Re:Why I Would Hire Game Developers for my Startup
by petewarden on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @12:52PM
(#864580)
I was six years in consoles, five in a big-but-cool corporation on desktop apps, and the last year in web.
- Game developers are high-energy and are there because they really, really want to be doing their job. They could make more money doing something less sexy, so they're self-selected enthusiasts.
- My game projects tended to be under one year, with high pressure, clear goals and a definite deadline. This, and the general culture of the industry, encouraged lots of crunch time, and made any code philosophy other than churning out code asap hard to adopt.
- Driven by both their motivation and the project conditions, good game programmers are awesome at creating a lot of decent code very fast.
So, judged purely on coding game programmers tend to be pretty strong. The trade-off is that there are a lot of skills they don't have to develop that you need in the web world. The whole mindset of everything (apart from the HTML rendering) running on a machine you control changes things fundamentally:
- It's far easier to deploy fast and deal with problems as they arise, rather than coding and testing defensively to avoid them in the first place
- Optimization is a completely different beast. You now control the hardware side of the equation too, so the old habits of improving performance can lead you astray
Anyway, this isn't as clear-cut as I'm painting it (I'm sure MMORPG guys have a lot more in common with web developers for example), but who's 'better' definitely depends on which dimensions you're looking at.
- Game developers are high-energy and are there because they really, really want to be doing their job. They could make more money doing something less sexy, so they're self-selected enthusiasts.
- My game projects tended to be under one year, with high pressure, clear goals and a definite deadline. This, and the general culture of the industry, encouraged lots of crunch time, and made any code philosophy other than churning out code asap hard to adopt.
- Driven by both their motivation and the project conditions, good game programmers are awesome at creating a lot of decent code very fast.
So, judged purely on coding game programmers tend to be pretty strong. The trade-off is that there are a lot of skills they don't have to develop that you need in the web world. The whole mindset of everything (apart from the HTML rendering) running on a machine you control changes things fundamentally:
- It's far easier to deploy fast and deal with problems as they arise, rather than coding and testing defensively to avoid them in the first place
- Optimization is a completely different beast. You now control the hardware side of the equation too, so the old habits of improving performance can lead you astray
Anyway, this isn't as clear-cut as I'm painting it (I'm sure MMORPG guys have a lot more in common with web developers for example), but who's 'better' definitely depends on which dimensions you're looking at.