[HN Gopher] Technical interview methods pale in comparison to pl...
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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio
with someone
Author : blackhole
Score : 317 points
Date : 2021-03-26 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erikmcclure.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erikmcclure.com)
| chmod775 wrote:
| Twenty hours is too long?
|
| Considering the average number of per-month applicants for
| software developer positions is probably less than one, you ought
| to have that much time.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| The conclusion of the article somewhat contradicts the title:
|
| "What's the takeaway from this? I don't know. We certainly can't
| switch to using Factorio as an interviewing method - you might as
| well just give a candidate a take-home assignment. At the very
| least, we can do better than whiteboard interviews."
|
| So it's not a description of how to use Factorio for
| interviewing, beyond a simple assignment of Factorio tasks to
| seniority levels. It does however make an interesting comparison
| between Factorio and software mechanisms.
| kevincox wrote:
| I seriously think that "personal projects" are very underrated
| when it comes to hiring. If I see that someone has a lot of
| personal projects and has lots of time in Factorio they probably
| know how to code. I'm not sure you can rank them as Junior/Senior
| too effectively as these two things don't require much
| leadership, but you can basically skip the trivial phone
| interview questions at this point.
| lghh wrote:
| I doubt jobs for urban planners ask what cities you design in
| your free time. I doubt jobs for lawyers ask what cases you've
| argued in your free time. Why do we ask what software you've
| built in your free time for software engineering interviews?
| kevincox wrote:
| Because in software personal projects are easy to do. It just
| takes drive and skill, which are both relevant skills.
| Passion as also valuable, it tends to show that people are
| willing to learn and have interest in the type of work that
| they will be doing.
|
| Artist and even urban planners regularly have a portfolio, I
| don't see how this is any different.
| lghh wrote:
| > drive and skill
|
| It also takes the privilege of time. For example, a single
| childless person likely has more time for personal projects
| than a single parent of 3. This does not mean one is a
| better candidate than the other.
|
| > Passion as also valuable, it tends to show that people
| are willing to learn and have interest in the type of work
| that they will be doing.
|
| You can have both of those things without "passion".
| scpedicini wrote:
| Why not ask? Programming is a craft, and having a showcase
| could demonstrate initiative, capabilities, and
| inventiveness. They're concrete samples of your work.
|
| Aside, there seems to be a swath of people who seem bizarrely
| resentful of personal projects. Yes, we get it, not EVERYONE
| in the universe has sufficient free time. Bla bla bla, maybe
| cut down on Netflix.
| lghh wrote:
| > Aside, there seems to be a swath of people who seem
| bizarrely resentful of personal projects
|
| I wouldn't say anyone is resentful, just rightfully
| annoyed. It's not bizarre. I just don't think we as an
| industry should require everyone dedicate every waking
| moment to working. It's not healthy. Surgeons don't do
| surgery in their free time and are not asked about it in
| interviews.
|
| > Yes, we get it, not EVERYONE in the universe has
| sufficient free time. Bla bla bla, maybe cut down on
| Netflix.
|
| I think the implication of not having enough free time is
| that a person does not have enough free time to do things
| like watch enough Netflix to free up enough time to work
| more.
| scpedicini wrote:
| I would argue that if you consider your personal project
| to be a form of work, then something is wrong. If the
| principal reason that you're working on your own personal
| projects is to be able to pad out your resume, then I
| agree with you.
|
| I don't think surgery is a good analogy. Engineering is a
| field where you're actually producing something, such as
| a product, that you can share and be proud of.
| leetcrew wrote:
| often in multiplayer factorio playthroughs you get one player
| who becomes the defacto "lead dev". it takes some nontrivial
| organization to get subgoals completed in a way that people
| aren't blocking each other. a common mistake is two players
| building separate factories too close together, which leads to
| some very messy solutions and limits how much the throughput
| can be upgraded.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's a great tool for junior developers. If someone hasn't had
| a dev job before, then a personal project -- even something
| simple like a twitter bot -- is almost a requirement in my
| eyes. IME, it is a strong signal for capability at that skill
| level.
|
| Most higher-level devs don't build personal projects. I've
| worked with plenty of ridiculously capable people who work 9-5
| and go home to their family. If anything, diligently keeping
| set hours is probably a stronger signal for a good senior
| candidate than personal projects are. A good senior candidate
| should be doing the thing they want to do already (thus, no
| need for side projects), or be capable of getting everything
| they need done for their job in 8 hours or less.
| zrail wrote:
| Looking at personal projects biases against people who don't
| want to or can't do them, either contractually or due to
| time/energy constraints.
| scpedicini wrote:
| Why wouldn't I want to take every possible factor into
| consideration? If I have two people, one of whom has a github
| with lots of personal projects and the other one does not,
| I'm naturally going to get a better sense of the github
| developer in terms of their overall capabilities.
|
| That doesn't automatically make him the better candidate but
| it definitely gives me more information to act on.
|
| If people don't want to or can't work on personal projects
| then that's fine, but I'm not going to ignore the people who
| are passionate about building their own stuff.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Not unreasonably. Like it or not, at else being equal someone
| with more current experience is probably the better employee.
|
| There's this feeling that employers should just take the next
| person who fits some quota because to pick and choose is to
| _be biased_ which has somehow become a bad phrase. My
| employer literally pays me _to be biased_. My job skills
| include having appropriate and helpful biases.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I guess I'm the only person here who doesn't like playing
| Factorio because my fingers just hurt too much from the constant
| clicking and dragging and dropping.
| splonk wrote:
| I've never played Factorio and have no particular opinion on its
| value as an interview method, but I assume some of whatever value
| it has comes from forced team interaction rather than anything
| inherent in the game.
|
| I have turned down an interview because of Diablo. I got
| recruited a couple times by a startup that would have been a very
| good fit for me. The first time it was quite small and I chatted
| with the CEO about possible roles and product directions and
| such, but I'd just quit a long term job and eventually decided
| that I wanted to take a break for a while.
|
| The second time was years later after it had grown a lot and
| gotten tons of funding over multiple rounds. As it happens, the
| CTO was also a friend-of-a-friend. When the Diablo 3 beta came
| out, I played a bit with him and our mutual social circle, and he
| demonstrated enough personality traits during that brief
| experience that I decided I wasn't interested in socializing with
| him more, and just turned down the recruiter after checking to
| see that he was still the CTO. I would have at least discussed it
| further if he wasn't specifically in a leadership position.
| aj7 wrote:
| $30 to practice infinitely.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| TIL I am a senior developer. I'm taking this thread to my manager
| right now.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| If you think about it, that's not that far off of a professional
| licensing exam like the ones that lawyers and doctors take: it's
| something that's peripherally, but not directly, related to the
| actual work, takes a long time to complete, can be improved
| somewhat through careful study and can be objectively examined
| for success.
| endisneigh wrote:
| isn't the best technical interview inherently just doing the job
| itself? find some aspects of the job that's representative of it
| and have the candidate do it - if they can, then you're hired.
|
| the issue is with technical jobs it's difficult to surmise what
| exactly is "representative" to begin with. I imagine the only
| reason candidates aren't just asked to work in the actual job for
| say, 8 hours instead of doing say, 7 irrelevant 45min interviews
| is because of intellectual property.
|
| I wonder if Google or another large company has ever tried to re-
| interview all employees with more than say, 4 years of experience
| and correlated their interview performance with past job
| performance.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I actually bounced off from factorio becuase I'd rather solve it
| as a programming / optimization problem than run around im the
| game. I find this with a lot of management sim games.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Did you bounce before construction and logistic robots? That is
| basically the shift from traditional rts-style game to
| programming/optimization game.
| _e wrote:
| Yes, confidence to try something new and problem solving are
| important factors but once one solves for those then testing for
| the ability to communicate well with others might be as or even
| more important than having the required computer skills.
|
| I used Zachtronic's TIS-100 [0] as a test variable and found the
| best person to work with. I believe it was a two way street
| because they saw an opportunity to work with someone who attacks
| problems a little differently. I am in real estate. Who would
| have thought knowing something about assembly would be helpful?
|
| [0] https://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/
| theptip wrote:
| This is a great way to end up with a monoculture, with all of the
| fragility that's associated with it. That might be a fun way to
| hire engineers 1-5 in a startup but it will hold you back in the
| end. Many good engineers have no interest in games, and won't
| present well in that arena. You'll get lots of false negatives.
|
| "Fizzbuzz is all we have..." is a myopic take. Interviewing is
| hard but not as hard as the article makes out. There is a
| legitimate debate between take-home and on-site interview
| practices, but at the end of the day you want to see a work
| sample that is as realistic as possible from your candidate.
| Companies that are good at hiring understand this. Factorio has a
| tenuous (at best) correlation to the work you're asked to do.
|
| It's like doing puzzle questions because you "can see how they
| think about problems", but interviewers are really just selecting
| for people that think like they do.
|
| (And for context I like Factorio.)
| Rule35 wrote:
| > but interviewers are really just selecting for people that
| think like they do.
|
| No. We don't care how you get it done, but that you try in a
| way that would be worth paying you for.
|
| My job isn't a calm safe place, it's the chaotic result of two
| departments and the proverbial rubber hitting the road in one
| spot. It's not intentionally bad, mean, hard, or long, and we
| weed out people who don't cooperate well, but every crazy thing
| you can imagine has happened.
|
| But even in previous, easier, positions people were still put
| on the spot by being assigned to work with customer support on
| some issue way up the stack from their normal job, which
| required to be on a call with 20+ outsiders, from CEOs to SREs,
| and representing us and our department properly. The people on
| HN who talk about giving people calm interviews to see their
| true selves don't get it, the performance under a small amount
| of stress is far more interesting. Do you get mean and snappy,
| get entitled, shut down, or what?
|
| If being asked, kindly, to solve a basic leetcode is too much
| then there's no way you'd be suitable for anything else we do.
| jontas wrote:
| I am a senior engineer and have been programming for close to two
| decades. I picked up Factorio a few months ago and felt
| overwhelmed. I couldn't finish the tutorial. I think my problem
| is spatial relations--it is something I've always struggled with
| (how to arrange furniture in a room, solve a jigsaw, etc).
|
| I don't think this is a detriment to my programming ability at
| all--spatial relations really never enters into architecting a
| large system. Of course you need to think about design
| constraints but none of them exist on a physical plane.
|
| Factorio, on the other hand, requires actual spatial relation
| ability. You need to visualize how belts intersect and how to
| best position things so they dont interfere with each other. This
| is where I struggled.
| learnstats2 wrote:
| I agree with this - having watched the trailer and played the
| demo, Factorio looks to me like a game of managing logistics of
| transporting resources around, featuring a conveyor belt system
| that only works in 2D.
|
| In another game, I'd consider that an annoying micromanagement
| feature.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Also a senior engineer. I tried factorio demo out for maybe 30
| minutes, but hated the fact that I actually have to walk the
| engineer around and do menial tasks like resource collection
| myself. Why can't I just do stuff with mouse cursor like in
| most other top-down strategy games? Maybe the game changes in
| later stages, but the demo seemed to be full of nonsense
| busywork that is prevalent in survival games.
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| You might like shapez.io
| SolarNet wrote:
| Independent of the thesis of the article, which is obviously
| terrible, it does get much better very quickly.
|
| The "gather resources yourself" stage is like the first 5
| minutes of the game, more so to force people to automate; I
| actually think it's an intentional stylistic choice to
| demonstrate how they are different. Like the first
| technologies one gets automates all of the resource
| collection in the game (and later tier resources _can 't_ be
| collected by hand). It becomes a pretty good point and click
| strategy game very quickly. In fact after the first couple
| hours you can basically play the game from the map screen if
| you want, using blue prints to put down large buildings and
| spidertrons as units to move around, without moving your main
| character ever again.
|
| Like this is how the mid game looks (user designed blue
| prints, bots build it automatically, etc):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0k1YeMm-6o
| POiNTx wrote:
| The manual resource collection aspect becomes automatic once
| you have a basic factory setup.
|
| There's also a mod called long reach[1] which allows you to
| do most things without walking around. If you want to give
| the game a second chance I'd look into that.
|
| To give an analogy with programming. The demo is more like
| setting up your programming project, which can be a bit
| tedious. While the normal game play is more like thinking
| about the software you're building, defining good
| abstractions, thinking about how to structure your code both
| on a macro and micro scale, keeping things DRY etc
|
| [1] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/themightygugi_longreach
| outworlder wrote:
| > and do menial tasks like resource collection myself
|
| That is PAINFUL in Factorio for a reason. It forces you to
| automate it away as soon as humanly possible. Which is the
| point of the game.
