Don't worry, blogpost author. We think you're a Queue<T> and that's all that matters.

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, the candidate had ignored a bunch of requirements outlined in the assignment.

At first I was willing to give him a chance, but when I gave it more thought, I realized that one of the biggest issues I've had with colleagues was them not reading the issue they're given, not understanding it, not fulfilling the requirements given in the issue and/or outright ignoring what's written because they independently decide they know a better solution (without consulting anybody), which turns out to be worse because of reasons which might not have been outlined in the issue, but still lead to the given requirements.

I pointed this out and felt it was a big red flag that, in a best-case scenario, this candidate was still unwilling to follow or incapable of following clear instructions. The candidate wasn't invited to the next round.

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 self-taught developers.

What did come out from the blog post though:

- OP writes really well

- OP has learned to be very honest with themselves (and I hope not too self-critical now)

- OP seems really good at delivering things people like, even if they’re a bit cobbled together

All of which are very valuable and harder to learn than programming fundamentals tbh.

I felt this article in my bones. I also had the same realisation years ago and eventually wrote about it on my blog: https://omeysalvi.com/blog/blog-11. I still have a long way to go but I feel encouraged that at least I'm learning with intent now.

Hey, I'm the original author. Thanks for sharing this. I saw a spike in my analytics and couldn't figure out where it was coming from, now I know :)

> But interview after interview, the story started to make sense. They were not wrong, I was not ready, and it took me a long time to admit that.

I believe this is one of the most humbling but also maturing moments in career and adulthood.

I submitted this because I thought it was a good and nuanced (if long) take.

FTFA:

> If I had AI in 2019, I would not have lasted 3 years before the interview crashed me. I would have lasted longer, and the crash would have been worse.

> Before AI, I got a lot of interviews. Companies would talk to anyone with a reel. Today a beginner can send out fifty applications and not even get a first call. The thing that saved me may not be available to people starting out now. I do not have a clean answer for what to do about that. I only know that interviews were the best school I ever had, and I feel for anyone who is being shut out of that classroom.

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 Fundamentals halfway through. Though I have no frame of reference for how reasonable it is. (Is the average game dev really expected to implement a rigidbody sim from scratch?)

I wonder how long/far someone can truly go without actually knowing stuff today. I don’t know about game dev but the web is certainly built on abstraction: In university I’ve met people whose portfolio sites are made in NextJS but don’t know what React, the DOM or even HTML is. I think this is bad. At the same time (with the help of AI) they are certainly shipping things and working real jobs.

At least on the web, with frameworks and stuff abstracted into magic services or libraries, you can go really far without knowing what you’re doing. At what point does not knowing the lower level stuff start becoming a hard ceiling?

Thanks for sharing! (Sorry the following is written before I realised you posted your own blog post!)

It does seem like a trap, although you might nit have had the raw technical skills for the job they applied (by the way why wasn't he screened out early rather than on the take home task?),

They clearly have a lot of the skills around game design.

The trouble is that they also didn't have the high level skills that someone who does have the low level technical skills might need from a lead!

I'm not entirely sure on the take that AI would make it worse. If they are satisfied with the kind of game they make. Then they could continue to make games for many years.

I do think it's right that Game Developer companies want technically highly skilled people. My favourite thing about AAA gaming is the feeling of the constant cutting edge.

On the other than, I don't see why they couldn't have a long and fruitful Indie career.

> Then the interviewer asked me why I used Queue<T>. I couldn't answer

And this was before AI. Imagine the amount of people who will never be able to answer similar questions. I am going to maybe have a bad take, but if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be working in the field until you do. It's not okay to wing it into new roles with more responsibility.

What's with all the Unity articles on the front page recently? Seems suspicious.