The secret life of a games programmer
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This and similar advice have been repeated through the decades and have stopped no one. I heard that line. Didn't stop me. I dispensed this line and have stopped no one. Life is a different thing when you're young.
Let me have another chance at giving out unwanted advice:
If you enjoy programming games get a regular job that you work at 9-5 and use the time you would've spent working unpaid overtime at a games studio to work on a game at home. You will have creative control and freedom to choose any tech and tools you want - neither of which you'd have at a games studio. Do I even need to mention a normal salary and other benefits at this point?
Your last advice seems even less effective than the standard to me, in that it's totally ineffective against someone who says "yeah but I want to work on Halo" whereas there's at least a snowball's chance in hell that if you say "MS will pay and treat you like shit if you work on Halo" they might reconsider...
It feels like this is always the crux of the problem. Young people full of life just don't understand how soul-crushing certain jobs can be. I was one of those people.
In a past position, I was told that the hours would be long, and the competitive nature drives people to insanity. On the bright side, you'll make some great friends (the ones that you don't hate) and the benefits are outrageously good. All of that was true to the letter. I didn't understand the subtext of work coming before literally everything else (including health), the pay is trash, and life will always be massively in favor of your superiors.
What my teenage self didn't understand was how much of an impact the subtext would have on my life in the future. And if I did (though I'm sure I didn't), it didn't matter. It was what I wanted. It was my calling.
On the other hand, you run the risk of sounding like an someone who, "just doesn't understand the passion" that someone can have for the job - even if you're recounting stories from your past. Too much negativity just keeps the young crowd from believing you.
Hobbies will only ever be just that. Some of us are in it to make something meaningful and if that means most of us will fail then it's better to have tried than to wake up 50 years old having never tried at all.
The difference: From what I've seen/heard, working for a Y-Combinator startup is a far better environment than working for a lot of game companies.
This is precisely what I'm currently doing.
Why? We use technology not to 'disrupt' some industry, get bigger returns for a financial firm or big data problems with users information. Instead, we create software with the sole purpose of making people happy, And we also get the chance to tell stories that will influence thousands maybe millions of minds.
So we are in a never ending search for big insights about the world and ways to encode them into fun games. I'll never grow tired of that.
Everyone rationalizes what they do. People working in those other industries will usually tell their version of your story: "I'm not working on some shitty game that will be forgotten in a year... I'm working on building a social revolution!!!!"
Sorry. For the most part it's all about someone's bottom line. Indie game development isn't any purer than working for startup X on Bush st. that has similar lofty goals about "making people happy."
> get bigger returns for a financial firm
This is especially funny to me. If you're working for even a Mojang-sized studio, I hate to tell you but: You're definitely using technology to get bigger returns for a firm.
Sure, it's not a financial firm. Let's not pretend that the differences are all that meaningful. Instead of stock market returns, game studios just seek to maximize the return they get on game development time.
EDIT: s/Riot/Mojang. I didn't realize how large Riot has gotten.
> I'll never grow tired of that.
Great. And EA will never get tired of people working themselves to death for what inevitably amounts to minimum wage given the hours worked. Guess it's win-win.
Side note: Didn't Mojang get bought by Microsoft? Are they still considered small? (NOTE: I've not researched this is a serious, not-loaded question..)
I was just making the point that unless it's essentially you and a couple buddies, profit and revenue is the elephant in the room.
Or the center-piece, depending on how brutally honest management wants to be about it.
So what's with the raft of dull first-person shooter franchises that aren't fun to play? I suspect it's more like any other industry; churn out what sells.
Maybe you're playing the wrong type of games.
I find MMOs/MOBAs and a lot of loot-roulltte style games to be devoid of any value for me.
This resonates with me! I have experienced this kind of management schizophrenia many times, telling you that you have flexible working hours, that you can manage your time yourself, that you should take your time, do things right... And then, on the other side, appears the pressure to deliver, the "questions" that suggest you might need to "hurry" a bit more, to deliver more stuff, to cut some corners if necessary...
