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Comment by pipeline_peak | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard so many horror stories in the game industry about being underpaid and sleeping under desks.

I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.

Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.

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I went through the game dev -> business dev career path.

The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev. To my eyes it looked like a choice between making things fly and explode (which was cool and relevant to my peers) and being some "database accountant" writing boring stuff I did not care about.

I was a broke student in my first real job. I didn't even consider being underpaid, because I was making more money than I've ever seen. I took a while before I've learned that my manager was paid literally 3x more than I was.

From the inside, crunch felt like being a hero and shipping on time. I enjoyed coding and was in good health, so it didn't seem problematic to me.

I did not realize how fucked-up game dev business was until I had 3 studios in a row die before releasing their second game.

> The reason was simple: I did not believe there can be anything interesting or challenging in non-game dev.

Every now and then someone creates new piece of software that just changes things. Twitter as example (I remember saying to myself as I signed up for the bet, "well, that's gonna be not useful at all - who the f needs SMS on the internets?). Another example, in a more software related bubble one could say rails (ruby on rails) was very influential for web development overall.

I find thinking out of the box very challenging.

The jury is still very much out on Twitter's usefulness. Primary engagement is from those who want to be seen and heard. Not sure anyone's listening.

The reporters are. I haven't visited twitter in a couple of years, but I see plenty of news articles that start Musk, Trump, or somebody tweeted something. It seems to be a pretty good press release pipeline.

Also on the other less cynical version of that, reporters are there - always. If there's something happening on the ground, you can get an unfiltered / unedited feed of what's happening around the world. For example I've got a list of 20 or so reporters from different countries on the ground in Ukraine, covering the situation every day. I find it much better than reading the published summaries.

It can be useful when all your infrastructure is down, to get the word out. It’s a decent second channel. But I’ll agree I think most tweets seem like shouting at a cloud.

I love Twitter but I follow a bare minimum of focused accounts.

I'm a prolific follower and follow several thousand accounts making it my primary source for getting a heads-up on what people all over the place in those fields that interest me are thinking and doing (IT, politics, gaming, art, business, etc).

That said, I really miss the good old days before 'social media' when there used to be actual forums and blogs and IRC channels for everything under the sun. Thank heavens we still have HN.

> Is it just me or does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting. I get it, I’m a gamer so I obviously don’t care about healthy choices.

This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage. If possible, they'd offer free off-brand animal crackers to everyone crunching.

Facebook managers have used sushi to motivate employees to complete the internal employee sentiment survey routinely every half for the last n years (something between the novelty and properties you describe) makes it attractive to folks

Kind of shows the difference in worlds between plain old tech (sushi as motivation for a half hour survey) vs gaming (food as incentive/etc. for ridiculous hours)

Just give me money so I can spend it how I want to, free perks at work aren't actually free

There's something to be said for a guilt-free indulgence.

Naively, yes. But if they gave you the $X to spend however you want, you'd have to pay income taxes out of it and then sales taxes to buy for yourself. When the workplace does it, they don't -- and it's an expense for them! Plus, they get the bulk price.

In which case let the employees decide what to spend things on

If they did it that way, it would be taxable income.

Also... isn't there just food at the cafeteria?

If there's no food at the office I'd start worrying about the company not being able to secure funding.

> This is how I know I'm old. Instead of giving me the cheapest viable dinner possible, why not spring for something more tasty, healthy, and costly? Pizza is the free meal equivalent of minimum wage.

That's not all of it, though. It's also one of those meals that are logistically east, because most people are OK with pizza. "[S]omething more tasty, healthy, and costly" is also the kind of thing that will likely require separate individualized orders for each person.

...and the animation industry

...and the movie industry

...and the music industry

...and the, well - we could go on like this forever. If it's creative work, people will endure all kinds of sh!t in order to work on the stuff they love.

I'd be willing to say the wider tech industry isn't much better, it's just one degree less shady and disgusting.

And about 300,000 degrees more lucrative.

