Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

What do I do when the dream job I really want has a bit of a lengthy process (like a couple of months) but other jobs while they are also decent if not good and also in the same field I am interested in (the games industry) might offer me a job first.

I'd like to not pass up on opportunities, especially as I feel beggars can't be choosers, but I really do want that job that might take longer to get a final answer on; how do I balance entertaining other jobs as to avoid turning them down out of hand while waiting on what the final result is from my dream job?

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 16:44

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 2, 2024 21:34

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Lockback posted:

While its not a good look to bail on a job shortly after taking it and it's burning a bridge, "Dream Job" would be a good reason to do that. If you're talking about "potential job is marginally better" then I'd say take the bird in the hand and don't worry about it. If potential job is truly much better then I don't think it makes you a horrible person to bail out.

And for the games industry, leaving a "typical" entry level game job for one of the few, legit really good ones is probably a real good move even if it means walking away from job #1 after a couple months.

To add some clarification, I don't have any job offers yet, but I am in the interview process for I think three or four game studios, one of which (the dream job, which is also a good company to work at w.r.t working conditions) told me up front that their process might take a couple of months; I don't know how long the process will be for the other companies as I've only started taking hackaranks and scheduling screening interviews, but one of them I am having a interview with their team/project lead next week.

So basically there's no job offers at hand, but I am worried one might appear before the job I really want to work at can have a chance to offer me, BUT they might not if my proficiency isn't the right level. I'm not in a super rush to take a job financially speaking but I am worried about turning down an opportunity for an opportunity that might not materialize but I imagine the time different between offers is only a few weeks and not months.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 18:39

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Vincent Valentine posted:

I have only ever gotten "meets expectations" at my job, despite going well above and beyond. It's a scale of 1 to 5 points and "meets expectations" is a 2.

This is because my managers have a set, total, number of points to distribute to all members of the engineering team, and bonuses are based on the amount of points earned. I have been told, flat out, that the only reason I didn't score higher is because they just ran out of points to distribute.

Take a wild loving guess at who consistently gets above a 2.

That reminds me back when I did game testing and we found a bug, even if we needed to work as a team to find the bug, only one of us actually got to get credit for it!

# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 18:50

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Speaking of code challenges I took one recently for C# and I had a lot of trouble with it because y'know, people don't typically operate well under pressure.

Later that night when I was sleeping I bolt upright because I have the realization I vastly overcomplicated the problem and it was way simpler than I initially took it to be.

Which is frustrating because that question took up so much of my time I couldn't complete the last question which was trivial.

The question was along the lines of, complete the following program, there are two inputs, A and B and they are integers. From these two integers find us the largest possible square, such that for example suppose A is 10 and B is 21, the answer is 7 because 21 divides into 3 7 times and you can cut off 3 from 10 to also make seven. The minimum length of any side is 1 so if A+B is 3 return "No".

The way it was phrased tricked me into overcomplicating it, that I had to do some weird optimization puzzle between these two numbers and account for edge cases like what if A or B is 1 and the other is some larger number etc.

When I was sleeping I realize it's trivially simple. Just take RoundToInt((A+B)/4) if A+B >= 4 and that's always your answer! Because for the example given, 10+21 is 31, 31/4 is 7.something as 4x7 is 28 with remainder 3; and this works in general!

# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 19:16

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Doom Mathematic posted:

I've read this eight times and I haven't a clue what the actual question was. How can 7 be "the largest possible square"? 7 isn't a square number?

I didn't explain it well (and I don't remember the exact wording), the question is along the lines of "return the largest possible length that make up the sides of the square from the two numbers such that it is the largest possible square" but it also included confusing wording about the nature of A and B.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 22:46

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Dylan16807 posted:

Took me a minute but I think I figured out the prompt.

You are given two rods, length A and B. You can cut them into more rods, but not combine rods. You have to make a square out of four equal length rods. What is the largest rod length you can use? Write a function that takes A and B and returns this number.

Edit: though that would mean (A+B)/4 is the wrong answer, for something like 4 and 40. So I'm not sure. If it's just "A+B total resources, split into four" that's not much of a problem to solve.

I think you're correct, I don't remember the question very well at this point, there had to be some reason why I struggled with it in terms of how it was phrased and I think that's it but I am not 100%.

(A+B)/4 might not be correct but on the other hand probably does get me closer to a correct solution.

Maybe something like this?

code:

int larger;
int smaller;
if (A > B) {
    larger = A
    smaller = B
} else {
    larger = B
    smaller = A
}

if larger + smaller < 4 return "I can't do that dave"

attempt = floor((larger+smaller) / 4)
if (smaller < attempt) {
    attempt = LCD(larger)
} 

return attempt.toString();

10 and 21 would still get 7.
1 and 8 would still get 2.
4 and 40 would get 10.
1 and 2 would get the fail message.

Any issues?

# ¿ Mar 4, 2021 16:11

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

The next question I didn't have time to do made me sad because it was so trivial, I should have skipped to it.

