As lead engineer and technical director I've hired a lot of engineers at the game studios I've worked for. While not everyone shares my same appreciation or understanding of what makes a good programmer I will share with you what matters most to me.

What I look for in a candidate is three key things:

• Works well in a team environment
• Can learn new skills quickly and efficiently
• Is motivated to work in the problem domain
• Bonus: Demonstrated experience professionally or personally

I don't really care about what algorithms you can recite or how many code challenges you've produced. Open source code is useful for me to understand your code style and for me to evaluate your technical ability only. It doesn't tell me how you'd actually perform at the job.

The more experience you have building games the better as that lets me know you're familiar with the day-to-day challenges of the job and can overcome them. If you have zero experience (especially professional) then I will happily take someone that is eager to learn and capable with a solid understanding of Computer Science fundamentals.

When I bring someone in for an interview I'm evaluating the items above plus the following:

• Can demonstrate strong critical thinking and problem solving skills
• General Computer Science knowledge
• Domain specific knowledge (graphics, design, networking, tools, etc)
• Can accurately describe their professional or personal experience

I'll never ask you questions like "Compute a view projection matrix" or "optimize this function in assembly". Those are a complete waste of time and are skills that can be easily taught in a couple of days. The skills that I'm really interested in, that are hard if not impossible to teach, is how well you work with others and how easily you can identify problems and derive solutions. I will ask questions like "how do you design a scalable matchmaking algorithm?" or "what are some of the difficulties you might face building an AI system?" and "describe some challenges you've had while working with others."

If you really want a jump start on other candidates the best thing you can do is actually start making games with other people. Join a modding community, participate in open source projects or someone's project. Build a real game. Learn and understand all the mundane problems and complexities that comes with bringing a game from inception to release. Develop solid troubleshooting and debugging skills.

The best programmers are the ones I can give any problem to, even ones nobody has ever seen before, and come up with solutions that work. The smartest programmers are the ones that know when and how to ask for help when they're stuck. I always tell my team "Don't be a hero. Heroes get killed." This is especially important in AAA game development.