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As someone who has worked in both the game industry and the film industry - tell your son this: When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious
by qarl 1mo ago
As someone who has worked in both the game industry and the film industry - tell your son this:
When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious price. We live in capitalism and so everything has its cost. Passion in the workplace is taken-advantage of by the corporation. Sure, maybe there are a few places. Maybe more at the beginning of the industry. But by and large you and your skills will be treated very poorly. Because you really want to be there. And so they can get away with it. Paid less, treated less, considered less.
It's the same dynamic at play with teachers, who also feel passionate about their work. Probably every profitable field that has passion.
I don't say this to dissuade your son. But he should know what he's getting himself into. What the real price is. And what we need to fix.
- datakan 1mo agoThat's kinda what I feel like telling him. He has a lot of passion and he's a very smart kid. I don't want to crush that, I want to nurture it. I think being real about things is important though and he has a lot of years still to ultimately decide.
- qarl 1mo agoI think you're doing right by giving him AI. But get him a coding harness - that's where the real traction is right now. Claude Code or Codex. I say this because - the joy of making games is mostly in the design. The imagination it takes to create a new world. I use AIs to create these worlds for me, from MY imagination, and they are extremely useful for that.
- camdenreslink 1mo agoOne lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.
- qarl 1mo agoThis is, in fact, what my kid is planning. They are artistically inclined - make beautiful art - but when looking at colleges focused on law. Why? Because lawyers make bank, and they can fund their passion that way. Not the way I did it, but... who knows?
- mike_hearn 1mo agoDon't sweat it. Everyone wants to write games at that age. I wanted to write games at 13, I was taking part in an open source game project at 15. Kid's interests in what kind of things they want to make do widen over time.
- cmrdporcupine 1mo agoThis is what I keep saying to my youngest, who wants to do games. Go to any bank or insurance company or web agency or to a FAANG company etc and you find rooms full of people who got into programming because they wanted to write games. And then realized what a trap that is and how much more money they could get out of just doing the same programming work but for far more "boring" ends. Same as working for a non-profit on "meaningful" work. The meaning part starts to wear thin as you see the people around you slaying themselves for it and getting no adequate compensation.
- qarl 1mo agoThere's a reason garbage collectors get paid so well.
- onei 1mo agoWhat was it like to work in the film industry, presumably as a software developer? I've heard lots of anecdotes about the games industry, but nothing whatsoever about working on a film.
- qarl 1mo agoHonestly - and maybe it's because it's had longer to mature - the film industry is better than the game industry. Before computers, films already needed artists to create brilliant stuff - and programming for passion is very much like art, I think. Still, not a great place to be. Long brutal hours with insane deadlines, and a corporate structure that will try to bleed you dry. But they do have more recognition of the passion aspect.
- wat10000 1mo agoThe real trick (if you can pull it off) is to cultivate a passion for something most people aren't that interested in, but where there's plenty of demand. I wanted to make games growing up, as I'm sure many of us here did. It's actually how I got into programming in the first place: I want to make games, oh here's this book on BASIC that came with the computer, maybe that will tell me how. Somewhere along the way I managed to transform that into a broader passion for high-performance low-level programming not necessarily in games, and that has ended up being a great career. There isn't a great mass of people trying to get into the non-game side of this, so I get the benefit of personal passion without the downsides that come from competing with a million other passionate people. If I had a kid into computers, I'd probably go with the "I want to make video games" sentiment for now, since it's a great hook for many broadly applicable skills, but be on the lookout for interesting non-games things that might catch their eye.
- qarl 1mo agoTo be fair - I think the world is in such flux right now it's kinda impossible to predict what is a good path forward. I have no idea what to tell my kid. But yes, I think many of us started with that book on BASIC making little programs for the joy of it. And it leads you all sorts of places. "Follow your bliss" as they say.
- wat10000 1mo agoYeah, I'd be a lot less confident in any career advice today compared to, say, ten years ago. But what else can you do....
- piloto_ciego 1mo agoYou're right. Side note, you mention the travails of capitalism in all this. I've been thinking that maybe that's what we get out of this. Maybe we leave it behind over the next couple years. I have ironically been joking to my friends about "FALSA!" or "Fully Automated Luxury Space Anarchism" a la "The Culture." I'm optimistic enough to think I might get a chance to live in it (though I'm probably more inclined to live in the Elench).