Karl Schmidt

Our building has been trying to deal with this for 6 years but the city keeps stalling it

Oh that’s great to hear, I haven’t played that series but heard good things

Oh great! I haven’t played them

And the story.... "last time on ____" style like saturday morning cartoons would do

Is shadowing a part of your hiring system?

You get another perspective when it comes to reviewing the interview notes and feedback sessions. You also provide more representation to the candidate of who is on the team.

It's lower stakes for the person shadowing. You aren't expected to run the interview, so it's more comfortable. You can find out if you want to run interviews without committing to doing one. It's a incremental way to get interviewing experience.

You can read instructions, take courses, and even role-play, but there is no substitute for actually being in a live interview. You get a chance to see how an interviewer handles unexpected events, and how they maintain or adapt the process for the situation.

They sit-in for an screening call, technical interview, or some other meeting with a candidate. The person running the interview can announce that this person will be here to observe, and they can optionally do a quick introduction or hello.

I've found this to have several benefits:

Shadowing is one of the most effective ways to train someone for interviewing.

Shadowing is to: "accompany (someone) in their daily activities at work in order to gain experience at or insight into a job".

Reminder to other indie dev teams especially new teams. Most of us are happy to share advice and give feedback on publisher/funding/platform deals and terms. There are some shady predatory biz weasels that will take advantage of you as soon as your game starts to pop off. Please reach out.

Honestly, AI slop PRs are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for #Godot maintainers.

If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of:

fund.godotengine.org

I have something like this for my MentorCruise intro calls, even though it's just me doing the interviews. It makes it easier, consistent, and I can focus more on the content of the calls than the structure.

Even a short simple standard operating procedure document can make a big difference.

You can make copies and fill them out as notes. Share them with other folks you train to run interviews. Update them over time from feedback.

It could be a format like this:

1. Share the call structure with the candidate.
2. Quick introductions
3. Open-ended question and follow-ups
4. Previous project question
5. Questions from the candidate

If you don't have a documented process for running interviews, I highly recommend you make one.

You can start simple: a single document. Google Doc, Notion page, something.

I think I heard about DICE this year more than any other.

Injured my rib in BJJ today. Ow.

Hiring can be better. It could even be fun, for everyone involved. Dare to innovate here!

They might make small prototypes to test an approach, try some new technology, or validate something. They hopefully do code reviews. So maybe you could have a tiny-scoped spec ready for candidates to work on or review. Bonus points if it's themed to your company in some way.

Review what your engineers actually do during the day. They probably discuss bugs and possible approaches to feature requests. So those are good things to simulate in an interview.

Aside from being questionable predictors of job performance, they don't give the candidate any clue as to what they actually would do in the role. So what should you do?

Do your engineers complete brain-teaser tests all day? Then why use them in the interview process?

An interview process needs to have proxies to signal competence and understanding. But there are better (and more fun) ways than whiteboard coding or leetcode tests.

Ugh that sucks.

Re-examine your hiring process with the lens of intention. You might end up with a more focused, shorter process. You might keep a bunch of stuff. You might end up with something slightly enjoyable for all parties involved!

We often copy & paste without questioning: does this work for us? Does it align with our values? Stage of company? Brand and culture?

They would regularly seek and review feedback to improve the process, just like a software project.

When reviewing the hiring process of a startup, I can usually figure out which big tech corporation the founders came from.

I didn't step back and really think about the core intention of hiring, until later on when I worked for a startup that did. They thought about each step, always going back to the goal: a qualified employee that is a good fit for the company.

When I first started hiring - I had no idea what I was doing. I just repeated what I had gone through myself. Whiteboard coding problems. Brain teasers. Trivia.

My first job in games came via a 4-month co-op (internship) placement at Relic Entertainment. It was an incredible opportunity that helped kick start my career. I'm still connected to colleagues I met then.

Use your unique advantages.