[fr_freak]

When I worked in IT, I discovered that a good rule of thumb for hiring good computer people is asking them which games they play. There seems to be a high correlation between competent computer people and the games they play. Someone who said “I never play video games” was probably a crappy computer guy.

[Tell It Right]

For me, a tell was me asking what their toughest project was. If their resume said they had a BS in CS from one of specific universities I was most familiar with, their answer was always their senior level course in which they had to build a pre-compiler from scratch. My response was always, "mine too", even with decades of experience later in other projects. It was an amazingly difficult college project, particularly since we were young and our only "experience" was home hobby programming since we were 14 or so.

This was a required course for CS in the Univ of Alabama system colleges. At the end of the course we turned in our assignment. The instructor ran my program and told it to read a text file of source code he made, and my program had to parse, tokenize, and implement whatever user defined variables and procedures he coded, including when he called his own methods recursively. (During the course he defined a mock programming language.)

Many senior CS students changed their major because of this one required course that was offered only once per year. I figured the few who made it trough that could handle whatever we threw at them.

[zeugma]

Someone who said “I never play video games” was probably a crappy computer guy.

Probably generally true, but I use my computer to get work done, and to facilitate various personal interests. If I wanted to play games, I'd get a console.

[luckystarmom]

I never really played computer games (except things like Tetris), and I was a good software engineer.

Now, my husband was a great software engineer and he does play computer games.