Guest Lecturer - Mark Craig

Our guest lecture this week was presented by Mark Craig who is the founder and also the programming director at Lucid Games. The main subject of his lecture was ‘Programming at a modern game studio’. Mark has much experience in this area as he was the lead programmer at Bizarre Creations for over 10 years and then moved on to his own company.

In his presentation Mark talked about two things, the essential skills a programmer needs and then also getting a job as a programmer. On the subject of essential skills, he listed a lot of different languages, API’s and engines that were split up into subsections, that he recommended should be learned.

The second part of the lecture was about recruitment and applying for jobs as a programmer in the industry. What was interesting to learn was that a lot of employers will give the applicants a test before their interview, while Mark told us about the different types of exams who also went on to explain that the outcomes of the tests did not actually show the applicants skills and that they are not always relevant.

So after this lecture I went out to research programming jobs and how to hire a programmer and I found a really interesting article written by a man called Jeff Atwood, in this article he shares advice and techniques that he himself has seen work. First he thinks that all pre interview tests should be done online, mainly basic ones just to show that the applicant is capable, he says, “the goal is not to prove that the candidate is some kind of coding genius, but that they know what the heck programming is” This is something that he and Mark both agree on. Jeff Atwood also goes on to talk about the importance of portfolios and how employers want to see actual projects you have worked on, again this is something that Mark talked about as he said that creating a demo of your work really helps when applying for jobs as it is an actual visual representation of your skills.

References:

Jeff Atwood. (2012). How to Hire a Programmer. Available: http://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-hire-a-programmer/. Last accessed 8th May 2015.