I work for a big games company as a senior programmer, and I’m a regular on the interview loop. While I’d love to hire candidates who are smart and get things done, the reality of the situation is that more often than not I also have to hire candidates with experience. They have to be smart, they have to get things done, and they also have to be effective within a week of their start date when they get thrown into a big C++ game codebase. Perhaps one could argue that for sufficient values of “smart and gets things done” this is already covered. All I know is that I’d love to walk into an interview and meet a candidate who:
- Can whizz through a simple coding question like “remove spaces from this string”.
- Can equally whizz through a simple high school applied maths problem.
- Can clearly and concisely explain what virtual functions are and how they work, the mechanics of constructors and destructors, or the compile and link process.
- Knows linear algebra such that they can explain dot and cross products, how to construct a camera matrix, or how to compute a vector reflection off a plane.
- Has a working knowledge of lists, trees and hash tables, and can explain why certain algorithms are O(1), O(log n), O(n), O(n log n) etc.
It’s amazing how many interviewees stumble over this stuff. It’s pretty fundamental to game programming. I would love to see a candidate who breezed through this so we could get to the interesting interview questions. All too often, just three or four of these simple questions take the whole hour.
