Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who was it? And what game was it?
Skald: Against the Black Priory
Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
61–70 of 114 posts
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend at a nearly-FAANG said not using AI tooling in the interview is now an automatic fail. “Not that you’d be able to complete the task on time without it anyway”
How does that work? I assume it's not Leetcode anymore then? Current LLMs mostly one-shot these types of algorithmic exercises, except maybe for the most difficult ones.
You could get a task something like make a popular service that would override default behavior. E.g ntp or something similar. Do it in like 30 mins.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#63Mike, ludum dare co-founder (and sole maintainer these days) is looking for work. For your consideration please
https://mikekasprzak.com/Resume-MikeKasprzak.pdf
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#64> 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…
There are an incredible amount of CS graduates, far more than the available jobs, so the number of under-employed CS grads only goes up with time. If anything I'd have expected somewhere around 200-250 apps for that time period.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#65Curious about "no-AI" policy. From my experience interviewing lately AI is allowed,but the task is usually big in a small time window. So you quickly spin up the project but I see most of work in QA
A friend at a nearly-FAANG said not using AI tooling in the interview is now an automatic fail. “Not that you’d be able to complete the task on time without it anyway”
For general software engineering, the accepted thought is you're not really an engineer without the use of AI. Because engineering consists of using the right tool for the job, applying best practice, making tradeoffs, and justifying every decision from a technical standpoint. And it's anti-engineering to write the code yourself rather than putting your ego aside and taking advantage of AI's huge productivity gains.
Game dev is... different. Game devs fancy themselves more as artists, and using generative AI is an affront to those sensibilities.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#66IMO the take home assignment is trivial, even for non-game developers with zero Unity experience; maybe you don't need a take home assignment at all. I also think that asking people to "not use AI" when you have absolutely no way of enforcing it is just self-deception.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend at a nearly-FAANG said not using AI tooling in the interview is now an automatic fail. “Not that you’d be able to complete the task on time without it anyway”
For general software engineering, the accepted thought is you're not really an engineer without the use of AI. Because engineering consists of using the right tool for the job, applying best practice, making tradeoffs, and justifying every decision from a technical standpoint. And it's anti-engineering to write the code yourself rather than putting your ego aside and taking advantage of AI's huge productivity gains.…
>And it's anti-engineering to write the code yourself rather than putting your ego aside and taking advantage of AI's huge productivity gains.
Are these huge productivity gains in the room with us now?
LLM-assisted coding makes the easy stuff quick and the hard stuff impossible. But I was spending 80% of my mental energy on the hard stuff anyway, and the easy stuff was down time that's closer to rest than it is to work.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#68"Our take-home lets candidates code." - As a dev, I absolutely hate the practice of such assignments. 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…
This (particular) take home assignment looks absolutely fine to me. If you can't do it under 2 hours (maybe I couldn't? I've never used Unity) then you shouldn't _want_ to work there.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#69This 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…
> great way to filter out anyone worth hiring btw
This seems to imply that there is a significant causal link between a developer’s salary and the quality and quantity of their output, and I just don’t think that’s true in the general case.
Re: Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
#7020 people given a take home test for one role?
I get icky feelings about these. Clearly, 18 out of 20 submitted something so I guess most people go along with it and perhaps I'm an outlier.