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> Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life

That's not the argument being made here. The field is changing. I had a good career in graphics, my life wasn't wasted at all. That doesn't mean a college student would have the same experience starting today.

Well, of course not, unless you are claiming that a future career in graphics is a bad idea, and there is no way you could say that with any reasonable certainty, I do not get the argument at all.

The field is always changing. You could find people in the 80s saying ‘I had a good career in graphics, a college student would not have the same experience starting today’

100% this. My dad told me not to get into it because of the web (he was a C guy) and instead I went head first into it AND did graphics programming (using C#, ewwww) just for the fun of it. Never discourage from someone wanting to learn, discourage the ego that thinks we need another John Carmack.

Seems like a great field to get into if you can make it to the top 5-10% skillset.

The rapid advances, in a trend replicating throughout society, push out the middle in favor of the top.

Out of curiosity, which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in?

Nepo baby.

Joking (sort of).

I can't say I know of any in the fields I'm familiar with. I've watched tech get increasingly top-heavy since the covid hiring boom and bust, although it was already trending that way.

There are a lot of fields dominated by boomers on the verge of retirement that are the safest bet for people who want to be good and make a good living but don't care to be extraordinary.

I've heard that from arborists, water treatment specialists, actuaries, a few others.

Nobody who has ambitions of being the top of their field in engineering wants to be a water treatment specialists, arborist or actuary (maybe actuary if you're a stats nerd). What you're saying is go do something on the based on the potential for you to be professionally successful.. What about people doing things they love?

I hate these people telling people who love to do a certain thing that they should just become a plumber or an electrician. Not everything is about spending your life to make as much pieces of paper the govt tells you are worth something.

I'd rather be in poverty working with computers everyday and doing what I love than make 10k a month being a plumber. I actually can't stand you people.

The question I answered was:

Which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in

> I actually can't stand you people.

Unnecessary. People who want a basic middle class existence are not greedy and should not receive disdain. Many have responsibilities to their elders or others, have kids or want them, etc. so avowed poverty is not realistic.

Especially when bohemian poverty is an increasingly vanishing option on a practical level.

> I'd rather be in poverty working with computers everyday and doing what I love than make 10k a month being a plumber.

Other people choose a job that pays enough that they do not have to live with the stresses that poverty brings. Even if they do not love it.

When I hear statements like yours, I think that they come from not actually having lived with very little money.

Being into computers is now such a stereotypical way to be nerd, I would be way more interested to talk to a plumbing nerd right now.

Has tech really gotten more top heavy?

I feel more like people kept flooding into the middle and bottom, and companies that used to focus on top talent got watered down with those middle and bottom types.

A lot of the people getting laid off from Google and Meta would not have been hired at all in those places 15 years ago, for example.

Press C to doubt. This doesnt explain all the stories of long time og people from both getting let go. I have worked in big tech and little tech finding banger engineers in both. Comp != quality.

I mean, there's other problems with OPs argument.

For example, "there's no chance to become the next one" implies it's only worth it to do something if you can become the absolute best person in the field.

It's a big world. Most of us will not be the very best at what we do. There are millions of fun games that were not written by John Carmack.

Who is John Carmack? That old dude from the 90s?

I kid, but there are many other modern Carmacks and id argue even more impressive contributions. The guy has done little since he left gaming.

I wish more people praised Alex Evans. Dreams rendering tech is still unmatched to this day and was my inspiration for graphics, not Carmack.

My man :) Alex Evans has been my gfx coding hero since the 90s with his demoscene work, and I had the privilege of working briefly with him at Lionhead.

That is amazing and i am jealous.

Getting into a field that is changing is the best time to get into that field. The playing field gets equalized and you have more opportunity to be established as a strong expert.

That is not a universal because the incumbents may hold the institutional reigns. See Academy for a counter example.

Yeah, like I imagine they mean that as a career it is competitive and demanding while having few openings so you shouldn’t stake your education and future on it, but I’m with you. This is something I really want to learn well enough to contribute the world.

Another staple of HN I abhor is “don’t bother learning this cool thing unless an official IQ test says you are over 150.”

I live after the motto of "always disregard the naysayers." If someone tells you a thing is a bad idea, you can safely ignore their advice.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Chill down. It's just someone who has a lot of experience in the field making an analysis of the current landscape of the career, using their own as an example.

> Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack.

John Carmack was one of the _first_ graphics programmer to ever exist. The next John Carmack can't be in the same field. The same way we can't expect the next Beatles to be playing rock music. :)

Is it so wrong to be doubtful of whether the field is still lucrative? We live in times of great change, it's only natural to be less assured when recommending a career path to others.

