Diagram made with https://sankeymatic.com

Full post here: https://www.ballardgames.com/tales/hiring-dev-2025/

Posted by victor-ballardgames

35 comments

  2. What is considered a late submission? I would assume submissions are accepted or not, do this is new to me.

  3. It’s a bit strange the initial phone call is so far down the chain. Is there a reason this doesn’t happen at the start? Also I’m curious how that one candidate used AI to reply on the phone!

  4. Not matching current needs? You mean they didn’t solve the take-home?

  5. How did someone use AI to answer the phone screening? Or was it more that they revealed they’d used AI to get through the previous steps.

  8. did they just have google call screening thing respond to you instead of picking up? lol.

  9. A Sankey diagram at least with this layout doesn’t fit the data very well.

    The data is somewhat interesting, the visualization in my opinion isn’t beautiful though.

  10. Congrats. You all are part of the problem of companies giving take home assignments thinking it’s an acceptable practice. Furthermore giving them before you’ve even had the decency to have a phone chat with them.

  11. I’m surprised so many people did the take-home. Pretty much everyone I know in tech immediately disregard any application that sends a take-home round.

  12. absolute dog behaviour making them do a take home BEFORE an initial call when you only have 34 candidates to go through.

  14. “not available immediately”

    Fun story,
    I once worked for a company with a contract requiring 2 months notice plus 2 extra weeks just to review your resignation. Total nonsense, especially for an intern like me.
    When I decided to quit, I realized no company wanted to wait that long for a junior hire. So, I applied elsewhere without mentioning that “detail.”

    One company told me they needed someone “yesterday.” I nailed the interviews, got the offer and guess what:

    The contract they sent had the exact same restrictive clause. They were desperate to hire fast but used a contract designed to make leaving nearly impossible.

    P.S. meanwhile, they could fire me with only a 2 week notice

  15. The fact that 17/20 candidates actually did a take home assignment before talking to anybody…

  16. It’s funny that you list “used ai to reply” because I’m 1000% sure you use ai to reply to them, especially when rejected.

  17. Curious what you mean by ‘candidate used AI to reply’?

    I have a feature on my phone that lets me screen calls from unknown numbers using the google assistant and this has saved me a lot of time and annoyance picking up calls from scammers instead of people I want to talk to. I would hope that you mean they had some goofy AI shit try to do the whole SCHEDULED phone call, and not just ‘they used a feature to screen an unknown call that we didn’t properly schedule’.

  18. I’m staggered that 3% of the applicants were actually offer worthy.

    In my experience it’s like .3 percent. We get so many applicants. Like 1000 for every job. Half aren’t even in the same universe as the job. Another quarter are just making shit up and have no relevant experience at all. Then half the rest need a visa. It’s terrible.

    In my experience as an applicant I can’t even get an automated rejection email on 90% of opportunities despite having done pretty much the exact job they are hiring for, in the same industry and as a local candidate. I do think many jobs are posting a 150k a year job but have a 80k budget.

    The idea that this many of your applicants got this much engagement from you is staggering to me from perspectives as both the applicant and the employer.

  19. I’ve seen a lot of these recently where every non-hired candidate is given a reason and I appreciate that you didn’t do this for the last 5 candidates and the 4 that weren’t hired are just “no offer”.

    I think that’s highly reflective of the current job market difficulties. It’s entirely likely that you had 5 quality candidates that could have done the job in the end, but there’s only one opening so 80% of those didn’t get hired, not because they weren’t qualified, but because someone else was a little bit better in some way

  20. Yeah one of the things I often tell students is that job numbers often sound scarier than they are. “Over 100 applying for a small job?” But then you have to realize that most of them are garbage. Some combination of spamming their resume to every possible submission regardless of qualification, with trashy throwaway cover letters. Some that do have a decent resume are unable to be contacted. Some are found not to be human at the phone phase. Some that look qualified on the resume but basic tests/technical interviews reveal massive flaws. Then after that you are often down to just a few candidates. Anyone that’s ever had to do hiring can attest to this.

    This isn’t to say that software market is great right now, but reddit tends to distort reality. Junior positions are down to about 80% of pre-ChatGPT levels, not 10% like some people believe.

  21. for anyone interested, here’s the take home: [https://gist.github.com/victor-ballardgames/b1dd4ce6b9eac15be665db32b7a188d6](https://gist.github.com/victor-ballardgames/b1dd4ce6b9eac15be665db32b7a188d6)

    Start with an empty Unity scene that contains a single cube.

    **Goal:** Implement a system where the cube’s color is controlled by an external HTTP service rather than being set directly in Unity.

    This is freshman level stuff. Easy REST API basics. Sure, easily cheesed by AI, but I can’t imagine this taking more than 10 minutes even without it.

    Limitations:

    * You can use any language or framework for the HTTP service.
    * You cannot use AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude etc.) to write or debug the code

  22. Everyone is bashing on this poor indie company but when I applied for King (big gaming company) there were 2 coding steps before an interview.
    1 with leet code type questions and 1 take home assignment (also something nothing to do with gaming development) if you passed the CV screening + leet code.

    At least from the blogpost, the take home assigment from this indie studio was something related to the job. That’s actually nice.

  23. Good article.

    What would make someone be considered as “not matching current needs”? Was it a lot of Jr. Devs, people who didn’t use Unity – or something else?

    Also, what factor did the final person who succeeded have, that the others didn’t have?

  25. Take home that early is disgusting lol. I would’ve peaced out.

  26. Looks like you think you are Google.
    But you are just a shitty indie dev. 

    Goodluck attracting skilled people who know their value and value their time. Hint for you, they value their time than yours and will not do free tricks for a chance to talk to you. 

  27. I did a take home once and it was one time too many. Waste of 16 hours. Basically worked for two days with no pay. Never again.

  28. Now collectively laugh at the guy who used AI to reply for a job

  30. How many turned out to be North Koreans using aliases?

  31. What is an email review? I’ve heard of reviewing a resume or experience via a phone call/linkedin but not an email review. Especially as a first evaluation.

  32. Nice write up!! I’ve done something incredibly similar with student assessments and it was so simple to set up and yet gets such big results. It’s great to see these outcomes!

    Nowadays, I also have candidates that I need to assess before passing them into the next tier. I will say having a 5 minute conversation before they take the test opens the pool a lot, and saves everyone time. Having everyone take the test, even if they aren’t a good fit burns everyone out, and opens us up to letting great candidates slip by bc the great candidates know they’re worth more and will go seek it out.

    I also have candidates I talk to that don’t pass the assessment and then I have somewhere else I can place them because I got the chance to talk to them first, instead of a straight reject without talking to anyone. It’s served our agency well and I invite you to consider that for the next round of hiring.

  35. Make everyone do a fucking take-home test before you’ll even talk to them on the phone. Man hiring is completely fucked.

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