GenZedong

You're right that you're probably overestimating the basic competence. If you have proficiency in one language, you can end up pretty easily learning another, as every programming language has similar concepts, they just implement them all in a different way.

As for the practical day to day, understanding algorithms isn't really needed. Most languages & frameworks have already implemented almost all problems you've come across with methods like sorting & things like that, but it's helpful to know generally what the performance of something is just in case you end up working with a large dataset.

I feel you on the HackerRank problems, they're annoying & pointless & don't seem to translate well into day to day work, but unfortunately they're used most often for technical interviews. I always had the toughest time with them & I still resent them to this day lol.

I find there are two different areas of skills needed to break into tech:

• Interviewing
• Actually doing the job

Interviewing is much more about solving problems in front of people which usually feel very self indulgent and pointless. There are some that are awesome interview processes but 80% of the time you'll get some bullshit problem to solve in front of them. I find not passing these is its own form of filtering for yourself, because the engineers that think of them or design these interview processes are usually egotistical & have a lot of pull within the org.

Doing the job is much more about collaboration, practical aspects of working together (source control like git, understanding the agile process, knowing who to go to for specific types of knowledge, code reviews, etc). There is a lot less hypothetical knowledge needed unless you're working on critical systems that require high performance & have strict memory limits.

As for whether or not to work in video games, you're definitely right about them being the most exploited. But if you're hoping to work on a unionized team, the video game industry is just about the only one who has any sort of organization effort toward getting unionized & have close to the only unions in the entire tech industry. So it's a trade off. I have tried unionizing in tech start ups before & it has been incredibly hard to get people together for it, I've only gotten small cores of people willing to do it before getting laid off or leaving.

Hope that helps. You're welcome to reach out any time if you want more insight, I know breaking into tech can be daunting.