7 ms·
Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025
- imsurajkadam 11mo agoThis is very consuming. If chief tier people start doing this thjs then this will start draining “em more. Chief operated people should focus and be picky about whom they want to WORK WITH.
- ro_bit 11mo agoThe blog post is about the hiring process for a three person game studio
- overgard 11mo agoTotally curious about the "Candidate used AI to reply"
- DeathArrow 11mo agoI would have outsourced the initial screening to a hiring agency and only interview top 5. For a 3 people team this 4 weeks hiring process is too tedious.
- aeonflux 11mo agoResults from outsourcing can vary. You might end-up with totally unmatched 5 candidates and complain that there is no good people on the market. How would asses that the agency did good job (or any job at all)?
- ro_bit 11mo agoOne note that might be good to highlight in the article is that the take-home is expected to be 2 hours long. From my experience, they are much longer so I was initially surprised to see take-home's being given before an initial call until I looked at the assignment itself.
- kassner 11mo agoI still consider this a red flag. The company wants me to put time into the hiring process, but they can’t be bothered to do the same. If there is at least a recruiter screening first, I’ll apply and ask about “Bring Your Own Code Examples”, mostly when their daily work would use tools that I have some code published.
- resonious 11mo ago> but they can’t be bothered to do the same They will need to review your submission, which absolutely does take time.
- LtWorf 11mo agoI'm sure the AI will do that.
- stavros 11mo agoWho do you think will write the submission code?
- joshdavham 11mo ago> They will need to review your submission, which absolutely does take tim But that's the kicker: they won't review your submission!
- joshdavham 11mo ago> I still consider this a red flag. The company wants me to put time into the hiring process, but they can’t be bothered to do the same. Exactly this. It costs a company nothing to give you a take-home, but it will cost you (the candidate) potentially many hours. On my last job search, I got burned a number of times where I'd work for hours on a take-home only to get ghosted. I don't think they even looked at my solution. Now I have a personal policy where I will refuse to do a take-home unless the interviewer sits there with me while I do it. This demonstrates to me that the interviewer is actually serious and respectful of my time.
- dainiusse 11mo agoCurious about "no-AI" policy. From my experience interviewing lately AI is allowed,but the task is usually big in a small time window. So you quickly spin up the project but I see most of work in QA
- testing22321 11mo agoA friend at a nearly-FAANG said not using AI tooling in the interview is now an automatic fail. “Not that you’d be able to complete the task on time without it anyway”
- Vegenoid 11mo agoI interviewed at a place that proudly stated that they have a goal that x% new LOC are LLM-generated. They didn't say what x was, but implied it was high.
- OptionOfT 11mo agoUnless they empower developers to thoroughly review that generated code this is a recipe for disaster. And even then, reviews are the first thing to be cut when pressure goes up. It's a dangerous line to cross.
- ryandrake 11mo agoI don't understand why a company would have a goal like this which isn't tied to something around business success. Measure a meaningful output rather than an input. This is like having a goal that x% new LOC are typed by the programmer's left hand.
- teiferer 11mo agoThat's a good policy. If that's what they do in the job later as well, then it allows LLM-skeptical applicants to immediately move on. An interview is a two way street. I'd like the company to present itself authentically so that I don't waste time if they eventually turn out to have a culture I don't like, e.g. demanding LLM coding assistent use.
- arresin 11mo ago> Work with Indies — no formal connection, but the results were great! –. Our listing went live at 11:30 AM on October 15th, and we had to ask them to shut it down by 6:30 PM on October 17th because we had too many candidates. In the end, we collected 159 applications. Is this normal in Seattle? That’s a tonne of applicants especially on what seems like a niche job site. Are they mostly junk offshore applications or bots? Interesting that out of that it looks like 90% were late applications or not qualified and only 17 total completed the take home.
- npinsker 11mo agoIt’s not a niche site within its market.
