Hi all,
have some one give me the idea to make a question for leader or senior unity3d programmer?
Thanks,
Just give them a programming game jam challenge, think of a simple prototype game design and ask them to write it within a fixed time frame.
For examples of what experienced people can do with Unity check out previous Ludum Dare entries which should have been made in 48 hours or less.
But references, blogs, games and assets on the store are other good indicators of a developer’s ability.
A 48 hour challenge for getting a job? You realised most interviews are 30min-1 hour?
Then I must be doing something wrong. An interview with me for a role in my team is at least 3 hours if not 4.
If you are interviewing and want some questions to determine how much someone knows about Unity, I’d suggest:
a) What is the most complex thing you have done in Unity?
b) What is an asset bundle?
c) What’s a good use for a plugin?
d) What’s deferred rendering?
e) How does ShaderLab work?
f) What editor extensions have you written?
g) Talk me through how you used the Unity Profiler to optimise your most recent game.
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My last interview was 1.25 hours with the boss and another hour with the team. Most of my interviews have averaged around an hour and a half with the interviewer and another half an hour to 45 minutes with the team I’d be working with.
So, for a lead/senior developer? The results of a 48 hour jam doesn’t seem that bad. I’d probably still go more with the venerable *Graham Dunnet’s questions though.
* Mr, Dr, Ms, Mrs? Although I’ve never known any female "Graham"s, I’d rather not presume gender on the internet, hence the Ms/Mrs.
These are the initial questions we ask potential candidates to gauge their Unity expertise…
1.) How active are you on the unity forums and unity answers websites, and what is your username?
2.) What are your favourite tools for increasing productivity while you work and how do they help you?
3.) What source version control software would you recommend using with Unity and why?
4.) Can you explain the difference between the Update, LateUpdate and FixedUpdate methods, and how they all relate to each other?
5.) What can you tell me about Unity’s threading model?
6.) If I have a finite state machine with the states idle, walking, running, jumping, attacking, defending, fleeing, but in my update method I have numerous if else statements checking the state…
Name any major problems that can occur with this sort of implementation, and with which design pattern would you correct this implementation?
7.) Name some of your favourite Unity plugins and how they help you?
- We have probably about 50+ top notch Unity devs here, Afaik, I am the only one that checks/participates in the forums. I wouldn’t bother using that as any kind of factor, unless you use it as the inverse. Participation in forums has no indication to skill.
4 is decent. The rest are more about checking to see if they have the same preferences/patterns as you already use. They should be more open ended, and intended to determine how they would handle a situation, not if they agree with how you might handle an FSM is proper and if that is most efficient. That kind of stuff implementation details, not high level stuff sr/lead stuff.
Any dev that relies too heavily on plugins probably isn’t a lead/sr. level.
The only plugin I ever used is NGUI… and most likely uLink.
I dont feel the need to use others plugins (code specific) generally. I prefer to write my own code.
I dont know if I would want to give out my forum name. I can be a bit of a c*** online. lol.
A two day jam is a completely different type of experience to a long term development. It wouldn’t be indicative of anything of use. It may be a good gauge of technical skill, but it isn’t much of a gauge of the “lead” part - doing things fast on your own doesn’t at all indicate how we’ll you’ll do things with a team over an extended period.
Oh? What makes you say this?
At our business, effective “make/acquire/buy” decision making is a critical aspect to being a lead at anything. On one hand we don’t want to pay someone for days or weeks of effort to make something we could have bought and made slight modifications to, and on the other we don’t want to get stuck relying on 3rd party crap just because it was cheap.
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As I mentioned, these are the initial screening questions, and to me they seem pretty open-ended. Not sure how more open-ended they could be or which ones you think are not open-ended and don’t try to get the developer to explain how they would approach a problem.
Regarding the forum/community question, this is important, regardless of what you may think, as someone’s attitude towards the community and conduct on the forums is often a reflection of how they operate in the work place. If the developer offers many helpful, insightful posts, thats a big plus over someone who trolls other people on the forums with little substance.
