No One Hires Jr Devs So I Made A Game 

"Nobody is hiring high school chemistry teachers any more so I made my own meth lab empire."

nobody hires sr. dev so I made a hello world app

Nobody hires nuclear engineers under 45 so I made a bomb.

Welp, time to make a todo app in Unreal Engine 5 with jiggle physics

"but it does not mean our story ends here" is such a beautiful phrase. Props to HR who came up with it.

This sounds very familiar. I spent 6 months looking for a job after recently getting laid off. After about 60 rejections I decided to make a game. I started by trying to make a multiplayer RTS and spent about 3 months working on that and gave up after realizing it would take me too long to finish so I changed focus. I decided to focus on making smaller sized local/multiplayer games. I made 3 games in the last 3 months. Each game uses split-screen and supports up to 4 players. So now it's a year later I still don't have a job, but at least I made some games.

I counted 8 rejections. Those are rookie numbers.

We live in a world where psychology degrees and business majors get more job security and job availability in tech company positions than the developers themselves. What a time to be alive.

"If you have a remotely competent interviewer..." Welp... We're screwed...

Omg I just watched this and now you're covering it sick. On the note of getting hired: This is exactly how I got hired. After 8 months of endless rejections and studying and leetcode grinding, I didn't write a single line of code to get hired here. Instead my interviewer asked me to talk about my magnum opus at my last gig, which was breaking apart a monolith into microfrontends, stitching them together with module federation and using a shared library to manage state between all of them which was super cool to me because I had never even heard of module federation before they tasked me with research and implementation.

I like how he introduced it, he introduced the features or mechanics of the game clearly, like bullet points. Later on, these will become the requirements of the program, solid start. If he doesn't have a job yet then I don't what wrong with this world, I'm only 10 minutes in and I can see he's quite competent, maybe he might lack strong personal and sales skills to take hirers to his turf, but otherwise, this guy would be a good asset for most companies.

nobody hires principal engineer so I made a OS

Making a game isn't just hard, it is also quite easy to review the competence. Great value there.

I made a website so interactive you could change basically every aspect of it. It even had a physics engine and was so modular I could add a new feature/mini-app in less time it takes to deploy the docker image. It was also my first ever web project. I couldn't get a job because I didn't have any prior work experience.

Key up/down: animation on keydown, action on key-up. Depends on the nature of the application - if mistakes are punished, if speed is necessary, etc

You act on press in action games and on release in strategy / turn based. Cool video. Can't believe this guy had problems with getting hired. He's 10x dev junior.

The debate about whether to act on button press ("down") or button release reminds me of my experiences playing RTS and MMO games. I recall using an add-on that triggered skills immediately on the key press (down event) rather than default release event. It felt more responsive and felt like a slight reaction-time advantage, which matters in competitive play. For any regular work situation? No way...

Nobody hires a fresher. so I made my own startup.

My first big solo project was a multiplayer turn based strategy game, Nodrog's Fortress. It taught me so much despite being unsuccessful commercially so far. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything though. Just go build something that sparks your passion and I promise you will level up.

"Do something for real real" Yea this is the biggest thing I look for when hiring. If you've got real projects and can walk me through your logic on a couple of examples, you're in.

Then they ask him to do a medium LC question and he doesn't pass it because he didn't have the time to study for making the game

Hex grid is still a 2x2 grid, just rendered 50% off on every other row. on-press if there's no or neglegable cost, on-release if there's a cost (ie: changing tabs vs downloading a file or unlimited moves vs limited moves)

"Store would complain" is Thor'd in the balls.

My absolute favorite interview format (on wither side of the table) is a review of a project the candidate made on their own. The candidate is usually at easy since they’re talking about something they’re familiar with, and the interviewer can judge code quality, decision making, tradeoff evaluation, library selection, etc. It also allows for great conversation.

I think John Carmack's argument for acting on press genuinely only works because he was working with a _keyboard_ app. For PC keyboards, you literally expect that when you press a key it acts immediately. If you mess up you can just press the delete key and start again. But for buttons that lead you to another area of the app or other such use cases, I just don't see how it can be better.

Fellas the bar is getting raised

The talk about him not being a junior dev makes me chuckle. By the time I graduated from college I had already spent 3 years working on a 100k line C codebase that was for a simple multiplayer video game with around 100 concurrent players. So, yeah, sounds about right.

Nowadays it's harder to get to the interviewer, you know, the person that understands what the job is about. Most people will fail at the ATS review, which is the non-human part of the process. Oh, and I hope you never have to do an interview with an interviewer who clearly doesn't want to be there. Had way to many of these in my life.

Man that multiple sine wave trick for the shake is beautiful! Love this video!

Had a go at a game myself earlier this year. I recreated pokemon (mechanics not a whole game) essentially. Well sort of anyway, I didn't finish everything and I would probably want to start from scratch rather than try finish it in its current form, I made mistakes. But damn, I learned so much... Games are incredibly complex!