Who clicked on this thread looking for career advice??? This discussion is not what I was expecting when I clicked on this thread. What's with the sudden obsession about the field having to be lucrative first? Where's the "hacker spirit" of just wanting to know how stuff works?

Academia was never a lucrative field. For the sacrifices it requires, it will never be financially viable for me to work there. Am I wasting my time going through the Feynman Lectures nonetheless? Keeping my calculus decent? I clicked on this for the same reasons; not looking for career/financial advice, I just have a morbid curiosity about how the sausage is made.

Not to mention, of course, that skills are transferable. Philosophy students don't study Plato because his ideas are relevant to everyday life. His way of thinking/reasoning about problems given his limited means is a timeless skill. I will probably never have to use any direct fact in the Feynman Lectures in my dayjob but learning to think like Feynman is useful when reasoning about large obscure systems which I do encounter daily. FL is not so much an exercise in physics but in the application of the scientific method in general. For software engineering, it nicely compliments Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual" IMO.

What I expect to learn from graphics programming:

- it's a good practice for applied maths/vectors/linalg - it's a good practice to learn lowlevel APIs/programming tricks - maybe I'll make a cool game

All of which can also find application elsewhere in computing.

That sounds nice, but we need to make money and there aren't alot of opportunities. I'd love to get away from web and infra nonsense but,in The right domain id even do it for a pay cut. Hobby work won't get you a job

No, I said something different:

I said the technology is accelerating at such a scary-high speed, that it is no more fun and very hard to earn any merits today, which was quite possible over the last decades.

(and for me personally: Yes, Im happy to be no more involved, though I profit from this experience very often, even if Im in a completely different sector today)

> I really dislike people that got into a thing and then try to discourage others. “Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life” which is bullshit from a jaded person that lost passion. Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack.

Given that almost everyone who wants to be a "graphics programmer" is also somehow gaming industry adjacent, it is extremely fair to ward them off from the folly. I do the same for anyone wishing to do "VLSI hardware engineering." If you have the skill to do either of those, you almost CERTAINLY have the skill to do something else that is almost as interesting and not saddled by garbage employers.

The primary problem with being a "graphics programmer" beyond a tyro is that the biggest consumer of graphics programmers is the game industry which is a notoriously shitty and wretched industry. Every ... single ... employer. So, from the point of view of future potential, "graphics programmer" has very little upside over pretty much ANY other type of programmers.

Second, "learning graphics programming" is like "learning phone programming", you spend more time fighting godawful software infrastructure more than you do actual programming. AI actually kind of helps this, but it doesn't completely remove the fact that 80% of your knowledge has a half-life of 18-24 months.

Finally, saying "I want to learn graphics programming" is like saying "I want to learn engineering." What "graphics programmer" means is vastly underspecified. 3D game rendering and 3D/2D CAD rendering and 2D vector rendering are completely different skillsets. GPUs are great at the first and kinda okay at the second and kinda lousy at the third. Which kind of "graphics programmer" are you even going to be?

> Which kind of "graphics programmer" are you even going to be?

If one follows OP's advice, none at all.

> it is extremely fair to ward them off from the folly

I completely disagree with this. It is a damaging and unproductive attitude to teach beginners and young people. Who are you to say their future career prospect is a folly? The only thing that defines the talents of tomorrow is that they have ignored such advice and then pushed forward the state of the art in ways you couldn't even imagine. This is how progress works.

> Who are you to say their future career prospect is a folly?

Someone who watched an industry chew up and spit out far too many young people. That's who and that's why I'm qualified.

> The only thing that defines the talents of tomorrow is that they have ignored such advice and then pushed forward the state of the art in ways you couldn't even imagine. This is how progress works.

You would encourage an individual to walk a path that is 90%(95%/99%) likely to damage their life horribly in the name of "progress"? Really? That's ... more than a little inhumane.

Would you encourage someone who likes writing to be a "journalist" right now? I should hope not. I wouldn't tell them to not write, but I sure would try to find a better way to channel that skill.

Or perhaps, if we substituted "pro basketball player" for "graphics programming" perhaps you could see the folly? Although, at least the individual playing basketball would gain the immediate benefits of being quite fit while the graphics programmer would enjoy no such side benefit.

> You would encourage an individual to walk a path that is 90%(95%/99%) likely to damage their life horribly in the name of "progress"

Are we still talking about graphics programming? Damage one’s life horribly, really? Those poor kids you saw ‘spat out’, are they irretrievably broken? You speak as if people are single-purpose machines, and that there is nothing to learn from adversity and challenge. That skills are not transferable and there is nothing new is there to be discovered.

