Anonymous feedback from a developer (bold is mine, read only the bold if you want a TLDR):
Responding to your EA forum post about hiring developers
I’m about to start my first dev job at a large non-EA company, and cared about a few things when choosing to which haven’t come up.
The main important thing for me was being able, in some sense, to assess the company while it was assessing me. They did this really well, so I now have a good sense of what working with them will be like. Most of this came from interning with them—in general, work trials seem really good for candidates and employers—but it came across in the interview process as well. There were lots of live-coding interviews, where the interviewers would critique my code as I was writing it (for code style, missing edge cases, etc) in much the same way as they would internally. This gave me a sense of what things they cared about, and what it would be like to be criticised in this way as a normal part of my job. Sure, this is daunting—but if parts of the job are in some way, it’s better to find that out early.
I was also given the opportunity to ask all of my interviewers questions, which they answered as openly as possible—even things like ‘what’s the worst part of your job’, or ‘if you left within 5 years, why would that have happened’. This seems like a relatively small thing that made me much more confident about what I was getting into.
If I move to direct work in the medium-term future, I’ll probably want to get a similar sense of what the culture is like—either during the application process, or just by e.g. knowing people wherever I’m applying. At that timescale I’d also care about less dev-specific things, like the flexibility to start a family, or to find a job without having to move.
Hopefully this is helpful; I’m happy for you to use it or not however you see fit.
Thank you, whoever you are that filled out the form. :)
Anonymous feedback from a developer (bold is mine, read only the bold if you want a TLDR):
Thank you, whoever you are that filled out the form. :)