My interviews at Rare and Lionhead
Hello community friends :)
tl;dr Interviewed at Rare and Lionhead. You dont need a degree. They look like awesome places to work!
So, I've pretty much been lurking on here for a while and havent really been active since back in the NAG days other than an annoying Unity question here and there, but I thought I would share my experience with these two companies, which I hope might benefit some of you guys who are looking at getting into the mainstream games industry.
Let me start out by saying that getting into the mainstream games industry is not a huge desire of mine, and would like to ideally go indie, but having a wife and stuff, its probably the place I would most like to earn my money until I have a game that Im happy to release, or at least enough savings to do this for a while :D
About me
Well, there isnt much to say. I lived in South Africa my whole life until 10 months ago, when I decided to move to the UK. I have 4 years industry experience. My strengths are C#, JavaScript and MS-SQL. I have no university degree, but I have a couple of Microsoft certifications that I got just before I left for the UK. I got my first job by literally sending out close to 100 CV's to places all over the country with a collection of the stuff I had written up to that point (I had been playing around with code since I was about 11). I got 2 face to face interviews, and one offer, which was in my home town, Durban. Blah blah blah, changed jobs a couple of times then moved to the UK. I worked at a company here for around 9 months, then decide to go into contract work as it pays more. With my CV out I got quiet a few opportunities to interview at a couple of places, but then, out of the blue, I got a call saying that Lionhead and Rare want interviews with me. I literally couldnt sleep because of the excitement. The roles were not on the actual game development team, but the services teams, which were both using a mixture of C#, SQL, and Azure.
**Note:** These interviews were for contract developer positions. I am told they are different for full time employees
The Interiews
Lionhead:
Salary: £340 - £380p/d
6 month contract
37.5hrs per week (9:00 - 17:30)
So, the Lionhead interview was the worst interview of my life. It was a telephone interview with 4 people from Lionhead. They weren't as fun as I expected, and seemed to want someone waaay more technical than me. They told me that, if I were to join then, I would be working on the store for the Fable game, and then jumped right into the technical questions. These started off simple. "Whats the difference between an interface and an abstract class", "What is the difference between a struct and a class" etc, and then got super crazy. One of the questions was "Can you describe the difference between a semaphore and mutex", to which I gave my answer liking a semaphore to the bouncer at a club and a mutex to a girl's boyfriend, which I though was pretty cool, but I just got a "Well, I guess you're right" monotone answer :P In the end, I think I took it way too lightly, but I didnt really want it that bad as they were about a 2 hour train trip away. This is pretty much were it ended between me and Lionhead.
Rare
Salary: £340 - £380p/d
Breakfast and lunch incl.
6 month contract
37.5hrs per week (flexitime)
Rare is a 40 minute drive from my house, which immediately made me favour them over Lionhead. Rare phoned me up and asked me to come in. An a nice, cold, British morning, I drove out to the Rare farm. Yes, the farm :D Rare purchased a piece of land in the middle of nowhere and built up a dev workshop. Once arriving, I was given a little tour, and these are some of the things that they had to offer:
* Free food and drinks
* A games library (with all different consoles from the DS to the PS3, which you could sign out with games)
* Arcade machines all over the place
* A games room (with different games and consoles set up for people to use)
* Their full sized soccer field for after work games
* Their pond, where you can relax during lunch
It was amazing. From there I went into the interview. It was a face to face with the development manager and 2 of the seniors. The interview started with some of the basic interview questions to get a feel for the candidate. "What is your favourite feature in a specific language", "Has there ever been anything you have not been able to do", "What is your favourite game". From there they had similar questions to what the Lionhead guys had (not surprising, as they are both Microsoft owned), to which I answered pretty much exactly the same answers. They laughed at my semaphore/mutex reference though :D They also loved the fact that I dedicate Tuesday nights solely to working on my own projects. After that, it turned into one big dev session. They asked me to spec out the system they were about to create. I threw out some ideas, and they pointed out some flaws, then they threw out some ideas, and I pointed out some flaws. It was like an awesome creative session, and the guys there were super awesome. I left and felt super confident, I really thought I had it. A few days later the recruiter called and said that I got through to the next stage and needed to do a C# assessment, which I unfortunately cannot talk about. Anyway, I had 3 days to do the assessment, but rushed it (I did it in a night) because I needed to give another company who had made me an offer an answer that week. In the end, I got a no back from the guys at Rare. They said they needed someone with solid Azure experience, and although I know the basics, they needed someone who they knew could perform in a worst case scenario. Unfortunately there arent too many jobs out there that can get you exposure to Azure, so there wasn't much I can do about it.
