We took the Caledonian Sleeper from London to Glasgow in June of 2019. Saved the hotel night and were hiking the West Highland Way by 9:00. Scotch in the dining car + a private bathroom and double bed. Fantastic experience.

As an independent dev team working with Microsoft Games in 2002-2003, we used RAID to ship Rise of Nations. It was great! Rockin' fast compared with any web tool now and batch operations were near instant. Sadly it was utterly insecure for remote use and it went away after that game.

I loved Rise of Nations! Mind sharing which bits you worked on?

Single player campaigns

Become an excellent debugger. It's sorely neglected as a skill that goes along with development, but is not the same thing as being a good coder.

Read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Indispensable-Software-Hard...

It's short and sweet and applies to any technology problem.

+1 to this.

What I learned working for Brian Reynolds (Colonization, Civ2, Rise of Natopms. etc...)

Step 1: int result = rand(100); switch (result) { //... do something simple }

Step 2:

Watch the AI until something dumb happens, improve the logic.

For a well done interview, the problem is definitely mine. I wish I could reliably do the right thing and show a quality thought process as I iterate towards a good answer. However, I need to be away from the pressure to speak in order to solve problems. Sometimes this only takes a few minutes, but that silence in an interview ruins my composure.

This problem doesn't happen to me when I'm delivering a product pitch, speaking at a conference, meeting with investors, or any other situation where I'm on equal footing with my audience. Frequently, though, I ask to get back to people later with answers to difficult questions. I also prepare fanatically for those situations, where it's very difficult to prepare for a random tech interview.

A huge part of this is simply finding ways to stack the deck in my favor. A great interviewer knows that it's THEIR job to figure out what I can do well. Most people are not great interviewers. This makes a technical interview a total crapshoot that has never worked out for me.

My post is definitely suggesting that companies should examine their process to see if they're filtering for the right things. More importantly, I'm explaining how I've solved this problem for myself. Will I miss opportunities with my approach? Absolutely. I just now believe that I find better ones with my new method.

One caveat... I mostly consider a question like, "Can you explain what a closure is?" to be conversational. Simple knowledge quizzes are great fodder for a phone screen just to find out if someone even belongs in the room and whether they match the needed skills in general way. Where I get into trouble is with with whiteboard coding, brainteasers, etc.

We could have a great chat about async front end dev and then I'd stare blankly at you when you asked about CSS specifics. That's productive and tells you about my experience, though not my aptitude.

Thanks for this blog entry. I happen to be going through this problem right now. I'm a developer who just moved to SF. There are tons of jobs, but I freeze up during tech interviews. In the past I have landed jobs at small companies with a looser interview structure where I can basically distract them with interesting nerdy stuff so the time runs out before they can get to the programming questions.

I am wondering 2 things: 1. How do you phrase it to a potential employer that you would prefer a take home project? Do you say you do bad under pressure? Do you say you think your abilities would shine though on a larger thought through assignment instead? 2. Do people have other strategies for dealing with such issues? Perhaps using a head hunter who knows the hiring process of each company, and can pass you along to ones with a less rigerous tech interview component.

Maybe I should just find smaller companies that have not figured out their interview process yet and hope they wont drill me.