About the reconnect: theres an old RTS game from the turn of the century called Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns that has a beautiful lag and disconnect tolerance system; it'd be worth a look for a reverse engineer. The game will sit there an wait until everyone gets reconnected and synced up, couple friends and I played a match for three hours with three ai players and the game never dropped; we had a few pauses for the resync sure, but we were able to finish the entire three hour match. Cool system and an amazing strategy game that's complex but not complicated to play.

A cool part of making the video, he is presenting his tech interview. He could put a link in his resume.

re: act on press vs release, there is no hard rule. keyboards act on press, the web acts on release. It comes down to expectations, most mouse presses are on release, to differentiate between a short or long press.

Triggering on down is essential in many games (Particularly FPS) because people are working at the limits of their reflexes and you need the game to be highly responsive. Thats not quite so critical if you are just selecting an action in an application or even a turn based strategy or some such. Then you have to weigh it up against backing out of a miss-click. I.e. Id argue its context specific.

considering there are going to be much more layoffs of actually good developers in the upcoming years, we are gonna have so many great indie games soon - just like we had in late 80's - when game industry was done BY professionals and FOR professionals

My experience is that interviewers look at game projects like you played with toys while making some easy ass checklist app that has one vaguely simulare feature as the company has in one of their system makes them horny af

16:52 My favourite solution is the alternate button cancels the action. IE I left click then right click, that cancels the left click so I can release both with no effect.

8yrs experience but I may as well be junior dev since I never finished my degree. Its hard out here to find work guys.

The onPress and onRelease issue is pointless when devoid of context. If want your gun to fire on press, but you probably more comfy with your grenade starting on release. You probably don't care much if your motor starts on press or on release, but you CERTAINLY want your emergency stop button to work on press.

ON the whole act on release vs on keydown. I think, significant(irreversible, consequential, unrepeatable) actions do on release allowing user to think and everything else on keydown, so everything feels faster. we are not always have to take one side or the other

This guy is great. Who's gonna tell him that he'll get a job, but never once exercise anything close to that level of intricacy... from the software side of dev -- stage 1: it feels like 90% is just make a form for a customer, make it look the way they want it, make it store data with an api... stage 2: update user interface to limit the range of a numerical type, make it so the form inputs can't contain some characters, make it calculate things more on the front end... reduce page reloads... etc...

I’m currently on a similar grind, minus the “applied to jobs at game studios” part. As much as it would be great to be part of a team, I have a very specific game I want to make, because I really want to play that game.

No one hires junior devs, so I'm making a Game Boy emulator.

17:47 no, if you fire it on release then you can set it up to make sure the user hasnt dragged their mouse away from the button. this allows them to cancel the action if they accidentally misclick but hold the mouse down, and drag it away. firing immediately is unnecessary. i expect the page to wait while i hold it. thats how its been for years, and it has no bad side effects changing it because you think its more responsive will just piss users off

Bear in mind this dude created the presentation too.

28:12 Not exactly but pretty close. You want to think about the server the entire time, yes, but not necessarily server first. What matters is your architecture. You need to identify what might need to be shared, what stays on the client, what stays on the server, what is in both but not synced, etc. Converting a single player game to multiplayer is insanely hard because no one thought about responsabilities and state. If you remember the entire way through that this is a multiplayer game, nothing stops you from making your first prototype single player and doing the server later. What matters is that when it comes to networking, your state is already ready to be networked, and your gameplay logic isn't tangled up.

Skill issue, I useArray Buffers for contiguous memory. If I had more time on my hands I could probably flesh out a buffer "struct" that's one or half a dozen buffers storing numbers, strings, objects, functions, all that. The only reason for me not use buffers is when the data is too big it's actually better fragmented otherwise it can't fit anywhere and it runs into sort of a SEGFAULT adjacent problem.

So he coded this and also has the presentation skills at 3:30 to make this look like polished training. I thought I was faking before, now I know for sure...

To make on release action feel snappy, just animate te button press by changing the button color. Then on release preform the action and reset te button color. Best desing in my opinion!

I saw it, he is definitely not junior dev.

At [5:35] Yeah, Graphics programming is more complicated and without a simplified drawing framework and library like the 2d or 3d canvas in the browser, you end up having to do a lot of stuff just because it is how a GPU actually works (if you want any sort of good performance) While the API for Canvas could be better; I would say, canvas is still a lot less difficult or complicated than direct OpenGL or DirectX (and especially, Vulkan) coding.

I guess i can be grateful that I have a job doing mobile development that doesn't involve any game development. Sometimes it's just changing a button color everywhere (with no css), or removing the separator line from a table, but it can be as hard as debugging data between the client and server, memory and performance issues. I checked and a couple of my favorite games are made in Poland and Germany and it pays less than USA. for games made in the USA the salary is comparable to mobile dev, if you are lucky.

I think every single developer at some point has built a game.

I made an app for contractors and small business can generate work estimate, invoices and stuff like that and send emails to customers automictically with a pdf estimate and customer login auth via magic link so they can interact with estimates and talk to the customer. Honestly I am not sure it will be enough to get hired so It better start making good money from subscriptions when I get it to full release.

if this guy a junior, what are we ?

