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Industry Knowledge.md

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Industry Knowledge

These questions help gauge how well the candidate is acquainted with recent developments in the industry. Their interest in new technologies and changes in the production landscape is important for understanding how well they’ll be able to innovate and stay relevant. The questions here presume a games industry background (it would be a great exercise if the community evolves a similar set for film/VFX).

Some of these questions are purely informational and don’t need much explanation. For junior candidates we don’t expect much in-depth knowledge; for seniors, a lot of the value comes from their insights into relatives strengths and weaknesses of different technologies or software stacks. A strong indicator of seniority and maturity is a nuanced approach to the strengths and weaknesses of competing alternatives; tech fandom is for juniors.

  1. What realtime engines are you familiar with? What kind of experience do you have with the different engines?

    • Generally, experience of more engines is a good thing even if it's superficial. Use the answer to inform what other quesions you emphasize.

  2. What would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of the different engines? If you were doing a personal project, which one would you pick?

    • Does the candidate focus on UI/UX concerns? On raw performance? On tools and pipeline? Or…?
    • How nuanced and balanced is their view of the strengths and weaknesses? Are they reacting to experience or to marketing videos? Do they see technical and workflow tradeoffs as design choices, or just as “good” and “bad”?
    • Are they emotionally hung up on just one product? Are they self-aware about that?
    • The personal project question can also be very revealing – it can show what they are interested in as creators and/or technologists.
      • Is it a quest for a very specific visual effect?
      • Is it essentially a tech demo?
      • Is it creative or exploratory? Does it show out-of-the-box thinking
      • Is their hypothetical passion project related to the job we’re hiring for?

  3. If you could change only one thing about your favorite engine, what would it be? Would that change if this was a business decision instead of a personal one?

    • If the answer focuses on usability and workflows, does it reflect professional judgment or is it merely “I hated this and I want it fixed even if it’s trivial”.
    • If the answer focuses on technical or graphic sophistication, is it a generic “pretty feature” wishlist or does it reflect a good appreciation of the pros and cons of different technologies.
    • Does the candidate they show a perspective on the difference between personal preferences and what’s best for the user community (or the business)?
    • How does their answer relate to the position we’re hiring for?

  4. Does your preferred engine have a distinctive look or feel, even when used across a diverse array of projects? If so, what creates that impression?

    • What do they reference in their explanation?
      • Lighting models, like Frostbite’s dynamic lighting?
      • Antialiasing strategies, like Unreal’s default heavy TAA?
      • Content organization imposed by engine limits (like, the difficulty of doing an outdoor game in Source, or doing a big streaming game in vanilla Unity)
      • Pipeline imposed limits (like, levels coming directly from a DCC instead of an iterative game editor environment)
      • Animation features, like runtime retargeting or runtime IK.
    • Does their discussion indicate broad familiarity with the common problems across engines and productions?
    • Are they able to articulate the technical reasoning behind the perceived difference (= more senior), is it a gut feeling (=more junior)?

  5. Where do you think realtime engines will be heading over the next 5 years? What exactly do you think will be different? How much do you think this will change our jobs moving forward?

    • There is of course no right answer here, but it's important to poke a bit at the candidate's answer to see if it reflects hard thinking about the direction we're heading or if it's just an easy one liner. Is the candidate actively thinking about the future they anticipate? Are they learning new techniques or paradigms to prepare for it? In some ways this question is a proxy for passion.
    • At any given point in time, most candidates will lean towards a single generic answer. In 2022 it was probably "ray tracing," in 2024 it's almost certainly "AI"
    • For AI answers in particular:
      • Does the candidate show an awareness of directability problems? What concrete advances in this area can they expect?
      • Do they have strong feelings about what problems AI is good for and where it is not strong?
      • How do they see the relationship between procedural tools (such as Houdini) and AI when it comes to reproducing statistical processes like biomes?
      • Do they have a strong sense of the amount of data needed to train AI's locally?
      • What does their answer imply about their attitude towards their production-artist colleagues?
    • For ray tracing answers:
      • Does the candidate have an opinion on when/how raytracing will become affordable for mainstream consumers (particularly on mobile platforms)?
      • How do they expect raytracing to affect material authoring? How will it affect stylized rendering?
      • Are they familiar with the technical details of how raytracing is implements on modern GPUs?
      • Do they expect raytracing to force a move towards photometric lighting and physical cameras?

  6. If you were in charge of picking an engine for a new project and you weren't allowed to use your favorite one, what would you be looking at to evaluate alternatives? What are the key features needed to make a successful project?

    • There are lots of options here, but it's important for a tech artist to think about tooling and workflows as well as raw technical capacity.
    • Does the candidate stop to ask about things like genre, team size, or target platforms? The "right" answer probably depends heavily on that.
    • How does the answer balance concerns about production readiness with graphics features or throughput?
    • The key information here is not what choice they'd make, but how they think about making that kind of choice: what does it tell you about how they evaluate the relationship between teams, projects, and technology in general?