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.

I went to a private university to learn gamedev. And I feel like I learned game but not dev. Yes I slung a lot of code but, when the game industry dried up and I applied for a bunch of developer positions, I kept finding terms I had never heard of. Basically any methodology other than compile and fix was completely absent from my skillset. What I had learned, I had discovered while helping mates in other disciplines with their coding assignments. And the learnings I had were completely transitory. Tricking DirectX 9 into compiling was actually quite different even from DX8 or DX10/11.

I think this kind of thing is endemic, and its not just a youtube video problem. I guess you could see private education as kind of the same beast as self education.

That said, it did give me troubleshooting skills, because effectively we were taught break fix to such a spectacular level, especially in netcode, that my skills were very easily transferable. Didn't come back to code for ages.

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.

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.

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

Being old enough to enjoy reading technical books/articles is a + and knowing the acronym RTFM

I learned about collection types other than array/list from reading this article by the creator of the game Project Zomboid- as he used Stacks for zombie behaviors https://ia600303.us.archive.org/18/items/pdfy-G4Wm9sq1LU298r...

Then I got this book which is a great overview of C# for use in Unity https://csharpplayersguide.com/

Remembering which ones are FIFO and LIFO helps you remember what is what for etc

But yeah- had to read an article and a book- I hated most of the Unity youtube tutorials- enough info/help to get you going but they leave you stranded in the woods without a path out because you were blinding following someone else when you walked in.

Better to read/learn and understand the small bits yourself slowly as they are the breadcrumbs that lead you out.

The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap.

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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?)

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.

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?

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.