[gameprogrammer] Interview transcript and a lesson from it

I had an interview with Flying Lab software a couple of days ago.  I 
didn't pass what should have been an extremely easy interview covering 
basic C++ such as inheritence, virtual functions, 1st year student stuff.

Here's a semi-accurate transcript of the last few minutes that sums it 
all up:

Interviewer: "How would you store enemies in an RTS?"
Me: "I generally store game objects in a dynamic array of pointers. 
However, sometimes you might want to also store the pointers in a tree 
for searches"
Interviewer (Paraphrase): If the enemies were being used to render you 
would store them in a rendering tree.
Interviewer: Is there any case where you wouldn't want to store objects 
as pointers but store them directly?
Me: "I can't think of anything.  There was one case in my last game." <I 
pointed out a case where you would store a unique value in a tree for 
fast searches>.
Him: "You would store an object directly that if the object took less 
memory than the pointer.  You aren't experienced enough so we don't need 
to continue this interview." <Click>

Basically, my failure was in not being able to read the guys' mind.  It 
might mean I wouldn't want to work for such a person, but there was no 
reason for me to not pass the interview.

The lesson I learned from this and that I would like to share is it's 
important to be more assertive than I was with loaded questions.  Don't 
even try to guess because you are sure to fail.  The correct answer 
would have been, "There is no answer to that question because it is too 
vague"


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