Further Applications
Moving into February 2017, I still didn’t have a job–not in software engineering, anyway. I tried driving for Uber for a little while, but I ended up just breaking even most days. I eventually took a job bar-tending at a local brewery so that I could contribute, at least a little bit, to our family expenses. Luckily, we were renting a granny flat from some friends and our rent was ridiculously cheap.
It was at this point that I decided it was time to broaden my job search to include companies outside of the games industry. However, I made it a point to apply only to positions that I felt would help me build skills that would be applicable to game development (primarily, C++ roles) or look good on my resume.
This wave, I sent out applications to General Atomics, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, NuVasive, ViaSat, Insomniac, Epic Games, and Cryptic Studios. Interestingly, Insomniac and Cryptic (game developers) were the only two that I heard back from this time. Both sent me programming assessments, Insomniac also included a text document with some programming and design-related questions.
The Insomniac programming assessment tasked me with implementing a memory manager in straight C. I banged my head against if for a couple weeks before finally conceding defeat. I emailed the recruiter to let her know that I was withdrawing my application and wished her the best of luck in filling the role. I then proceeded to search online for resources related to custom memory managers in C and C++. I’ll admit that, after reading multiple articles and chapters on the subject, I still found it to be a bit too arcane for my current understanding. Also, I think I even found an article by John Carmack in which he said something to the effect that writing your own memory manager is “not a good idea”. I’m probably taking that out of context, but it was good enough for me.
The test from Cryptic had two parts. The first was to perform mathematical operations on an input string based on operators contained in the string. I was able to come up with a brute-force solution for this portion and decided to go with that and devote my remaining time to the second problem.
The second half of the Cryptic assessment was to implement a method to link 2×2 square tiles in a manner similar to dominoes. The tiles could be rotated, but could only link to other tiles if they matched exactly on the attaching sides. I was, sadly, unprepared and inexperienced enough that I, once again, could not finish the assessment.
Based on my application/interview experiences up to this point, I was starting to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for a game dev career.