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| >Why can't I just do stuff with mouse cursor like in most
| other top-down strategy games?
|
| Because thats not what the game is. If you want that, play
| something else.
| wideareanetwork wrote:
| Well according to the thesis put forward here you aren't a
| developer they'd want to employ .
|
| As a job seeker you need to identify these companies fast so
| you can avoid wasting your time on them.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| That's not really how interview processes work.
|
| If factorio interviews fill all roles with competent
| personnel, reduces hiring of incompetent people, etc., then
| it could be "good enough". Sure, you miss a lot of people who
| would also be good [enough].
|
| They're not saying people who can't play factorio can't
| develop; it's the opposite. The hypothesis is surely that the
| can't+can't group has a large overlap.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Why not use starcraft instead and filter by apm and
| multitasking? You are sure to miss out on a few good
| candidates but you will filter out a lot of people who
| cannot manage 3 bases really effectively while watching the
| minimap, while designing custom build orders that can
| survive in the current meta. It's like interviewing boxers
| on their blitz chess playing ability because you want
| "people who can think ahead under pressure." Please.
|
| Skipping candidates "just in case" is like not hiring women
| "just in case" they distract the men. Those defensive
| hiring practices destroy diversity, diversity of thought,
| and the chance for a human to be evaluated in a fair or
| rational way.
| SamBorick wrote:
| Factorio is fascinating because it also simulates critical issues
| in productions: bugs will come and eat your beautiful factory.
|
| I also I threw together some thoughts about factorio and
| programming a few months ago:
|
| https://dev.to/samborick/what-factorio-taught-me-about-work-...
| benlivengood wrote:
| I'm looking forward to "10 years experience with Factorio"
| appearing on job postings. Does 891 hours count?
|
| One downside is that Factorio is almost immediately rewarding
| whereas programming generally takes a lot more effort for
| mediocre payoffs; hiring good factorio players will bias you
| toward people with enough focus for high reward behavior but
| maybe not so much for standard software engineering.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> or, if the feature is sufficiently common, google it_
|
| I do that all the time. I haven't yet, today, but I'm sure I will
| soon. I'm working on some stuff I haven't done in a while.
| Googling has the extra benefit of helping me to do something that
| I already know how to do, but more effectively. I can always
| learn new stuff.
|
| They also mention that people "don't have the time" for open
| source.
|
| But I do have the time, and the result is a pretty massive
| portfolio.
|
| It's been kind of amazing, watching it get ignored.
| doix wrote:
| When I was responsible for recruiting interns, I always wanted to
| use TIS-100 as an interview tool, or more likely a modified
| version of TIS-100 with different instructions/architecture to
| not give an advantage to people that have "played" it before.
|
| It would test their ability to read documentation and apply what
| they've read to problem. It also doesn't rely on them memorizing
| frameworks/API's etc. And it even in the early "levels" you can
| ask them to optimize for program size or cycle-count.
| Unfortunately no one would let me do it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| For anyone interested in Factorio as well as the technical notes
| of optimization. I highly recommend another game: Daison Sphere
| Program.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog...
|
| The leading programmer uses some sophisticated ways of
| optimization, including:
|
| - DOP instead of OOP
|
| - Leveraging GPU for parellely calculating certain stuffs
|
| - Using a GTX 660 Ti for development
|
| Here is a technical post but in Chinese. Lemme know if you are
| interested and maybe I can do some translation.
|
| https://www.zhihu.com/question/442555442/answer/1711890146
| jkingsbery wrote:
| Dyson Sphere Program is so good. I haven't played Factorio yet,
| but I think it has all the same sorts of things that this
| article described.
|
| When I started playing DSP at first, I was just putting stuff
| anywhere. Then I realized that there are advantages in trying
| to make things modular in a way roughly analogous with code. At
| the same time though, it is very different than code, as the
| design is spacial, not as abstract as coding. Refactoring code
| is very different as a result.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah exactly, those games really bring out the "programmer"
| mindset out of everyone :D
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I've only played factorio demo (too expensive for me) but the
| parts seem almost identical. factorio doesn't have the
| different planets, and different solar systems, etc, AFAIK,
| but the basic by building blocks seem near identical to me.
|
| The curved build surface causes lots of interesting aspects
| to arise.
| wskinner wrote:
| It's unclear if this article is satire or not. Given that you
| will be spending 20 hours of at least two people's time (one
| candidate, at least one employee), the space of alternative
| interviews is quite large. You could, for example, spend 20 hours
| observing them perform an actual software task. This piece
| doesn't consider alternatives at all, merely asserting that this
| particular 20 hour game is the best that can be done. I see no
| reason to believe that comparing the play of a practiced factorio
| player to that of a brand new player would carry much signal at
| all. That means that a company carrying out this type of
| interview would need to ask candidates to study by playing the
| game.
| detaro wrote:
| The article clearly states that this is not a realistic thing
| to do.
| lvice wrote:
| This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on
| Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably
| easier) modern refresh of Factorio.
|
| While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article.
| Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually
| to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I
| ran while I build software like:
|
| - If I don't plan ahead enough the scope and layout of the
| factory, I end up with a spaghetti mess that is very difficult to
| rectify (technical debt)
|
| - If I plan too much ahead, I overwhelm myself without even
| starting. The amount over-engineering and over-preparation
| becomes counterproductive and demoralizing.
|
| - Starting new factories is fun. Maintaining and extending a
| factory that is starting to show serious design issues is a
| chore. I always tend to want to scrap the factory and start
| fresh.
|
| - While designing a factory, modularization is key. You can go
| with a "monolithic" factory where you provide all possible
| materials as input, and try to build everything as output. It is
| very efficient transportation wise, and can centralize all
| management, but it can and it will become an unmaintainable mess.
| You can also design factories as "microservices", where each
| factory is a very compact, clean and scoped. It will only produce
| nails, or rubber, or copper wire. When you need to increase
| production of that item, you just duplicate the module
| (horizontal scaling). It seems fantastic at first, but the issue
| is now transportation. Dozens of micro-factories have to
| communicate with themselves to combine and produce more
| complicated items. The physical distance makes planning
| transportation a logistic and construction nightmare. So you have
| to find the right compromise between monolithic and micro-
| services.
|
| I think I agree with the article that you can extract a lot of
| information about how good a person can be at software
| development by the way he plays Factorio/Satisfactory. Not so
| practical though :)
| kleff wrote:
| Satisfactory is really great, highly recommended from me as
| well. I think the verticality really adds a lot of fun over
| Factorio where you are restricted to keeping everything on the
| same level. Can make some really confusing spaghetti though...
| willis936 wrote:
| The loss of 3D was one of the biggest things I missed when
| moving on from industrial mods for minecraft (the inspiration
| for factorio).
|
| I recently got an RTX card and played around with the
| minecraft RTX demos. I decided to look further into behavior
| packs, and apparently the scripting API is much more capable
| than it previously was. The community of people making
| content is basically nonexistent, but I now think it's just
| because people have moved on.
|
| Everything is in place to have added blocks, oregen, ticking
| tile entities, power generation/distribution, multiblocks,
| etc. It would be nice to see a behavior pack that picks up
| the torch of gregtech/industrialcraft.
|
| Unfortunately, most of the unofficial GT versions have lacked
| proper vision. That is, vision in a way that is not aligned
| with GT proper, and what really draws players of industrial
| games in.
|
| Anyway, here is a promising example. I hope to see more
| industrial content for minecraft for windows 10.
|
| https://mcpedl.com/advanced-machinery/?cookie_check=1
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yeah, I love both factorio and satisfactory, but factorio
| ended up being the one I dumped more hours into.
|
| Satisfactory ended up hiding too many details as you move
| around - the first person view and the very large structures
| made it really hard to untangle the mess.
|
| Satisfactory felt like writing regexes - Basically write
| only, hard to read and parse afterwards.
|
| That said, man the first person view is fun when you're
| actually doing the building. Just not nearly as fun once
| things have gone wrong and you need to debug.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Don't know if I agree on the height issues... every machine
| has ladders, they give you a tower fairly early on, and you
| can always walk on conveyors
|
| As for debugging, I've found that planning a build on
| paper, keeping in mind production ratios, eliminates the
| need to experiment and debug, and then building simply
| becomes figuring out how to route conveyors
|
| I've never had issues troubleshooting by getting to a high
| place and looking at the big picture, but to be honest
| since I started planning my builds on paper it barely even
| comes up
| novok wrote:
| This is the reason why I don't like playing factorio. I'd
| rather make real software and get paid or build something
| usable vs a game version of it. I spend a lot of time already
| doing it as my job, and it stresses me out in a similar way.
| nthj wrote:
| I like factorio because I don't have to have 17 meetings to
| get alignment on changing 3 lines of code. "I objectively
| need more electricity, so I will refactor the nuclear
| reactor" is the only agreement needed
| novok wrote:
| That applies to any project where you work alone too.
| colpabar wrote:
| Now check out Dyson Sphere Program, it's like those games but
| in space ;)
| zinclozenge wrote:
| I just got it recently and I enjoyed the heck out of it.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I've got to the "I probably need to leave my starter solar
| system in order to increase my DS production rate" stage,
| and honestly I think that's my limit. I find I can't recall
| where everything is (I think that can be fixed to some
| extent) and I'm not about to start writing documentation
| for a game!
| colpabar wrote:
| > _I 'm not about to start writing documentation for a
| game!_
|
| Ha, I have a dsp.yml file for exactly that :D
| DanHulton wrote:
| The latest update in Experimental (in Early Access on April 13)
| adds Drones for point-to-point delivery without needing
| connecting belts or rails or whatever. They're pretty low-
| bandwidth so you can't use them to transport raw materials at
| any scale, but if your "microservices" are sufficiently focused
| at a higher tier, you can tie them all together pretty easily
| with Drones now.
|
| At least, in theory. Drones are T8 tech, and I'm not _quite_
| there yet to start putting that theory into practice. But
| that's the stated intent, at least.
| kempbellt wrote:
| Also dipped my toes into Satisfactory this winter - after
| spending over 2,000 hours in Factorio.
|
| Games like these challenge your ability to manage complex
| systems. Remembering which parts of your system processes which
| data (aka, "materials"). Finding and addressing bottlenecks in
| production lines. Maintaining and upgrading components, while
| creating new production lines using the techniques you learn.
| Managing time spent refactoring old systems vs replacing them
| with new ones. Etc, etc, etc. Planning properly - as you
| mention - is extremely critical to building a good factory.
|
| However, despite over a decade of software development
| experience, and some time in Factorio, my first several play
| throughs in Satisfactory where an efficiency disaster, and even
| my recent ones were an ugly mess of spaghetti for the first few
| days of gameplay.
|
| It took _several_ playthroughs for me to grok the mechanics
| well enough to build a somewhat efficient factory. If my first
| couple tries were reviewed in a job interview I highly doubt I
| 'd get the job.
|
| There are strong similarities between these games and the
| mechanics software development, but like any new system, it
| takes time to create a true intuitive understanding of the
| mechanics and demonstrate them in front of others. If you're
| going to interview someone for a job, you're better off testing
| their ability to play the game that they'll be playing on a
| daily basis if they get hired: "Software Development".
|
| Software Development, the game!
|
| Want to play a game where you will never run out of new
| content? Where you are constantly challenged by new issues
| that'll haunt your dreams and make you lose sleep? Software
| Development is the game for you! With an ever changing
| landscape, where components and frameworks are updated daily!
| That's right, DAILY! This _MASSIVE_ -multiplayer-online game
| never turns off. There are actively hundreds of thousands of
| players right now!
|
| And you know what the best part is? Software Development is not
| "Pay-to-Play" like all those other games that try to steal
| those valuable dollars out of your pocket.
|
| No, in Software Development YOU get PAID to play. That's right!
| All you have to do is find a company, nail a job interview, and
| enjoy playing the game you love while they hand you buckets of
| REAL LIFE MONEY that you can spend on other games that you have
| to pay to play. And also, food and rent and stuff...
|
| _Download now at, the internet._
| [deleted]
| evo_9 wrote:
| Factorio runs on Windows, Mac and Linux; Satisfactory only runs
| (currently) on Windows. Factorio is the better option, though
| Satisfactory is a great game non-the-less.
| SilasX wrote:
| Disclaimer: I've only played the Factorio demo.
|
| If that's the analogy, then I don't think it captures the core
| difficulty of software, which is unknown unknowns. That is, you
| write something that depends on an external system working a
| certain way, you follow its spec and depend on it working that
| way, and then it just ... doesn't, and you have to find exactly
| where it deviates, possibly making up some complicated kludge.
|
| To capture that, there would have to be e.g. some hidden logic
| about which direction the output comes out that you have to
| deal with and work around until you understand it.
| lvice wrote:
| I think this part is captured by Satisfactory "Tier" system.
| As you progress in the game, you unlock Tiers which allow you
| to build new materials and structures. The issue often is
| that you optimize the hell out of your factories to build
| something that is needed at you current Tier, and when you
| unlock the next one, you suddenly have to refactor everything
| to build the new items, that require different ratio of
| materials and inputs.
| [deleted]
| rcxdude wrote:
| There's not a lot of unknown unknowns in factorio, but one
| thing which it really captures about software development is
| your own decisions coming back to bite you, or emergent
| complexity from notionally simple rules. As your factory
| grows you'll find yourself wishing you'd built things
| differently because suddenly something needs to expand beyond
| what you expected or some part of it is right in the way of a
| train network. Train networks are really tricky to make work
| effectively, it's very easy to have deadlocks appearing if
| you make a mistake, and you might not notice until you
| suddenly don't have any power because the trail with the coal
| is stuck waiting at a fouled up junction or something like
| that. There's a lot of opportunity to debug problems as they
| appear even in something you designed entirely yourself (and
| in a multiplayer game it's even more so because you might be
| detangling someone else's build).
|
| A lot of the process of learning the game is basically
| learning patterns to reduce this. At the higher level of
| megabase design it's basically about designing a modular
| system so you can scale things out as efficiently as possible
| (and there's lots of possible variations of this).
