u/Immediate-Inside-909

I have an Embedded SWE interview coming up and the technical round is a bit different from the usual low-level/system design stuff. The interview is 2 hours total, with 1 hour focused on live coding where I’ll be asked to implement a “simple game” in C or C++, followed by 1 hour of behavioural/situational questions.

The company is not a game development company, and I don’t really have any game dev experience either, so I’m trying to understand what kind of game implementation is commonly asked in these interviews. From my research so far, I’ve seen things like Tic-Tac-Toe, Snake, and Conway’s Game of Life mentioned, but I’d like to hear from people here.

Thanks in advance!!

Timezone / Availability: EST , FULL DAY

Stack / Languages:

• C / C++
• Linux / QNX
• Embedded + kernel/system-level programming

Goal:
Looking for people into recreational low-level programming. Stuff like kernels, allocators, networking, emulators, reverse engineering, concurrency, bare metal, etc. Mostly just building weird systems projects for fun and learning.

And some DSA as well.

I’m finishing my master’s next month and currently wrapping up my internship. I have around 1.3 years of internship experience(YOE).

I’ve been applying for jobs and getting interviews, but many are for roles asking 3-5 YOE. Recently, I cleared a Linux kernel engineer interview that asked for around 4 YOE, and the interview felt pretty easy and they will share an offer this week.

Now I’m wondering: should I trust my skills and take the jump from intern to senior SWE, or should I follow the normal path from junior to mid to senior?

I know interviews don’t perfectly measure skill, but I also don’t think YOE always does either.