[vertexmachina]

For a job at a small new game studio, first there was a slightly technical but mostly informal chat with a Director of Engineering where he asked me about things from my resume and my website (I keep a blog where I write about side projects). I love when interviewers take the time to look at my website and ask me about it because I can talk about that stuff all day.

Then they gave me an assignment to build a particle system. They provided a rendering framework and then I wrote the code to generate the particles. It was so much fun that I spent a lot of time on it. The follow-up was a panel with four engineers and we just went over my particle system code where they asked me about my reasoning for certain design choices, possible edge cases, etc.

It was all very positive and I got the job.

I much prefer the code review style of interview because I'm not good at writing code or problem solving while someone is watching. I've never been offered a job that had any sort of coding/whiteboarding component. My brain often presents novel solutions to complex problems at 2AM after I've slept on it, or during a walk around the block, and that sort of thinking isn't exemplified well in many technical interview scenarios. Talking about code I've already written is much closer.