Well good luck in the job hunting. I wish you well.

Thanks

tried a lot of the games industry and a few big name places, trying investment banking next

I can't help thinking you must be a gambler.

Not necessarily. They use programmers to optimise trading systems so that they can do what is called high frequency trading, They get uber fast computers and they basically bid nano seconds before a big buy order comes through and that guarantees them a small but definite profit.

Congrats Nick, and Lev.

Nick, as others have said, phone up and accept in principle but don't sign anything yet.

Go to the other interviews. Letting on that I already had a job offer didn't do me any harm, and I got the job I really wanted. I felt a bit guilty about it too, but it doesn't last.

Lev, I'm pleased you got a job in your chosen field. I went through a few months thinking I would have to throw away 16 years experience and start from scratch - it sucks.

Regards

Spreadie

Funnily enough did it for guaranteed profit and made about £500 in a year


This, and also areas such as machine learning to predict current trends, it's quite a technical area Pays very well too, grad jobs are nearly double the wages of the games industry positions in some cases

Yes but for a bank you will be able to show a very quick return for the bank so they can afford to pay well, plus they have bigger sums of cash to start with.

How can you have had the time to do that many??? It takes me at least a week per application!

Microsoft portal, pre-uploaded CV to their specs, filled out form, 10 jobs a day max (generally specific areas)

2 recruitment companies who are game specialist who have my CV and I email them a covering letter

Rockstar for 4 or 5 positions across offices. (time consuming)

Well known MMO dev in worldwide locations (form details saved so quick after the first one)

Google allowed me to apply for multiple positions at once inc the grad positions

Contractor/recruitment company I currently get paid from MS also advertise positions that I have looked at

Another company I am waiting to hear from (the CEO was very interested when I was chatting to him) and another games company in the UK, then a few in the US, waiting on the results of the programming exam there


Lots of fingers, lots of pies

Need to look at grad schemes/grad positions for IB companies next, got a respectable app showing off my .Net skills across multiple areas, going to mod the PC version to use WPF (WM 6.1/6.5 doesn't directly support it) so it looks nicer, and to work on some more machine learning (going to make a tic tac toe machine learning vs neural net/finite state machine game to show some skills there) and also currently working on some natural language processing for a spam detection program in Perl (and a new language to add to my list)

Well good luck with it all Fin.

Cheers, got a reply from one of the big names yesterday about setting up an informal phone interview.... for their 1pm it's about 9pm here

Got a technical interview this Monday in the evening with a US company, will be interesting to know what they are interested in, going to look at some algorithms etc in advance and other areas I don't usually deal with to try and get some knowledge down, will be some live coding too

Sounds good!

One thing I would probably say RE the live coding (with my vast experience of never having been in a programming interview ) is don't be afraid to use pen and paper for at least the first few minutes depending on what it is.

I am sure there will be lots of people who will dive in and start trying to pull bits of code together but a more structured approach (IMHO) would give off a more organised impression to your interviewers. Especially if you can then code and get everything right first time rather than hacking at code to get it right.

Treat it like homework - post the test on here and ask us to do it for you.

ood luck.. just dont do the swordfish way of "pressure" coding