How can this not have a huge bias in favor of gamers?
Might work for them because that's the kind of culture fit they need, but I doesn't look all that generalizable for other companies.
I have zero interest in sports and am clueless to the rules of baseball or football or basketball. I hated when I got questions that assumed I had any such knowledge.
Granted this was way back when when interviewers like to toss brainteaser questions to cargocult Google/Microsoft/etc...before they started doing leetcode to cargocult Google etc.
You make it sound so easy. Once I gave my PS4 controller to my dad to play a driving game. Even though he's a better driver than I am, it did not go well.
But on serious note, People who played the game could just hide the fact that they know the game mechanics. And act like they are catching up faster then normal person would.
The best interview is one that can’t be gamed. Just like Hollywood auditions. Give the people the script and see how well they do. Tell the interview candidate you are going to give them 3 questions and they pick the one they want to do, even if they know it already. This strips away all pretense that they are figuring it out on the spot. At least then you are on a level playing field.
This is a universal problem with all interview techniques. Interested in any ideas for how to fix it.
It's even a problem with "personal interviews," because some people have had more experience with optimizing one-hour first impressions than others.
Well, there is a counter strategy that works even in this situation.
The counter strategy would be to just know way more interview questions than the interviewer, and know the answer to every question that they have, so that they run out!
When I was full time applying for jobs, a couple years ago, it got to the point with me. It turns out that people interviewing others, only have a couple questions that they use for interviews, and it is not that hard to know all of them.
I think you dramatically over-estimate most people's literacy with games and movement in a virtual space, let alone most people's hand-eye coordination. How many people can touch type these days?
Can you really not see how such an interview would bias towards Gamers?
There's a lot to being a successful developer that is probably so easy for many individuals that they might not consider that a person might be IQ smart, but unable to handle such a task at a professional level.
I'm in a similar boat to the the GP: I do really well on logic tests and programming challenges, but I struggle with the the soft skills necessary to be a good team member.
Because these actually have very little in relation.
>What's the takeaway from this? I don't know. We certainly can't switch to using Factorio as an interviewing method - you might as well just give a candidate a take-home assignment.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that McKinsey has a bias towards gamers.
then again, I guess that's also true of software.