jaaron

100% this.

I feel like there's a ton of innovation in the cloud/container CI/CD space, but next to nothing elsewhere. In fact, some of the innovations in CI/CD make things _more_ difficult for those of us developing in other environments (such as game development).

There's a lot of low hanging fruit for improving things elsewhere.

Here's a short version:

Joost, backed by the founders of Kazaa & Skype, tried this starting in 2007. It failed, YouTube and other streaming approaches won.

Some of that was content, but some of that was that bandwidth became cheap enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost

Singularity 6 | Engineers, Managers, more | Remote or Los Angeles (Westside) | https://www.singularity6.com

Singularity 6 is the game studio behind Palia (palia.com): a cozy, community sim MMO. We're a pre-launch startup founded by AAA game industry veterans with VC funding by a16z and others.

Our engineering team is growing rapidly. Open position include:

- Engineering Managers

- Game Engineers

- Backend Software Engineers

- UI/UX Engineers, particularly those with mobile experience

- SREs

- Machine Learning Engineers

We're looking for a range of experience levels. Tech stack includes Unreal Engine, Rust, Nomad and more. We're big on open source and looking to contribute back to the community. If you've always wanted to get into the game industry, this is a good opportunity. If you're part of the industry, this is a studio that pays competitively and is committed to investing in people.

I'm the tech director and you can find me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaaronfarr/

Apply at https://www.singularity6.com/careers

Note: the Engineering Manager and Game Engineering roles require (eventual) relocation to Los Angeles. Other roles can be remote, though we prefer local candidates. Here in LA, we're still working from home.

Really depends on the sort of "windows-only" jobs you're thinking of.

My startup is mostly Windows, but that's because we're doing AAA game development and still have some tooling that is Windows only at this stage.

I find that with WSL2, I can do everything I need. A fair bit of my day is spent in emacs.

Great list of information anyone should know before accepting an offer.

As a hiring manager, I'm usually one of the first people new candidates speak with (perhaps right after briefly talking to a recruiter). Generally, I want to make sure candidates have all this information within the first interview or two. These days, I tend to open my interview with an opportunity for the candidate to ask any questions about the role and company that weren't answered by the recruiter.

I also try to leave time at the end, but I find that there's often so little time at the end, that it's better to start with any questions.

Singularity 6 | Engineers, Managers, more | Remote or Los Angeles (Westside) | https://www.singularity6.com

Singularity 6 is the game studio behind Palia (palia.com): a cozy, community sim MMO. We're a pre-launch startup founded by AAA game industry veterans with VC funding by a16z and others.

Our engineering team is growing rapidly (currently 25, trending to at least double this year). Open position include (across all experience levels):

- Engineering Managers

- Game Engineers

- Backend Software Engineers (microservices, middleware)

- UI/UX Engineers

- SREs

- Machine Learning Engineers

Tech stack includes Unreal Engine, Rust, Nomad and more. We're big on open source and looking to contribute back to the community. If you've always wanted to get into the game industry, this is a good opportunity. If you're part of the industry, this is a studio that pays competitively and is committed to investing in people.

I'm the tech director and you can find me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaaronfarr/

Apply at https://www.singularity6.com/careers

Note: the Engineering Manager and Game Engineering roles require (eventual) relocation to Los Angeles. Other roles can be remote, though we prefer local candidates. Here in LA, we're still working from home.

Game industry would be one source. At least for many teams and projects, Git isn't very useful (horrible for large binary files common in AAA games). So many companies still use Perforce or sometimes you'll see SVN still. That means a whole bunch of really qualified engineers who have never or rarely used git.

I'm sure there are other industries for which that is true too.

It's a good reminder how small a section of the tech industry comments on Hacker News.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that so many don't understand where k8s came from.

Google doesn't run on k8s. k8s was _not_ invented or designed to solve Google-scale problems.