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| IANAProgrammer, to some extent I create my own GIGO issues
| which are like small instances of poorly defined behaviour.
| Sometimes you'll realise your whole world has ground to a
| halt and it's a conveyor backed up because one item arrived
| at an inserter and blocked it.
|
| I play a bit of DSP but have at least 3 different mitigations
| which are akin to input sanitising. However, if you just
| stick a filtered inserter by a conveyor to grab errant
| materials then it can comeback and bite you ... though I've
| found either I can route them back to the proper channel or I
| can get away with the technical debt by throwing enough
| storage at them and leaving it until the thing needs
| refactoring.
|
| You can have too much realism! I like that every green-
| circuit board works, rather than getting failures of systems
| that use that item with some random errors (that increase of
| your closer to the sun, say). I think that would be too
| frustrating.
| stnmtn wrote:
| I think this could potentially be the Biters - the enemies in
| the game that will periodically attack your base. You can
| guess that they will attack your base, but you are never sure
| quite when and it's always a concern in the back of your
| head.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I haven't played Satisfactory since the water update, so I have
| no idea if my approach still works, but IMO the easiest way to
| design an efficient factory is to not bother trying to balance
| anything, and scale out in only one direction as needed. Feed
| everything along a central stack of belts, and multiplex
| inputs/outputs via splitters/combiners so any individual
| machine line will always have throughput.
|
| It doesn't make for a very exciting build, but it's very rote
| and dependable.
|
| Also - build the entire thing high up in the sky.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The major difference between Factorio and software is you can't
| refactor in Factorio. Your options are to spaghetti or start
| fresh. You can't really pick and choose good pieces of your
| layout because of physical restrictions and the game is a giant
| math equation, and you want inputs to match outputs at every
| step of the way - if you don't have the space to do this you
| don't have the space.
|
| It's like if in the software world you could greenfield,
| waterfall, or spaghetti. There is no agile in Factorio, which
| is broadly accepted as most commonly the best way to develop a
| piece of software.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| But you can refactor... you can clear away everything and you
| get back 100% of materials
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Demolishing your base and building a new one is not
| anything like refactoring.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Why not? You clear out the part you don't like, and build
| anew
|
| No, code refactoring does not fit perfectly in this
| analogy. And your ability to do so is somewhat dependent
| on how you build. But I think all those factors are
| simply part of the puzzle in refactoring a factory
| yuliyp wrote:
| It's exactly like refactoring. You can replace a
| component that does something with a different structure
| for accomplishing that. Of course, if the system was
| tangled, then you may need to refactor other components
| first (read: relocate them to give room). The structure
| of the base around something is going to place limits on
| the refactoring. If the base is so horrible that you
| decide to gut it entirely, it's just like a rewrite.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The efficiency of "refactoring" in Factorio is like
| refactoring code using notepad while typing with your
| toes and you're only allowed to compile the source once
| you're done. Which is to say: on a completely different
| level!
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| You can absolutely refactor in factorio...in fact you _have_
| to refactor as you get access to better technologies. Just
| like software, refactorability is largely dependent on how
| well you design your base at the beginning. If you leave
| plenty of room for expansion and compartmentalize different
| production areas, it makes it extremely easy to upgrade with
| minimal disruption to the factory. And also like software, if
| you don 't put any thought into the design at the beginning,
| it will probably be easier to start from scratch than try to
| redesign on the fly.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Ultimately how well your base is designed is completely
| based upon what things you need to produce in the future,
| what their inputs are, what their outputs are, what those
| outputs will be inputs into, and in which quantities you
| need to produce all of this stuff.
|
| These are all things a new player has no clue about. All
| you're really saying is an experienced player that has done
| enough researching and equation balancing (X miners feeds Y
| furnaces and a line of belt can support Z miners) ahead of
| time _should_ be able to design a base that doesn 't
| require too much demolishing. And presumably, not
| overdesign in unnecessary base components.
|
| It assumes perfect knowledge.
|
| The closest to refactoring in Factorio is the ability to
| use bots to tear down and build blueprints. But you get
| that ability long after it would first be useful - that
| would be around when you get plastics, which easily triples
| the size of your base.
| sixothree wrote:
| This is exactly why I don't play games like factorio or
| tis-100. It's too much like work for me.
| lvice wrote:
| I honestly stopped after the winter holidays for this reason.
| At one point, it felt a bit too similar to actually
| working... but I enjoyed it very much until the "spaghetti
| factory point of no return" :)
| oauea wrote:
| Saying satisfactory is a nicer factorio is ignoring everything
| that makes factorio a good game.
| danaris wrote:
| As someone who has played a bunch of Factorio but only heard
| about Satisfactory: Can you elaborate on that?
| hobs wrote:
| Factorio is very much like programming on a good team,
| automation, expansion, refactoring, tooling used to solve
| your problems.
|
| Satisfactory is cool, but at no point do you get the "ok so
| I built this entire factory and now I can just replicate it
| modularly" - no, just place every, single, block, by, hand.
|
| To me factorio is a rethinking of the RTS game,
| satisfactory is like a really nice minecraft mod.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Factorio didn't have blueprints either, early on. I
| suspect Satisfactory will add them as it is still in
| early access
| hobs wrote:
| I think its possible, and I might switch over my opinion
| if such a thing existed - it'd still be hard to optimize
| it to build worlds of "factorio level" complexity.
| Filligree wrote:
| They've said they won't have blueprints.
|
| Now, granted, they might change their minds -- but it's
| hard to imagine how blueprints would work. Factorio is
| played on a 2D plane, with few obstacles in general and
| none that _can 't_ be removed; Satisfactory is played in
| a 3D world with immutable obstacles.
|
| The game is tuned towards not needing blueprints. You
| don't need large quantities of anything, just a small
| amount of every item -- the complexity scales up, but the
| scale itself kinda doesn't. Yes, some players will
| attempt to turn the entire output of the map into turbo-
| motors, producing _exactly_ the right amount of every
| ingredient, and will build their factory in the sky to
| avoid dealing with the terrain--
|
| And yes, blueprints could be useful in this specific
| case. But that's not most players.
| Bjartr wrote:
| > satisfactory is like a really nice minecraft mod.
|
| Which is ironic considering a big part of the original
| inspiration for Factorio was factory building mods for
| minecraft.
| oauea wrote:
| Factorio is (kind of) infinitely scalable. There is no max
| map size, and the game engine's performance is so
| incredibly good that it can support absolutely insanely
| massive factories. You can go as big as you can imagine,
| and the game will keep up.
|
| It's also ridiculously stable, in the ~thousand hours I've
| played I've never had a crash or a game breaking bug.
|
| Meanwhile satisfactory puts you on a fixed-size map and
| will slow down to a crawl once you build too much. This
| limits a lot of the things you can do in the game.
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| The simple answer is scale. The recipes in satisfactory and
| factorio are pretty similar in complexity, but the
| production chains in factorio are quite a bit larger. Also
| a lot of complexity comes in with scaling production up in
| factorio, since you largely have to scale horizontally, but
| in satisfactory, most of the scaling is vertical. Later,
| you can do more horizontal scaling, but even into the mid-
| game, you're pretty constrained by the amount of resource
| locations you have access to.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I think Satisfactory is "nicer" in that it's prettier and
| more user-friendly, has higher production values, etc. Not to
| speak for the parent comment but I took "nicer" to be a very
| deliberate choice instead of "better."
|
| It is true that Factorio is currently a better game and I
| suspect that will be the case even when Satisfactory is
| complete. I don't really think it's intended to be a 3D
| Factorio (even if that's the easiest way to describe it): it
| seems that the _design_ is to be less intricate as a
| construction management game, but with more details in the
| world design and player exploration: there are elements of No
| Man's Sky or Astroneer that are absent in Factorio. So I am
| still curious to see where the devs will take it.
| lvice wrote:
| Yes that's what I meant. I don't know factorio very well,
| "nicer" meant just that Satisfactory is more focused on
| being a pretty game with cool graphics and world
| exploration, and less "hardcore" on the automation stuff.
| zionic wrote:
| +1 on this. I could never get into Factorio with the simple
| graphics and 2D top-down.
|
| Satisfactory is freakin incredible and it is easily the best
| new game I have played in the last 10 years.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| If you enjoyed Satisfactory you might also want to try out
| Dyson Sphere Program. It doesn't provide the veritical
| building but it is a different take on the
| factorio/satisfactory style of gameplay.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I tried DSP, very fun game but the performance is terrible.
| i7-9700K and RTX2080 and I get 20 FPS before using even
| 1/10th of the first planet. Can't recommend it currently.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I've only played the demo of factorio, but on the same
| computer (AMD Ryzen 5, RX540) DSP runs much better for me
| - there's a noticeable slowdown on save now that I've
| covered about half my starting planet but other than that
| it's stutter free.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| Interesting, while i haven't built a sphere yet I have
| factories going on multiple planets and haven't noticed
| any performance issues. I'm on a a 2700k with a 970GTX.
| Not suggesting you don't have issues, but perhaps there
| is a fix?
| innocenat wrote:
| I am the complete opposite of you.
|
| I could never get into Satisfactory with the 3D graphics, but
| I absolutely love Factorio.
| Iv wrote:
| I think that's why I dont want to get into these games. They
| feel like work!
| golemiprague wrote:
| How does it work in other professions? I think in most
| professions once you have some experience you don't get tested in
| every job interview, people just rely on your history and their
| impression. I have decided to hire like that, just look at people
| history of work and talk to them in an interview and I think the
| rate of success was not worst than any other method. People got
| pretty good intuition in general for other people capabilities.
| yodelshady wrote:
| On a related note, feature request for factorio -
| comments/labels/documentation.
|
| For instance, I like to group chem plants together as a block,
| that I can move around easily, set up remote bases, or duplicate
| easily. That, of course, means a common input "format". I'd love
| for in-game blueprints to be able to label that (or am I missing
| it?).
| Filligree wrote:
| The common meta, aka. what you get on
| https://www.factorio.school/, is to mark inputs using constant
| combinators. Alternately, at larger scales a couple of chunk-
| sized (and absolute-tiled) railroad blocks will do nicely; the
| railway stations work as labels.
|
| If you dive even slightly into the (enormous) mod ecosystem,
| there's one that lets you make physical labels, at one tile per
| letter. (Text Plates, https://mods.factorio.com/mod/textplates)
|
| Since blueprint tiling was added, it's become absolutely
| obligatory to make good use of them. Almost every blueprint
| should have at least relative tiling enabled. Note, the tile
| size shouldn't necessarily be the exact size of the blueprint
| -- it's often convenient to have tileable blueprints overlap
| slightly, and it supports that just fine by making the tiles
| slightly smaller.
| omginternets wrote:
| It seems like Factorio itself doesn't matter here, and that any
| programming language can be used instead.
|
| So really, this article is saying "live, self-directed coding is
| the best technical interview", which isn't very original.
| [deleted]
| tstrimple wrote:
| There may be an anxiety factor which negatively impacts live
| coding interviews which wouldn't manifest as often in
| demonstrating similar skillsets in a game. It would be
| interesting to see how much of a difference something like this
| makes.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Performance anxiety (or the lack thereof) is a job skill.
| omginternets wrote:
| Yeah ... maybe...
|
| There might also be anxiety around playing a game you don't
| know well, which wouldn't manifest in a language you were
| familiar with.
|
| Honestly, this article is pretty superficial.