I did a reverse proxy for the first time also recently. Good-shid-ya.

Canvas isn't that bad. It is pretty bare yes. But it does give you starting point for everything you need to do it right.

Prime, maybe a cool video type could be you acting like a ‘competent interviewer’ to devs looking for work. It’ll both be super interesting and funny but also provide value to everyone in how to level up.

Also how he presented his project is quite impressive

The internet is a series of tubes. Game code is a series of ifs and fors

Firefox agrees - action on press Google/RU-vid, Windows, Android, Signal disagrees - action on release

Especially if you live in a small Montana town like me and just sold your truck to upgrade your PC cause F it there's fiber here and I don't go out anymore anyway

Say what you will about schooling, but the software development program I took spent much of the final year... making us develop software. A game like this probably would have been top of the class, but it's right in the ballpark of what people were expected to make before being sent out to find jobs.

I made my CV a 3D interactable scenario with game alike feeling(the player moves around the scenario and interact with few items, there is also dialogs lol) and still don't get hired.

The best thing you can do in an interview to teach the interviewer.

23:35 this pattern is called Entity Component System (ECS)

I never thought I'd disagree with John Carmack on something. I'm more of a respond on release. It depends on what you are doing. A UI button you usually want to do the action on release so the user can do the very common action of moving their input off that button before release. It also allows for visual feedback before committing since you animate it on press and release. If you are manipulating a scroll view you do it during down. But I know John is a performance absolutist so anything that adds in delay gets killed. So the input delay on waiting for release would be one of those things.

On release!! For the love of gaming on mouse up!

His animations are pretty impressive as well!!

The "on release" is lobbied by animators, otherwise nobody'll see their fancy button transitions

If this guy didn't get hired, you won't.

On release for UI, on press for everything else

it just takes so freaking long to do this and I currently have a job. I was lucky to find one last year. I do want to do my own projects but i lack time.

If you shoot a gun in real life pressing the button is ON PRESS so every action in any video game for all purposes should be irreversible ON PRESS. To model reality.

hex grid is a 2d array, you just display it differently.

There was a similar 2 player tank game on the Atari in the early 1980s

If a junior developer comes to interview with this project, he will be hired because, at that point, he is a medior developer, and they derisk themselves.

A diplomat or certifications mean zero shit, a self taught dev is way more attractive then a bootcamp dev. Bootcamp is just a tool for you to make stuff for yourself before being hired. If good, you can jump over the hiring part and create yourboen company or be a independent contractor. So the most unwanted status is unemployed juniors and minimum wage dev at a big brand.

Nobody hires jr. devs so I started the 4th riech against hiring managers... hol up.

Next thing, prime learns about Bevy...

I'm gonna actually steal that "Now it's safe to turn your pc off" to put at the end of my presentations lol

As an interviewer, I’d be incredibly impressed by the tech, choices, *finishing the dang thing*, etc. But I’d be more impressed by the ability to communicate all of those things. Even just the few seconds early on showing the grid going to hex then isometric. Imaging trying to describe that on a zoom call!

Wait... people have a todo app featured as a portfolio item? Like if you need some padding sure but even as someone without a single relevant complete app for what im going to school for that still just like sounds... so boring and too easy to tell an employer ANYTHING meaningful about your skill unless youre going for ui/ux design and its a handcoded CSS masterpiece

A key point is to not just make some crappy slopware "game" in unity. You need to actually program your own systems. Try creating your own netcode, or your own gamestate structure.

I already knew you forgot to turn off alerts when I pressed play

28:12 that's what I'm always saying also, game logic should be in the server and not in the client to avoid client cheats

A hexagonal grid is just a regular 2d array, it is just that every odd row is offset by 50%

I'm surprised you haven't automated turning off alerts

The jr devs I know can't handle a single class.

I´ ve got rejected 300 times this year and not a single person asked me for a single personal project, but 80 unmarried middle aged women told me A: they dont have any knowledge in programming and B: they own a dog, because they are unmarried and have no child.

If this is what it takes to be a junior dev, 3rd world country graduates barely scraping by will see more than 8 rejections And that also means im nowhere near junior... im MUCH farther below it...

Dang. He actually gets responses??? I just get ghosted from all of my applications

1:10 - "talk about how you sync the game state over the network" 3:00 - "it's turn based" Well that was a disappointment.

next step: make a game haha. Im pivoting from the automotive industry, so I just made some SaaS that I wish I had in my old job as projects but this seems more fun

This guy's skill level is way above any entry level dev. If you seriously expect entry levels to have this amount of knowledge you are hilariously out of touch.

So these are expectations for a junior dev now? Right? Right?

Dijkstra mentioned!

Flying turrets galore. 💥

Nobody hires an independent scientist so I broke the laws of physics. (ǝɯᴉʇ uᴉ spɹɐʍʞɔɐq ƃqᴉllǝʌɐɹʇ ɯɐ I ʍoN)

the master (click) baiter