Since it's inception, the open source community and several corporate contributors have made k8s much closer to something that can solve google scale problems, but that's definitely not where it started, or arguably, where it is now.

I disagree that the gameplay is particularly shallow. The end game requires both mechanics and tactics. That said, the end game may or may not be _rewarding_ as it's very grindy and there's a good question (for many of these sort of games) of what you're grinding _for_. But the gameplay mechanics get deeper than what you seem to have experienced.

Singularity 6 | Engineers, Managers, more | Remote or Los Angeles (Westside) | https://www.singularity6.com

Singularity 6 is the game studio behind Palia (palia.com): a cozy, community sim MMO. We're a pre-launch startup founded by AAA game industry veterans with VC funding by a16z and others.

Our engineering team is growing rapidly. Open position include:

- Engineering Managers

- Game Engineers

- Backend Software Engineers

- UI/UX Engineers, particularly those with mobile experience

- SREs

- Machine Learning Engineers

We're looking for a range of experience levels. Tech stack includes Unreal Engine, Rust, Nomad and more. We're big on open source and looking to contribute back to the community. If you've always wanted to get into the game industry, this is a good opportunity. If you're part of the industry, this is a studio that pays competitively and is committed to investing in people.

I'm the tech director and you can find me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaaronfarr/

Apply at https://www.singularity6.com/careers

Note: the Engineering Manager and Game Engineering roles require (eventual) relocation to Los Angeles. Other roles can be remote, though we prefer local candidates. Here in LA, we're still working from home.

Not necessarily true. I know several studios in Los Angeles that do 3D final renders on CPU, such as Disney Animation. GPU rendering works for realtime, but the memory constraints on GPU limit its use in the high end.

Everyone in the field is looking at GPU and some significant advances have been made, but it's definitely not true that "nobody" is doing rendering on CPUs.

Ok, this comment had me actually laughing out loud.

That said, the situation with W10+WSL reminds me a bit of the early days around OS X when we suddenly had a consumer grade desktop Unix experience. W10+WSL is clunkier, but trending in a decent direction.

Another one?

Nomad and kubernetes were released within months of each other in 2015. This isn't new.

We're using Nomad for our backend at Singularity 6 (developing the mmo Palia).

In my experience (having worked with Nomad, k8s, mesos, and homegrown schedulers), k8s is fantastic from an early developer experience, but rough from an operations perspective. It's definitely gotten better, but there's a reason lots of folks want to have someone else host and operate their cluster.

Nomad is the opposite. Less tooling and bit more complexity for the app developer, significantly easier to operate at the cluster level. Nomad is also less "all-in" in it's architecture, which gives operators more flexibility in how they design and support the cluster.

The fact that we can run on anything and don't _have_ to use containers is a serious advantage, particularly for game development.

From parent's comment:

k8s = 10x the components & difficult to install.

Nomad = single binary, works with but doesn't require containers.

Singularity 6 | Engineers, Managers, more | Remote or Los Angeles (Westside) | https://www.singularity6.com

Singularity 6 is the game studio behind Palia (palia.com): a cozy, community sim MMO. It's the beginning of many new community-first online worlds. We're still a relatively young, pre-launch startup founded by AAA game industry veterans. VC funding includes a16z and others.

Our engineering team is growing rapidly. Open position include:

- Engineering Managers

- Game Engineers

- Backend Software Engineers

- UI/UX Engineers, particularly those with mobile experience

- SRE & Sysadmins

We're looking for a range of experience levels. Tech stack includes Unreal Engine, Rust, Nomad and more. We're big on open source and looking to contribute back to the community. If you've always wanted to get into the game industry, this is a good opportunity. If you're part of the industry, this is a studio that pays competitively and is committed to investing in people.

I'm the tech director and you can find me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaaronfarr/

Apply at https://www.singularity6.com/careers

Note: the Engineering Manager and Game Engineering roles require (eventual) relocation to Los Angeles. Other roles can be remote, though we prefer local candidates. Here in LA, we're still working from home.

