{"id":443,"date":"2008-01-29T22:21:43","date_gmt":"2008-01-30T06:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=443"},"modified":"2008-02-28T22:31:28","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T06:31:28","slug":"smart-and-gets-things-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=443","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Smart and Gets Things Done&#8221;?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I work for a big games company as a senior programmer, and I&#8217;m a regular on the interview loop. While I&#8217;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 &#8220;smart and gets things done&#8221; this is already covered. All I know is that I&#8217;d love to walk into an interview and meet a candidate who:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Can whizz through a simple coding question like &#8220;remove spaces from this string&#8221;.\n<li>Can equally whizz through a simple high school applied maths problem.\n<li>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.\n<li>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.\n<li>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.\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s amazing how many interviewees stumble over this stuff. It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I work for a big games company as a senior programmer, and I&#8217;m a regular on the interview loop. While I&#8217;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&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,17,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-interviews","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}