Game hacker. I also like low-level tech - drivers, kernels, hardware/software interaction, etc.
I also like the business side of technology, and am particularly interested in team dynamics.
I'm continually disappointed by the increasing disconnect of the lessons of college with the needs of our modern professional world. Nearly everything meaningful is done as a collaborate effort, yet in formalized education it is branded "cheating". Education is not a zero sum game (but grades often are).
Lots of game development shops use C/C++ as that's the prima lingua for today's consoles, and is native to iOS/Android as well. The games space is rapidly shifting, so there's interesting stuff emerging from the chaos.
If you are willing to come to Boston, I'm happy to talk more about opportunities.
I'm a game programmer currently working at a small, boutique-like studio. I came from a casual gaming company , and before that from a big, "AAA" (whatever that means) studio. My work is mostly in C++, but increasingly involves middleware that uses Flash or web tech.
I've been part of startups, including a YC one. I'm no stranger to web programming, but I dont think I fit the picture you painted either :)
I'm doing some work on the side that involves web and mobile gaming, as well as some writing.
1) Employee morale is low. One problem cited is that they are unsure about the direction of the company.
2) The attempted fix to the moral problem was with an options grant.
The article goes on to talk about the quibble around who got what options, but this is all a tempest in a teapot. If the very people who make your products, who are the engine of your company, do not understand how you are going to continue to remain in business, then stock grants are, literally, worthless. You cannot get rich off a company that makes no revenue.
I'm appalled that this was Pincus' (or whoever acted in his stead's) idea. You could actually, I don't know, TALK to your employees, elevate their ideas, and produce something of value. Hell, you could even talk to your customers and discover what they like, to try and help you drive some innovation.
I was going to write something fairly audacious and start dragging in the history of Western philosophy, but instead I'll just focus on what I see as the flawed foundation of your argument: fairness.
I'll argue that fairness is not really an intrinsic understanding we all share but instead is a concensus. You could argue that it's not fair that some people are blind, but that you'd find few sighted people willing to put out their eyes. Fairness is a relatively fluid concept and it doesn't make sense to try and anticipate how "fair" your actions are.
The way out of this dilemma is avoiding following this line of thought all the way to first-world guilt.
So in your case, you have skills and talents you know you are applying and skills an talents you know are idle. You also likely have talents yet untapped. It is a waste of your energy to worry about this.
Do the best thing you can that intersects with the things you are most interested in. Group concensus in the forms of laws, ethics, an morals should be consulted but not necessarily blindly followed.
Major airlines do not guarantee the safety of any living thing in the hold of the aircraft.
Unless something has changed, my understanding is that small animals (cats, dogs under something like 10 lbs) are allowed to fly with you in an approved carrier.
Any other creature must go in the belly of the plane with the baggage. You will be charged the price of a seat, and in return the airline does not guarantee any particular temperature range for the baggage hold nor even that it will remain pressurized. This is for domestic flights in America - I cannot speak for other air travel situations.
As a proud owner of a 60lb dog, I have sometimes been in the position of having to arrange alternate transportation (usually driving a car) or altering plans to accommodate my pooch. I simply cannot take the chance that something were to happen similar to this story. It is tragic, no doubt, but the provisions airlines make are very clear and most of this risk could've been avoided.
Edit: I've thought about this issue a lot. I think it would be in everyone's mutual interest for airlines to offer a safe way to transport pets or other small animals. Assuming that's a non-starter with existing carriers, some other business could serve this niche effectively. I suspect it could be done profitably.
I'm 31 and fully expect Social Security / other entitlement programs to be non-existent in 30+ years. At least I'm helping some of you collect something today. Enjoy!
I agree that the title evokes a weird battle-of-the-sexes vibe. I also found the content to be pretty good.
From personal experience, I can't stress enough that CEOs, self-professed "business guys/gals", need some grounding in technology if you are doing a tech startup. It seems so obvious, and yet I'm sure everyone has a story about the guy who said "we'll get to market 3x faster because we can build it on rails"
The author also omitted certain releases (and fessed up to said omissions) to better support his claim. You can't fit the data to the hypothesis.
I stopped reading. This is a novelty. Move along.
I have no basis for this, but I'm wondering if this individual is an experienced developer. If time to implementation was a concern, I think OpenCV would've helped here immensely. Also, it's a breadth first search. :)
There is a very important distinction here: Pg's advice applies to situations where your effort is directly coupled to the company value. If you are a salaried employee, then it is a completely different value judgement. When the game or app or gizmo ships on time, and you don't really reap any tangible or intangible reward for that, then what's the point? Figure out your priorities, find someone who can give those to you, and move on.
The advice here is pretty general, and I fail to see how this applies to the situation of having a fulltime job versus just being time-constrained (which we all are). The advice is fine, but I claim there's nothing new to see here.
