The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. To my eyes it looked like a choice between making things fly and explode (which was cool and relevant to my peers) and being some "database accountant" writing boring stuff I did not care about.
I was a broke student in my first real job. I didn't even consider being underpaid, because I was making more money than I've ever seen. I took a while before I've learned that my manager was paid literally 3x more than I was.
From the inside, crunch felt like being a hero and shipping on time. I enjoyed coding and was in good health, so it didn't seem problematic to me.
I did not realize how fucked-up game dev business was until I had 3 studios in a row die before releasing their second game.
Every now and then someone creates new piece of software that just changes things. Twitter as example (I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the bet, "well, that's gonna be not useful at all - who the f needs SMS on the internets?). Another example, in a more software related bubble one could say rails (ruby on rails) was very influential for web development overall.
I find thinking out of the box very challenging.
That said, I really miss the good old days before 'social media' when there used to be actual forums and blogs and IRC channels for everything under the sun. Thank heavens we still have HN.
This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage. If possible, they'd offer free off-brand animal crackers to everyone crunching.
That's not all of it, though. It's also one of those meals that are logistically east, because most people are OK with pizza. "[S]omething more tasty, healthy, and costly" is also the kind of thing that will likely require separate individualized orders for each person.
Kind of shows the difference in worlds between plain old tech (sushi as motivation for a half hour survey) vs gaming (food as incentive/etc. for ridiculous hours)
If there's no food at the office I'd start worrying about the company not being able to secure funding.
...and the movie industry
...and the music industry
...and the, well - we could go on like this forever. If it's creative work, people will endure all kinds of sh!t in order to work on the stuff they love.
most people don't have an objective view of the whole market of things they can exchange for, its a compromise of what we are exposed to and what makes enough money
then there is a slight gradient containing people that don't care for a variety of reasons, such as some passive income or other financial security
Hard to know what you really like or hate, before working with it full time.
It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.
Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
The people you mention made a common mistake. They went to a university to study X, and not because they were interested in X but because they wanted to do Y and believed that X would be useful in it. That's a mistake, because academic education does not work like that. Mastering the curriculum does not make you an expert in the field. The curriculum is only a scaffold. You are always expected to learn more, both because you should find the topic interesting and because learning more makes sense.
I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.
I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys.
They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.
And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!
Facts. One of the main motivators for me to NEVER become a game devs is simply my love for gaming. Anything I’ve ever worked on professionally has become so demystified that the things I once loved become unappealing.
Importantly, other people are going to exploit your love to take advantage of you, getting you to sacrifice some of yourself for these ideals you hold, and then not share the rewards with you. To you it's your identity. To them it's words that save them money.
I like pizza, but I only want pizza some of the time. And when I want it, I want to buy it myself and get what I want, not get something mediocre.
But as you say, boring business logic is boring, so no surprise that people would be interested in games for that reason alone, but more than that, game programming isn't the same sort of work as other programming. Are there jobs for graphics programmers working on some business spreadsheet software company? If you want to do graphics programming you need to work in an industry that needs graphics programmers.
Doesn't really matter that you're not the Miyamoto. There's lots of programmers in leadership roles solving hard and interesting problems that don't exist in other sorts of business software.
This comes about because companies see 'culture' as a means of manipulating their employees. It works because long-childhood tokens are a status symbol - poor people need to grow up quickly and demonstrate that they are compliant by wearing suits or other uniforms, middle class show that they can afford long education by retaining the signifiers of childhood. But no-one does this consciously, so people are susceptable to being 'rewarded' by these cheap signifiers instead of real value
This sort of thing seems to happen quite a bit. Somebody in HR goes baby crazy and starts treating people in the office as their surrogate children. You can't say shit about it, because it's HR.
Someone's therapist is getting a new boat soon.
Because they're passionate, and passion can and is exploited because it's irrational.
I got more insight into game dev and I think that I'm good but you only need a handful of things which are really interesting.
Like the game engine or the ai part or whatever.
Those people are just better than I am due to just being smarter etc.
So do I want to be a normal paid tool developer or dialog system biluilder or do I want a proper carrier and earn money?
I earn a good amount of money and I do not work in game dev.
I don't regret it and can imagine doing full time private game development when I'm 50 and stoped working.
Yes! Give me better healthcare! I don't care about snacks and coffee. If I was healthy I could afford these things myself.
Even worse, using it as bait to return to office. "We're having a pizza party in the office today!" (Now a Waffle Party I might come in for)
* $3000/mo to cover employee paid premiums.
* $5k-$30k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual deductible.
* $5k-$100k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual oopm
* $36k/yr to fully find everyone’s HSA.
I think there’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit that makes people happy like pizza, beer, snack, and soda and it’s not like the choice is one or the other.
You do. I think it's a major appeal of making games. Miyamoto is not designing every level, art asset, every shader and every post effect.
I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.
Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.