3 ms·

In terms of attracting engineering talent, how does the video games industry fare? In a crunch situation, I can think of how easy it is for some to be able to

In terms of attracting engineering talent, how does the video games industry fare? In a crunch situation, I can think of how easy it is for some to be able to circumnavigate various pitfalls while others fall into them and have no time to address it. Very much a skill/experience thing. There’s countless examples of games that run horribly given their level of presentation, or have no business being so impressively performant on the hardware they’re running. I can guess what execs will pick when faced with “delay the game or ship a massive bundle.”

jjoonathan 4y ago
It attracts truly extraordinary talent. One of many examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw . There is more technical ambition in a single slide of that project than an entire department at places I've worked. However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep. If I were to dive into the JIRA for any one of these "missing compression" incidents, I wouldn't expect to find an easy win, I would expect to find "missing compression" beneath a pile of much worse bugs like "level 2 crashes on AMD cards." So it goes.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  > However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep. Yeah, I've often heard that the advice for people who really want to make games is to get some friends together and try to put out something together as a side gig while you work somewhere boring to pay the bills. SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is an awful experience. The expectations are high and the salaries are low because there's a seemingly unlimited bunch of young adults that want to make games. And yes, it takes extraordinary talent. Your code needs to be able to generate a frame in under 16 milliseconds in order to maintain 60 fps. If you want to appease the hardcore players with these crazy 360 hz monitors, you need to get your game loop down to a mere 3 ms. The amount of shortcuts and optimizations needed to pull that off is insane. At that level, you're trying to figure out how to minimize cache misses and branch mispredictions. How many Node devs are thinking about those?
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Just trying to maintain 60fps with a mapping Library like OpenLayers is a humbling experience.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    >>SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is an awful experience. Just as a counter point - I work at one of the largest AAA game companies and we have great work life balance(been here 9 years). Don't remember when was the last time I worked more than the required 7.5h/day, never worked on the weekend, the people I work with are all passionate about their work and want to deliver something great. The pay is "ok" - it's not exceptional but it allows for good quality of life. In comparison all my friends who went to work in traditional software development are paid somewhat more than I am but they all 100% hate their jobs, so......I don't think it's a bad trade off. As for the infinite supply of people wanting to do this - it's only really true at junior level, as soon as you talk anyone above junior it's extremely hard to recruit and you might be getting a handful of candidates a year. We've been trying to hire a senior rendering programmer for over a year now and we've had like 5 candidates total.
syntheweave 4y ago
Game programmers can do some amazing things, but they generally aren't given the schedules to do them "properly". If most commercial software is a feature factory, games are "megafactories" because they are not really competing on the robustness of the implementation, just on delivering a certain kind of experience that delivers some interactivity and shows off some assets, and that tends to lead towards approaches that hack one feature on top of another and then lean on manual testing to catch "enough" errors. Many games also take characteristic shortcuts that eliminate some options for game design in order to simplify the tech. The larger companies will often keep their tech teams separated from their game teams and treat the tech coders more generously. This comes with all the pluses and minuses of siloing the work - sometimes they solve the wrong problem, but do it well.
klodolph 4y ago
> In terms of attracting engineering talent, how does the video games industry fare? When I talk to people in the game industry, it sounds a lot like my experiences outside it. Plenty of programming skill to go around, but the skill is often allocated inefficiently, and everyone's under pressure to just ship stuff and move on to the next deliverable.
PeterisP 4y ago
They can get great people but then choose to spend their effort solely on features and ignoring things like size and speed - for example, the GTA V loading time issue (https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...) is a good example, where GTA V did many things really well technically but then completely ignored a huge loading performance issue for many years; things like that aren't "very much a skill/experience thing", the difference is whether the company cares.
naikrovek 4y ago
game developers work so much harder than enterprise developers, and enterprise developers look down on game developers as is they are sub-human or something. it's completely inverted to reality. I'm not saying that you are doing this, I am saying that this is done. watch some GDC developer videos on YouTube. these people work HARD for performance.
- tester756 4y ago
  Are you sure those people were talking about "game developers", not "game industry"?

jjoonathan 4y ago

It attracts truly extraordinary talent. One of many examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw . There is more technical ambition in a single slide of that project than an entire department at places I've worked. However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep. If I were to dive into the JIRA for any one of these "missing compression" incidents, I wouldn't expect to find an easy win, I would expect to find "missing compression" beneath a pile of much worse bugs like "level 2 crashes on AMD cards." So it goes.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
> However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep. Yeah, I've often heard that the advice for people who really want to make games is to get some friends together and try to put out something together as a side gig while you work somewhere boring to pay the bills. SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is an awful experience. The expectations are high and the salaries are low because there's a seemingly unlimited bunch of young adults that want to make games. And yes, it takes extraordinary talent. Your code needs to be able to generate a frame in under 16 milliseconds in order to maintain 60 fps. If you want to appease the hardcore players with these crazy 360 hz monitors, you need to get your game loop down to a mere 3 ms. The amount of shortcuts and optimizations needed to pull that off is insane. At that level, you're trying to figure out how to minimize cache misses and branch mispredictions. How many Node devs are thinking about those?
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Just trying to maintain 60fps with a mapping Library like OpenLayers is a humbling experience.
- gambiting 4y ago
  >>SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is an awful experience. Just as a counter point - I work at one of the largest AAA game companies and we have great work life balance(been here 9 years). Don't remember when was the last time I worked more than the required 7.5h/day, never worked on the weekend, the people I work with are all passionate about their work and want to deliver something great. The pay is "ok" - it's not exceptional but it allows for good quality of life. In comparison all my friends who went to work in traditional software development are paid somewhat more than I am but they all 100% hate their jobs, so......I don't think it's a bad trade off. As for the infinite supply of people wanting to do this - it's only really true at junior level, as soon as you talk anyone above junior it's extremely hard to recruit and you might be getting a handful of candidates a year. We've been trying to hire a senior rendering programmer for over a year now and we've had like 5 candidates total.

syntheweave 4y ago

Game programmers can do some amazing things, but they generally aren't given the schedules to do them "properly". If most commercial software is a feature factory, games are "megafactories" because they are not really competing on the robustness of the implementation, just on delivering a certain kind of experience that delivers some interactivity and shows off some assets, and that tends to lead towards approaches that hack one feature on top of another and then lean on manual testing to catch "enough" errors. Many games also take characteristic shortcuts that eliminate some options for game design in order to simplify the tech. The larger companies will often keep their tech teams separated from their game teams and treat the tech coders more generously. This comes with all the pluses and minuses of siloing the work - sometimes they solve the wrong problem, but do it well.

klodolph 4y ago

> In terms of attracting engineering talent, how does the video games industry fare? When I talk to people in the game industry, it sounds a lot like my experiences outside it. Plenty of programming skill to go around, but the skill is often allocated inefficiently, and everyone's under pressure to just ship stuff and move on to the next deliverable.

PeterisP 4y ago

They can get great people but then choose to spend their effort solely on features and ignoring things like size and speed - for example, the GTA V loading time issue (https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...) is a good example, where GTA V did many things really well technically but then completely ignored a huge loading performance issue for many years; things like that aren't "very much a skill/experience thing", the difference is whether the company cares.

naikrovek 4y ago

game developers work so much harder than enterprise developers, and enterprise developers look down on game developers as is they are sub-human or something. it's completely inverted to reality. I'm not saying that you are doing this, I am saying that this is done. watch some GDC developer videos on YouTube. these people work HARD for performance.

tester756 4y ago
Are you sure those people were talking about "game developers", not "game industry"?