| teekert wrote:
| Would be cool if Mineraft went this far. At least I can play that
| with my kids and I'm not haunted by that feeling that I'm
| building something virtual and useless. I can actually enjoy it,
| through my kids. Yeah it's weird.
| desireco42 wrote:
| I found refactoring demo... GildedRose to work well. It is super
| fun for people and they can talk through it. It helps surface how
| they are thinking about code, definitely not the something that
| can answer all the questions but reduces tension a lot with
| candidates.
| kentonv wrote:
| We used this a couple times at Sandstorm back in the day. At the
| end of the interview the candidate would play Factorio
| cooperatively with the team for a while.
|
| I think it is remarkably effective at identifying the kinds of
| skills and personality traits that a software engineer actually
| needs to have in day-to-day work. You can find out if someone is
| self-directed, how fast they work, whether they produce clean
| designs or spaghetti code, whether they are good at cooperating
| or tend to go off on their own, etc. Some people will just sit
| and watch and do nothing unless instructed... that's bad. Some
| people will build stuff, but with obvious efficiency flaws and
| "bugs"... also bad. Some people identify what needs doing and get
| it done effectively but without trying to be perfect... that's
| good. Factorio essentially compresses real-world work patterns
| into a shorter time period, giving you the chance to see how
| someone works in the space of a couple hours. I don't know
| anything else that does that.
|
| But, obviously, it's problematic. A person who has played the
| game before will have a big advantage. A person who doesn't play
| video games at all will have a big disadvantage. For these
| reasons, I don't think I could seriously recommend this approach
| be adopted more widely.
|
| But then, I don't know of _any_ approach to interviewing that I
| think is fair. Everything has problems:
|
| * Regular interviews bias towards people that are charismatic,
| not effective.
|
| * Coding interviews bias towards people who can code under
| pressure with someone looking over their shoulder, which is
| almost nothing like real-world coding.
|
| * Puzzle-y algorithms questions identify people good at clever
| solutions but that's hardly what most people need to do day-to-
| day when coding.
|
| * Take-home assignments bias towards people who have lots of free
| time, and still don't really tell you how that person works with
| others.
|
| * Looking at GitHub history biases against people whose lives are
| too busy to code in their free time (e.g. maybe they have kids)
| and who weren't lucky enough to have a previous job that touched
| a lot of open source.
|
| * Looking at past work experience misses brilliant junior
| programmers coming out of college.
|
| * Don't even think about using ML for this, that doesn't solve
| biases, it just hides them in a black box.
|
| It seems like there's no right answer here.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| You really hit the nail on the head here. I couldn't agree
| more.
|
| However, I think playing this game would be a fun and
| interesting interview.
| [deleted]
| brightball wrote:
| I've honestly simplified my approach to interviewing over the
| last few years and I'm pretty happy with the results.
|
| I just have a conversation and ask them to tell me about a
| favorite code project they've worked on. Could be school
| project, previous job, whatever.
|
| And just let them talk about it. I'll prod for more detail if I
| need to give a little nudge. Ask about problems they solved
| when doing it, etc.
|
| The _only_ thing that I'm looking for in this process is
| whether or not the person is truly interested what they're
| doing. This comes through when talking about something they're
| excited to have worked on, seemingly small problems that they
| had to really work to solve, etc. Geeking out, if you will.
|
| The single most important trait I've seen in programmers that
| I've worked with over the years is "level of interest". There's
| too much that you have to learn on a daily basis to be
| successful in this field. If you're not interested in learning
| new things and finding solutions to the problems that you
| encounter, you're not going to make it very far.
|
| Beyond that and basic competence in the core skills that the
| job requires, I don't look for much more.
|
| Thus far, everybody I've ever hired who has passed this little
| conversational test has been an excellent team member.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This.
|
| I was a hiring manager for 25 years, and this was _exactly_
| what I did.
|
| I made very, very few mistakes, and actually had some
| pleasant surprises.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Same here. There's no silver bullet question, and no high
| pressure situation with me.
|
| My approach has just been to have a conversation, and try to
| move it along naturally. What do you think of concepts? What
| useful STL did they add? Why did you go with this design? Ask
| me something.
|
| If the person doesn't really have the level of interest
| required, they will run out of things to say. Like a cave
| left unexplored. The good candidates will go down all the
| caves with you, even if they don't quite know what's there.
|
| In particular, the times I've had dud hires it was not
| possible to know from the standard fare of coding questions
| and IQ questions. When I was doing that obviously the people
| I hired passed. But for instance one guy really didn't want
| to be a programmer, he just knew how to answer the questions.
| He ended up stalling on his first assignment, and eventually
| decided to change careers. Another dud also lacked
| motivation, perhaps because he was asked to do something not
| quite in his area to begin with. He ended up not doing
| anything at all.
|
| Apart from those two, dozens of others have turned out ok. I
| never ran into that guy who couldn't do FizzBuzz, despite not
| asking. I also don't think it was all that bad to let go of
| the duds within a quarter, they never got so ingrained in the
| team that we depended on them, and they could plausibly move
| on to another job without mentioning us on their CV.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > A person who doesn't play video games at all will have a big
| disadvantage.
|
| Even more so for a person who _can 't_ play video games, e.g.
| blind people. Many of the other interview techniques, for all
| their faults, at least don't (inadvertently) discriminate
| against people with disabilities.
| billfruit wrote:
| While I get some of this sentiment, wont some sort of social
| deduction game like 'Throne of Lies' be better at identifying
| potentially good team members?.
| kentonv wrote:
| I'm not familiar with that game, but the point of using
| Factorio is it is a game where you have to build complex
| systems and maintain them, which has many parallels with
| real-world software engineering. "Throne of Lies" doesn't
| look like that kind of game.
| billfruit wrote:
| Throne of lies and social deduction games like them are
| about finding out peoples real intentions from what they
| say and do, also aspects like using and understanding
| subtle signalling to collaborate with ones team.
| Shish2k wrote:
| In my software engineering work I do a lot more "writing
| documentation to be as clear as possible" than "social
| deduction and subtle signalling" ^^;;
| liaukovv wrote:
| In fact i would hate to work at a place where you have to
| do social deduction
| collyw wrote:
| I had a pleasant interview experience one time, that avoided a
| number of those problems.
|
| I was asked to bring in my laptop with some code I had written.
| I did, we talked about it. The interviewer asked me to add a
| simple feature. It's code I was familiar with (as you would be
| after working for a company for a bit). So no stress. No
| gotchas.
|
| No time wasted with yet another technical test with a throwaway
| app. Setting up a new project is always a bit of a faff.
|
| Admittedly not everyone will have some code ready, but then a
| normal take home test would be the fallback.
| cesarb wrote:
| > A person who has played the game before will have a big
| advantage. A person who doesn't play video games at all will
| have a big disadvantage.
|
| There's also a "similar game" advantage. For instance, a person
| who played games like OpenTTD before will have a much easier
| time with Factorio rail signals, since the two kinds of rail
| signals in Factorio work very similarly to two of the several
| kinds of rail signals found in OpenTTD.
| prepend wrote:
| > Some people will just sit and watch and do nothing unless
| instructed... that's bad. Some people will build stuff, but
| with obvious efficiency flaws and "bugs"... also bad. Some
| people identify what needs doing and get it done effectively
| but without trying to be perfect... that's good.
|
| Some personalities are better suited for programming, although
| I think hard work can overcome anything.
|
| I remember an old blog post [0] of mine that used Hammerstein-
| Equord personality quadrants of smart/industrious, smart/lazy,
| stupid/industrious, stupid/lazy and describing it for how that
| effects tech team planning.
|
| [0] http://www.prepend.com/2009/05/programmer-classifications-
| by...
| collyw wrote:
| > Some personalities are better suited for programming,
| although I think hard work can overcome anything.
|
| I am not sure about the hard work part. Some people don't
| seem to think the right way for programming.
|
| I studied a one year IT masters conversion course back in the
| dot com boom, and chose the best / hardest course I could
| find. The first 3 weeks of the course was an intensive Java
| programming course. There was an exam at the end of this.
| They suggested that anyone who didn't pass this exam, don't
| do the rest of the course, but they didn't actually force
| them off. I was friends with at least two people that failed
| that exam, but continued anyway. They struggled and I don't
| think they passed the final exam despite plenty of hard work.
| prepend wrote:
| I think hard work and studying is probably better than
| natural aptitude and no hard work.
|
| I've worked with people who didn't care at all, it was a
| job, but they studied and worked hard and were pretty good.
|
| Of course, I'd rather work with someone who had both.
| trhway wrote:
| so, you've pointed 7 flawed existing approaches as the reason
| to come up with and use an 8th one. At least those 7 have
| actual connection to programming. Your 8th one has only
| imaginary indirect connection only through your internal
| interpretation. It is just like those box-building/etc. games
| they play at Scrum training which have nothing in common with
| reality.
|
| And many flaws in the 7 aren't intrinsic flaws, instead it is
| flaws of the wrong "one size fits all" application:
|
| > Looking at past work experience misses brilliant junior
| programmers coming out of college.
|
| yeah, don't use that as negative for junior programmers coming
| out of college.
|
| >Take-home assignments bias towards people who have lots of
| free time, and still don't really tell you how that person
| works with others.
|
| the same, if candidate prefers that way - let them, if not -
| use other approach
|
| etc.
| johncessna wrote:
| > But then, I don't know of any approach to interviewing that I
| think is fair
|
| The companies that think deeply about interviews are aware that
| their interview is biased, and they do so intentionally. At a
| certain point watching 5 good engineers not meet the bar is
| better than having 10 bad engineers get through.
|
| Maybe the 'right answer' is to let your needs drive the bias of
| your interview. Do you have a position that needs to deal with
| immense pressure with management breathing down their neck?
| Bias your selection with whiteboard interviews. Are you looking
| for a principal engineer that can drive adaptation and change
| in a large org? Bias your selection process to get that.
|
| tl;dr Maybe the issue is the one size fits all thinking to the
| tech interview.
| rhacker wrote:
| There really isn't. At the end of the day every company I have
| been in has: the asshole, the smart guy, the idiot, the guy
| everyone is scared of, the guy that can't be fired ("the
| originals"). Then you just kind of multiply them randomly
| depending on team size.
|
| These hiring articles are a huge pointless waste of time.
| SamBam wrote:
| Makes me feel lucky to be in my job, and a jolt of gratitude
| every-so-often is a welcome thing, so thank you.
|
| I work with 8 other senior or senior-ish engineers, we are
| all basically taking a slight paycut (not too much, maybe
| 80-90% of rates we might get elsewhere) to work for a non-
| profit making interesting stuff for kids, and everyone is
| genuinely nice and fairly hard-working.
|
| I wonder if the "taking a paycut to do something actually
| interesting and worthwhile" is part of it.
| iAmAPencilYo wrote:
| Hi, could you share a little of what you do? It didn't even
| cross my mind I can work for a non-profit, still get paid
| (not top dollar) and have a good community impact (kids in
| your case). Thanks!
| SamBam wrote:
| I work for a grant-funded educational software company
| that makes science simulations for K through college, but
| mostly middle school and high school.
| collyw wrote:
| My company had all of those rolled into one. Thankfully he
| burned himself out with the technical debt that he had
| created and quit. He was smart and could probably beat me at
| hacker rank type challenges. I know to focus on
| maintainability over cleverness.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Regular interviews bias towards people that are charismatic,
| not effective.
|
| A cooperative multiplayer game is also going to be a similar
| soft skills check that favors people that can communicate not
| just well, but also charismatically.
|
| That said, a possible advantage to doing that in a game, as
| opposed to a regular soft skills interview (or worse trying to
| force such soft skill checks into the pressure cooker of a
| whiteboard interview or puzzle questions) is that you _maybe_
| provide an environment where the interviewee can be dopamine
| hacked into believing they can relax and you maybe get a
| glimpse into how the person 's soft skills check out on the
| other side of that boundary where interviewee knows that they
| need to be "on" and acting.
|
| I'm not actually sure if that is good or bad, but a lot of my
| takeaway from this article and other comments in these threads
| is it sort of feels like there's a lot of excuses for "pick a
| game that seems technically similar", but most of the "good
| feedback" that seems to be coming back from these experiences
| resembles what history tells us about regular interviews versus
| technical interviews: soft skills matter a lot more than what
| you can gauge technically in an interview. Most technical
| interviews are just soft skills interviews under the pressure
| cooker of taking a non-standardized pop quiz your professor
| decided you need to take because you showed up to class in only
| your underwear (and also you are flying for some reason in this
| nightmare). Cooperative games possibly present the opposite of
| the pressure cooker: dopamine hacking the interviewee an excuse
| to let the pressure _seem_ like it is off while you are still
| doing that same sort of soft skills check.
|
| (Aside: problem solving is classically a "soft skill".
| "Behavioral interviews" were as much about problem solving
| decades before the software industry invented the "technical"
| interview.)
|
| (Further aside: This sort of dopamine hacking is very familiar
| to anyone that's seen Fraternity/Sorority rushes. Soft skills
| are hugely important for "group fit"/"team fit" in college
| social groups as they are in employment groups, and seeing how
| potential new members interact in "fun"/"game" situations often
| tells you more about the person than if you sat down and
| interviewed them one-on-one in a suit and tie or equivalent and
| they know they have to be "on". Rushes include both of those
| things for many reasons.)
| jackietreehorn wrote:
| We used it at Cloudflare a few times too (as suggested by
| former Sandstorm people). I still remember getting the purchase
| of the game approved by engineering leadership. Was pretty
| humorous where it went from wanting to understand to whatever
| approved in like 30 seconds.
|
| I agree with your assessment of the pros/cons of the various
| interview methods. I agree that there is no right answer.
| kentonv wrote:
| Huh I actually had no idea it was tried at Cloudflare!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _It seems like there 's no right answer here._
|
| I think you've done a good job identifying the most common
| options. Since none has proven decisively better than any other
| at aiding hiring decisions, how about letting the candidate
| decide which sort of interview to participate in?
| KingEllis wrote:
| > * Don't even think about using ML for this, that doesn't
| solve biases, it just hides them in a black box.
|
| Can you clarify: what is "ML" here? "Machine learning", ML the
| language, MatLab, "machine language" (a.k.a. assembly), Matt
| LeBlanc? I'm out of ideas...
