Hacker News Reader

I think graphics is underrated as far as currently hyped subfields.

Being able to visually see the effect of your code is really satisfying and fun.

Graphics is pretty mature, and also relatively niche in its applications (hence little jobs and lacking salaries for the most part). But I agree, it's very cool.

I wouldn’t say graphics is all that niche compared to many other fields. There are plenty of jobs in it. The problem with salary seems to be that many people want to be in the gaming industry. Ultimately a problem of supply/demand and an exploitation of passion.

There are jobs, but probably, in terms of volume, it's 0.01% of the volume of backend or frontend jobs. Which in itself might not be bad(as there's less graphics programmers to fill these positions as well), but they aren't as geographically distributed as more mundane jobs, which limits your living options.

Also, at least in Europe, they pay much less than doing backend contracts for big corporations with plenty of money. For example, senior graphics dev in a CAD company in UK will make maybe 50-60% of backend contractor's salary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com