- zipy124 11mo agoThere are an incredible amount of CS graduates, far more than the available jobs, so the number of under-employed CS grads only goes up with time. If anything I'd have expected somewhere around 200-250 apps for that time period.
- TrackerFF 11mo agoI met this guy who became a game dev later in life, as in his 30s. He has quite the non-traditional resume as far as devs go, with no formal CS education. In any case, he went on to work on a game, and kept doing so for years. He hired artists etc. but did the core development himself. Released the game, which has now sold over 150k copies since the release last year. Obviously not crazy numbers up in the millions or tens of millions, but impressive for a first release, and from a dev basically learning as he's moving along, with a regular 9-5 job and family - doing it purely for the love of the game. Makes me wonder if he'd ever have gotten the chance, had he first tried to join some small indie studio, rather than the DIY route.
- bob1029 11mo agoI am impressed with the extent of the effort here. I struggle with the notion of working with just one other person on a game. Building an entire hiring pipeline and documenting it seems like something that would immediately kill the dream for me at this scale. There is something that feels very cursed to me about a team of size 2~10 for game dev. At this point I'd much rather go solo or join a team of 100+. Zero structure or a lot of structure. A medium amount of structure seems to bring the maximum amount of entropy.
- bluescrn 11mo ago> There is something that feels very cursed to me about a team of size 2~10 for game dev. Very small teams can be great - so long as you are able to focus on building a game, not building a company. You need to treat it more like a game jam, at least in the early stages of a project. Just make things, see what works, rapidly prototype and iterate. But you probably all need to be equal partners in the project from the start for it to work well. It's not so good for creative work when there's a management/employees 'them and us' divide from the start.
- meheleventyone 11mo agoHaving worked on games in giant teams and small teams my own preference is actually on the smaller end. Ten people feels like a comfortable limit. I'm very much a generalist though and love contributing to all the different bits and pieces of a game. As such I generally find larger teams overly bureaucratic, slow to move and stifling. Solo dev requires a lot of mental fortitude because there is no one else to carry the momentum.
- chr1ss_code 11mo ago"Our take-home lets candidates code." - As a dev, I absolutely hate the practice of such assignments. Every non-junior dev/coder should already have at least some indicators out there showing how they code - GitHub, a personal site or any other resources. For juniors or CS graduates there might be bit of a grey zone, but even then, with how widely available web space is nowadays, there’s really no excuse not to have something out there if you are serious about the "love for coding". So the sentence “we need to respect people’s time as much as our own” seems flawed to me, because you obviously don’t respect the time of the candidates who coded for nothing for you. To me, that is also a huge red flag when considering a position. Important should be assessing someone’s theoretical knowledge of software patterns, principles and architectures ..just getting a feel for their nerd level. Seeing how much they actually care about code and details, whether they can really express themselves and if they could communicate a problem clearly.
- automatic6131 11mo agoThis (particular) take home assignment looks absolutely fine to me. If you can't do it under 2 hours (maybe I couldn't? I've never used Unity) then you shouldn't _want_ to work there.
- nradov 11mo agoLol you clearly don't have much experience. Most of the best developers have all of their code locked up in corporate repositories and have nothing they can legally share.
- stevoski 11mo agoThis is a good write-up. If you’ve never run a hiring process, it’s hard to get a feel for just how difficult and time-consuming it is. And risky - hiring someone wrong for the role is very expensive and disruptive. And yet more likely to happen that you’d think, even with a rigorous selection process.
- edent 11mo agoWhy not list the salary up front? That reduces the number of people with wildly different remuneration expectations?
- ludicrousdispla 11mo agoYeah, I lose a lot of interest whenever I am asked my salary expectations.
- chihuahua 11mo agoI'd prefer to get that out there early in the process, rather than go through 5 interviews and then find out they're offering half of my minimum requirement.
- FinnKuhn 11mo agoBecause they hope that someone gives them a number that is lower than the salary they had in mind.