Every dev house uses plugins. You guys at Disney rely on a huge set of plugins in the latest title we are porting for you. Knowing plugins to save yourself time and knowing plugins that are used industry-wide such as NGUI and the Prime31 and analytics plugins is an extremely important part of being a well-rounded developer and which is why I believe it’s an important question to ask.
If a developer has never heard of NGUI or Flurry or Prime31, I’d start getting worried, quickly.
Leveraging and relying on 3rd party tools are two very different things.
Certainly you are correct, but we were talking dev not business and I said “relies too heavily”. But, if a dev can’t build a GUI system in Unity, they aren’t a senior dev by any stretch of the imagination. They certainly should know their way around and be familiar with plugins and when to leverage them. Too often people have slapped together a sort of game using mostly 3rd party tools and making they assumption that they are now an experienced game developer. They are not. A dev who relies/depends on several 3rd party tools is not a competent developer.
Fair enough, as initial questions.
If you are using it rule out potentials, you are going to miss out on a lot. The Unity forum is is a very small community and not a lot a of professionals are active here. If you judge by their activity that is one thing, as long as you are ruling out due to lack of activity.
Depends on the title, some stuff yes, some not so much. But regardless, as I clarified above, it is was more about devs that “rely” on plugins vs ones that leverage them.
Most of the people we have interviewed have very little forum presence. But just from reading a few forum posts you can gauge quite clearly where their skill level is at, determined both by the questions they ask, and any answers they give. It’s just another feather in the hat, but it’s not a decision maker.
Fair enough, that could provide useful insight into their actual skill level.
- In order to verify you are eligible to work in the USA, please allow us to open up the eVerify website and I’m going to hand you the keyboard and mouse, can you please enter your information there. I don’t need to see what you type, when you are done, we only need to see a Yes or No answer on site.
I’ve seen responses such as No Match, Does not exist, Different name or they just leave after asking 1).
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Talk me though how you would handle physics, terrain, combat, spells and quests on an MMO server, without using Unity Headless.
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Talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using NGUI compared to using either ScaleForm, DF-GUI or IZGUI.
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Talk about how you would go about making iOS plugin or Android plugins.
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Explain which previous management tool you used. Scrum, Waterfall, Agile and how you can lead three different teams - the 2D arts team, the 3D arts team and team of developers.
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Talk about how you can use 7zip to emulate AssetModel. Explain the pros cons of using 7zip vs. AssetBundle and what you would do to do run-time loading of models, assets and terrains.
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Can you discuss about GUI states, direct X writes or OpenGL writing to screen when building a GUI plug-in for Unity.
8 ) Can you tell about differences between Unity’s Shaders and Open GL shaders.
9 ) Can you talk us through how along side Unity’s Profiler, your usage of other profilers, such as iOS profiler, Android profiler.
- Explain how you can avoid or step-side AOT errors on IOS environment.
Gotcha. I thought you were saying that using 3rd party stuff when you can roll your own implies not having a senior level of experience, but you were not.
I “rely” on them all the time, but from a business perspective rather than an I-couldn’t-do-it-myself perspective.
Which is why a) I said “seem” and b) I followed up immediately with:
The response was intended to refute the idea that an interview shouldn’t be any longer than .5-1 hour.
Indeed, a game jam would not be the only factor in determining eligibility for the position. But it could be a part of the process. Or even seeing how they would deal with a similarly short deadline. How would he/she organize the time? If given a team, how would they ideally delegate? What sort of development process would they prefer to follow? Would they be able to set a realistic target state for the game? Programmers, even great ones, can wind up having a tendency to underestimate the time it takes to complete a feature…unless they realize this fact and adjust for it accordingly.
I’m not saying I advocate for the idea wholeheartedly, but if I were being considered for such a position, and part of the process was a game jam, I wouldn’t think it totally off target.