windows and Linux just fine. I honestly think it might be related to attention span, miscommunication, language barriers and/or maybe a heavy reliance on AI tools (though to be honest, even local LLMs would have spotted the error immediately).

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#47

Post by nazgulsenpai »

djeastm wrote: post #32
bambataa wrote: post #14

Extremely well-written and honest post. The struggle with being self-taught is that you don’t know what you don’t know. This is probably even worse in areas like Unity, where the coding part is sort of a sideshow to the main event. Nowadays the problem is you lack the discernment to evaluate AI output. I wrote The Conputer Science Book ( https://a.co/d/01e62STx ) to act as that basic building block and help orient se…

>The Conputer Science Book I suggest an edit to fix the typo.

Conversely, I only opened it to see if it was actually cleverly titled Conputer :)

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#48

Post by matsemann »

Not the same issue as the author, as I come from programming and been toying with Unity for myself / hobby. But it's surprisingly difficult to learn, because most guides and tutorials don't teach you the fundamentals. They teach you how to specifically do X, but it's hard to apply when you want to make something else. Often they also "hack" it to work, and as an experienced dev I can then really feel that this isn't the way to actually do it, it's just a shortcut, but I don't know how it should be done.

Like the input system. Many tutorials will just assign a listener on WASD buttons or something. But that only gets you so far.

Or the mentioned Brackeys. Very cool and well produced tutorials to make certain graphical effects. But often they are impossible to combine with your actual shaders, and if mindlessly applied you haven't learned anything generalizable you can use for your own vision. Just then have to hope there exist a tutorial or asset for whatever effect you're looking for.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#49

Post by eterm »

lossyalgo wrote: post #44
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh... I've had two bad hires in two years that were exactly like this - if you can't follow simple instructions, how have you survived in this career for this long?

Ugh... we have a new colleague who does this repeatedly. Most recently, I said in order to build, you need to do this: - git clone - git clone - git clone What do they do? git clone repo1, 2, 3 without giving parameter, which clones into default folders named after the repos. Build fails of course because repo1 depends on repo2 and 3 being named specifically. He sends me the error log (remote colleague, yay) and I sa…

Sure, that's frustrating.

But you know what's also frustrating? Code bases which involve multi-step manual steps to build.

You should be able to get a working local environment with a single command.

You should be able to get a working local build with a single build command.

If you have depedent projects, they should either be in a monorepo, or delivered through a packaging system so they are not depend on the specific local naming of other repos.

Having a repo depend on a different repo being in a specific place on the file system is bad, having multiple of them is terrible.

Stick what's needed in an onboarding script, and make sure it works before onboarding someone.

Ideally that script should be kept to a minimum, if it grows too large that's a sign you've split things artificially instead of finding natural splits.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#50

Post by HiPhish »

It takes a lot of humility and strength to admit this. Kudos to the author.

I was similar to that in the past, chasing tutorials and only having half-baked knowledge. What shook me out of that was this article: https://fabiensanglard.net/c/

    I'm going to start with the things I didn't take too seriously: Internet tutorials, blogs and almost anything brought by Google (yes, it includes this article). I usually considered those sources unreliable and potentially harmful.

    Like a lot of people in the industry I used to Google way too often. Overtime I found the illusion of speed and the inaccuracy of the answers to be counter-productive.
    
    No website is as good as a good book. And no good book is as good as a disassembly output.
This set me straight and got me to look into actual authoritative sources. Instead of tutorials read a proper book. Don't scrape StackOverflow, read the reference documentation. Learn to write automated tests instead of randomly poking around in the application. The thing is, I did not even intend to learn C, but after reading that article and other articles on that website I accepted that if I want to get good at programming I should start with the fundamentals, and C was a good starting point. It was the first language I actually learned properly.
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