- lone-cloud 11mo agoBingo. Discussing salary is a game and the first person to say a number loses.
- ryandrake 11mo agoIt's totally unserious to ask a candidate to negotiate against himself by providing a ceiling. As the candidate, just say $1M/year and move on to the next employer. If they're not asking a serious question they should not expect a serious answer.
- TZubiri 11mo agoA more generous interpretation is that they want to find out what the market salary is. How are they supposed to know what the market price is if they say their salary range first?
- roenxi 11mo agoThe perspective here is subtly baised - look at the diagram down the bottom and realise that they were always only going to hire 1 person, so all the reasons that they give for not hiring the person are, in fact, not reasons that the person filtered out wasn't hired. They are processes to rank the applicants. If there were more candidates they'd add more reasons not to hire most of them, if there were less candidates the reasons not to hire would start to disappear. In particular, companies are in some sense bluffing with the "Didn't Qualify" category. I've seen hiring situations where nobody qualifies but they actually need to fill the position - they hired someone who didn't qualify and trained them up. They did a great job. "Didn't qualify" is only a real category for the most demanding jobs. Software is just not one of them, nobody has any idea if dev is going to be good or not before they hire them. Companies often have a hard time picking which devs are the productive ones when they've already hired the dev. So we've got an article about a process used to rank devs, and no particular evidence of whether the dev hired is actually very good. Which is fine, still an interesting read. But it is good to keep a clear perspective. This is one of those situations where doing big parts of the process by fair dice roll is not necessarily an inferior approach.
- k__ 11mo agoTo be fair, "outside of budget" and "didn't qualify" are pretty much catch all.
- c0balt 11mo agoThere's also team culture fit, which depending on (mis)application can be very broad too.
- ludicrousdispla 11mo agoI think the article was more about the gates in the applicant 'funnel' rather than describing their method of ranking applicants as suitable developers. The best dev for the job may have been 'unqualified' given that they were looking for "a generalist who can do both Unity and services coding."
- gedy 11mo ago
- lone-cloud 11mo agoThis sounds like an incredibly toxic hiring process and not a company I'd ever want to work for. So you apply for a job and in response they (maybe) email you back asking for your expected salary (great way to filter out anyone worth hiring btw) and if you're cheap enough they then ask you to do work on a take home assignment. Everyone here thinks that this is okay and they want to be interviewed this way? "Since we are focused on efficiency, we need to respect people’s time as much as our own". How exactly does this process respect the candidates time?
- animal531 11mo agoFor the game industry this is practically amazing. Firstly, for 99% of appointments they usually don't care how good of a developer you are. You may have invented 10 new technologies and have revolutionized the field, if you can't show them a portfolio of games you have shipped then they don't care. They don't hire you for a developer/code role because you're a great developer, they hire you because you've shipped some games before (which is totally a different metric). For whatever reason the whole industry is stuck in this mentality, they can't differentiate between the metrics of appointing a great developer vs trying to find someone that can ship titles. Asking for expected salary is a pretty quick way to filter because no one ever lists their requirement in their cv. If the job listing included their range then they might have gone with just assuming that the applicants would be within that range, but it doesn't hurt to check. The test itself is quite easy and straightforward, if anything the real gotchas around it would be to stand out significantly from everyone else.
- supriyo-biswas 11mo agoA few paragraphs below, the article answers that the company can't afford to pay as much as some others; I assume if you are being already being paid way over the market rate you should keep working at the place you're at. As for the take home, I'd take it or any other kind of non-conventional question that allows me to show me my skills, rather than the usual interview where your interviewer gives you an algorithm or system design question they couldn't solve themselves, with the occasional smirk as they watch you fumble through that question.