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| Machine learning
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think the answer is that it takes time to get to know someone
| and their skills. There is no quick simple test. You can give
| them multiple tests over time if you want.
|
| I think that if you have money for recruiting then you can
| screen with an initial test, then pay them for a few hours or
| days of additional tests. And then ideally there is a
| contracting period that is an additional test but on a real
| project.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> person who doesn 't play video games at all will have a big
| disadvantage_
|
| My thoughts exactly while reading the article.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A reminder that the goal of an interview process is not to be
| fair. This is not a sports event or a court case.
|
| Mostly your goals align with "being fair", but not always, and
| that's OK.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I agree, so upvoted. The most important question is: "Would I
| like to work with this person?". That is unfortunately
| unfair.
| plank_time wrote:
| Hire quickly and fire quickly with a generous severance. That's
| the only method that I've seen works effectively. Netflix does
| more with 2000 engineers that companies with 10-20x that.
|
| This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren't
| "perfect" but had a lot of positives to offer.
| EveYoung wrote:
| You can only do this if you have the name recogition and
| compensation to attract enough candidates who are willing to
| take this risk. Plus, if you have long on-boarding processes
| this could become quite expensive.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Yeah. I used to know someone who worked at a call center
| once. The onboard training was like 40+ hours. They had a
| problem with people who only got hired so they could be
| paid to watch videos before quitting on the first day, but
| there wasn't anything they could do about it.
| sshumaker wrote:
| This approaches biases against those whose residency status
| is dependent on employment (e.g. H1Bs).
|
| There's no silver bullet when it comes to hiring.
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| H1B is only meant to fill positions that companies "say"
| they can't fill with american citizens. It has just been
| abused to hire people cheaply.
|
| Let's focus on solving problems in america for american
| citizens first, then we can worry about everyone else.
| driverdan wrote:
| Which is fine because H1Bs shouldn't be used for most
| positions. If something actually requires an H1B candidate
| then you use a different process.
| musingsole wrote:
| H1Bs are one example, but isn't living in a high-rent
| area another? In either case, you can't maintain your
| physical position for long without continuous employment.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _hire quickly and fire quickly_
|
| This kind of mentality is not conducive to a well-functioning
| nation with people who have dependents and need stability.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| In the SF bay area for these roles the job market is much
| more fluid than most places
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Only when the pay doesn't compensate for the instability,
| which in Netflix's case, is a lot. You could work two
| months and have enough saved to last you an year.
| namdnay wrote:
| If the nation is well-functioning, getting fired isn't the
| end of the world. If your job is independant of your
| healthcare and you have several years of allowance to seek
| another one it's fine to try out a few jobs before finding
| what sticks
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| These arguments are silly. If you're competent you've got
| nothing to worry about. If not, then something to work on.
|
| Incredible hiring risk aversion is what makes finding a job
| for everyone a shitshow. Definitely not an efficient market
| as it stands.
|
| If it weren't for an easy to hire organization that gave me
| a chance, I'd likely be homeless.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I would reverse it.
|
| The nation is not conducive to business if it can't provide
| healthcare and safety nets for those without work or in
| between jobs. In the US we are held hostage with healthcare
| based on our employers - if you're even lucky enough to
| have a stable job with benefits.
| splithalf wrote:
| To say nothing of the universities.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Show me one coutry who pays unemployed benefit at the
| level of the job you need to leave because of that insane
| hire fast fire fast.
| namdnay wrote:
| In France your jobseeker's allowance is 80% of the
| average salary of your last 12 working months. Whether
| your last employer was for 10 years or 10 days. It starts
| slowly ramping down after the second year of searching I
| think
| masklinn wrote:
| "Hire quickly and fire quickly" has other issues than
| healthcare and safety nets though, moving across a
| country and spending weeks trying to find a place to live
| (possibly losing money on rent because you can't find
| anything to buy yet) only to have to do it again in a few
| weeks' time is difficult.
|
| Less of an issue if you're full remote, or you provide
| good accommodations, I guess.
| namdnay wrote:
| Indeed. And of course the biggest advantage of them all:
| living in a big city. One of the main reasons for the
| salary difference: it's a lot easier to get raises if
| there are 10 companies offering the same job
| plank_time wrote:
| Saying that it isn't conducive to an entire nation is a bit
| of an over-dramatization, don't you think?
|
| I think a generous severance makes up for that. Plus people
| would know what they are getting into, just like Netflix.
| If you don't want the risk/return you don't have to apply
| or accept a job there.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Saying that it isn't conducive to an entire nation is
| a bit of an over-dramatization, don't you think?_
|
| I don't think so.
|
| > _I think a generous severance makes up for that._
|
| That's your opinion. But what you think is generous isn't
| necessarily what others think is generous.
|
| > _Plus people would know what they are getting into,
| just like Netflix._
|
| I disagree.
|
| > _If you don't want the risk /return you don't have to
| apply or accept a job there. _
|
| The risk/return needs to be clear though and
| hirefast/firefast isn't always clear.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Past patterns can be an interesting contrast. During WWII
| generals were hired and fired quickly. Because the practice
| was pervasive there was no big stigma to being fired and
| there were always alternative positions to try. It also
| helped that there was a general structure which was not
| explicit or required but was broadly exhibited. That is,
| new hires were expected to show basic proficiency within
| two weeks and to make a significant contribution with in
| six weeks. Since a relatively quick test of skills was
| built in to the management structure there was less
| pressure on initial evaluation.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| It isn't a company's responsibility to create a well-
| functioning nation.
| omginternets wrote:
| Says who, Milton Friedman?
|
| Surely companies have some minimal responsibility to act
| ethically, and surely behaving in a way that causes
| social dysfunction is not ethical.
| heartbeats wrote:
| It's the responsibility of the government to create a
| well-functioning nation, and to use corporations to this
| end. But to suggest that people or the corporations have
| a direct responsibility, is to shift the responsibility
| away from those who are on 'our side', and to those who
| are either neutral or its primary victims.
| omginternets wrote:
| Surely every stakeholder has some degree of
| responsibility in the proper functioning of any system.
|
| By your reasoning, I am free to degrade public
| infrastructure such as roads because it is not my
| responsibility to build them.
|
| Equivalently: I am morally justified in committing crimes
| since I am not a police officer.
| heartbeats wrote:
| I have a responsibility not to violate the law or
| vandalize the roads, but I don't think I have a
| responsibility to drive extra carefully or patch up
| potholes as I see them.
|
| To me, this seems like a very cynical scheme. We tell
| "normal people" that they, personally, ought to BUY
| AMERICAN to prevent jobs from moving abroad. When they
| eventually do, we can tell them they should've done more
| and that it was their fault. It shifts the liability on
| to the victims, rather than the perpetrators.
|
| But the responsibility of ensuring that a country has a
| good trade deficit is upon the government, if anyone!
| There's no serious way I can prevent it, so the only real
| point of saying it's my responsibility is to diminish the
| government's responsibility for failing to prevent it.
|
| To suggest that the companies have a moral obligation, is
| to suggest that an abstract body corporate can have a
| conscience. If it could, there would be no need to ban
| slavery - just expect that the honest businessmen of
| America cease to traffic in them.
| omginternets wrote:
| >I don't think I have a responsibility to drive extra
| carefully or patch up potholes as I see them.
|
| We agree. We also agree that businesses do not have the
| responsibility of fixing society.
|
| However, they do have the responsibility not to degrade
| it.
| mixedCase wrote:
| >Surely every stakeholder has some degree of
| responsibility in the proper functioning of any system.
|
| A civilization enforces responsibility through the law.
|
| >I am free to degrade public infrastructure such as roads
| because it is not my responsibility to build them.
|
| Yes. And either the government should set laws to prevent
| you from misusing the infrastructure, and/or the people
| should shun your company for being a bad actor. The
| former being consistent for infrastructure that is owned
| and maintained by the tax-funded government.
|
| >I am morally justified in committing crimes since I am
| not a police officer.
|
| Morality and legality are different things. Neither
| people nor corporations should be judged by the
| government through the abstract, subjective morality of
| individuals, only by agreed upon, written law, and at its
| loosest which is a court's interpretation of the law.
|
| You as an individual can hold anyone responsible for
| anything under any criteria, but then you should state
| you're speaking for yourself as per your own moral code.
| As a society, we have rules for that.
|
| If you want to make your moral code the law, then that
| should also be explicitly mentioned as such instead of
| speaking as if it's the status quo.
| omginternets wrote:
| >Yes. And either the government should set laws to
| prevent you from misusing the infrastructure, and/or the
| people should shun your company for being a bad actor.
|
| It seems we agree. Similarly, governments should encode
| the civic responsibility of businesses into law.
|
| Whether or not they have actually done that is a
| different debate.
| r00fus wrote:
| It would absolutely work -- assuming everyone has access to
| healthcare (preferably universal coverage).
|
| Unfortunately this cuts at the moat that big corporations
| have set up not to mention health insurance industry and
| big pharma. Which is why it hasn't happened yet here
| (though it has in many other countries).
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I definitely think that if every employer used Netflix's
| strategy there would be issues, but if the job market had
| more churn stability would take on a different meaning.
| Imagine that it was expected to change jobs frequently if
| you or your employer was unhappy; I'd bet lots of people
| would be way happier.
|
| The problem is of course that even if you have every reason
| to think that some other place would hire you, you need a
| degree of slack to begin with. There aren't any easy
| answers there, but that's where I'd say an expanded social
| safety net should come in.
| zamalek wrote:
| You probably don't need Hadoop, and you probably don't need
| 10x engineers.
|
| > This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren't
| "perfect" but had a lot of positives to offer.
|
| This is not true. An AS/HFA/Autistic person wouldn't survive
| very long at Netflix, because they biologically struggle with
| the goal-setting/performance review game. These individuals
| may have talents that are biologically unavailable to
| neurotypical people.
|
| The Netflix approach selects for a very specific type of
| individual: an extreme degree of rote knowledge and the
| ability to effortlessly apply that knowledge. There are
| people who acquire this knowledge and talent via
| unconventional means, and Netflix is able to grab those
| people up.
| handoflixue wrote:
| I can personally confirm that there's at least one autistic
| person in a senior engineering role at Netflix.
| zamalek wrote:
| n=1.
|
| In addition, that individual is likely wasting mental
| resources gaming performance reviews, or their manager
| has identified their struggle and is protecting them from
| the ceremony. Systematically, Netflix is not equipped to
| deal with them.
| novok wrote:
| That has major issues with immigrants, who wont apply in a
| fire quickly scenario.
| kleinsch wrote:
| The Netflix model makes a ton of sense, but doesn't apply to
| most other companies, bc Netflix is a unique case. They pay
| top of market, all cash. They have massive name recognition
| and obvious longevity. Probably most uniquely - they only
| hire senior people who have a track record of experience they
| can look at.
|
| When you're a startup that nobody's heard of, half your
| engineers are going to be junior, and half your comp is stock
| options that will probably never be liquid, the offer doesn't
| make any sense. Are you just going to give offers to 20
| random new college grads and coding bootcamp alums planning
| on firing the 50-75% that don't cut it? Good luck ever
| getting junior people to accept offers again. Do you think
| someone with 10+ years of experience is going to take a pay
| cut to take the job with a random startup with a decent
| chance of getting let go if the manager isn't feeling it
| after a few weeks?
