I always thought this was standard. Certainly every job in gamedev for which I've ever landed an interview required

In my experience it was about half.

Certainly for entry level jobs there will be coding tests, but once you've got a few years of experience they are less necessary.

Hey all. Sorry late reply but I lost all forms of internet and telco not know what was wrong. it just started to work again now. lucky or it was going to be 5 days until a tech could come out.

It was only one question. and it was for picking tomatoes lol. so they really should just used colours and not numbers.

And like I said I can never do them no matter how long I look at them. And also you have to be free from injury which ruled me out anyway so the whole thing probably a waste of time. As I'm stuck with bulged neck disc. Just another dumb idea of mine. heres the place 10 km from where I live and its high tech Sundrop Farms. there only looking for full time pickers at the moment. I would like to do the maintenance side of things as I'm a metal fabricator by trade and have a associate diploma in mechanical engineering, plus IT and programming, and also I spent a good part of my youth working during the day and doing night schooling to get to this point.

The plant looks maintenance intensive, With all the mirror having motors to track the sun. It doe's look like a cool place to work but.

My own personal belief is that it's the wrong way to filter applicants.

For the companies it feels like a good way to filter applicants.

Their effort is to have their HR person email a form to anyone who passes the first resume filter. The much-smaller number of people who complete the programming test can have their code copy/pasted into a source file where automated tests are run. If the tests pass, then it passes the filter and they can be called in for an interview.

From an HR perspective it is great at reducing the stack from hundreds of applicants to ten or twenty.

But as you point out, it is also a wrong way to filter them.

Many excellent programmers won't bother with the coding tests. I've been working as a programmer for years and have a long list of game credits, that should be more than enough evidence that I know what I am doing.

So while it does help HR by letting candidates filter themselves out, it is bad for the company because many of the best and the brightest will not bother. The policy excludes the bottom half, but also excludes the gems at the top.

As I wrote, it seems about half of the employers I've worked with and interviewed with over the years rely on them. They are more common for entry level workers, but once you've demonstrated experience over the years there is no need.

That is one of the big difficulties of hiring entry level programmers.

On the one hand, you want to quickly exclude the mediocre programmers from the pool. On the other hand, the true gems of upcoming developers are less likely to want to do that work.

I think the companies that don't look at other factors and blindly send every potential programmer a large quiz are taking the wrong approach. They do quickly exclude the bad coders, but they also exclude a lot of gems.

You need to balance both sides of existing evidence and 'proof' of a quiz that could easily be found online. If they have a portfolio of existing code or completed demos or even shipped products, that can be strong evidence. If they don't have any evidence, then you can go based on grades and other factors.

In either case, at the entry level and sometimes even at the mid level you still will need to have them write some code. It can be writing code during the interview rather than a pass/fail test before the interview. For the gems there should be an abundance of evidence that they can do the job, for the mediocre people, hopefully you aren't interviewing many of those.

Here is the dirty secret, and it applies to all of the tech sector, not just games.

Interviewing for talent is hard. Getting an idea of skills in the course of a day of interviews is *hard*.

Even looking at past performance (especially in games) is hard. Are they ready for the next project, or did that last game burn them out?

(Seriously, I have known people who would not hire people out of studios known for high crunch, because they had had too many cases of hiring people who were burned out. You had to go somewhere else first and prove you were ok, before they would consider you)

Whiteboarding questions aren't there to prove how good a programmer are, they are to weed out the people who can talk all the right talk but are inept.

There are all sorts of schools of thought on how to interview, and there are trainers out there touting methods for companies to use. People keep looking, because this is hard, and because the cost of a bad hire is high.