There are 2 acceptable responses to that, plus a taboo one. The 2 standard responses is either to try to uphold an unrealistically high standard (the neurotic overachiever type), or you can take the blame for not doing it and sacrifice your sense of self worth (the dilbertesque, paper pusher type). Both private and public sector have plenty of uses for workers of either type.
What is not permitted is to react like a grown up and point out to the inconsistency of the "mixed messages". I have read that this typically gets responded with hostility from higher-ups (who typically are not fully conscious of the dynamics of the game, or see themselves as just transmitting the requirements from upper management).
Of course I barely have a handful of first and second hand data points, but those seem consistent with the model as explained above.
Monday morning: ${Executive} is coming down to talk about ${something unrelated} on Thursday. Attendance is strictly optional. This is doubly so if you're working on something critical.
Tuesday and Wednesday morning: Don't forget about the talk on Thursday. You don't need to go, but it would be nice if you attended.
Thursday morning: Don't forget about the talk this afternoon. Plan head down there about 12:45.
So, to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of an empty conference room, they go from "invited" to "encouraged" to "drop what you're doing and get in there now."
Yeah, they do this where I work, and I just don't go. So far it hasn't happened, but if someone comes to me and complains I'll blink innocently and say "Oh... I thought it was optional?" I expect when being faced with admitting to a lie they'll just drop the conversation.
On the other hand, I have no interest in management.
Of your 3 solutions the first two are non-starters for me, and have found the third very tricky. So I prefer two other options - walk away from the situation, or calmly accept and subsequently ignore chastisement.
The latter solution is interesting, since often anger expressed by the person doing the binding is because they themselves are also in a (potentially self-inflicted) double-bind. They want to express their anger at you, but don't necessarily feel ill-will toward you, knowing subconsciously that your actions are reasonable and rational. Of course, dealing with this is a lot easier said than done, and I'd seek to walk away as soon as possible if it happened with any regularity.
A simple game by myself as the complete owner on my own time seems way more fun by comparison.
Getting paid 60% of what I could get outside the industry and the crunch time lowering that wage further, and screwing up my health, and leaving me with zero time for a social life eventually got to me, though, so I got out of the industry, despite my passion.
I now design board games in my spare time while working on enterprise software at a Microsoft shop, and get paid a lot more, and if I ever have to stay late (which happens every once in awhile) they credit me the time to take off in the future so I'm only working 40 hour weeks.
I absolutely love programming games! It's the most fun programming I've ever had in the 10+ years of writing code. Nothing beats showing off your creations with family and friends and them "getting it."
I've gone back and forth of whether I should join the industry but with a kid and high priority of family time, I just can't do away with what's actually important to me. I've never regretted working a solid job to support an awesome hobby.
I've started getting into the board game hobby recently and it seems like, while you're never going to get rich off of it, there's much greater opportunities to gain a reputation and while there's a lot of "play the game a few times and move on to the next" in the hobby as well, because games are physical they tend to stay out there and get reprinted for decades, instead of stay out there for a few months, on average.
I tended to design board-game-friendly designs in the first place, so I decided to pretty much switch to board games. As a bonus, there's a healthy demand for mobile app versions of board games anyway, so you can get a physical AND a digital version for the same game design.
Plus it's a hell of a lot faster to prototype new mechanics and build prototypes with physical board games.
But that's me. Programming games is still a lot of fun, just sucks when gamers spend so little time on your game before moving on to the next shiny thing.
I think the most difficult thing about the video game industry is the amount of drama in the hobbyest scene. Still trying to find a "group" that isn't jumping on the latest "cause" rather than feeding in depth discussions of randomly generated worlds.
One time I was tasked with implementing a system that simulated traffic in a city for an open world style game. That was a really interesting problem that I enjoyed working on.
ALL of the joy had been sucked out of development.
Work/Life balance was fine but the technical work/administrative work balance was completely off.
