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Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Assuming this question is asked in good faith. I find it hard to believe you could work in the tech industry and not realize that a lot of your co-workers probably play games. Unless you're just the type who doesn't ever speak to people.

I'ved worked in tech for 20+ years at this point and every tech company I've worked at had gamers across all departments but usually programmers/engineers have a much higher percentage of being gamers. Every tech company I've worked at has some area with consoles hooked up to TVs for playing Fifa or Mario Kart type multiplayer games. Most of those companies also had one or two arcade machines too. And then every company has some internal groups/communities for gamers. Even the most serious and least "gamey" of the companies I worked for (a financial tech company) had internal communities for Dota 2 and Valorant...

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I would go further and state that many probably owe gaming for their tech career. In the dark ages, installing and running a game could take significant technical effort. Scouring forums and looking for magical configuration or patches that could make it work. That technical knowledge builds upon itself.

when games were far more open to supporting mods and had big communities around it, its where I first cut my teeth programming in earnest without even realizing it.

At some point, the programming became more fun than the playing for me

now kids are modding roblox and minecraft

My programming journey started in like 2013ish with making guns on roblox which eventually turned into working on Minecraft mods.

It’s actually really cool (to me) the irony that both of these games are over a decade old — ancient in the computing timeframe, I would argue — and so widely appealing to all age ranges.

Roblox released in 2006 [0]

Minecraft officially was released in 2011, with a public testing release in 2009 [1]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft

Agree! What got me into programming was building/running my own Counter-Strike server and corresponding stats website. Now with companies running their own servers internally, that isn't nearly as common.

I'm old enough to remember trying to get IRQs and DMAs set, and trying to figure out whether I should use Tandy or EGA mode.

Some even disassembled their games to modify them ;)

I work in startups, and literally not a single one of my coworkers plays games. Maybe it depends a lot on your field or company?

As an anecdote that is completely contrary to yours. I also recently worked in startups (within the last year), and practically single person in the founding team I worked alongside was an avid gamer.

I think the proportion of gamers in the tech sphere vs others is likely overall higher than the norm. I do honestly find it hard to believe others don't think gaming is common in tech.

On my current team in a definitely non-startup corporate-y atmosphere, even many of the devs well into their 40s and above are avid gamers to this day. Meanwhile I'm 30 and while I don't play very often anymore I definitely was one as a teen into my early 20's.

I'm disappointed there was any doubt that my question was asked in good faith! I do regret the obsession I had with video games when younger because of the huge time sink I put in, but I only see that as a me-problem (others likely have a healthier relationship with it).

Thanks for sharing your experience though. That's interesting news to me. I talk with coworkers occassionally, but games don't come up (and neither do other interests outside of work).

> I do regret the obsession I had with video games when younger because of the huge time sink I put in

Don't regret time spent doing something you enjoy. So as long as you enjoyed it, feel good about it.

Opportunity cost is real.

Try to not do this to yourself too much. Everybody needs an outlet, and you can't beat yourself up for spending time relaxing or enjoying instead of hustling with a side gig or something.

I’m not beating myself up. I’m consciously choosing to engage in productive and enriching hobbies, while refusing to rationalize away those that are time wasting.

What are those hobbies?

Reading non-fiction, writing open-source software, taking continuing education classes at my local university, learning foreign languages, self-study, volunteering, travel.

What makes any of those things more or less valuable than playing a video game?

Volunteering, sure, but the rest are just as self indulgent as any other pass time. Just because you value them higher doesn't mean you should discount the things that other people do to enjoy themselves.

In our intensely competitive capitalist society, gaming has a low expected utility. It also doesn't usually reinforce skills that make you more employable. You also usually don't get a salary or remuneration.

The elitist in me wants to say games are little more than hi-res Skinner boxes. But properly applied, games can teach us strategy, reason, and problem solving. Is that why I play God of War? No. I play it because KRATOS SMASH

All of those activities enrich my life and help me grow as an individual. I think someone should always be learning throughout their life, and I have yet to see a video game that accomplishes that.

That's cool! I do all of those things as well, minus the uni classes and open-source. But for someone who has no interest in travel, then learning foreign languages would be a waste of time. I personally consider writing open-source software a waste of my time because it would be taking away from my closed-source side project ventures.

You can totally min/max your entire life and only do things for self-improvement, but then to what end? What do you expect to derive out of the continuing education classes that is going to be significantly valuable to your life/career?

I think it's important to note that many people are actually quite satisfied with their position in life, a lot of us are making a lot of money engaging in interesting work, so at a certain point doing things for the sake of minimizing opportunity cost comes with diminishing returns as you've already made the most of the opportunities you've already had. The whole point of working hard is to reach some stage of life where you can actually reap the rewards and have the time and resources to enjoy yourself however you please without worrying about it.

I don’t really use my language learning for travel—nearly everyone speaks better English than I do their native language.

But in the same way that learning Haskell or Lisp can change the way you write and think about code, learning a language like Japanese can fundamentally change the way you think about everything. There’s intrinsic value to being multilingual.

Of greater pragmatic benefit is that if you learn a language, like Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, or French, you gain exposure to a whole different media landscape, including information on news and world events that is drastically different from what you encounter in the anglosphere.

I don't consider playing video games time wasting. If they were, then watching movies is time wasting, enjoying art is time wasting, playing board games or sports with friends is time wasting.

Certainly, an addiction to gaming is bad, as is playing games too much to the detriment of the rest of your life. Ultimately, everyone should do what they find enjoyable in the moment that they will simultaneously not regret later in life. Totally understand if video games fall under that category for you, but I dispute them as "time wasting" as a general statement.

All activities are inherently "time wasting". After you're gone and dust - it's not like you'll be regretting playing the latest release of FORZA versus taking yet another Rosetta Stone course...

Opportunity cost is definitely one thing I had in mind. Other than that, my peers were committed to various things like fundraising for charitable organisations, doing something good by serving people in one way or another, voluntarily taking up responsibilities or just becoming a more well-rounded person by spending their time doing various things instead of just one thing.

While they all did that, I just stayed at home playing games instead and acted like the sole purpose of life was to enjoy myself which is something worth regretting (and happy I've made some progress since then).

It's not. Every instant of your life you're making choices that lock you out of opportunities. To claim that you're able to measure the opportunity cost of your current path is to claim that you're able to know the path that would have led to the greatest reward and measure that reward. At best you could say that in hindsight a previous choice you made was suboptimal.

> Don't regret time spent doing something you enjoy.

This common saying is harmful and borderline hedonistic. Not all enjoyable activities are good activities. Should ex-smokers not regret their past smoking habit, then?

Everything must be in moderation. Playing video games, watching movies, and binging TV shows are great for unwinding after work. But if you do them too much, they can disrupt your life.

Nerd alert.

Yes, ex-smokers should not regret their past smoking habits. There is no point in letting past decisions affect your present emotions.

Are you suggesting that we should never regret anything, then?

Like I said, everything must be in moderation. Regrets are effective for reminding us not to repeat the same mistakes. But of course if we regret our mistakes 24/7, it will only depress us and discourage us to do anything.

Yes we should not regret anything. Regret is not effective for reminding us not to repeat mistakes ( the experience of the mistake is enough to do that, and not the same as regret)

You have a different definition of "regret" from what most people think, then.

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