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The video game industry as a whole has been a notoriously bad place to work for techs for a long time. It is extremely deadline driven, technical decisions are

The video game industry as a whole has been a notoriously bad place to work for techs for a long time. It is extremely deadline driven, technical decisions are often made by product managers (or worse, other business people), and on top of that the pay is often mediocre compared to other industries. In the past, they've gotten away with it by enticing young people in (often because they loved video games growing up and want to make them) and burning them out. That seems to be a strategy that no longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so aggressive that you'll very quickly learn you're being taken advantage of if your linkedin profile is even moderately up to date and checked. These labour shortages (in all sorts of industries) are really going to be fascinating to watch. It's been 40 years since workers have had this kind of power/positioning and it'll be interesting to see if and how companies will adapt and change.

jatone 5y ago
agreed, I'm excited to see what happens. its taken those 40 years for globalization and women in the work force to be integrated and absorbed. we're just now seeing the labor markets plateau.
- hylaride 5y ago
  I think on top of all that, the two largest demographic groups, millennials and boomers, are no longer working together as the latter start to retire en mass (that's already been accelerated as many took early retirement during the pandemic). It will indeed be exciting to see what happens now...
HideousKojima 5y ago
>That seems to be a strategy that now longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so aggressive Companies are also becoming more and more willing to post salary ranges along with job postings these days as well, which makes jumping ship from game dev even easier. "I could make 30-50% more and only work 40 hours a week instead of 60-80, at the low cost of giving up games to write boring tax software instead? Sign me up"
- kranke155 5y ago
  You also will be working on boring tax software from 9 to 5. That gives you hours every week to build your own toy games, potentially even with friends making something cool.
  - HellDunkel 5y ago
    The hidden cost is you will start to hate writing software.
- Const-me 5y ago
  > giving up games to write boring tax software instead I don’t believe tax software actually needs people with game development background. The GUI is relatively basic, the code is not terribly complicated nor performance-critical, but probably needs niche skills like SQL and finance. However, there’re huge areas of software with both problems and technologies being rather similar to videogames. These areas include CAD/CAM/CAE and many other non-gaming 3D graphics applications such as VFX and medical imaging, HPC, robotics, low-level multimedia, computer vision, some parts of AI/machine learning, professional audio, some parts of embedded, some parts of mobile.
croutonwagon 5y ago
I was reading an AMA with Todd Howard of Bethesda a while back and noticed he said they were hiring. So I took a look specifically in my specialty (ops/cloud ops etc). I hesitate to use the buzzword dev ops because all of our code is focused on automating operations, enhancing reliability and balancing with cost so my core devs can do their work better, faster etc. Anyway. In Bethesda land it was called NOC admin or something with a very clear deadline of you becoming a developer only within three years or getting out. It made total sense why fallout 76 has so many issues with their net code. They don’t actually want people with any experience in managing these things, they want guys to just hit reboot it seems and use it as a jumping block. At my company it’s telling how little networking and systems stuff our coders and sql folks know and when left to their own, things run pretty bad. My company has learned from this and we have pretty good reliability as a result and have a unique ability to scale and automate, especially products that were done by different core teams since my team often comes in and makes it all integrate well. Anyway, all that said it was pretty eye opening and while I still like video games here and there, and even Bethesda ones, I have no desire to go work in that industry. I’ll stick to my sector.

jatone 5y ago

agreed, I'm excited to see what happens. its taken those 40 years for globalization and women in the work force to be integrated and absorbed. we're just now seeing the labor markets plateau.

hylaride 5y ago
I think on top of all that, the two largest demographic groups, millennials and boomers, are no longer working together as the latter start to retire en mass (that's already been accelerated as many took early retirement during the pandemic). It will indeed be exciting to see what happens now...

HideousKojima 5y ago

>That seems to be a strategy that now longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so aggressive Companies are also becoming more and more willing to post salary ranges along with job postings these days as well, which makes jumping ship from game dev even easier. "I could make 30-50% more and only work 40 hours a week instead of 60-80, at the low cost of giving up games to write boring tax software instead? Sign me up"

kranke155 5y ago
You also will be working on boring tax software from 9 to 5. That gives you hours every week to build your own toy games, potentially even with friends making something cool.
- HellDunkel 5y ago
  The hidden cost is you will start to hate writing software.
Const-me 5y ago
> giving up games to write boring tax software instead I don’t believe tax software actually needs people with game development background. The GUI is relatively basic, the code is not terribly complicated nor performance-critical, but probably needs niche skills like SQL and finance. However, there’re huge areas of software with both problems and technologies being rather similar to videogames. These areas include CAD/CAM/CAE and many other non-gaming 3D graphics applications such as VFX and medical imaging, HPC, robotics, low-level multimedia, computer vision, some parts of AI/machine learning, professional audio, some parts of embedded, some parts of mobile.

croutonwagon 5y ago

I was reading an AMA with Todd Howard of Bethesda a while back and noticed he said they were hiring. So I took a look specifically in my specialty (ops/cloud ops etc). I hesitate to use the buzzword dev ops because all of our code is focused on automating operations, enhancing reliability and balancing with cost so my core devs can do their work better, faster etc. Anyway. In Bethesda land it was called NOC admin or something with a very clear deadline of you becoming a developer only within three years or getting out. It made total sense why fallout 76 has so many issues with their net code. They don’t actually want people with any experience in managing these things, they want guys to just hit reboot it seems and use it as a jumping block. At my company it’s telling how little networking and systems stuff our coders and sql folks know and when left to their own, things run pretty bad. My company has learned from this and we have pretty good reliability as a result and have a unique ability to scale and automate, especially products that were done by different core teams since my team often comes in and makes it all integrate well. Anyway, all that said it was pretty eye opening and while I still like video games here and there, and even Bethesda ones, I have no desire to go work in that industry. I’ll stick to my sector.