| At the start of my third year as a student, I biked through a record-worthy rainfall to my first interview with a small local games studio. Showed up completely soaked, but sat down relaxed and feeling reasonably confident. (I had done a handful of unity and opengl projects.) The interview started with a bit of small talk, I chatted with one of the guys about Brood War and Starcraft 2. Later during the technical interview they asked me about the difference between private, protected, and public and said I was the only student they had interviewed who had answered correctly which was wild and honestly stunned me for a moment. They liked how in one of my examples of scripting something I had written some fun dialog and I mentioned I did writing as a hobby which seemed like a plus. I talked about which classes I enjoyed the most and how they were challenging/interesting. I did not get a job offer and learned from a friend that I had come off as "depressed and disinterested" (I don't think they realized he was going to relay that info to me...) All I can do is guess that it's a combination from showing up completely drenched and sharing how I enjoyed those "challenging" classes made it seem like I would get quickly bored of scripting... After that, I bombed an interview for a QA role because I went into it completely unprepared for just how much it would differ from a programming interview. Point being those first two experiences got in my head and I basically had anxiety over anything job-hunt related for the next 2.5 years. When I did get a job, I was extremely happy with the interview process (even though I felt I did poorly on it). Here's more or less how it was structured (TL;DR): - Office tour/chat with a programmer who had referred me
- quick 5 minute introduction to senior programmers in charge of the technical interview
- 1 hour alone in a meeting room with a laptop and 4 written questions (a generous amount of time)
- ~15 minutes reviewing my answers with the senior programmers
- importantly, they gave me a chance to talk about my answers and when I got something wrong they would simply state that it had an error and see if I could spot it
- 15 minutes on C++/memory/performance/behavior quirks (important stuff in AAA games)
- ~30 minutes talking about stuff I had worked on
- occasionally they would mention something related I hadn't heard about and explain it while gauging how well I could follow along
Basically, based on my own interview experience/anxiety if I had to choose an interview method, it would be very similar to what I just mentioned. Seeing a familiar face and the introduction followed by the alone time did a lot to ease my anxiety. The time where I felt most comfortable was talking about the stuff I had done because I was very familiar with all of it/it was easy to talk about.The process seemed less focused on where I had gaps in my knowledge and more focused if I had a decent amount of knowledge in general and if I had the ability to recognize and correct the gaps in my knowledge. Sorry if it's a bit of an info dump, but it's something I think back to a lot. |