Oh, and offer me as much salary as you can with the option for me to dial that back into equity. I can't pay a mortgage or buy pizza with options, and my market rate does not fluctuate based on how much buzz you have on twitter.
And I'm trying to say that, in most cases, these things appear to be superficially easy but are more complex than you give it credit for.
In almost all cases, the sad fact is that a playable version on the PC will generate sales. Any deeper level of polish is only diminishing returns.
It may sound like I'm hating on PC gaming but I'm not. I only am giving my perspective from inside the sausage factory.
As someone in the AAA games industry, let me address the following quote:
"It only takes a little extra work to make your PC games play on the PC, and make gamers happy"
Sadly, that's naive. Like any other software company, there are diminishing returns for features / revenue. When the product is slated for release on Xbox, PS3, and PC it is typically done with one codebase with platform specific code where necessary. You often end up with a common denominator where the PC people usually feel left out in the cold.I can attest that it takes a monumental amount of work to support the myriad graphics card configurations for the sole purpose of getting your game to look/feel ROUGHLY the same on all three platforms. To customize the game for one platform would be at the expense of the other two (from a development, production, and QA perspective) and it often doesn't make sense to those paying the bills.
Sometimes the PC gets a dedicated port (such as Mass Effect for the PC), and those things that make PC gamers smile get added. However, this port is essentially a new project (SKU in retail games parlance) that is greenlit only if the console versions of the game have sold well enough to warrant it, and is typically done by a third party under extreme time pressure.
All these factors contribute to less polish, which everyone involved is keenly aware of. Hopefully I've illustrated that this is a complex problem that can hardly be addressed by a "it doesn't take that much more effort to do a good job" platitude.
I'd love it if pg chimed in and explained why, after citing Cambridge as the best city in the world, they pulled up tent stakes. Did the author capture it fully?
Lest all the Mac people tilt this playing field, I'll weigh in and say I have a Windows laptop and desktop. I run a VM on each for Ubuntu when I can, and use Cygwin when I can't (I'm looking at you, Oracle, and shaming you for your USB device support under VirtualBox).
I'd run Linux all the time if the driver support was there for my POS laptop, but it's not and I doubt it ever will be: I simply need the optimized Windows drivers for the display and battery.
You can get A LOT of mileage out of Cygwin and the ilk - plenty for my needs. As a desktop/web developer, bash/vim/make/python, etc. are but a click away.
I'd only get a Mac for iOS development, and even then I would hate my life under XCode.
I like the idea that WFC is the "hardcore" Windows programmer language. Perhaps the author's brain would explode if I showed him the 80-line C boilerplate for setting up a simple, single-window app using the Win32 API (where the function signatures were decorated with the PASCAL #define). Ah memories.
I think the author misses the point: you can't just look at code and expect to understand performance, in any language. That's what profilers are for.
I will agree that micro-optimization of known hotspots is mechanical, but finding the right areas can be deliciously difficult.
The author misses IE6 because it was the dominant browser and he/she could code for it and call it a day? Might as well claim you miss Lynx and the days where shelling out to gopher links was so easy because it was one command in emacs.
I use C/C++ and assembly everyday as a game programmer. It is the incumbent development language for consoles (at least xbox and ps3 - I'm never done any dev on the Wii). I suppose its stay is due to the ease of access to the metal.
It's propably worth noting that lots of games use higher level scripting languages to do speed-insensetive tasks.
I guess I'm a philistine, but I only recognize like 3 names here. Also, comments about it being Sunday, the traffic on the M25, and the weather simultaneously bore me and hearten me (in that I'm just as lame as some millionaires).
It bears repeating: good interview(er)s will try to determine how you think, not your end result.
I do a decent amount of interviews (maybe 2-3 a month), and we by and large are looking for people who can think through a problem, defend a solution, ask good questions, not give up, and appear to be cool to work with. That's it. Some of these questions are great, fundamental CS stuff that I would expect any engineer to have in their back pocket, but some are trivia. Trivia is great, but if you dont't know it I wouldn't hold it against you.
I guess my point is to relax. If you thought about some of these things and answered them, great. You're better prepared for next time. Memorizing answer sheets doesn't help in the long run
"It is at the forefront of what people are working on, and what is going to become big within the next few months"
This smacks of market timing, which does not work for stocks and does not work here. Not all failures are possible to explain in terms of technology maturity or penetration (e.g. the author's example of YouTube-like sites), nor can you say with certainty a Facebook-clone will fail (there have been many posts and discussions on HN lately precisely on how to succeed at that.)
Instead, I believe the message should be similar to what PG espouses: solve a problem. If the people who have this problem also have money, invite them to pay you for it.