I spent the past 4 years at a small studio with about 6-8 programmers.
Almost all the programmers that ever joined our team came from a non gaming background.
And every time I onboarded someone new, it went about the same way. They adapted pretty quickly to our C++ codebase, even if they had a different background. But most of them were really not used to work in an environment where performance really matters. They knew how to write code, but they didn't know how to write fast code. Or what actually makes their code fast.
So if you want to prepare, take the slowest machine you can get your hands on, and program something for that hardware using C++ or Rust. It doesn't matter what it is. You'll learn a lot and have something nice to talk about at the job interview.
Almost all the programmers that ever joined our team came from a non gaming background.
And every time I onboarded someone new, it went about the same way. They adapted pretty quickly to our C++ codebase, even if they had a different background. But most of them were really not used to work in an environment where performance really matters. They knew how to write code, but they didn't know how to write fast code. Or what actually makes their code fast.
So if you want to prepare, take the slowest machine you can get your hands on, and program something for that hardware using C++ or Rust. It doesn't matter what it is. You'll learn a lot and have something nice to talk about at the job interview.