Fair

stuff they ^think they love.

most people don't have an objective view of the whole market of things they can exchange for, its a compromise of what we are exposed to and what makes enough money

then there is a slight gradient containing people that don't care for a variety of reasons, such as some passive income or other financial security

Unfortunately, many of the schools that offer people creative degrees are also more than happy to charge them exorbitant sums of money for tuition - more so for the graduate degrees. I have a feeling that there are plenty of creative artists in the movie / gaming / etc. industry that are sitting on $100k-$200k in student debt, making $50k/year in some high cost-of-living area while being worked to the bone.

Hard to know what you really like or hate, before working with it full time.

the movie industry has some good unions. It ain't perfect but it's something.

Anecdotal, but everyone that I can recall from my uni's CS cohort who used video games as motivation to learn CS were ultimately bad or middling programmers, who were basically only employable by these game companies that pay crummy wages with bad work culture.

It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.

I think that would be a bad generalization. Maybe people obsessed enough with video games that you find out that's why they are learning CS are bad coders?

The impression I get from video game hackers (eg. finding glitches for speedrunning) are that they are quite talented, and console hackers as well (finding that PS5 jailbreak definitely requires skill) so I'm not sure if it's the best generalization.

console hackers and game programmers have little overlap, though. If you've spent the time to understand VR/ED you probably want to do that, in which case you're not programming.

Hacking savefiles and similar stuff (yourself, not just copying things on the web) help teach the key work habits of day to day programming. Problem solving, sticking to a problem, visualizing, decoding, basic computer architecture, tech docs, self starting, debugging, etc.

Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.

My experience is the opposite.

I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.

Huh, I guess I always found the exact opposite to be true. But I finished university in 2012, prior to the gold rush. CS department cohort stereotypes have probably drifted somewhat.

Class of 2006 here :)

Also anecdotal, but the best self-taught programmers I know (or knew, at this point) came from the demoscene and often made their careers in game development.

The people you mention made a common mistake. They went to a university to study X, and not because they were interested in X but because they wanted to do Y and believed that X would be useful in it. That's a mistake, because academic education does not work like that. Mastering the curriculum does not make you an expert in the field. The curriculum is only a scaffold. You are always expected to learn more, both because you should find the topic interesting and because learning more makes sense.

Your average AAA dev is usually better than other fields because they use C++ and so they need to understand a lot of complicated topics.

It's not quite like the old days, but games and game engines frequently require far more math and algorithms than the usual programmer just moving bits between database and screens.

I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys.

They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.

I absolutely noticed the gamer attrition between first and second year compsci at uni.

> You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.

And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!

Or even gamedev!

Unless the coding of boring business logic crushes your soul so much that you burn out and end up losing interest in being creative altogether.

I let this sentiment keep me in the games industry for 20 years. Since I left I’ve had no trouble finding challenging and fun work, for better pay and no overtime. Wish I had left sooner

What is quest design if not heaps of business logic with a different name.

Your soul can be crushed in any industry, though, and every type of job can burn you out and make you lose your creativity. It's up to each of us to watch out for ourselves.

I think you have this precisely backwards. Soulless crunch work in the video game industry as a code monkey given no creative control over the game is more likely to kill your interest in playing video games. If regular boring non-videogame office work killed people's interest in games, there would hardly be a market for videogames at all; who would buy them?

> And, possibly just as importantly, you'll have time for gaming!

Facts. One of the main motivators for me to NEVER become a game devs is simply my love for gaming. Anything I’ve ever worked on professionally has become so demystified that the things I once loved become unappealing.

"Find the thing you love and do that for a living, and you'll never work a day in your life," is such bullshit. Has anyone over 35 - with half a brain - ever said that? If so, then shame on them. Maybe find the thing you love second most, and risk resenting that. Maybe.

Importantly, other people are going to exploit your love to take advantage of you, getting you to sacrifice some of yourself for these ideals you hold, and then not share the rewards with you. To you it's your identity. To them it's words that save them money.

One problem with companies buying pizza is they always buy it from whatever pizza shop has the best reputation for reliably filling large catering orders, which is never the pizza shop that makes the best pizza.