Basically suppose a cartesian plane centered at 0,0; there is given to you a list of X,Y coordinates labeled with letters (A, B, C, D, etc).

Return the string consisting of the labels enclosed in the largest circle that doesn't contain any duplicate labels.

So if there's 2 A's, only include the one closest to the origin.

Just... Make a list of the all the points, sort by distance from 0,0 and add them to some sort of dictionary until there's a dupe and return the result. Easy.

I left comments outlining my logic to how I would solve it if I didn't run out of time. Lets hope they aren't testing me for time management :v:

# ¿ Mar 4, 2021 21:30

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

HappyHippo posted:

Was it specified that the circle was centered on the origin?

I believe so, but this was over a week ago so I could be wrong.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2021 21:40

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

I took a really challenging programming test and passed all of the test cases but the last one, I hope I make it to the next phase :ohdear:

# ¿ Mar 13, 2021 00:24

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

If I know someone who works at a major game company (i.e am friends with them on facebook) and friends with someone who are friends with them, how should I approach applying to their company and make use of the connections I have to give my application a boost? It feels very awkward for me because this is someone I respect a lot but also haven't interacted with a whole lot except in passing. Should I talk first with the person I am somewhat friends with who is friends with them to ask them for advice?

# ¿ Mar 15, 2021 21:35

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Well turns out not getting the hackarank challenges 100% correct was disqualifying, so gently caress doing tests "properly" I guess. If the point of these tests was to gauge "Can this person code?" and as a starting point to discuss how I go about solving problems and what my pitfalls and strengths are I can understand them, but if the expectation is actually getting them and their hidden tests 100% correct in under an hour I feel now like I'm being tested as to whether I've seen a palindrome test question before and not on "Seeing a completely new problem how do you solve it?" like the discussion earlier about the "How do you find a cycle in a linked list?" problem.

My incentive now seems to be to google the problem and rewrite psuedocode in whatever the target language is to insure a correct solution instead of trying to figure it out on my own in the time allotted.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 03:16

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

I spammed out another 30 applications and got a few more phone interviews about it. One of them wants me to send them a supplement to my resume with more details as to my portfolio which seems good?

downout posted:

You're really growing as a developer.

It doesn't make me happy though. :mad:

# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 18:10

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

To be clear I'm complaining about how not passing like a online hackarank; the only technical interview I've ever had actually resulted in me being hired.

But it does seem like a good idea though nevertheless to brush up on those kinds of questions.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 18:52

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Yeah I've been trying to clean up my apartment as well but my computer is located in an awkward spot.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2021 21:27

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Fellatio del Toro posted:

I love this.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2021 17:58

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

I've been getting a steady trickle of requests for interviews which I've been taking/following up on while I'm still in the probationary period, you never know if I might want to keep my options open I suppose?

I took a assessment at one recent place which I bombed hard, but the questions were all accomplishable I feel? I just needed more time to properly think them through. I contacted them about it and explained my circumstances as how I usually am entitled to extra time on exams back during school, and got to redo it with extra time.

Felt pretty good about it this time; I got hit with a variation of the optimization problem again but this time "what is the optimal amount of exact change between 10s, 5s and 2s (but no 1s) from an arbitrary number", this is one of those questions that at first seems complicated to me but with time to actually think it through I see there's a trick to it and I had a neat "Ahah!" moment. Basically any number is either divisible by 10 so many times (or none); and if there is a remainder it has to be between 1 and 9; and 1 through 9 break down into n/a, 2, n/a, {2,2}, 5, {2,2,2}, {5,2}, {2,2,2,2}, {5, 2, 2} and slammed this into a switch statement. I could in theory write a loop instead which might be more flexible for different circumstances (What if they change the machines to give you 100$ bills?) but that isn't what the problem asked for, I did comment about that though.

There was a strange "find the approximation of pi" problem where it was a little unclear what exactly it wanted you to do, but I just googled "find pi from quarter circle" and found that it was called a Monte Carlo approximation and that was easy. It was weird because aside from the loop to sum up all the points inside the circle it was almost completely done for you?

There was a "print the results of a tennis match" question which was a little gnarly but they made it clear what the test cases were and it handled all of them but my code was maybe a little ugly.

The last question was to basically do code review and clean up someone's hypothetical code, that one was fun. I made it really elegant.

Regardless of the results in the end, at least this time I felt like I gave it my all and I learned a very valuable lesson about the importance of explaining extenuating circumstances for extra time on the technical assessments ahead of time so I can put my best food forward.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2021 04:59

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

My primary disqualification in my most recent round at Google was from trying to talk through the solution up-front. They felt it took too long for me to get to the optimal solution. I was following the classic formula of going over a few sample inputs/outputs, speculating on the brute force solution, going into a better one, and eventually coding through it. This is how I even see it done in videos that they post. Based on what I've seen between that and my Facebook screen in particular, I am pretty sure now they want me to just instantly recognize the optimal solution and vomit it out. Immediately.

