Hiring a Developer as a Small Indie Studio in 2025

This is very consuming. If chief tier people start doing this thjs then this will start draining “em more. Chief operated people should focus and be picky about whom they want to WORK WITH.

Totally curious about the "Candidate used AI to reply"

I would have outsourced the initial screening to a hiring agency and only interview top 5.

For a 3 people team this 4 weeks hiring process is too tedious.

One note that might be good to highlight in the article is that the take-home is expected to be 2 hours long. From my experience, they are much longer so I was initially surprised to see take-home's being given before an initial call until I looked at the assignment itself.

Curious about "no-AI" policy. From my experience interviewing lately AI is allowed,but the task is usually big in a small time window. So you quickly spin up the project but I see most of work in QA

> Work with Indies — no formal connection, but the results were great! –. Our listing went live at 11:30 AM on October 15th, and we had to ask them to shut it down by 6:30 PM on October 17th because we had too many candidates. In the end, we collected 159 applications.

Is this normal in Seattle? That’s a tonne of applicants especially on what seems like a niche job site. Are they mostly junk offshore applications or bots?

Interesting that out of that it looks like 90% were late applications or not qualified and only 17 total completed the take home.

I met this guy who became a game dev later in life, as in his 30s. He has quite the non-traditional resume as far as devs go, with no formal CS education.

In any case, he went on to work on a game, and kept doing so for years. He hired artists etc. but did the core development himself. Released the game, which has now sold over 150k copies since the release last year. Obviously not crazy numbers up in the millions or tens of millions, but impressive for a first release, and from a dev basically learning as he's moving along, with a regular 9-5 job and family - doing it purely for the love of the game.

Makes me wonder if he'd ever have gotten the chance, had he first tried to join some small indie studio, rather than the DIY route.

I am impressed with the extent of the effort here. I struggle with the notion of working with just one other person on a game. Building an entire hiring pipeline and documenting it seems like something that would immediately kill the dream for me at this scale.

There is something that feels very cursed to me about a team of size 2~10 for game dev. At this point I'd much rather go solo or join a team of 100+. Zero structure or a lot of structure. A medium amount of structure seems to bring the maximum amount of entropy.

"Our take-home lets candidates code." - As a dev, I absolutely hate the practice of such assignments.

Every non-junior dev/coder should already have at least some indicators out there showing how they code - GitHub, a personal site or any other resources. For juniors or CS graduates there might be bit of a grey zone, but even then, with how widely available web space is nowadays, there’s really no excuse not to have something out there if you are serious about the "love for coding".

So the sentence “we need to respect people’s time as much as our own” seems flawed to me, because you obviously don’t respect the time of the candidates who coded for nothing for you.

To me, that is also a huge red flag when considering a position.

Important should be assessing someone’s theoretical knowledge of software patterns, principles and architectures ..just getting a feel for their nerd level. Seeing how much they actually care about code and details, whether they can really express themselves and if they could communicate a problem clearly.

Why not list the salary up front? That reduces the number of people with wildly different remuneration expectations?

The perspective here is subtly baised - look at the diagram down the bottom and realise that they were always only going to hire 1 person, so all the reasons that they give for not hiring the person are, in fact, not reasons that the person filtered out wasn't hired. They are processes to rank the applicants. If there were more candidates they'd add more reasons not to hire most of them, if there were less candidates the reasons not to hire would start to disappear.

In particular, companies are in some sense bluffing with the "Didn't Qualify" category. I've seen hiring situations where nobody qualifies but they actually need to fill the position - they hired someone who didn't qualify and trained them up. They did a great job. "Didn't qualify" is only a real category for the most demanding jobs. Software is just not one of them, nobody has any idea if dev is going to be good or not before they hire them. Companies often have a hard time picking which devs are the productive ones when they've already hired the dev.

So we've got an article about a process used to rank devs, and no particular evidence of whether the dev hired is actually very good. Which is fine, still an interesting read. But it is good to keep a clear perspective. This is one of those situations where doing big parts of the process by fair dice roll is not necessarily an inferior approach.

