#code samples

This might be surprising, but recruiters and hiring managers often don’t actually bother to look at (or even ask for) submitted materials unless you’re an artist and have a portfolio. Most programmer candidacy proceedings I’ve been through haven’t asked for code samples, but prefer to send programming tests instead. I never expect any of the people I interview with to have played or even looked at my games before, even though several of them were very well known. I certainly can’t show them samples of the code I wrote for my employers - most professional programmers’ work is under NDA anyway, so asking for code samples isn’t a super common thing. I know that I’ve personally rejected zero candidates because of their how their personal projects were presented online. I’ve only ever looked at them after phone interviews and programming or design tests to get a better idea of a serious candidate.

What hiring managers especially look for in a submission, however, is a resume that shows experience doing the duties and tasks that match the job opening. If that’s for a gameplay programmer role, we want to see things like building game systems, 3D math, and experience working with designers. If that’s for a level designer, we want to see things like building levels for Skyrim, Quake, Counter-Strike, etc. Make sure your skills are well-described in your resume. If it’s a decent match, that’s typically enough to get you past the initial screening process.

Remember, when you’re doing an initial submission to a studio, you’re usually not presenting to a dev on the team. First, you have to get past the HR recruiter who sifts through all the candidates and only passes along the promising ones. Depending on the studio, these recruiters can go through dozens or even hundreds of CVs on a weekly basis. They don’t have the time to go look at everybody’s web page or github to do a deep dive, they put the resumes they get into two big piles - pass and fail. Those that pass move on to the hiring manager (and the candidate’s likely boss) for inspection, who will then pare down the list even further. In my experience, we give callbacks to maybe 10-20% of the total candidates who submit for a position. This means that a well-written, descriptive resume tailored for the job description will go a lot farther towards getting you a job than anything else.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

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Oh, no worries.  Thanks for the comment too.

I don’t do a lot of programming, though I have the vague impression that I’m good at it.  I’ve always been good at math and good at problem-solving, so I just had this intuition that I’d be good at a lot of stuff, and which I was able to pick up with no effort.

Let’s first have some basic understanding of Apache Ignite and then we will look more into its life cycle with the help of a demo application.

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Features :

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Code samples are kind of a weird thing, because it’s often difficult to give one piece of code and get enough context to learn enough about the programmer who wrote it. Most of the engineering hiring managers I’ve talked with about this subject prefer to give self-contained programming tests instead of asking for code samples for this reason. That said, to understand what kind of code samples they’re looking for, you need to understand what they hope to learn from the code samples.

#1. We want to see you solve a non-trivial problem

We write code to solve problems. Some of it is fairly rote automation of stuff, and that’s something pretty much anybody can write… that’s not what the hiring manager is looking for. The more interesting samples involve solving a problem where there are multiple potential answers, and some of them are clearly better than others. If the problem can be solved in O(n log n), then the hiring manager will be disappointed if you solve it in O(n²). The best answers are fast, clear, and elegantly handle failure. Show us a real problem that you solved in a fast, clear, and elegant way.

#2. We want to see your mastery of the language and architecture

When programming in any language, there are going to be little optimizations of the language that can add up over time. In C++, for example, declaring variables of the same fundamental type together saves memory. Passing const references to objects is usually better than passing an object by value. You should know these kind of gotchas, because it shows a better overall view of code - we want to see that making little optimizations like this are second nature to you.

#3. We want to see your code’s legibility

You’re looking to join a team, and that means working with other engineers. At some point, somebody else is probably going to have to pick up code that you wrote and you’re not going to be around to answer questions about it. Maybe you’re on vacation, out sick, too busy, or have moved on to another project but, eventually, somebody else is going to have figure out how your code works by looking at it. You should imagine that this somebody has severe rage issues and will come after you if you force her to read difficult or awful code.

This doesn’t just mean “comment your code” either. While commenting code is useful (and I encourage you to do it), the code you write should be written with clarity in mind. The entire architecture of your code should be intuitive and clear. The function name should clearly state exactly what it does and it should return something appropriate. The parameters passed in should be easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly. A new programmer who comes in and looks at it should be able to understand what it does. A new programmer who just looks at the declaration should be able to figure out how to use it.

Overall, hiring managers want to see that you can solve problems in an efficient and elegant manner, that you understand the language and its idiosyncrasies, and that the code you write is good in a team environment. This is what your code sample should show us. If you don’t have something like that lying around, give yourself a relatively small-scope coding challenge (like writing a text-based checkers program or a program that solves a boggle board that’s just an N by M array) and come up with your solution for it in the given language. Review it. Show it to other programmers and ask them to nitpick it. Re-review it, and make sure it is code you can feel proud of.

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