After all of this, the development manager invited me on LinkedIn and just sent me a messaging saying that if the project wasn't at a critical state and they didnt need someone to hit the ground running, he would have taken me in a heartbeat. I asked him what it was that he looked for in a candidate, and he replied with:
* Culture
* Passion
* Ability to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them
* A love for coding
* A love for games
* Everything else can be learnt
In the end, it was cool to see that there is a way to get into the games industry, even if you aren't a ninja 3D engine writer, and yeah, these places are as cool as you would expect them to be :) Also, they pay pretty well, especially considering the areas they are in. You could get +-£100p/d more in London, but you would be paying that in travel costs or rent depending.
P.S Sorry for the long post :( #MissedYouGuys ;)
P.P.S I am actually something that Ill get up soon, promise :D
tl;dr Interviewed at Rare and Lionhead. You dont need a degree. They look like awesome places to work!
So, I've pretty much been lurking on here for a while and havent really been active since back in the NAG days other than an annoying Unity question here and there, but I thought I would share my experience with these two companies, which I hope might benefit some of you guys who are looking at getting into the mainstream games industry.
Let me start out by saying that getting into the mainstream games industry is not a huge desire of mine, and would like to ideally go indie, but having a wife and stuff, its probably the place I would most like to earn my money until I have a game that Im happy to release, or at least enough savings to do this for a while :D
About me
Well, there isnt much to say. I lived in South Africa my whole life until 10 months ago, when I decided to move to the UK. I have 4 years industry experience. My strengths are C#, JavaScript and MS-SQL. I have no university degree, but I have a couple of Microsoft certifications that I got just before I left for the UK. I got my first job by literally sending out close to 100 CV's to places all over the country with a collection of the stuff I had written up to that point (I had been playing around with code since I was about 11). I got 2 face to face interviews, and one offer, which was in my home town, Durban. Blah blah blah, changed jobs a couple of times then moved to the UK. I worked at a company here for around 9 months, then decide to go into contract work as it pays more. With my CV out I got quiet a few opportunities to interview at a couple of places, but then, out of the blue, I got a call saying that Lionhead and Rare want interviews with me. I literally couldnt sleep because of the excitement. The roles were not on the actual game development team, but the services teams, which were both using a mixture of C#, SQL, and Azure.
**Note:** These interviews were for contract developer positions. I am told they are different for full time employees
The Interiews
Lionhead:
Salary: £340 - £380p/d
6 month contract
37.5hrs per week (9:00 - 17:30)
So, the Lionhead interview was the worst interview of my life. It was a telephone interview with 4 people from Lionhead. They weren't as fun as I expected, and seemed to want someone waaay more technical than me. They told me that, if I were to join then, I would be working on the store for the Fable game, and then jumped right into the technical questions. These started off simple. "Whats the difference between an interface and an abstract class", "What is the difference between a struct and a class" etc, and then got super crazy. One of the questions was "Can you describe the difference between a semaphore and mutex", to which I gave my answer liking a semaphore to the bouncer at a club and a mutex to a girl's boyfriend, which I though was pretty cool, but I just got a "Well, I guess you're right" monotone answer :P In the end, I think I took it way too lightly, but I didnt really want it that bad as they were about a 2 hour train trip away. This is pretty much were it ended between me and Lionhead.