This sounds like an incredibly toxic hiring process and not a company I'd ever want to work for. So you apply for a job and in response they (maybe) email you back asking for your expected salary (great way to filter out anyone worth hiring btw) and if you're cheap enough they then ask you to do work on a take home assignment. Everyone here thinks that this is okay and they want to be interviewed this way?

"Since we are focused on efficiency, we need to respect people’s time as much as our own". How exactly does this process respect the candidates time?

> If we see potential, the first step is always asking the candidate upfront for their expected salary, availability, and whether they want full-time or part-time. Since we are focused on efficiency, we need to respect people’s time as much as our own. Most candidates appreciate it; for example, it immediately filtered out a very qualified candidate whose salary ask was 4 times our budget.

I feel like the "respectful of applicants' time" thing to do would be to state a salary range in the posting.

This aligns closely with the hiring practices I learned in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The only thing missing is to have structured interviews to reduce interviewer bias.

The best predictors of job performance are a simulation of the job and past performance. This is not new research or a secret.

IMO the take home assignment is trivial, even for non-game developers with zero Unity experience; maybe you don't need a take home assignment at all. I also think that asking people to "not use AI" when you have absolutely no way of enforcing it is just self-deception.

> You must ask candidates to solve problems directly related to the role. If you’re hiring a game programmer, knowing how to detect fraud in bank transactions is irrelevant knowledge if that task never appears on the job.

I wish more companies understood this. In all my years of interviews I never got a coding interview or take home programming assignment that even remotely resembled the work they needed.

20 people given a take home test for one role?

I get icky feelings about these. Clearly, 18 out of 20 submitted something so I guess most people go along with it and perhaps I'm an outlier.

Hiring for the exact needs you think you have and rejecting anything that doesn't match exactly is not very constructive.

Chances are, you're going to see applicants with combinations of skills you couldn't even have imagined.

Humans are complicated.

This is a good write-up.

If you’ve never run a hiring process, it’s hard to get a feel for just how difficult and time-consuming it is.

And risky - hiring someone wrong for the role is very expensive and disruptive. And yet more likely to happen that you’d think, even with a rigorous selection process.

"Unfortunately, this time, we had 46 late applicants we didn’t even look at"

You couldn't even do the INITIAL / quick triage for those 46? You couldn't even just spend 20 seconds on each to see if they were remotely qualified to be considered or not? It would have taken one person 15 minutes. You instead just threw away all those applications without even glancing at them? In addition, these were applications that people got in before the deadline, before you closed the application process, they applied correctly, and you just threw them away without even glancing at them?

The article includes actual numbers of the filtering funnel! Excellent!

"Late applications" though: Wouldn't it be very wasteful though, to dismiss a third of candidates simply because late application when the posting was live just two days? As admitted, the hiring process is time consuming. It seems wasteful then to filter on "available during the 2 day posting window"! That availability was not a serious job requirement.

I wish we stopped playing games during hiring processes. I get you're trying to weed out the bad ones (can't take pressure, not pro-active, can't ask questions, etc.), but the entire process sucks on both ends.

Let's say we care about the potential employee's needs, most people want to feel like they're making a difference at work and build something that matters. I have never had a job interview where I was able to discuss this topic. It's just "are you good enough to work for us?" while the entire company is falling apart in the background.

Do you actually want to improve your company, or are you just looking to share more workload? Because those are two different things. I'm not looking to join your bike-shedding business

> always asking the candidate upfront for their expected salary [etc - to respect and save everyone time]

Isn't that a dark pattern (in addition to being a time saver for everyone)? It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't kind of thing.

This is an adversarial question in a process which needs to be ruthless against the time-wasting applications, but also needs to be cooperative with future co-workers.

If you are open to a broad range of salary in exchange for perhaps working at a super exciting place, then there is no good answer. Even "I'm open to a broad range of salary if that's needed to work at a super exciting place" is not a great answer.

Leaving it to the legal requirement of posting an expected salary range and negotiating from there might be a better way.

Mike, ludum dare co-founder (and sole maintainer these days) is looking for work. For your consideration please https://mikekasprzak.com/Resume-MikeKasprzak.pdf