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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I am a game-engine-developer... without any work at the moment.

People just rarely want my skills, I work with C, C++, Lua, ASM, blazing-speed well built code that takes a long time to make.

People don't even ask me to do interviews, when I see all these posts on HN complaining of interviews I can't relate, I never get invited to them in first place, because I don't know React, Enterprise-Java, Electron and other whatever new very high-level tech designed to speed up dev (at cost of program speed for end user) that is popular.

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I'm just going to put this out there.

Game engines have a lot of similarities with the problems in Robotics. Given an array of on-board sensors you need to build a model of your environment, plan through it, behave intelligently, and network information with other robots or human users. Furthermore to validate the product you need a simulation environment and engines like Unreal are starting to be used to do so (https://github.com/Microsoft/AirSim). High performance code is key to making it all happen in real time and C++ is the native tongue.

I work at http://shield.ai/ and we're building these robots today. Our mission is to reduce American and civilian casualties to 0 by 2030 in ground combat. If you're interested - here's my email adam.dorwart [at] shield [dot] ai

A lot of ex-gamedev(I'm one of them) go into embedded devices and mobile where power/perf still matters or over into financial(more common in eu gamedev) where latency is king.

That's the route I took(gamedev->embedded/mobile->bigco), I'd look into those type of companies where a low level native skillset matters.

There are plenty of jobs available for game engine developers, and low level engine programmers in general. If you'#re applying for jobs with React/Electron in the descriptions, you're not really applying for engine developer positions, though.

Where? Mind you, I don't live in a first world country... So it must be either remote, or allow relocation. (in my country at least ALL jobs are for React/Electron/Java... I applied to them because they are the only job listing that existed in first place, better to work on the 'wrong field' than to be hungry).

Well we're in Ireland and looking for a good C++ programmer. But not in the Gaming space I'm afraid :(...

It's very dispiriting to see someone with your skills having any trouble finding work. You should be in very high demand.

I don't know where youre located, but in many parts of the world there are low level c++ jobs available. The us and Europe are full of them, and every company I've spoken to has offered relocation.

There's a difference between people not wanting your skills, and people not wanting your skills where you're located, unfortunately.

Can you transition to db-engine-developer ? Being on the low-level it should be easier.

Example: http://www.scylladb.com/company/careers/#software-developer (they like kernel hacker more, but who doesn't)

You can build new features in c++, everything has to be fast/low-level, networking, use Lua to create coprocessors etc.

Why not apply/interview with them ?

Can you imagine what humanity would achieve if we stopped developing pointless or redundant new database engines?

I can, we'd have in-core sharding/ha/multi-dc in postgresql by now if they didn't focus on nosqls :(

I doubt that. If you're referring to the people adding the json datatype & operators, there's little overlap with the people working on replication related issues.

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