[temporary22]

"1. Learn some games relevant skills after hours to show that you are prepared and not expecting us to train you from scratch (unity or unreal are most common). [..] This will show the initiative you took on your own and what skills you’ve developed."

Are you evaluating also how much time it took to complete the after hour project? What if I complete a clone game in 2 years? This might be excluding anybody that cannot work after hours, for a reason or another.

[gfxgirl]

> This might be excluding anybody that cannot work after hours, for a reason or another.

Maybe I'm reading into this but I see this type of response a lot on HN.

> A: You need experience. Get some after hours

> B: I don't have any time after hours. It's not fair

Like gees! What do you expect?

B: I wanna be guitar player in a rock band

A: Well, if you don't play guitar, take lessons after hours

B: I don't have any time after hours

A: So what do you expect me to do about it? I'm not about to add someone who's never played guitar and can't demonstrate the skills as a guitarist in my band. It's not my problem that you can't play, don't have the time to learn, and yet want to be in my band.

---

Same for any company: So what do you expect me to do about it? I'm not about to add someone who's never programmed games and can't demonstrate the skills as a game programmer in my team. It's not my problem that you can't code games, don't have the time to learn, and yet want to be in my gamedev company.

[robswc]

Totally agree. I really don't understand what people think the solution should be. If person A has 10,000 hours (because they've been doing something for years) and person B has 1,000 hours (because they had other commitments) you ofc (save other reasons) have to hire person A. It sucks but I genuinely don't know what else to say.

I work in quantitative trading and the number of people that think they can just throw a script together and make money is... well, if I had a dollar for each...

[000001010011100]

Judging by this response you don't seem to have many things that could or would take up your spare time.

Please, please please think about you comment when/if you ever have kids. I guarantee your perspective will have changed a great deal.

[RadiozRadioz]

This person is speaking from the employer's perspective, I struggle to see how becoming a parent would change the equation for their side.

They want to hire people who already have some degree of relevant experience. That is a reasonable requirement. If that excludes some parents who don't have time, so be it. Being a parent is one of many lifestyle choices that can limit one's ability to arrive at an interview with sufficient background knowledge. It does not warrant special treatment & exception just because it's parenting.

[flippinburgers]

One of the very real sacrifices of becoming a parent is that your ability to just try out new stuff be it a job or a hobby becomes very limited.

[badpun]

It's not possible to have it all in life. The choice of having kids (and being a good and responsible parent to them) obviously closes some other doors.

[ttyprintk]

Should number of kids come up in a job interview?

[dangero]

We are OK with missing out on some people because we cannot clearly evaluate their ability

I don’t care how long it took. Longer would demonstrate a sustained interest. Shorter would demonstrate efficiency. Both are valuable

[lentil_soup]

I have hired a bunch of people in game-dev, personally it doesn't matter how long it took. If you show me a demo game/project you've built then we can talk about it, problems you faced, decisions you made about the architecture, your pipeline, where you cut corners, etc.

I don't care how long it took (specially if it's a hobby after work kind of thing) as long as I can see you have a solid understanding and experience of what the work really is.

Not having time after hours it's a hard problem to solve. Gamedev problems are quite different to other software industries so previous experience might not immediately translate, this is specially true for gameplay programmers or things like tools and engine where you need to have experience with working with artists/designers and within the constraints typical of games (memory, performance, platforms, etc). But other fields like, backend, devops, data analysis I've seen often hire from outside the industry

[mnsc]

Excluding everyone that cannot work after hours might be the intention?