I went to a gamedev job interview recently (messed up the 2nd stage (un?)fortunately), the first stage was some small tasks about 3d graphic, gemoetry, collision detection, etc. It's just so much more fun to me than "parse xml, put stuff in db, render html". I don't know why, maybe simply because it's different? I always enjoyed small scale math problems, and I don't really get to do that in my regular job.
One problem is that lots of people want to be game developers, so the working conditions and pay can suffer. But the consensus among indie developers who I've talked to is that the pay isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and it's still worth spending a few years 'paying your dues' at a large company, if only to learn about how the development process works in the real world; there's a whole lot more to making a game than writing a good engine. Unfortunately, game development also suffers from Publish or Perish Syndrome, so it's hard to get a foot in the door with large companies unless you've already shipped a game.
I'm saying all of that as somebody who thinks that they would enjoy being a game developer, but I've never worked in game development so most of what I'm saying is secondhand information. It's enough to make me happy to stick with learning on my own time for now, though.
People need to stop enabling this kind of nonsense - a big part of the problem is so many people want to make games that they'll put up with terrible working conditions to do so. Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization - but in a parallel to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line, everyone believes they're the best programmer, so no-one wants to do that.
I don't know. I've worked with ex game developers in Norway and Sweden, two countries with fairly strong unions, and the story is basically the same. The companies are very good at convincing you that you really want to work under those conditions and that doing so makes you awesome. They also know that if they insist on 'realistic', union approved, working conditions, the publisher/studio will just hand the next game off to another, less difficult, team. Hell, I've known people to straight up lie to their union rep about their working conditions because they don't want the unions stepping in and 'ruining' things.
More or less.
There are times when it's more productive than this, usually towards the end of a project when all that's left is bugfixes, polish, adding in special cases here and there to make certain parts of the game more playable/obvious/fun/etc.
But most of the time it's as you said, or even worse. The first couple weeks of crunch you might get 1/1 hours work to hours productive, but after a month or so of 80 hour weeks you're just working 80 hours to get 40 productive hours out of it. If that.
> Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization - but in a parallel to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line, everyone believes they're the best programmer, so no-one wants to do that.
I'm not an expert on unions (by any stretch, really, so correct me if I'm wrong), but I worry this would have a lot of unrelated negative consequences for the game industry, like making it very difficult for indie studios to get off the ground, which IMO would be more negative for the industry than crunch is (if I'm not mistaken about this being a likely possibility).
(Also, it seems very strange to me to separate game and non-game programming in this way. Where is the line drawn?)
Except that comes with it's own significant detrimental side effects, not the least of which are incentivizing labor from countries without unions.
All of the above said, it's not just them that are distracting. It's literally just the effect of the open floor plan. Someone is talking 4-5 desks down and your brain has to make the constant decision not to listen to them.
Company that fires experienced engineers to hire junior ones? Doesn't sound that lucky.
Yes!
When you have someone who only makes decision based on outcomes from a black box process with the counter productive passive aggressive nagging of when will it be done vs. someone who understands the stress,emotions (yeah programmers have them too),art and approximate effort management to avoid burning people out will be a godsend.
You can absolutely become the latter without technical expertise, I would say empathy is the biggest tool of someone who manages programmers.
The cigar smoking hunch back Soviet union styled factory owner who keeps saying he survived the dot com bubble like it was some world war and getting angry when programmers are trying to 'subvert' him by intentionally missing deadlines. I think it's good that these type of industrial revolution era work management culture is slowly eroding.
But yeah the disconnect between those on the front lines everyday with headphones on vs. the schmoozing politicizing manager with 30 years of restaurant experience is not going to be a good cultural fit. Eventually, everyone abandons you, people check glassdoor reviews and then you are finished, you can't hire anyone anymore without some insane turnover.
I hold out hope that independent games companies are different, and from what I've heard, they mostly are.
If I'm going to work 16 hour days, 6 days a week, I may as well be getting something useful out of it.