I actually think just looking at a lot of programming problems and their solutions would help me out more there. I don't think I need to practice coding them out so much as instantly recognizing the faster solution, which is an exercise I could theoretically do. However, that's something I wouldn't be worrying about for another year because now I'm in the dog house.

I think this happened to me at an interview I had with Zynga. Same process and everything, I eventually worked out an optimal solution (over the phone I might add) but despite the interview going really well it seemed to me in the end I got an email basically saying I wasn't at the level they wanted.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2021 18:20

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

My performance on the retaken technical assessment jumped from 42% to 84% :cool:

# ¿ Aug 6, 2021 14:57

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Jose Valasquez posted:

Nice

I ran the data through my custom ML algorithm and it says if you can convince them to let you take it one more time you'll jump up to 168%

I suspect it would have been higher if I wasn't "lazy" with a couple of the questions. Maybe I could have put a little more effort into the coin question, but I'm not sure how much more time I would've needed for the "print the current state of a tennis game" question as that one was a little trickier.

Coin question I probably could've done something like:
1. If even it is divisible by 2. (4 is {2,2}, 6 is {2,2,2}, 8 is {2,2,2,2}, 2 is just 2). So that's your change.
2. If odd and less than 4 return false. If 5 or greater we have:
5 is 5.
7 is 5 and 2.
9 is 5 and 2 and 2.

So current remainder modulo 5 and then new remainder divided by 2?

For something a little more flexible if there's denominations larger than 10 added.

I'm not sure if its feasible in an hour to find a more flexible solution that gives the optimal amount of exact change for any
arbitrary collection of denominations though.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2021 16:39

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

In my experience it didn't seem like being a QA games tester helped my resume break into development jobs; 90% of what they seemed to be looking at for my first couple of jobs was completed projects on github, and a lack of those or any kind of intern or coop experience seemed to hurt a lot.

Once you get your first job and have like at least 3 years experience at it it seems like getting new jobs got easier. I think with 5 years doors just open for you.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2021 23:11

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

I basically suspect there's some kind of software HR companies use that gives some kind of number and that number goes up the longer you've been out working?It feels like there's just such a stark difference even a small amount of official employment provides.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2021 20:43

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Hadlock posted:

Recruiting software definitely filters for people who are nearing the 2 year mark with no major title bumps, those people already have some equity, unlikely to be be awarded more, and are comfortable there but might be ready for something new with better chance of promotion

Also target employees at series A/B that got their last funding 18-24 months ago, things might be looking grim on runway and employees looking for the exit doors

But yeah, it's hard to justify hiring a green kid on a shoestring budget, experience is almost always preferred

Experience is great and all and that's understandable but they also shouldn't be advertizing the positions as entry level! Yet also requiring 20 years experience! And invented your own programming language! Co-founded github! For an entry level position!

# ¿ Aug 25, 2021 23:16

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

A lot of this depends on the kind of experience you're accumulating. I have what ostensibly looks like twelve years of random Python scripting and that has closed lots of doors.

You heard it here first, Python destroys your hireability! :v:

But yeah I'm talking about years of gainful employment at a company with some kind of role and title. In my case 3 years at CSE seemed to do a lot to open doors for me; albeit not quite the doors I was looking for. I was looking for a job in the games industry but mostly seemed to get passed over by Behaviour, Ubisoft, etc but ended up mainly getting interest from smaller tech companies that used game engines as a part of their workflow for a non-game product.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 15:38

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

I wore a suit-jacket (blazer?) to a technical interview, I feel like I made an impression as it seemed like I got a lot of peoples attention when I entered their office, but was it a good impression?

So far I think in retrospect the worst thing I probably did was my tendency to ramble when nervous, as I feel like I probably end up saying things that ultimately are counter productive to coming across as proficient in the skills for the position I'm interviewing for, I dunno yet what the result is but I suppose I'll try to practice and write down some more concise answers for some of the questions I've answered. So far I've taken a sort of casual approach of not really practicing for the interviews as I'm not really in a rush but some of these jobs (looking for game development positions) do look really nice and professionally satisfying and would be nice to get the job offer for even if my unemployment benefits last a whole year and if I budget carefully can probably make that work to focus on indie gamedev.

Questions I tended to get asked IIRC:
- Tell me more about your technical accomplishments/roles.
- A bit of a curve ball but I got asked about some more specific Unreal frameworks we didn't use at my past job so my answer was "no, it never came up".
- What's an example of something like a Character you've implemented, i.e ai, state machines, etc.
- Would you change how you approached the above?
- Any experience implementing multiplayer?
- What sort of gamedev do you see yourself as, do you like to push the envelop of technology/performance, or do you prefer implementing gameplay features?
- Any questions for us? (I usually ask what a typical day is like, how are issues handed out, I should ask next time what sort of training they offer for personal growth?)

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 16:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 2, 2024 21:34

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Congrats! I'm somehow still Magoo'ing my way into software developer jobs and finally got a proper Game Development role at an actual game studio about a month ago after being laid off from my Game Developer in Name Only position at a glorified surgery simulator startup which Failed To Meet Sales Expectations.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 04:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it