|
| With 15 years of experience and a family to provide for,
| there's no world where I'd consider that type of
| hiring/firing culture for anything other than a proven brand
| name with top of market comp, environment, and coworkers. Did
| an interview loop w/ Netflix a couple years ago, seems like
| an amazing place to work, ultimately went a different
| direction for non-culture related reasons.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Start ups need different kind of people than big companies.
| With a startup the biggest mistake someone can make is not
| moving fast enough, and the startup dies. In a big company
| the code base always gets too big, so a person who works
| slower, but is able to improve the code base while
| shrinking it is worth more than a person who finishes fast,
| but blows up or slows down the code base. Interviews have
| to search for the right style of people.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Funny story. I'm _exactly_ the type of person a startup
| needs.
|
| _Seriously_ experienced, with a truly heterogenous
| skillset. I was a manager, trainer, artist, writer,
| musician, and a prolific, ultra-high-quality coder. I
| have an _enormous_ portfolio, and decades of experience
| selling ideas and proposals to _very_ skeptical, hard-
| nosed, empirical managers (Japanese tech executives). I
| have no problem traveling to odd places, clean up pretty
| well, and have lived all over the world. Cultural
| differences are a turn-on for me. I 've worked on some
| pretty exotic teams, my entire career.
|
| I'm familiar with branding, localization, aesthetic
| design, hardware/software integration, basic network
| design, Web tech, systems design, application design, Web
| design, usability, and accessibility. I program Swift,
| and have, since the day it was announced. My GH ID is
| solid green (and not gamed). My last commit was probably
| an hour ago. I have been shipping software my entire
| adult life, so I'm pretty cognizant of what it takes to
| get stuff out the door, and supported, thereafter.
|
| I was given a level of trust, at an ultra-conservative
| Japanese tech company that few Westerners ever get,
| because I have a Personal Code of Ethics, Honor, and
| Integrity.
|
| Better yet, I can _prove_ it. Simply look at my
| portfolio, read my Web articles, or peruse my training
| materials. It 's all out there.
|
| But even better, I have no problem taking risks, and
| working for lower wages, as I have my retirement set, and
| I code for the love of the craft; not to get rich.
|
| After being insulted numerous times, when I was still
| interested in working for someone else, I just gave up,
| and I'm currently working on a 501(c)(3) (for free),
| giving them some software that they can't believe they
| got. I'm loving it, and I can't see any possibility that
| I'll be coaxed into the rat race again.
|
| I'd say that the hiring system is in not-so-good shape.
| kilbuz wrote:
| How well does Factorio performance correlate with job performance
| over different periods of time and different employee
| backgrounds?
|
| I don't see this mentioned in the article.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Your comment assumes that both 'Factorio performance' and 'job
| performance' are measurable. That is questionable, in my
| opinion.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| If someone is going to argue that Factorio is a useful tool
| for technical interviews, it's only reasonable to expect that
| they will present a visible correlation between in-game
| performance and real-life performance. Otherwise, how is this
| anything other than a novel just-so story?
| cloogshicer wrote:
| How do you show correlation of two concepts that are
| inherently not measurable?
|
| Do only statements that are measurable have value in your
| opinion?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Even if something isn't measurable, you can provide
| anecdotal evidence that a correlation exists.
|
| If you're going to say "Methods X and Y pale in
| comparison to Method Z for evaluating W" and expect
| anyone to draw conclusions from it, one would hope for
| even just a little bit of evidence.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Ok, that's fair, I agree.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Click-Bait title, and judging by comments here everyone went for
| the click-bait.
|
| The author doesn't actually use factorio for interviewing, and
| thinks it world be a bad idea to do so.
|
| A more accurate title would be "Comparison between Factorio and
| Software Engineering Concepts" - but that wouldn't have gotten it
| to the top of HN so fast, nor gotten so many comments so quickly.
| neogodless wrote:
| I believe we may be at a point where it is understood that
| headlines are created with the goal of attracting readers to
| the article, and it may no longer be necessary to point this
| out for each article we come across.
| wccrawford wrote:
| When the headline is so obviously clickbait, it's probably
| more interesting than the actual article... And the comments
| here are likely more interesting as well, just based on the
| title.
|
| So I no longer worry about people who haven't read the
| article. I just enjoy the discussions.
| ouid wrote:
| I'll stop when I'm dead.
| enumjorge wrote:
| What's the limit? What if I write an article with a title
| like "Breaking: Google to deprecate its search engine, will
| get into selling beanie babies instead" but in reality the
| article is about the many different types of mayonnaise one
| can buy? I think it's reasonable to expect the title to
| somewhat reflect the content of the article.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| That's not even the case. The point of headlines is to
| attract readers to the comment section on facebook, reddit,
| twitter, HN, etc. Some small percentage of people who have
| become engaged in the discussion seeded by the title then
| click through and provide a bit of ad revenue.
| dang wrote:
| It's their job to sex up the headline and ours to deflate it
| to size.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
|
| I've replaced the title with representative language from the
| article body.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&sor.
| ..
| Sodman wrote:
| There's a difference between editorializing a headline vs
| having an article titled "X is the best", where the content
| is literally "Well X obviously isn't the best, that would be
| ridiculous. Also we have no idea what the best is."
| fhifjfhjjjk wrote:
| I do not want to live in a timeline where Factorio becomes the
| new Leetcode, please God
| beaconstudios wrote:
| software engineering and factorio are cybernetics and systems
| theory. That's the overlap - dealing with causal loops, buffers,
| queue theory, feedback, all that.
|
| It really pisses me off that we as an industry don't broadly know
| our roots and the actual theory that we are putting into practice
| when we work. The "coding is engineering or art" debate? Easy;
| it's systems engineering.
|
| The closest we get as an industry to teaching what's under the
| hood is to deal with computer science, which is great, but data
| structures and complexity heuristics are only a small piece of
| the puzzle.
|
| It's no great surprise that there's such a big problem with cargo
| culting when most of us don't explicitly know what it is that
| we're doing.
| ouid wrote:
| I think Pyanodon's modpack might actually count as good interview
| material, if it didn't take 800 hours to play.
| [deleted]
| kstenerud wrote:
| The fact that all of the game's functionality mirrors real-world
| situations when building system shows that you could just ask
| someone to build a scaled down system rather than asking them to
| play this game.
|
| Any game sufficiently complicated as this will be akin to asking
| someone to write some example code in a language they've never
| used before, so you wouldn't be able to tell much anyway.
| mariksolo wrote:
| I bet the author of his article will change their tune if someone
| makes them do an interview with a game they don't have any
| experience in, like chess, kerbal space program, OpenTTD etc.
| miki123211 wrote:
| If you ever actually want to do this, be aware that it's not only
| unethical, but possibly illegal. Requiring candidates to play a
| game discriminates against people with visual impairments, who
| can't play games, but can code as well as anyone else.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The problem with this is that a lot of it is actually learned
| skills. So someone with experience in the game or other games
| that are similar has a big advantage. Including the people
| judging noobs who already know strategies for layout etc.
| andyxor wrote:
| why there is no standardized Leetcode-style tests like SAT or GRE
| that can be administered once and applied to all software job
| applications.
|
| The current situation is like every company coming up with its
| own version of IQ test, the randomness factor is huge. if current
| employees of any company were to simply retake their own tests
| most will fail.
| MrKristopher wrote:
| Even though FANG and startups are giving similar whiteboard
| interviews, they are evaluating on different dimensions to
| select candidates that fit their respective companies and the
| specific position. Reducing the Leetcode skill to a single
| number would not work well for this reason.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| I suspect that a lot western companies don't want to go down
| the "chitty" route.
|
| And those tests are gameable as are IQ tests and discriminate.
| [deleted]
| francisduvivier wrote:
| How can this not have a huge bias in favor of gamers? Might work
| for them because that's the kind of culture fit they need, but I
| doesn't look all that generalizable for other companies.
| cwhiz wrote:
| It might, if they were actually suggesting this. Title was
| intended to race to the top of Hacker News.
|
| >What's the takeaway from this? I don't know. We certainly
| can't switch to using Factorio as an interviewing method - you
| might as well just give a candidate a take-home assignment.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| You only have to understand how to move your character using
| WASD, the concept of Inventory and pointing at different places
| on the ground with a cursor. Failing to understand this simple
| set of rules would disqualify a person from most jobs ever
| invented.
| minikites wrote:
| >Failing to understand this simple set of rules would
| disqualify a person from most jobs ever invented.
|
| I think you dramatically over-estimate most people's literacy
| with games and movement in a virtual space, let alone most
| people's hand-eye coordination. How many people can touch
| type these days?
| Toutouxc wrote:
| You literally only place your fingers on the WASD keys and
| you move your character in a 2D (!) virtual space. With
| Minecraft it would be a completely different story, but
| Factorio is really accessible.
| cdirkx wrote:
| Why would the amount of software engineers that can touch
| type be down?
| lukas099 wrote:
| > You only have to understand how to move your character
| using WASD, the concept of Inventory and pointing at
| different places on the ground with a cursor.
|
| You make it sound so easy. Once I gave my PS4 controller to
| my dad to play a driving game. Even though he's a better
| driver than I am, it did _not_ go well.
| lghh wrote:
| Using a controller for someone who has never used a
| controller for and mentally mapping the act of driving to
| it is probably more difficult then handing a mouse and
| keyboard to someone interviewing for a software development
| job.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Game controllers are different beasts altogether. It's
| always fun watching a hardcore PC gamer struggle with a
| DualShock (or the asymmetrical weird thing they use on
| Xbox) for the first time. I know what you mean, but
| Factorio is really much slower and much easier to pick up
| than a driving game on a controller. I'm not saying it's a
| great choice for a one-hour interview, but anyone should be
| able to do whatever they want in Factorio after a couple of
| hours.
| me_me_me wrote:
| But its biased against people who can't use mouse and
| keyboard :)
|
| But on serious note, People who played the game could just
| hide the fact that they know the game mechanics. And act like
| they are catching up faster then normal person would.
| plank_time wrote:
| Most interviews in other industries try to figure out how
| much a person knows at that point in time. Software
| interviews try to do the impossible and try to figure out
| how quickly someone learns. That's because this can be
| gamed, as you mentioned. I know people that have memorized
| 800 leetcode questions and got jobs at all the FAANGs, even
| though they were average developers. For the record I've
| never gotten into FAANG (although I have gotten into FAANG-
| adjacent) so my evaluation should be taken with a grain of
| salt.
|
| The best interview is one that can't be gamed. Just like
| Hollywood auditions. Give the people the script and see how
| well they do. Tell the interview candidate you are going to
| give them 3 questions and they pick the one they want to
| do, even if they know it already. This strips away all
| pretense that they are figuring it out on the spot. At
| least then you are on a level playing field.
| boomfus wrote:
| Isn't that a common criticism of every interview style?
| Whether it's whiteboard questions, take-home projects, soft
| skill questions, lots of people will lie and say they've
| never seen the question before.
| plank_time wrote:
| At this point, you would be foolish to admit that you've
| seen a question before. Everyone is faking it, and if you
| be honest, you'll just keep getting harder and harder
| questions from the interviewer. The only time you should
| not fake it is if you've been asked that question at the
| same company. I think they would keep track of that and
| if you didn't mention it, they would look deceitful on
| your part if they catch you.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > you'll just keep getting harder and harder questions
| from the interviewer.
|
| Well, there is a counter strategy that works even in this
| situation.
|
| The counter strategy would be to just know way more
| interview questions than the interviewer, and know the
| answer to every question that they have, so that they run
| out!
|
| When I was full time applying for jobs, a couple years
| ago, it got to the point with me. It turns out that
| people interviewing others, only have a couple questions
| that they use for interviews, and it is not that hard to
| know all of them.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _People who played the game could just hide the fact that
| they know the game mechanics. And act like they are
| catching up faster then normal person would._
|
| This is a universal problem with all interview techniques
| _. Interested in any ideas for how to fix it.
|
| _ It 's even a problem with "personal interviews," because
| some people have had more experience with optimizing one-
| hour first impressions than others.
| francisduvivier wrote:
| Yeah it's not about "failing to understand", or "being able".
| It's about having advantage if you are already familiar with
| similar things. It's about those few extra things that you
| don't have to spend a single thought on anymore, giving you
| more headspace to think about the problem at hand. And it's
| also about feeling less stressed because you are in a rather
| familiar environment.
|
| Can you really not see how such an interview would bias
| towards Gamers?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's not about understanding the set of rules, it's about
| applying it in real time while playing. It adds a huge mental
| burden on the interviewee if they aren't familiar with it
| already. And the older you get, the harder it becomes.