A decade or so, I did _everything_ in emacs. I was never more productive and I attribute it partially to the sort of flow that Legend seems to be trying to make.

Smartphones are what killed it for me. As I switched to using my smartphone + tablet more, it broke my emacs setup. I'm still trying to get it back.

Unity is a more generic game engine, Unreal is more specialized.

C# is an easier language for most. C++ (particularly UE's flavor) is more difficult.

Unity is much easier for a single person or small team. Unreal is designed in mind for teams with dedicated designers, artists, audio, engineering, animators, etc.

For a long time, Unity fought to be anything more than just 3D Flash. It wasn't taken seriously. And for good reason. About a decade ago I worked on what was at the time considered to be one of the largest Unity codebases in existence. It was rough. Unity's come a long way since then.

Singularity 6 | Software Engineer, Sysadmin, Game Engineer, UI/UX Engineer, Engineering Manger | Remote or Los Angeles (Westside) | https://www.singularity6.com

Singularity 6 is the game studio behind Palia (palia.com): a cozy, community sim MMO. It's the beginning of many new community-first online worlds. We're still a relatively young, pre-launch startup founded by AAA game industry veterans. VCs include a16z and we've closed a series B round.

Our engineering team is growing rapidly and we're still looking for more help to take Palia to launch. Open position include:

- Engineering Managers

- Game Engineers

- Backend Software Engineers

- UI/UX Engineers, particularly those with mobile experience

- SRE & Sysadmins

We're looking for a range of experience levels. Tech stack includes Unreal Engine, Rust, Nomad and more. We're big on open source and looking to contribute back to the community. If you've always wanted to get into the game industry, this is a good opportunity. If you're part of the industry, this is a studio that pays competitively and is committed to investing in people.

I'm the tech director and you can find me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaaronfarr/

Apply at https://www.singularity6.com/careers

Note: the Engineering Manager and Game Engineering roles require (eventual) relocation to Los Angeles. Other roles can be remote, though we prefer local candidates. Here in LA, we're still working from home, office to reopen late 2021 or early 2022.

Most small to midsized organizations would prefer to deal with false-negatives during hiring (missing out on good talent) than the issues of false-positives (bad hires). Often times (not always) no one is preferable to a bad hire.

A bad hire can set everything back significantly more. Not only do you have to deal with new missed deadlines or poor quality work, but you often have to deal with the fallout with team members. Plus you're using up a lot of management/leadership hours dealing with it.

The impact is even more important the more senior the role. Hiring a bad manager or lead can impact way more than hiring a bad fresh-out-of-school grad.

Yes and depending on the field, you may have to do mandatory additional certification and training throughout your career.

We have certs in software engineering, but in my experience, they've largely failed as an indicator of qualifications. Some hiring managers see them as nice to have, but I've also met hiring managers who are actively skeptical of certifications.

We also don't have differentiation of software levels or skills. If you're a programmer, you could, in theory, go program anything from web to AI to robotics. You don't have to be certified to work in nearly any industry. And we don't have formal hierarchy of skilled work, such as EMTs, nurses and doctors.

We're a relatively young industry that just hasn't worked things out yet and, to be honest, in the United States, there isn't pressure by employers to get our act together. The engineers themselves are in charge often and we're skeptical of boards and authority. We have too many stories of folks making it big with no formal education. Those with the money aren't demanding change because the current system "works."

It's possible software engineering will someday evolve into a boring respectable profession, but right now it's still a creative field of fads, trends, rock stars and super stars (let alone ninjas and wizards).

No.

As a software engineer for 20+ years, I've talked with my sister, who is an ER doctor about this often. Most folks outside of engineering think our interview processes are crazy.

Keep in mind, there's significantly more training that goes into the medical field, so there's more emphasis on the institutions. Where did you go to school? What hospitals or facilities did you work with? Your resume and references speak more strongly.