Turning this around, would I discourage a kid from seriously pursuit a career as an astronaut or racing driver? That has a higher likelihood than most to ‘damage one’s life horribly’.

I honestly cannot understand nor subscribe to this pessimistic worldview, the one that would tell a kid to abandon their dream and go do what they believe society needs. Bollocks to that.

Dreams are fun but they don't pay. And then you are earning scraps, and you realise that you'd prefer to be rich than to follow the dream for nothing.

I get that. In the time you'd learn about graphics programming, you could learn something else that would be able to give you a boost in the hiring market.

Rereading that, my comment has been needlessly rude. For that I apologise, even if the point stands a bit still.

I appreciate the apology (wasn’t necessary) but I am a dreamer at heart and I subscribe to Buckminster Fuller’s idealism: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/133403-we-should-do-away-wi...

After all, he liked polyhedrons so much he made a living out of it. Following his dreams literally saved his life.

Thank you for sharing that, it is a good quote, I agree.

> 3D game rendering and 3D/2D CAD rendering and 2D vector rendering are completely different skillsets.

Actually, no. Autodesk acquired Alias, and got the Maya animation system, in 2005. Soon after, the CAD tools had cinematic quality output. The architectural people loved this - good looking, accurate architectural renders came out. They especially liked that lighting worked, and you could use the CAD system to place real-world light fixtures.

> Second, "learning graphics programming" is like "learning phone programming", you spend more time fighting godawful software infrastructure more than you do actual programming. AI actually kind of helps this, but it doesn't completely remove the fact that 80% of your knowledge has a half-life of 18-24 months.

What kind of knowledge are you talking about here? learnopengl.com is still relevant today for its technical knowledge of fundamental graphics techniques, in spite of OpenGL itself slowly dying. The knowledge itself is overwhelmingly transferable to whatever modern graphics API you’re using.

With mobile development, I can see that you’re mostly learning surface level tools and APIs, which get changed frequently as a new iOS version comes out. But with graphics it’s actually the opposite — most large features come with new hardware, and because most of your customers are generally using older hardware, you can’t even use those new features until the majority of users have upgraded and support it (usually with a new console generation).

Regardless of what you think of the games industry, graphics programmers are highly in demand and paid relatively very well. It’s hard and there’s a lot of surface area to cover to really be excellent, but the knowledge is relevant, longstanding, and rewarding IMO.

What was that quote about chess... ?

Ah yes:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life" [1].

I'm not a graphics programmer so I'm not in a position to gatekeep but I fully agree with the sentiment in the OP (I mean KellyCriterion's post). Do you really want to dedicate your life to an industry that will chew you up and spit you out just to release a borken AAA game that will go down in review flames for ripping its players off?

Side projects, sure. But, professionally? There's gotta be better ways to pay the bacon and bring home the bills.

____________

[1] https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/favorite-chess-quot...

Dont forget funny "perks" like "crunch-time" and "pre-crunch-time" :-D

Yeah. Luckily I learned about those things at my first year at university in a "Computer Science with games design" course. I switched to straight CS in year two and I've always thought I dodged a bullet, there.

Sad though. The most fun you can have with programming is maybe the least fun programming job of all.

Last sentence:

Quite true! Game Dev (and Graphics Programming) should be fun - though in todays environments, its everything apart from fun.

Honestly: For me today, writing boring business/workflow/CRUD/shop applications is the fun I should have had when being in GFX-programming - I do not know why its not fun to work for a game dev company.

Isn't it mostly shaders programming nowadays?

Modern APIs make synchronization and resource management a lot more complex. Used correctly they result in better performance; used incorrectly...

That being said, "nowadays" most studios just throw shit at UE5 and get it over with. It's obvious from how terrible many games run that they don't have a rendering engineer on the payroll.

"These annoying, jaded horse-drawn cart builders, cautioning youngsters from getting into the field in 1908."

Except the point of the jaded person is that building transportation vehicles is a bad industry to get into, because there is a massive switch from cart building to automobile and truck building on the basis that it has become impossible to build a full automobile as a single person.

"Graphics programming" is definitely not equivalent in scope (in the analogy) to "the entire transportation vehicle industry".

If that jaded horse-cart builder worked at Studebaker (or Peugot or Durant-Dort which became General Motors) it would be bad advice, bc they turned into a car company. Many cart companies did, bc the people with the knowledge of suspensions, etc developed those skills in cart making