Rare
Salary: £340 - £380p/d
Breakfast and lunch incl.
6 month contract
37.5hrs per week (flexitime)
Rare is a 40 minute drive from my house, which immediately made me favour them over Lionhead. Rare phoned me up and asked me to come in. An a nice, cold, British morning, I drove out to the Rare farm. Yes, the farm :D Rare purchased a piece of land in the middle of nowhere and built up a dev workshop. Once arriving, I was given a little tour, and these are some of the things that they had to offer:
* Free food and drinks
* A games library (with all different consoles from the DS to the PS3, which you could sign out with games)
* Arcade machines all over the place
* A games room (with different games and consoles set up for people to use)
* Their full sized soccer field for after work games
* Their pond, where you can relax during lunch
It was amazing. From there I went into the interview. It was a face to face with the development manager and 2 of the seniors. The interview started with some of the basic interview questions to get a feel for the candidate. "What is your favourite feature in a specific language", "Has there ever been anything you have not been able to do", "What is your favourite game". From there they had similar questions to what the Lionhead guys had (not surprising, as they are both Microsoft owned), to which I answered pretty much exactly the same answers. They laughed at my semaphore/mutex reference though :D They also loved the fact that I dedicate Tuesday nights solely to working on my own projects. After that, it turned into one big dev session. They asked me to spec out the system they were about to create. I threw out some ideas, and they pointed out some flaws, then they threw out some ideas, and I pointed out some flaws. It was like an awesome creative session, and the guys there were super awesome. I left and felt super confident, I really thought I had it. A few days later the recruiter called and said that I got through to the next stage and needed to do a C# assessment, which I unfortunately cannot talk about. Anyway, I had 3 days to do the assessment, but rushed it (I did it in a night) because I needed to give another company who had made me an offer an answer that week. In the end, I got a no back from the guys at Rare. They said they needed someone with solid Azure experience, and although I know the basics, they needed someone who they knew could perform in a worst case scenario. Unfortunately there arent too many jobs out there that can get you exposure to Azure, so there wasn't much I can do about it.
After all of this, the development manager invited me on LinkedIn and just sent me a messaging saying that if the project wasn't at a critical state and they didnt need someone to hit the ground running, he would have taken me in a heartbeat. I asked him what it was that he looked for in a candidate, and he replied with:
* Culture
* Passion
* Ability to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them
* A love for coding
* A love for games
* Everything else can be learnt
In the end, it was cool to see that there is a way to get into the games industry, even if you aren't a ninja 3D engine writer, and yeah, these places are as cool as you would expect them to be :) Also, they pay pretty well, especially considering the areas they are in. You could get +-£100p/d more in London, but you would be paying that in travel costs or rent depending.
P.S Sorry for the long post :( #MissedYouGuys ;)
P.P.S I am actually something that Ill get up soon, promise :D
Comments
@electrov was actually accepted at Rare, IIRC, but he was messed around too long with his visa and they couldn't wait anymore. At least one other ex-I-Imaginer worked at Rare as well (Saeoon Lee), and had only good things to say about it.
Would love to read more about what you get up to over in The UK!
If you haven't already, I really hope you land a great gig soon!
Do developers generally start as interns, or do they get a few weeks to play around with stuff or something?
p.s. I'm meaning for the game dev side, not so much the backend.
The Rare job used "we need to hire someone that can hit the ground running" as a get out. That makes me wonder when a studio is ever NOT going to be trying to hire people that can hit the ground running? Hiring people is a response to stress, a problem-solving attempt that only becomes an option after a problem is big and bad enough that the people already working somewhere either don't have the time or the skills to solve it. That means that the chances of a studio hiring someone with enough leeway to allow them to skill up first is pretty low, so if you want to be super hireable, BE that person that can hit the ground running...
Although it's probably not too realistic in the first place: I doubt anyone can really grok a complex, unique technology environment (like whatever's going on in a game studio) all that fast. It's always going to take setup time.