| fudged71 wrote:
| Worth pointing out that McKinsey developed their own game for
| demonstrating problem solving in interviews.
|
| I don't think anyone is arguing that McKinsey has a bias
| towards gamers.
| peruvian wrote:
| I will argue McKinsey has a bias against humanity and good
| things, but that's off-topic :-)
| leetcrew wrote:
| I don't think it would have a huge bias towards gamers in
| general. the real issue would be people who already happen to
| be good at factorio. if you play with experienced people, it's
| easy to pick up on a lot of efficient patterns without really
| understanding why they work.
|
| then again, I guess that's also true of software.
| decafninja wrote:
| Reminds me of questions related to sports.
|
| I have zero interest in sports and am clueless to the rules of
| baseball or football or basketball. I hated when I got
| questions that assumed I had any such knowledge.
|
| Granted this was way back when when interviewers like to toss
| brainteaser questions to cargocult
| Google/Microsoft/etc...before they started doing leetcode to
| cargocult Google etc.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'm D tier programmer who would easily land a programming job
| if factorio was the skill metric.
| politician wrote:
| Do you control trains with circuits?
| MPSimmons wrote:
| If you're actually D tier, and you're good at Factorio, why
| are you a D tier? You clearly have the mindset for problem-
| solving. What is holding you back?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Software development as a career is a lot more than just
| learning, design, applying logic. We still have to manage
| projects at a people/organizational level, interact with
| team members with various backgrounds, understand what
| people are asking of you.
|
| There's a lot to being a successful developer that is
| probably so easy for many individuals that they might not
| consider that a person might be IQ smart, but unable to
| handle such a task at a professional level.
|
| I'm in a similar boat to the the GP: I do really well on
| logic tests and programming challenges, but I struggle with
| the the soft skills necessary to be a good team member.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| If GP had the answer to that, they wouldn't likely be held
| back.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > you're good at Factorio, why are you a D tier
|
| Because these actually have very little in relation.
| lukehutch wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the only thing that playing Factorio really tests
| is the player's ability to learn and play Factorio.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Please no, no. We are talking about fixing the interview process.
| We already have Leetcode game and people complained already.
| Please don't make me play another game.
| danbrooks wrote:
| Job candidates could die to biters during an interview! This
| needs to be tried once (and posted to youtube)! Preferably on max
| difficulty.
| notJim wrote:
| Good lord, this is an awful idea. I've played a ton of Factorio,
| and I'm a decent engineer, and while the skillsets are similar
| _conceptually_ , the actual execution and mechanics of them are
| very very different. Factorio involves a lot of care with spatial
| layout, tricks to optimize loading the conveyer belts, ensuring
| that the right ratios of pre-cursors are sent, etc etc.
|
| You could get a candidate who perfectly understands design
| patterns for programming, because they've studied programming and
| know how to program using programming languages and programming
| tools, but they don't translate that very well into the spatial
| environment of Factorio. Debugging and optimizing in Factorio
| again are _conceptually_ similar to doing so in a programming
| language, but the actual techniques and patterns available to do
| so are very very different, and you have to _learn them_. Most of
| us do not figure these things out from scratch by ourselves.
|
| As others have pointed out, it also is begging for a monoculture.
| Plenty of people who are good at programming don't give a shit
| about video games, and will either do poorly in this interview,
| or will skip it altogether. The result would be hiring one type
| of person, and not having any other skillsets on your team. Even
| as someone who would do well in this interview, I would run
| screaming, as I do not want to work in a monoculture.
| jmarcher wrote:
| Also, you might end up with a bunch of industrial engineers who
| may not code (yet).
| ummonk wrote:
| Clickbait title with very long content that people can't be
| expected to read in full before the conclusion finally makes it
| clear that factorio is being used as an analogy, not a serious
| suggestion for interviewing.
| h2odragon wrote:
| 4 hours would be a _long_ job interview.
|
| Has anybody ever played _less_ than 4hr of factorio?
| js8 wrote:
| Yeah, Nefrums would pass the interview in less than 2 hours..
| lmilcin wrote:
| I dislike defining seniority by your technical knowledge or
| skills. I have a different, I think more useful definition that I
| use. It overlaps a little bit but excludes knowledge,
| intelligence and focuses on mindset and ownership.
|
| More senior person is one that has more _mature_ approach to
| their work. One that can get better results with less resources.
| Typically more senior people can also accept wider variety of
| tasks.
|
| What is better results and what is less resources will depend on
| the project.
|
| It has nothing to do with the knowledge or experience, in my
| opinion.
|
| You can have good senior person get better results in a
| technology they have no previous experience with compared to a
| very experienced / intelligent / knowledgeable person that has
| track record of making bad decisions. Senior person will use
| their good judgement to warn the manager they are running outside
| of their knowledge and to know when they need to use some
| resources (like help) from somebody more knowledgeable.
|
| A knowledgeable but less senior person may think they know
| anything but not be able to recognize they are trying to achieve
| something that is outside their area of expertise or not be able
| to recognize or accept they are bad at something.
|
| For me senior developer is somebody I can entrust they will put
| honest, worthwhile attempt at making good decisions when it is
| called for and recognize when they need to come back for further
| direction.
|
| Senior developers show ownership in that they seek to uncover
| problems and discuss those problems with the team, proactively
| and productively. Senior developers can smell problems even if
| they don't necessarily know the solution. They can act on the
| signs of the bad smell and maybe seek discussion (with architect?
| client? manager? team?) to figure out what is going on and what
| needs to be done further.
|
| Senior developers understand there are many ways/levels to solve
| the problem and sometimes solution isn't more code but maybe
| procedural change or a shift in paradigm.
|
| Senior developers can meaningfully help/direct more junior team
| members _individually_ without taking over their projects.
|
| Senior developers can keep working relationships even with
| difficult people or people they don't like.
|
| And so on.
| goddess33 wrote:
| As good-intentioned as this is... it's the type of behaviour that
| just adds more barriers for women trying to break into tech.
|
| When hobbies like these - video games made exclusively by white
| men [0], played (almost) exclusively by men - are used to assess
| a candidate's ability as a _software engineer_ , who do you think
| benefits?
|
| [0]https://factorio.com/game/about
| benmller313 wrote:
| Why wouldn't a woman be able to be good at a game made by a
| white man?
| LanceH wrote:
| It is especially dangerous territory saying women can't be
| good at Factorio since it has such analogs to programming.
| Saying women can't play it is very close to saying women
| can't program or think logically.
|
| Saying they don't like it because it was written by women is:
| first, sexist; second, who the hell looks up who made the
| game _before_ they 've played it.
| tryonenow wrote:
| Isn't it racist and sexist to presume that women and POC won't
| play a game just because it's made by white men? How is that
| relevant? Is anyone else concerned over this kind of overt,
| casual, anti-white racism and misandry that has become socially
| acceptable as of late?
| ummonk wrote:
| Don't be disingenuous. It's almost exclusively played by
| mostly white (and some Asian) men, often on the spectrum. And
| you know this is true and that it isn't sexist or racist to
| point it out.
| scpedicini wrote:
| "almost exclusively played by mostly white (and some Asian)
| men, _often on the spectrum_. "
|
| you have the demographic data to back that up? I'd hate to
| accuse you of talking out of your ass.
| fghfghfghfghfgh wrote:
| That's not the point. The point is the disingenuous, and
| sadly socially acceptable, argument that something is
| bad/wrong because it is made by men or white people
| fghfghfghfghfgh wrote:
| Yes, for one I am concerned. Not so much for myself but for
| the future of my little boy
| fghfghfghfghfgh wrote:
| I think it benefits people who play video games. I also think
| that group consist of people who are neither men nor white.
|
| I am not impressed by this comment but in keeping with my own
| promise of assuming good faith, can I ask you to elaborate
| please?
| DelightOne wrote:
| Just drop them into a highest difficulty game and see how they
| are at crisis management. And at prioritizing. You could even see
| what they do at peace times.. Using it for personality analysis
| sounds like a bad idea.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| I test my developers in Counter Strike to see if they have a
| backbone, teamwork and can control rage.
| S_A_P wrote:
| I don't know that I agree. I don't really play games so I would
| be a bit lost here, but if you needed me to design and start
| coding a large distributed system I would happily oblige while he
| watched...
| shawnz wrote:
| Isn't a factory a large distributed system? What's the
| difference between this and a visual programming language like
| LabVIEW?
| S_A_P wrote:
| In the abstract sure, but in the concrete and in the way I
| think through problems its just not the same.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Well, LabView doesn't have locals who get pissed off by your
| pollution, for one.
| inetknght wrote:
| In Factorio you can turn off the locals.
|
| But turning off the locals for your factory is probably not
| what you want to do.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I have a question about whiteboard interviews.
|
| I have used and continued to use whiteboard coding in interviews.
| However I emphasize to the person that I am interviewing that
| there is no expectation that what they write on the whiteboard
| compile, or even be a real language. I'll usually do a quick demo
| and joke that my own white boarding looks like the bastard child
| of Python and FORTRAN. The point of the exercise is to have a
| design conversation and see if the person can think about
| algorithms or solving problems, not write valid code with a
| marker.
|
| Do people still have the same level of disdain for this technique
| or am I misunderstanding the objections people have to whiteboard
| coding.
| Raidion wrote:
| I don't think anyone is expecting syntactically valid code (or
| at least that would be huge red flag for me if I interviewed).
| You do get bonus points the more "real" and consistent your
| whiteboard code is though.
|
| I think people dislike whiteboard interviews because there is a
| significant subset of people who do not perform well under
| pressure, combined with the fact that a lot of software
| development is not terrifically algorithm heavy. This means
| that it's a (by nature) uncomfortable task and does not
| adequately represent the value the developer can bring to the
| business. In my current role, I would much rather have someone
| who can show strong knowledge of dependency injection and unit
| testing on my team over the person who understands how to
| balance a binary tree from memory.
|
| I really only use algo/code/sql whiteboarding for junior devs
| now, and most mid/senior devs get asked about some hard code
| bug they've solved, what their preferred software patterns are,
| and we whiteboard some architecture.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| The problem is that algorithms were discovered by
| mathematicians/computer scientists doing proofs for 40 hrs /
| week. It isn't something that can be reasoned about. It must be
| learned and memorized. This forces people to study that which
| is already embedded in the tools they use to perform their job.
|
| If you ask people to whiteboard out a system at a high level
| that accomplishes some task, then that can be reasoned about
| and better tests their understanding.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| See that's what I do mostly. Most often it's "here's a table
| of data I have, how would you compute this report." Not
| things like inverting binary trees or implementing hash maps.
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| Please don't. Better, I'll remove the please and go JUST DONT
| FUCKING DO IT.
|
| Hiring is broken because most people hiring aren't good at it and
| the people working in tech are pretty much idiots (I'm focusing
| more on SV-startup, 5hour discussion about aeropress, put people
| down because they chose vim or emacs - people kinds). From
| 'cultural' fit interviews (who the fuck cares if you are a sikh
| or an atheist, whiskey drinking or think alcohol is evil? You are
| hired to do a job, not much more). This 'i have my social life at
| work, so I want people I can hang out with' shit has got to end.
| I work remotely for 10+ years and I can see in
| interviews/meetings the people that seem to base their identity
| and life around work, and the ones that actually are well rounded
| people that don't care about which coffee grind size you use on
| your morning crap of joe.
|
| I have been a professional boxer and dabbled with MMA/Grappling.
| I can say most things in the article can apply. So.. at the end
| of the interview just get them in gloves and duke a few rounds? I
| would be sued out of existence, but for some reason, between take
| home assignments, 10h whiteboard drilling and whatever the fuck
| is hip now (leetcode or what not), interviewing is broken because
| people are idiots. I have been interviewing people for the last 5
| years. If in an one hour talk that is semi technical, you can't
| understand if the person knows what the fuck they are doing or
| not, then the problem is you, not the whiteboard or the take-home
| or the paid assignment. Just admit most people interviewing
| others for technical positions have not fucking clue or training,
| BUT, hey, they are smart people from Standford or MIT, so 'how
| hard can it be' and we get the clusterfuck that it is now
| klyrs wrote:
| Big agree to everything here. I've seen my fair share of office
| romance, and wow, folks, it _sucks_. When your work is your
| family, friends, your whole life, it 's gonna be a dating pool
| for people, too. When you start sleeping with one of your
| "family" members, that's fine, whatever. But when you
| _inevitably_ split, work becomes a soap opera, everybody feels
| the need to pick a side, banal decisions (like attending a
| meeting or not) become political. Shit.
|
| And to think, I've been told by a department head that the way
| to get business done with a certain co-worker is to go out for
| beer with him. So that's my fault for not knowing / doing that.
| No matter that I don't drink. No matter that I'm not cool
| enough for this dude to want to go drinking with. Big ol' fuck
| off, loud and clear. Wouldn't it be better if he could just
| respond to my emails like everybody else is expected to?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| As someone who is actively interviewing, this really resonates
| with me.
| m463 wrote:
| yes, I agree.
|
| Honestly I was looking at this and thinking it's not too far
| off from introducing yourself as Tyler Durden and then testing
| him.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Thank you for writing this. It bothers me that the genealogy of
| leetcode has been completely obscured as it comes from
| competitive programming competitions whose primary demographic
| were who? Those smart people from Stanford or MIT. Once you
| realize the "who", it becomes even more clear for me why we're
| dealing with 'i have my social life at work, so I want people I
| can hang out with'-type people when we're preparing for
| interviewing. Not to mention that crowd is least likely to have
| any experience communicating with, say for example, Black folk,
| amongst other demos, as _peers_ , you you get all these issues
| surrounding application of "culture fit".
