4 ms·

Yeah games company interviews can be hilarious. I had an interview for a company in the south of England a long time ago. The first half went okay, then in the

by davedx 2y ago

Yeah games company interviews can be hilarious. I had an interview for a company in the south of England a long time ago. The first half went okay, then in the second half the whiteboard came out, and I was asked to "implement C++ object oriented method dispatch in C" with a chunky marker pen. I mean, it's not exactly a rocket science question, but it's not easy either (on a whiteboard, with a chunky pen), and in the end it just felt like it was some weird hazing rather than any test of my actual software development or programming ability. I stayed in the interview, went home, never heard from them again. I ended up getting a job at a different studio that had a slightly saner technical interview, and after I started there, I heard the first place had gone bankrupt! Sometimes you just dodge bullets...

CoastalCoder 2y ago
Depending on the specific job role, I actually like that interview question. It tests knowledge of the C++ vtable and function pointers, which is probably a good marker for intermediate-level C++ knowledge. Especially for debugging some heinous bugs.
- davedx 2y ago
  It tests knowledge of how C++ itself is implemented. That's not really something most people study or prepare for unless they work on C++ compilers. I wouldn't call knowing how vtables are implemented intermediate-level C++ knowledge, and I never again encountered it despite spending another ... 5-6 years writing C++ code afterwards. It's intellectually interesting for sure, I think depending on how it's introduced it could make an interesting discussion in an interview. But asking someone to implement them from scratch on a whiteboard? Come on. :)
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    My personal experience has been that vtables: (1) occasionally show up in learning materials regarding virtual methods, virtual inheritance, static vs. dynamic types, and RTTI, and (2) sometimes understanding them is very helpful when debugging gnarly problems, especially with objects that have been wrongly typecast. I.e., you can inspect vtables in gdb. Maybe the takeaway here is that C++ is a huge topic, and different people have had to learn different details.

by davedx 2y ago

CoastalCoder 2y ago

Depending on the specific job role, I actually like that interview question. It tests knowledge of the C++ vtable and function pointers, which is probably a good marker for intermediate-level C++ knowledge. Especially for debugging some heinous bugs.

davedx 2y ago
It tests knowledge of how C++ itself is implemented. That's not really something most people study or prepare for unless they work on C++ compilers. I wouldn't call knowing how vtables are implemented intermediate-level C++ knowledge, and I never again encountered it despite spending another ... 5-6 years writing C++ code afterwards. It's intellectually interesting for sure, I think depending on how it's introduced it could make an interesting discussion in an interview. But asking someone to implement them from scratch on a whiteboard? Come on. :)
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  My personal experience has been that vtables: (1) occasionally show up in learning materials regarding virtual methods, virtual inheritance, static vs. dynamic types, and RTTI, and (2) sometimes understanding them is very helpful when debugging gnarly problems, especially with objects that have been wrongly typecast. I.e., you can inspect vtables in gdb. Maybe the takeaway here is that C++ is a huge topic, and different people have had to learn different details.