I like pizza, but I only want pizza some of the time. And when I want it, I want to buy it myself and get what I want, not get something mediocre.

First off sleeping under desks is a project management failure and not representative of the games industry. Heaps of people making games that haven't worked a day of overtime for years and years.

But as you say, boring business logic is boring, so no surprise that people would be interested in games for that reason alone, but more than that, game programming isn't the same sort of work as other programming. Are there jobs for graphics programmers working on some business spreadsheet software company? If you want to do graphics programming you need to work in an industry that needs graphics programmers.

Doesn't really matter that you're not the Miyamoto. There's lots of programmers in leadership roles solving hard and interesting problems that don't exist in other sorts of business software.

I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids. I thought, this place infantilises its employees, I will never work here.

This comes about because companies see 'culture' as a means of manipulating their employees. It works because long-childhood tokens are a status symbol - poor people need to grow up quickly and demonstrate that they are compliant by wearing suits or other uniforms, middle class show that they can afford long education by retaining the signifiers of childhood. But no-one does this consciously, so people are susceptable to being 'rewarded' by these cheap signifiers instead of real value

The hand print wall sounds like a hokey HR idea. Seems a bit harsh to judge an entire company on it.

Everyone else in the company went along with it

It's a lot more fun than getting fingerprinted, and you get the whole palm, too!

It shows you that HR has clout in the company which is bad. Where HR is necessary they should be silent paper movers.

> I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids

This sort of thing seems to happen quite a bit. Somebody in HR goes baby crazy and starts treating people in the office as their surrogate children. You can't say shit about it, because it's HR.

> I visited a place one where the schtick was to get new employees to make a paint print of their hand on the wall like a primary school kids.

Someone's therapist is getting a new boat soon.

> I don’t understand how anyone would want to be such a piece of a cog of a wheel just because they love games. You aren’t Shigeru Miyamoto, you don’t get to make creative decisions. You’d make twice as much coding boring business logic, it’s not “cool”, but you get to sleep at home.

Because they're passionate, and passion can and is exploited because it's irrational.

I went to a private game academy in Berlin and stoped after a year.

I got more insight into game dev and I think that I'm good but you only need a handful of things which are really interesting.

Like the game engine or the ai part or whatever.

Those people are just better than I am due to just being smarter etc.

So do I want to be a normal paid tool developer or dialog system biluilder or do I want a proper carrier and earn money?

I earn a good amount of money and I do not work in game dev.

I don't regret it and can imagine doing full time private game development when I'm 50 and stoped working.

> does being given pizza as an adult feel insulting

Yes! Give me better healthcare! I don't care about snacks and coffee. If I was healthy I could afford these things myself.

Even worse, using it as bait to return to office. "We're having a pizza party in the office today!" (Now a Waffle Party I might come in for)

I feel like these are crazy different magnitudes though. Buying a team of 10 the most expensive pizza in town is like $150. Giving that same team noticeably better healthcare costs…

* $3000/mo to cover employee paid premiums.

* $5k-$30k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual deductible.

* $5k-$100k/yr to fund everyone up to their individual oopm

* $36k/yr to fully find everyone’s HSA.

I think there’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit that makes people happy like pizza, beer, snack, and soda and it’s not like the choice is one or the other.

Pizza parties and healthcare are different ends of the spectrum. Bad healthcare is simply declining an offer, it's part of the compensation package being presented. A pizza party is fine for showing appreciation (better than cheap swag), I would run from a company that adds this in their compensation package though.

>you don’t get to make creative decisions.

You do. I think it's a major appeal of making games. Miyamoto is not designing every level, art asset, every shader and every post effect.

How would they know? They spent the last 10 years playing video games, they literally worship those companies. It's still not widespread enough as knowledge that those employers are literally all shit. And if that's your first job, how would you know it's better somewhere else? Got to learn the hard way.

It’s not culture but community that young workers seek. They want fun friends, not boring old coworkers with kids.

This is why I left the games industry. I love working on games but it doesn’t outweigh the cost.

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