Other hurdles in software engineering hiring:

- It's both a technical and (often) a creative field.

- Most work requires teams to complete and there's very little insight into who contributed what into a project.

- You don't have many of the signals from other fields, such as published papers, law cases, or hard numbers such as sales, certifications, etc.

Long story short: we don't have good mechanisms within companies to measure engineering productivity, let alone measure programmers outside of an institution.

I'm reminded of Steve McConnell's intro to "Software Estimation":

"Meanwhile, the typical software organization is not struggling to improve its estimates from +/-10% to +/-5% accuracy. The typical software organization is struggling to avoid estimates that are incorrect by 100% or more."

I agree about the IC terminology.

The best I've seen so far is "maker" vs "manager"

I feel like we've already seen some alternatives and the industry, thus far, is still orienting towards k8s.

Hashicorp's stack, using Nomad as an orchestrator, is much simpler and more composable.

I've long been a fan of Mesos' architecture, which I also think is more composable than the k8s stack.

I just find it surprising an article that is calling for an evolution of the cluster management architecture fails to investigate the existing alternatives and why they haven't caught on.

It's not just that.

Google (and a few others) dealt with retention issues from startups and other companies in SV who's sole recruiting strategy was poach from Google, ie- use Google as a filter and let them do all the work finding great talent and then we'll just hire Googlers (or one of the other major SV tech companies).

So retention is a significant factor for Google and other FAANG companies. They can simply pay enough to make sure other companies can't come in and take their talent.

Yep. There are reasons Perforce is so prevalent in game development, even if we gripe about it:

- Large binary asset support.

- Exclusive locks for binary assets.

- Speed. When configured properly, it's very fast, particularly for large repositories.

- Tooling support. It's nearly ubiquitous in gaming.

I'm working on repositories that are 100+ GB and need to support both programmers and artists. Git just isn't the right tool.

We do use git for backend server-side projects. Having to support two different version control systems is a pain, but, again, it's useful to have the right tool for the job.

I haven't used it, but I've heard of others using Blink Shell [1] with Mosh [2] very effectively.

[1] https://blink.sh/

[2] https://mosh.org/

My frame of reference for the argument about Mesos vs k8s is from earlier in the timeline when the k8s was up and coming and just starting to compete with Mesos. Just as in my analogy with Rails: at it's inception, it lacked a bunch of features, but it was accessible. Years later, Rails had many of those features.

k8s is the same. Operators didn't come around until late 2016 by CoreOS and even then they weren't widely adopted. It wasn't until after RedHat bought CoreOS and pushed operators as a pattern into k8s that the pattern took off. As it is, the k8s version of the operator framework only went 1.0 last year.

Finally, I should have pointed it out in my original comment, the Mesos vs k8s comparison isn't perfect apples and apples. Mesos is just a component in a stack, whereas k8s is effectively a full stack. Again, Rails was pitched as an opinionated, batteries-included framework compared to many of the more focused frameworks that, for their niche, may have been better, but the convenience of having everything in one packages won out.

>> Kubernetes was supposed to be scheduler for Mesos and Google invested in it.

> I never heard of such plan.

Oh, there was a plan:

https://github.com/kubernetes-retired/kube-mesos-framework

But it wasn't really in anyone's business model interests, even if it may have made sense for customers and the community.

Eh, maybe. I see your point.

The thing is, Mesos on it's own isn't k8s. Mesos is a scheduler. k8s is a full stack. So it's always been a bit off to fully compare the two.

If your system fit clearly within what k8s did well, then you were fine and the stack worked.

If you had a more complicated architecture with parts that didn't play well with containers or k8s' scheduling model, life became pretty difficult.

That's one reason I liked Mesos is you could build the stack you needed for _your_ infrastructure.

Granted, I don't think most shops had the kind of problems that warranted Mesos, let alone k8s (that's still true today). But k8s is "good enough" for lots of problems and understandably that's where the community went.