Thanks for sharing your story, it was an engaging read.

The part about filters in interviews resonated with me because of a recent experience. The place I work has been interviewing for new developers and the team lead asked me for my opinion on one of them. Overall seemed like a good candidate. But when I took a closer look at the assignment and the solution, I noticed that while technically the solution was good, the candidate had ignored a bunch of requirements outlined in the assignment.

At first I was willing to give him a chance, but when I gave it more thought, I realized that one of the biggest issues I've had with colleagues was them not reading the issue they're given, not understanding it, not fulfilling the requirements given in the issue and/or outright ignoring what's written because they independently decide they know a better solution (without consulting anybody), which turns out to be worse because of reasons which might not have been outlined in the issue, but still lead to the given requirements.

I pointed this out and felt it was a big red flag that, in a best-case scenario, this candidate was still unwilling to follow or incapable of following clear instructions. The candidate wasn't invited to the next round.

Extremely well-written and honest post.

The struggle with being self-taught is that you don’t know what you don’t know. This is probably even worse in areas like Unity, where the coding part is sort of a sideshow to the main event. Nowadays the problem is you lack the discernment to evaluate AI output.

I wrote The Conputer Science Book (https://a.co/d/01e62STx) to act as that basic building block and help orient self-taught developers.

What did come out from the blog post though:

- OP writes really well

- OP has learned to be very honest with themselves (and I hope not too self-critical now)

- OP seems really good at delivering things people like, even if they’re a bit cobbled together

All of which are very valuable and harder to learn than programming fundamentals tbh.

>The Conputer Science Book

I suggest an edit to fix the typo.

I submitted this because I thought it was a good and nuanced (if long) take.

FTFA:

> If I had AI in 2019, I would not have lasted 3 years before the interview crashed me. I would have lasted longer, and the crash would have been worse.

It's worth pointing out that:

1. Much of the core lesson in this article has nothing to do with Unity specifically, and applies to self-taught programmers in general; and

2. This person has a vested interest in making you believe learning Unity is especially difficult.

Both points are fair, but I'd push back a little on #2. We've seen plenty of devs who built real stuff in Unity — games that shipped — and the learning curve is genuinely rougher than most tools. That's not marketing; that's just what we observed.

> But interview after interview, the story started to make sense. They were not wrong, I was not ready, and it took me a long time to admit that.

I believe this is one of the most humbling but also maturing moments in career and adulthood.

There are activities where this type of realization is constant, and activities where it is rare.

Interviewing a marketing manager is dominated vibes and optics, and driving that clarity about what their actual skills are is an uphill battle. With a software engineer I can usually get there in a few minutes.

But many creative activities are susceptible to avoiding harsh realizations. And tfa was about the creative side of gamedev.

That doesn’t mean that engineers are better than English majors. If anything, technical people should have more respect for great creative talents, because those people got almost no feedback and still figured out how to become great.

The gamedev split is real. I've watched sharp engineers convince themselves their design instincts were equally sharp because... they shipped a thing? Technical work gives you compiler errors and frame rate numbers. Design lets you say "players just don't get it" for years. Real feedback on design usually means putting something in front of strangers who have zero obligation to be nice.

That moment hit me hard during my own Unity stretch. Spent months convinced the problem was the interviewers, then finally looked at a recording of one of my own "working" projects and saw how shallow the architecture was. Embarrassing but necessary.

I feel this.

I went to a private university to learn gamedev. And I feel like I learned game but not dev. Yes I slung a lot of code but, when the game industry dried up and I applied for a bunch of developer positions, I kept finding terms I had never heard of. Basically any methodology other than compile and fix was completely absent from my skillset. What I had learned, I had discovered while helping mates in other disciplines with their coding assignments. And the learnings I had were completely transitory. Tricking DirectX 9 into compiling was actually quite different even from DX8 or DX10/11.

I think this kind of thing is endemic, and its not just a youtube video problem. I guess you could see private education as kind of the same beast as self education.

That said, it did give me troubleshooting skills, because effectively we were taught break fix to such a spectacular level, especially in netcode, that my skills were very easily transferable. Didn't come back to code for ages.

Hey, I'm the original author. Thanks for sharing this. I saw a spike in my analytics and couldn't figure out where it was coming from, now I know :)

Don't worry, blogpost author. We think you're a Queue<T> and that's all that matters.

Unity dude here, learned alone/self taught-

Being old enough to enjoy reading technical books/articles is a + and knowing the acronym RTFM

I learned about collection types other than array/list from reading this article by the creator of the game Project Zomboid- as he used Stacks for zombie behaviors https://ia600303.us.archive.org/18/items/pdfy-G4Wm9sq1LU298r...

