Anyone running into leetcode interview tests for Unity jobs?

Are you guys encountering this? It irritates me to no end, all the large companies where I am have job descriptions that line up exactly with what I've been doing for years, they hit me up on linkedin weekly, but then they throw you into these algorithm tests based on leetcode, not for senior engineers, but for any of their Unity 3d jobs.

They don't have anything to do with your knowledge of Unity, making games, anything you actually do day to day, its did you memorize these algos or not.

I started grinding leetcode and now am questioning my life choices.

IMO if it takes you 15 minutes to think through and solve a problem you've never seen before, that should be as valid as someone spending 2 mins to solve a problem they've memorized.

 

Why you spending time on these test?
Are you looking for jobs?
I don't receive such spams on my linkedin.
Depending what did you put there and your connections.

 

They are HR idiots. Meta bugged me for weeks. 20 years technical artist, programmer, huge Unity portfolio and resume. They give me a bloody test to traverse directory folders from the command line. They tank months later and lose billions. Peloton was totally impressed till I showed up on zoom with my long hair and cowboy hat. I wasn't corporate enough.. Months later they tank. Didn't want to work for either of them but was curious what kind of knowledge they required. Not knowing the domain you are playing in and hiring from their domain specific talent pool with tests made for an entirely different computer tech specialty will have your prospects end up being good at the non-Unity domain stuff and usually not up to par with Unity. Can cost a company big bucks to not understand what they truly need and just hire based on buzzwords and false assumptions about the trade..and it is a trade...as you need to apprentice and then journeyman before being a senior unity dev. A 12 year professorship in compsci would not guarantee the chops you need to properly compose an architectural framework in Unity. There is alot of domain specific knowledge that can only be learned the hard way.. The walls of crap code and architectures obviously written by enterprise obscurantes I have had to wade thru in my day seems endless. Some folks will over-engineer a ball bearing because the actual use case for said ball bearing eludes them entirely.

 

To be honest, in this situation I'd simply not deal with them. If they're providing an idiotic test, then the test was proposed by an idiot, and that idiot is someone you'll have to deal with it. The right idea, in my opinion, is to either attempt to bypass the test and reach a sane human in the company, or to find someone else.

That is an opinion, however.

 

I got curious so I just looked up a few leetcode questions. Honestly, they didn't seem that out of line with code I've had to write in unity at some place or another.

The range of code I've had to write to make s**t work in unity is pretty broad.

Everyone approaches problems differently, so maybe other people haven't had to work through some of that kind of stuff, but a lot of it doesn't appear super awful.

That said, I would have different expectations for a pure coder from a generalist or tech artist. Like for a pure coder I would expect you to have at least hand rolled pathfinding (like an a* implementation) at least once, and be able to do similar types of algos. For a unity generalist or someone leaning toward tech art, I wouldn't expect any algos.

 

Back in school our comp-sci teacher had pretty high expectations from us. During tests we'd always get a task we've never seen before in that way (but always something that could logically be extrapolated from the stuff we learned the weeks prior). But we always had so little time for it, that the only way to get an A was to guess beforehand what that task would be, figure it out at your own pace at home and then memorize the solution.

I think this is a good strategy. People hire based on trust and these tests are a flawed way of substituting that trust. If you can find a better way to build it, go for it.

 

Agreed. Interviews work both ways. Do they want to hire you? Also, do you want to work for them?

If you just want/need the cash then just smile and jump through their hoops. Otherwise, if it irritates you so much then you should think about whether you actually want the job or not.