I assume everyone is curious and can easily filter garbage to find useful ideas. But I’ve been surprised the number of times juniors got stuck and weren’t able to Google and find libraries that are top on stack exchange.

Or designs with alternative analyses that honestly leave out the top toolkits for a project because they found the gartner report and didn’t go any further.

I don’t consider these junior/senior types of things, but there are things I have to realize vary across people and not everything is intuitive or easy to everyone.

Factorio isn't a game about shooting things. It is a systems-design game. Your goal is to orchestrate the processing of several different resources (iron, copper, coal, oil, stone) into several different intermediate products (gears, circuit boards, sulfuric acid, radar systems, etc), in service of a final deliverable (a rocket launch, or if you're ambitious, a continuous series of rocket launches).

To that end you must manage a variety of subsystems and how they interact with each other and with the components that you build. You will be rewarded for consistency, for modularity, for automation of frequent tasks, for reproducible designs, for looking ahead and preparing for scalability. You will be punished for failing to plan ahead. You will also be punished for trying to scale too fast, too soon.

The interview is a bad idea, yes. Even if all candidates were experienced with the game, as a showcase of how to build things, you'd still need many more hours than a typical interviewee is willing to provide, to showcase the approach. But it's not a game you get better at by focusing on "gaming".

My wife wasn’t a gamer before she met me. There are a hundred little things that gamers take for granted that non gamers don’t know to expect. You have to explain things like “there are lots of places you can go here, but if you’re a gamer you know it’s all fake: there is only one way to progress and there will be green lights at that spot. Why green lights? Who knows, green is just a standard message games use to say go-here, you know about it because of all the games you played in the past. Also, for some reason there will be items hidden if you wander around”

> Factorio isn't a game about shooting things.

Thank you for providing additional information, but I already had a good idea of what Factorio is; that is how I know I would be addicted if I were to ever try it.

I was specifically criticizing the idea that a senior developer should automatically be more proficient than an intern at navigating the UI of a game - even when that game is Factorio. It's seems preposterous to me, even though it's a tiny detail in a larger essay.

> You will be punished for failing to plan ahead. You will also be punished for trying to scale too fast, too soon.

Repeatedly playing a game helps one internalize and "have a feel" of when the timing is right. I agree with you - it's a terrible way to hire people, for the reasons you state, and because it unfairly favors people who have played Factorio before.

The thing about game engines is that they can only represent a simplified approximation; for example driving the "same" car model in 2 different games feels very different. Therefore game resource management and complexity are nothing like real-life. Would you want to work with a Director/Project Manager on the strength of how good they were at StarCraft 2 in an interview? After all, it's about resource management, planning and timing, right? </snark>

You say Factorio isn't a game about shooting things, yet probably the best way to be useful to a team game you've just joined is to fill your inventory with rails, drills, and combat equipment and then point useful at the nearest unexploited ore patch and go forward until all the red spots between the patch and the factory are gone. Doesn't prove anything about your programming ability, but since the factory is always gonna be running out of some resource anyway you'll be perceived as useful