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > as it comes from competitive programming competitions whose
| primary demographic were who? Those smart people from
| Stanford or MIT.
|
| I mean, it comes from every intro to algorithm and data
| structures classes at every serious CS program.
|
| > Not to mention that crowd is least likely to have any
| experience communicating with, say for example, Black folk,
| amongst other demos, as peers
|
| Not sure what you are insinuating here... That folks from
| these schools or who do good at algorithms don't see black
| folks as their equals? That sounds incredibly racist.
| imbnwa wrote:
| > I mean, it comes from every intro to algorithm and data
| structures classes at every serious CS program.
|
| If you wanted to indicate the level of generality here you
| wouldn't have used the adjective "serious"
|
| > Not sure what you are insinuating here... That folks from
| these schools or who do good at algorithms don't see black
| folks as their equals?
|
| I said "least likely to have any experience
| communicating... as peers". Hard to talk about "culture
| fit" when you don't have experience gauging certain folk
| who're far from sharing your background. That's just simple
| empiricism, which is why the reciprocal notion is true for
| many Black folk as well. De facto segregation has ruinous
| effects.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > If you wanted to indicate the level of generality here
| you wouldn't have used the adjective "serious"
|
| I've seen a lot of programs that have "IT" or other
| technical terms in their description but that would not
| prepare a student for a real Software Engineering
| position. Same thing with a lot of bootcamps.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Serious in this case means any accredited 4 year public
| or private university. So, not boot camps, not sketchy
| for-profit crap like Trump university. I went to an
| unremarkable 4 year public university and they focused
| quite hard on data structures and algorithms. I thought
| it was the same everywhere else...
| fractionalhare wrote:
| _> people that seem to base their identity and life around
| work, and the ones that actually are well rounded people that
| don 't care about which coffee grind size you use on your
| morning crap of joe._
|
| These don't seem related. I happily base my identity around my
| work. I don't care about my coworkers personalities or
| inclinations at all, as long as they're not assholes and
| they're competent.
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by identity? I don't
| hire people because I want them to be friends.
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| What I mean by basing your identity about work is that your
| personality, your life, your social circles, etc etc is based
| around work. Is like someone basing their identity on their
| sexual orientation, or the sports club they support. Their
| work is their life, almost a cult like following, and use
| that work for making others part of that circle (think
| cultural fit shit, about people not wanting to hire/promote
| people because they don't hang around for friday evening beer
| social hour, or in a kind of upper management thing, not
| wanting to hire people that don't play golf)
| dasil003 wrote:
| The reason interviews suck is because FAANG pays multiples of
| most other career paths, so an awful lot of people want those
| jobs, therefore they need an ever higher bar for people to jump
| through. Then every other startup and mid-size company cargo
| cults the process because they want to hire "the best" even
| though their funnel looks nothing like FAANG. Basically at this
| stage whatever process the top company chooses is immediately
| subject to Goodhart's Law, and they end up hiring roughly the
| same number of muppets as every other big company, the only thing
| you get is maybe a slightly higher IQ floor.
|
| Casually playing Factorio with someone might give you a strong
| hint of someone's potential as a software engineer, but the
| minute you bring it anywhere near a high paying job interview
| process you are asking for disaster.
| airza wrote:
| I have a similar pet theory that Baba is You has incredibly high
| predictive power for skilled application security people. It
| would be pretty heinous to hire based on that, of course.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| interesting, at one point I wanted to use sokoban puzzles to
| judge how candidates handle complex tasks. did not do it for
| variety of reasons but might not be such a bad idea to build a
| mock interview out of such non-whiteboard code schemes.
| davelacy wrote:
| I'm going to assume this is satire
| tyingq wrote:
| I don't think there is any silver bullet way to do technical
| interviews. The idea that you can extrapolate a few hours of
| exposure to a person into a reliable predictor of future
| performance is somewhat silly to me. Any technique you use is
| going to be biased for people that are good at "X", where "X" is
| a tiny subset of what you need in an employee.
|
| Obviously, you still need to do interviews, but keep some
| perspective when deciding. Don't overweight any one thing.
| Rule35 wrote:
| I heard good advice for life and interviews (be they for work,
| marriage, etc).
|
| For life, it's that you aren't your weaknesses but your
| strengths. Don't worry about filling the skill hole in juggling
| for instance, put that time into your strengths or hobbies. Be
| a better you, not a more complete someone else.
|
| For hiring though, if you've assured basic competence you're
| now more interested in weaknesses than strengths. You don't
| need the world's best person in the role, you need someone who
| won't bring down the group - either in their incompetence,
| malaise, nasty behavior, or whatever.
|
| So when being interviewing for a role don't worry about being
| the best, shoot for 60% and you're golden - but do your best to
| avoid showing even a single red flag.
| pydry wrote:
| You can choose to make X (what's tested for in the interview) a
| representative cross section of the harder things that you
| need.
|
| Or don't even try and make X _not even intersect_ with anything
| you need.
|
| It still puzzles me how many people opt "don't even try".
| tyingq wrote:
| I see what you mean, but in my experience there's this
| tendency where you think you're testing for "X", but you
| aren't really.
|
| A whiteboard FizzBuzz might be actually testing for
| memorization, deliberate interview prep, extrovert
| tendencies, etc. And not for any kind of actual technical
| skill. Failing the FizzBuzz could also just mean high social
| anxiety.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| Beyond Fizbuzz, the standard algo type interviews are just
| optimizing for time spent on Leetcode or length of time
| since finishing College.
| pydry wrote:
| True. I find I have to iterate on my processes quite a few
| times before I squash these issues.
|
| They're conceptually similar to software bugs - inevitable,
| often surprising and impossible to fix all at once.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > A senior developer should be able to explore the UI and figure
| out a goal, then establish a plan for accomplishing that goal.
|
| I'm confounded on why the author thinks being a senior developer
| (say, in embedded systems) would make someone better at exploring
| a _game UI_ compared to an intern-candidate who puts 20+ hours
| into gaming per week...
|
| I would probably walk out of the interview if someone suggested I
| play factorio as part of the hiring process - I have been
| intentionally avoiding it - you might as well offer me a free hit
| of crack cocaine while you're at it.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Factorio isn't a game about shooting things. It is a systems-
| design game. Your goal is to orchestrate the processing of
| several different resources (iron, copper, coal, oil, stone)
| into several different intermediate products (gears, circuit
| boards, sulfuric acid, radar systems, etc), in service of a
| final deliverable (a rocket launch, or if you're ambitious, a
| continuous series of rocket launches).
|
| To that end you must manage a variety of subsystems and how
| they interact with each other and with the components that you
| build. You will be rewarded for consistency, for modularity,
| for automation of frequent tasks, for reproducible designs, for
| looking ahead and preparing for scalability. You will be
| punished for failing to plan ahead. You will also be punished
| for trying to scale too fast, too soon.
|
| The interview is a bad idea, yes. Even if all candidates were
| experienced with the game, as a showcase of how to build
| things, you'd still need many more hours than a typical
| interviewee is willing to provide, to showcase the approach.
| But it's not a game you get better at by focusing on "gaming".
| [deleted]
| gentleman11 wrote:
| My wife wasn't a gamer before she met me. There are a hundred
| little things that gamers take for granted that non gamers
| don't know to expect. You have to explain things like "there
| are lots of places you can go here, but if you're a gamer you
| know it's all fake: there is only one way to progress and
| there will be green lights at that spot. Why green lights?
| Who knows, green is just a standard message games use to say
| go-here, you know about it because of all the games you
| played in the past. Also, for some reason there will be items
| hidden if you wander around"
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| You say Factorio isn't a game about shooting things, yet
| probably the best way to be useful to a team game you've just
| joined is to fill your inventory with rails, drills, and
| combat equipment and then point useful at the nearest
| unexploited ore patch and go forward until all the red spots
| between the patch and the factory are gone. Doesn't prove
| anything about your programming ability, but since the
| factory is always gonna be running out of some resource
| anyway you'll be perceived as useful
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Factorio isn't a game about shooting things.
|
| Thank you for providing additional information, but I already
| had a good idea of what Factorio is; that is how I know I
| would be addicted if I were to ever try it.
|
| I was specifically criticizing the idea that a senior
| developer should automatically be more proficient than an
| intern at _navigating the UI of a game_ - even when that game
| is Factorio. It 's seems preposterous to me, even though it's
| a tiny detail in a larger essay.
| viklove wrote:
| > navigating the UI of a game
|
| Why does it matter if it's a game? Navigating the UI of
| GitHub, JIRA, VSCode, etc. are all important. Being able to
| learn new skills is a good thing to judge people by. Seeing
| how quickly they pick up tools and apply them to solve
| problems is a great way to see how good a teammate someone
| can be.
|
| People just get hung-up over the fact that it's a game -- I
| don't see anyone complaining about the fact that you have
| to figure out how to use the HackerRank UI during an
| interview for some reason.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > You will be punished for failing to plan ahead. You will
| also be punished for trying to scale too fast, too soon.
|
| Repeatedly playing a game helps one internalize and "have a
| feel" of when the timing is right. I agree with you - it's a
| terrible way to hire people, for the reasons you state, and
| because it unfairly favors people who have played Factorio
| before.
|
| The thing about game engines is that they can only represent
| a simplified approximation; for example driving the "same"
| car model in 2 different games feels very different.
| Therefore game resource management and complexity are nothing
| like real-life. Would you want to work with a
| Director/Project Manager on the strength of how good they
| were at StarCraft 2 in an interview? After all, it's about
| resource management, planning and timing, right? </snark>
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Or you could just pair program with them on a real-world
| problem...
| arcturus17 wrote:
| An amusing thought experiment but obviously it would have
| catastrophic consequences in real life... Pretty much anyone can
| get good at the game by watching Let's Plays or reading guides.
| huehehue wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but the ability to study (read
| guides) and demonstrate understanding/retention of the material
| by actually doing something (playing Factorio) is a good
| signal.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Sounds like copying and pasting jQuery snippets from Stack
| Overflow.
| erichdongubler wrote:
| Honest question: is that fundamentally any different than
| building skills by imitating StackOverflow solutions or
| studying principles and patterns to build knowledge? I would
| view those as respective software development analogues, though
| there's definitely room for disagreement, particularly for very
| deep problem and solution spaces.
| MrKristopher wrote:
| The difference is that what you can learn on StackOverflow
| might actually be useful on the job.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I don't know, but I wouldn't take the risk to find out in a
| professional environment.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Jesus wept, what a horrifying abomination of an idea. The way I
| play computer games is so utterly unlike how I write code or
| design/manage computing systems, I can only surmise this is the
| product of confirmation bias run amuck, a nightmarish echo
| chamber of bad ideas reinforcing someone's ghastly monoculture.
|
| Cramming these tortured metaphors into your hiring process is
| worse than whiteboard programming, something I didn't believe
| possible until reading this steaming pile of numberwang.
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| Pro tip: Don't take advice or listen to people who use furry or
| anime profile pics.
| abootstrapper wrote:
| I have 100 hours in Factorio. I'm looking for a job. Where do I
| apply?
| draw_down wrote:
| Yes, everyone has their own obscure way of doing phrenology to
| decide if you have the right kind of engineer brain. I'm sure
| asking me to play this game will tell you _so_ much more than
| asking me to figure out how many golf balls will fit in a 747.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Looking forward to this becoming the new standard with an
| ecosystem of bootcamps, an infinite stream of blogs, youtube
| videos, and personal tutors teaching you how to play optimal
| factorio while candidates sweat bullets and cry.
| MrKristopher wrote:
| Also don't forget all the blog posts about how hiring is
| broken, particularly because high school dropouts are able to
| put hundreds of hours into the game while senior swe are busy
| with their jobs and families.
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