- rnewme 11mo agoMike, ludum dare co-founder (and sole maintainer these days) is looking for work. For your consideration please https://mikekasprzak.com/Resume-MikeKasprzak.pdf https://mikekasprzak.com/Resume-MikeKasprzak.pdf
- lunias 11mo agoIMO the take home assignment is trivial, even for non-game developers with zero Unity experience; maybe you don't need a take home assignment at all. I also think that asking people to "not use AI" when you have absolutely no way of enforcing it is just self-deception.
- cs02rm0 11mo ago20 people given a take home test for one role? I get icky feelings about these. Clearly, 18 out of 20 submitted something so I guess most people go along with it and perhaps I'm an outlier.
- zahlman 11mo ago> If we see potential, the first step is always asking the candidate upfront for their expected salary, availability, and whether they want full-time or part-time. Since we are focused on efficiency, we need to respect people’s time as much as our own. Most candidates appreciate it; for example, it immediately filtered out a very qualified candidate whose salary ask was 4 times our budget. I feel like the "respectful of applicants' time" thing to do would be to state a salary range in the posting.
- chihuahua 11mo agoIn fact, for companies of 15 or more employees, this is legally required in job postings in Washington state, where the company from the article is based.
- alfalfasprout 11mo agoannoyingly in WA/CA where salary ranges are required, liquid RSU comp is not (and that's often the majority of the comp).
- sentrysapper 11mo ago> You must ask candidates to solve problems directly related to the role. If you’re hiring a game programmer, knowing how to detect fraud in bank transactions is irrelevant knowledge if that task never appears on the job. I wish more companies understood this. In all my years of interviews I never got a coding interview or take home programming assignment that even remotely resembled the work they needed.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- creer 11mo ago> always asking the candidate upfront for their expected salary [etc - to respect and save everyone time] Isn't that a dark pattern (in addition to being a time saver for everyone)? It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't kind of thing. This is an adversarial question in a process which needs to be ruthless against the time-wasting applications, but also needs to be cooperative with future co-workers. If you are open to a broad range of salary in exchange for perhaps working at a super exciting place, then there is no good answer. Even "I'm open to a broad range of salary if that's needed to work at a super exciting place" is not a great answer. Leaving it to the legal requirement of posting an expected salary range and negotiating from there might be a better way.
- creer 11mo agoThe article includes actual numbers of the filtering funnel! Excellent! "Late applications" though: Wouldn't it be very wasteful though, to dismiss a third of candidates simply because late application when the posting was live just two days? As admitted, the hiring process is time consuming. It seems wasteful then to filter on "available during the 2 day posting window"! That availability was not a serious job requirement.
- codr7 11mo agoHiring for the exact needs you think you have and rejecting anything that doesn't match exactly is not very constructive. Chances are, you're going to see applicants with combinations of skills you couldn't even have imagined. Humans are complicated.
- pvillano 11mo agoThis aligns closely with the hiring practices I learned in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The only thing missing is to have structured interviews to reduce interviewer bias. The best predictors of job performance are a simulation of the job and past performance. This is not new research or a secret.
- ramon156 11mo agoI wish we stopped playing games during hiring processes. I get you're trying to weed out the bad ones (can't take pressure, not pro-active, can't ask questions, etc.), but the entire process sucks on both ends. Let's say we care about the potential employee's needs, most people want to feel like they're making a difference at work and build something that matters. I have never had a job interview where I was able to discuss this topic. It's just "are you good enough to work for us?" while the entire company is falling apart in the background. Do you actually want to improve your company, or are you just looking to share more workload? Because those are two different things. I'm not looking to join your bike-shedding business
- thegrim33 11mo ago"Unfortunately, this time, we had 46 late applicants we didn’t even look at" You couldn't even do the INITIAL / quick triage for those 46? You couldn't even just spend 20 seconds on each to see if they were remotely qualified to be considered or not? It would have taken one person 15 minutes. You instead just threw away all those applications without even glancing at them? In addition, these were applications that people got in before the deadline, before you closed the application process, they applied correctly, and you just threw them away without even glancing at them?