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Comment by DangerousYams | Hacker News Reader

I was a college student in India in 2001 being discouraged by my professors from seeking a graphics elective because "there's no career in graphics". 20 years later I can happily reflect on a dream career in graphics (EA, Pixar and my own game studio). The second edition of this book and its "make pretty pictures with a computer" message started it all off!

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Heh, I had a similar story but just a decade later. Was not allowed to take the graphics elective in University even though it was a part of the official syllabus. The reason being that it was difficult to get a good grade in this subject in the finals.

Indian society and the love for meaningless numbers on a sheet of paper, name a better duo.

I think this is just sign of active fads. When I wanted to pick a research area in 2007 multiple professors/students had told me to ignore databases. The understanding was RDBMSes of the day had solved all problems. There were minor rumblings of the NoSQL movement back then, but no one was sure if it would be impactful and/or last long. At any rate not many ppl expected the field would see so much activity :-)

Another example I can think of is speech recognition systems (ASRs). Around 2007-08 again, I was told by researchers in the area that they are not coming to personal devices anytime soon - esp for Indian accents. A few years later you could dictate messages to hangouts on an Android phone :-)

> A few years later you could dictate messages to hangouts on an Android phone :-)

... can you ? it's 2021 and on any top of the line phone I'm definitely unable to get speech recognition systems to understand sentences to an acceptable level. A few words work... kinda. Hell, even typing has become harder than a few years ago where it used to be a simple dictionary - now every other message the automatic correction is completely wrong, which is very frustrating.

Well, passably. If you speak slowly and clearly. I agree about auto-correction though.

I tried turning the typing corrector off on Android and the quality of my typing went down... It does catch more errors than it injects.

There was a curve. My typing quality went down at first, but as I adjusted I got both faster and more accurate over the next couple of weeks.

Wow, Maybe things were different in 2001 but saying there's no career in graphics sounds ridiculous today. It's also one of the coolest fields.

> there's no career in graphics sounds ridiculous today.

I'd wager that for this kind of people, even today, "graphics" is not a career. A career in these people's mind is something where you look like a stock photo executive, you'd do code for a couple years and move on to management.

Well, it kind of is the general expectation, unfortunately :-(

For many people if you're 40+ and you're not higher up in the hierarchy, something is wrong.

In India where the industry has expanded the way that it has, that might be a more reasonable expectation than say the US.

“ A career in these people's mind is something where you look like a stock photo executive, you'd do code for a couple years and move on to management."

I shudder when I think about this outcome, despite its inevitability.

Funnily enough, I’ve had research faculty in top tier universities say this sort of thing to me recently.

“Graphics is an industrial field. There’s just no money in it.”

Probably meant in the Indian context. Even today, the gaming/animation industry is pretty small here, it was probably non-existent way back in 2001.

I got told this as an elementary schooler circa 1980. Gotta stick with Pascal, Data Structures, Algorithms...

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