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> engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game de

> engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times. I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are categorically MORE complex than what Google, Apple, etc develop? They're not. It's all the same. Same complexity ceiling, same prerequisite levels of creativity. Most frontends that I develop use the same patterns as games and the backends that I've developed recently look like game servers. Same patterns, same techniques, same level of complexity. Game development is just development.

tayo42 5mo ago
It probably depends on the level in the stack your at. At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different. Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.
michaelsalim 5mo ago
Not a game dev but I used to dabble in it. Quite surprised by this take honestly. Sure, each domain has its own complex things to solve. But on average, I think it's quite safe to say that game development consistently demands more creative solutions to problems compared to many other fields.
- miiiiiike 5mo ago
  All development requires creativity. Different types of creativity for different types of problems. Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative. You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity? I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.
  - Thaxll 5mo ago
    In web dev there is little creativity because everything has been done and there is a library / service to solve every problems, none of that exists in major games. Try Claude in your frontend/backend service, then try that in a game client.
    - miiiiiike 5mo ago
      Games have engines that provide so much. Unreal, Gadot, Unity. Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required. I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 5mo ago
    I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.
    - miiiiiike 5mo ago
      Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
      - chrystalkey 5mo ago
        Well yes sure, but those infrastructure questions come with games as well on top of the whole inherent complexity described in this comment family
      - kelnos 5mo ago
        Complex in the way you're using it (a sea of technologies that looks daunting) doesn't automatically mean "hard". I've worked in big tech on distributed systems, with most of the things in your list, and worked on some difficult problems, but I could absolutely believe that cutting-edge game dev is harder, even significantly so.
nsagent 5mo ago
It certainly depends on what you're working on in games. Not every game pushes the envelope, but the ones that do are seriously complex. They are essentially realtime embedded systems, which push the hardware to the max. Sometimes you get similar demands at the big companies like Google and Meta, but often you have the opportunity to throw more compute at the problem. That is rarely possible in games. Having been a game dev before getting my PhD focused on NLP, I can definitely say some of the challenges I ran into developing a first of its kind MMORTS, was seriously challenging. When I took the mandatory grad classes in distributed systems and low level architecture design, I already had first hand experience and aced those classes without any effort. I was familiar with many of the problems and their solutions because I needed to for my work. In addition to working at the lowest level debugging the memory allocators, full networking stack, database layer, you name it all in C++. Being a lead developer on a project of that scope was much more complicated than any work I did later. My first semester of my PhD I wrote a Transformer from scratch referencing only the original paper (it was soon after the paper came out, there were few resources then). I was the only person who got an implementation that matched the results from the original Transformer (most got much worse performance). I credit the skills and abilities I gained in the game dev industry. That isn't me throwing shade at others; as I said there are hard problems in industries other than game dev, but the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.
- mickeyp 5mo ago
  No the insight here is that you went _back_ and got your PhD with years of experience building professional software. Expecting a 20-year old undergrad or a 23-year old postgrad to do as well as someone who left and came back to uni to finish their degree(s) is... uncharitable.
  - nsagent 5mo ago
    I became lead of that MMORTS within 4yrs of starting my career. I've worked with lots of PhD students who came back after more than 5 years working in big tech; not one had the experience and abilities I did. I've also worked with fresh grads in games who were miles ahead of 99% of the software engineers and PhDs I've encountered in my time. Again, I've also run into equally talented fresh grads in big tech, but they were much more rare. Take my anecdotes as you will.
Thaxll 5mo ago
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oreally 5mo ago
I think the differentiator is the amount of deep Math that goes into it. A simple card game is on par with standard app development. But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too. The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.

tayo42 5mo ago

It probably depends on the level in the stack your at. At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different. Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.

michaelsalim 5mo ago

Not a game dev but I used to dabble in it. Quite surprised by this take honestly. Sure, each domain has its own complex things to solve. But on average, I think it's quite safe to say that game development consistently demands more creative solutions to problems compared to many other fields.

miiiiiike 5mo ago
All development requires creativity. Different types of creativity for different types of problems. Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative. You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity? I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.
- Thaxll 5mo ago
  In web dev there is little creativity because everything has been done and there is a library / service to solve every problems, none of that exists in major games. Try Claude in your frontend/backend service, then try that in a game client.
  - miiiiiike 5mo ago
    Games have engines that provide so much. Unreal, Gadot, Unity. Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required. I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 5mo ago
  I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.
  - miiiiiike 5mo ago
    Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
    - chrystalkey 5mo ago
      Well yes sure, but those infrastructure questions come with games as well on top of the whole inherent complexity described in this comment family
    - kelnos 5mo ago
      Complex in the way you're using it (a sea of technologies that looks daunting) doesn't automatically mean "hard". I've worked in big tech on distributed systems, with most of the things in your list, and worked on some difficult problems, but I could absolutely believe that cutting-edge game dev is harder, even significantly so.

nsagent 5mo ago

It certainly depends on what you're working on in games. Not every game pushes the envelope, but the ones that do are seriously complex. They are essentially realtime embedded systems, which push the hardware to the max. Sometimes you get similar demands at the big companies like Google and Meta, but often you have the opportunity to throw more compute at the problem. That is rarely possible in games. Having been a game dev before getting my PhD focused on NLP, I can definitely say some of the challenges I ran into developing a first of its kind MMORTS, was seriously challenging. When I took the mandatory grad classes in distributed systems and low level architecture design, I already had first hand experience and aced those classes without any effort. I was familiar with many of the problems and their solutions because I needed to for my work. In addition to working at the lowest level debugging the memory allocators, full networking stack, database layer, you name it all in C++. Being a lead developer on a project of that scope was much more complicated than any work I did later. My first semester of my PhD I wrote a Transformer from scratch referencing only the original paper (it was soon after the paper came out, there were few resources then). I was the only person who got an implementation that matched the results from the original Transformer (most got much worse performance). I credit the skills and abilities I gained in the game dev industry. That isn't me throwing shade at others; as I said there are hard problems in industries other than game dev, but the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.

mickeyp 5mo ago
No the insight here is that you went _back_ and got your PhD with years of experience building professional software. Expecting a 20-year old undergrad or a 23-year old postgrad to do as well as someone who left and came back to uni to finish their degree(s) is... uncharitable.
- nsagent 5mo ago
  I became lead of that MMORTS within 4yrs of starting my career. I've worked with lots of PhD students who came back after more than 5 years working in big tech; not one had the experience and abilities I did. I've also worked with fresh grads in games who were miles ahead of 99% of the software engineers and PhDs I've encountered in my time. Again, I've also run into equally talented fresh grads in big tech, but they were much more rare. Take my anecdotes as you will.

Thaxll 5mo ago

[dead]

oreally 5mo ago

I think the differentiator is the amount of deep Math that goes into it. A simple card game is on par with standard app development. But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too. The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.