It's not that uncommon, really, at least amoungst companies over a certain size.
Phrased differently and with less hostility, for example "Why do you think an established developer like Rare isn't using this kind of approach then?", my reply would be:
Actually, based on @electrov's story, and (Saehoon's as well IIRC) I think they do. They weren't hiring him at a point where they were desperate for him to start, running at full speed. This is evidenced by the fact that they were prepared to wait months for him to get his visa sorted out before finally looking for someone else.
I'm not saying this is the case with all bigger studios, I did say: Some will never behave that way, for whatever reason. Sometimes even those that usually hire proactively are left with no choice because of a staff resignation or other unforeseen circumstances. For example I recently did an interview with an established studio in the states that was looking for a dev lead a month before shipping their product-obviously their existing lead had walked out on them.
And sometimes, for some roles, yes you do want someone that needs little or no warmup time. I suspect @CiNiMoD encountered such a case. They're looking for someone to architect a backend system for them for a store. This is quite possibly something nobody else in the studio has any experience with and they had the wisdom to see they needed a specialist, not just tasking any dev with suddenly becoming familiar with a whole different type of development. For a big role like that, I can totally understand wanting someone who's already familiar enough with your target tech that he can be a lead and teacher to new hires or existing employees (that would get to have some time to skill up).
Finally: Absolutely not, it's a great thing. But as you said, you probably do need to specialize on some things at some point and that means you'll have to neglect other things. And like @CiNiMoD said, sometimes it's just really hard to get experience in a particular thing that some company is looking for. But just because a job on offer lists something that you don't consider yourself a domain expert in doesn't mean you shouldn't consider applying. If you only ever go for opportunities that just require what you're already an expert in, you'll just slow down your growth.
@dislekcia makes a pretty solid point in "if you can hire people who can hit the ground running, why wouldnt you?". The biggest thing with contract workers is they are there for 3-6 months, so you dont have 2-3 weeks for them to get up to speed. For 3 weeks training at that rate, you are paying close to R100k just for someone to learn your code base, who is only going to be there for another 5 months.
@mattbenic, with the same reasons as stated above, they cant hire any more proactively than they are. They plan and know that a system will take +- 4 months to create. Add 30%(roughly) on to that for time they may take off and unforeseen issues, subtract that from the time it needs to be delivered then make sure you have someone to do the work by that date. It's a waste hiring someone full time for something like this because once its done, its done. On of the permanents they have will get up-skilled in the process and will be able to handle the maintenance thereafter. And again, back to @Dislekcia's comment where he says "Hiring people is a response to stress". This is 100% true, however I thinks its "planned stress". They know they are leaving it to as close to the last minute as possible, but planned in with some contingency and in some cases, a back up plan (game launching with no leaderboards, something like that). Its the most cost efficient way of doing things in the long run, and why you find that a large portion of the games industry are contractors. Did they give you any insight into how skilling-up in their internal game engines works? No
Do developers generally start as interns 2 of the guys who interviewed me started as interns, but thats as much as I know. I think for a full time employee things would be different, and I imagine they would have time to play around a bit :P
As you pointed out though, things can be-and are- different for permanent hires, particularly less senior ones (or we'd be an industry full of seniors and that's certainly not the case :) ).
As for the industry turning more to contractors, I think that's a good observation especially for mid level hires. There's long been a push for the AAA industry to be more like the film industry, with studios having small core teams and ramping up and down for particular projects. It's been a slow change though. A lot of the big devs are still permanent employee heavy with huge art and dev teams with established hierarchies that work on annualized sequels from parent publishers.
And of course, regardless of the position, a candidate that's fully skilled in exactly what you need will always be your first choice. But they're not always available, because as you yourself experienced you simply can't be an expert in every possible relevant tech.
So practically what does this mean? As said above, sure try to be the best you can be in whatever's practical, but don't not apply simply because you don't fully meet the requirements. Again your experience supports this, based on now having a good contact that would be open to hiring your for another position.