Then I got this book which is a great overview of C# for use in Unity https://csharpplayersguide.com/

Remembering which ones are FIFO and LIFO helps you remember what is what for etc

But yeah- had to read an article and a book- I hated most of the Unity youtube tutorials- enough info/help to get you going but they leave you stranded in the woods without a path out because you were blinding following someone else when you walked in.

Better to read/learn and understand the small bits yourself slowly as they are the breadcrumbs that lead you out.

I felt this article in my bones. I also had the same realisation years ago and eventually wrote about it on my blog: https://omeysalvi.com/blog/blog-11. I still have a long way to go but I feel encouraged that at least I'm learning with intent now.

> Before AI, I got a lot of interviews. Companies would talk to anyone with a reel. Today a beginner can send out fifty applications and not even get a first call. The thing that saved me may not be available to people starting out now. I do not have a clean answer for what to do about that. I only know that interviews were the best school I ever had, and I feel for anyone who is being shut out of that classroom.

I wonder how long/far someone can truly go without actually knowing stuff today. I don’t know about game dev but the web is certainly built on abstraction: In university I’ve met people whose portfolio sites are made in NextJS but don’t know what React, the DOM or even HTML is. I think this is bad. At the same time (with the help of AI) they are certainly shipping things and working real jobs.

At least on the web, with frameworks and stuff abstracted into magic services or libraries, you can go really far without knowing what you’re doing. At what point does not knowing the lower level stuff start becoming a hard ceiling?

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code.

The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap.

---

As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back.

https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game...

There's a great list of Fundamentals halfway through. Though I have no frame of reference for how reasonable it is. (Is the average game dev really expected to implement a rigidbody sim from scratch?)

I feel there was a very narrow time window in the 90s when a bunch of game franchises were started where the devs could get away with shipping stuff with a ton of bugs. The first two Fallout games come to mind. So does the original Deus Ex. This is definitely the exception not the rule though! Hardware constraints weed out shitty (or at the very least suboptimal) code very quickly.

This is the exception not the rule however. If there's one unifying thing about games that succeed despite major issues with the code its that the developers tend to have extensive experience playing board games and can make a compelling gaming experience without having a game with all the bells and whistles.

> The most beloved games have the shittest code

Do you have data supporting that? My favorite games (Factorio, Noita, Song of Syx to name a few) all share in common devs' passion and expertise. I don't have any example of a good game with shitty code.

What TFA describes is not someone who wrote poor quality code, but someone who could write no code at all, before the era of AI.

"The most beloved games" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

There's numerous studios across the games industry that have high coding standards, mandatory code reviews, and expect upskilling. Game complexity keeps increasing, and live service games in particular need to be stable and well maintained and very well engineered in the first place. For many games, the days of games being pressed to disk, shipped out and done with (where bad code is fine) are long gone.

Thanks for sharing! (Sorry the following is written before I realised you posted your own blog post!)

It does seem like a trap, although you might nit have had the raw technical skills for the job they applied (by the way why wasn't he screened out early rather than on the take home task?),

They clearly have a lot of the skills around game design.

The trouble is that they also didn't have the high level skills that someone who does have the low level technical skills might need from a lead!

I'm not entirely sure on the take that AI would make it worse. If they are satisfied with the kind of game they make. Then they could continue to make games for many years.

I do think it's right that Game Developer companies want technically highly skilled people. My favourite thing about AAA gaming is the feeling of the constant cutting edge.

On the other than, I don't see why they couldn't have a long and fruitful Indie career.

> Then the interviewer asked me why I used Queue<T>. I couldn't answer

And this was before AI. Imagine the amount of people who will never be able to answer similar questions. I am going to maybe have a bad take, but if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be working in the field until you do. It's not okay to wing it into new roles with more responsibility.

On one hand, now anyone can ask AI to explain Queue<T>.

On the other hand, most people aren't curious enough to ask.

Learning how to program from tutorials is like learning how to ride a bike from watching YouTube videos.

You kinda feel that you are learning something but you only truly learn when you have to do it from scratch.

What's with all the Unity articles on the front page recently? Seems suspicious.

There's decent research on "transfer of learning" that maps onto this — skills acquired in tightly coupled environments like game engines tend to stay context-bound in ways that aren't obvious while you're building them. As far as I know, the consistent finding is that abstract fundamentals transfer; domain-specific patterns mostly don't.