
The secret life of a games programmer - kostyk
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/secret-life-games-programmer
======
Paul_S
"If you like games and you’re a programmer, go work for a firm that will pay.
You will earn enough to buy all the games you want."

This and similar advice have been repeated through the decades and have
stopped no one. I heard that line. Didn't stop me. I dispensed this line and
have stopped no one. Life is a different thing when you're young.

Let me have another chance at giving out unwanted advice:

If you enjoy programming games get a regular job that you work at 9-5 and use
the time you would've spent working unpaid overtime at a games studio to work
on a game at home. You will have creative control and freedom to choose any
tech and tools you want - neither of which you'd have at a games studio. Do I
even need to mention a normal salary and other benefits at this point?

~~~
ramy_d
I thought HN would be the last place to see advice that would derail people
from diving into their independent endeavours. The reason no one heads your
advice is because driven people don't stop to "play it safe". My 2-person
part-time hobby project pales in comparison to the 6-person full time team
operation and its potential for achievement.

Hobbies will only ever be just that. Some of us are in it to make something
meaningful and if that means most of us will fail then it's better to have
tried than to wake up 50 years old having never tried at all.

~~~
Paul_S
I am specifically talking about working as a salaried employee of a game
studio. You are talking about starting a business. These are different issues.

~~~
ramy_d
I think there's a distinction between liking to play games and liking to make
games. If you really enjoy making games, then see how far it takes you.

------
phaser
Games developer here. Yes, I do work insane amount of hours and I would get
paid a lot higher for my skills almost anywhere.

Why? We use technology not to 'disrupt' some industry, get bigger returns for
a financial firm or big data problems with users information. Instead, we
create software with the sole purpose of making people happy, And we also get
the chance to tell stories that will influence thousands maybe millions of
minds.

So we are in a never ending search for big insights about the world and ways
to encode them into fun games. I'll never grow tired of that.

~~~
nradov
Do games actually make people happy? I used to play a lot of games thinking
they would make me happy, but they hardly ever did. Mostly the games turned
out to be a lot of extra unpaid work for no tangible benefit. Just grinding
away trying to reach the next level, another cut scene, a higher score, etc.
So I've pretty much quit playing.

~~~
x5n1
The game of life is mostly like that. Most of the stuff that's suppose to make
you happy does very little for you other than give you a reason to waste time
and effort. The stuff that makes you happy is usually free but costs time,
time you don't have because you spent it all trying to get money to buy stuff
that doesn't make you happy.

------
iagooar
> Management will always talk about having a healthy work-life balance but the
> implication is there that you could be doing more, fixing more bugs, taking
> on more work. > [...] feeling like your effort is constantly being judged
> means you end up doing it again and again.

This resonates with me! I have experienced this kind of management
schizophrenia many times, telling you that you have flexible working hours,
that you can manage your time yourself, that you should take your time, do
things right... And then, on the other side, appears the pressure to deliver,
the "questions" that suggest you might need to "hurry" a bit more, to deliver
more stuff, to cut some corners if necessary...

~~~
crpatino
There is a technical name for that in psicology: Double-bind.

There are 2 acceptable responses to that, plus a taboo one. The 2 standard
responses is either to try to uphold an unrealistically high standard (the
neurotic overachiever type), or you can take the blame for not doing it and
sacrifice your sense of self worth (the dilbertesque, paper pusher type). Both
private and public sector have plenty of uses for workers of either type.

What is not permitted is to react like a grown up and point out to the
inconsistency of the "mixed messages". I have read that this typically gets
responded with hostility from higher-ups (who typically are not fully
conscious of the dynamics of the game, or see themselves as just transmitting
the requirements from upper management).

Of course I barely have a handful of first and second hand data points, but
those seem consistent with the model as explained above.

~~~
noxToken
The double-bind was a hallmark of a past job. Anytime a meeting, an event that
the upper brass was hosting, or training was labeled as optional, there was
always a heavy emphasis to attend on the day of.

 _Monday morning_ : ${Executive} is coming down to talk about ${something
unrelated} on Thursday. Attendance is strictly optional. This is doubly so if
you're working on something critical.

 _Tuesday and Wednesday morning_ : Don't forget about the talk on Thursday.
You don't need to go, but it would be nice if you attended.

 _Thursday morning_ : Don't forget about the talk this afternoon. Plan head
down there about 12:45.

~~~
jcadam
Same thing happens here. Generally I think in these cases local management
only gradually comes to the realization that nobody actually wants to sit and
listen to a soulless executive spout off a bunch of non-information-
transferring coporate newspeak.

So, to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of an empty conference room, they go
from "invited" to "encouraged" to "drop what you're doing and get in there
_now_."

------
smrtinsert
Why do people thing they would enjoy being a game developer? Do they assume
they would have critical design or decision making input, or do they just love
coding physics/graphic rendering software. I never got the appeal. I like
games too, but I would never think making them in a large studio would be fun.

A simple game by myself as the complete owner on my own time seems way more
fun by comparison.

~~~
cableshaft
If you work on small teams and/or for a small studio, then you will have quite
a few opportunities to influence the design or decision making. I worked for
three small studios and influenced the design of every game I worked on.

Getting paid 60% of what I could get outside the industry and the crunch time
lowering that wage further, and screwing up my health, and leaving me with
zero time for a social life eventually got to me, though, so I got out of the
industry, despite my passion.

I now design board games in my spare time while working on enterprise software
at a Microsoft shop, and get paid a lot more, and if I ever have to stay late
(which happens every once in awhile) they credit me the time to take off in
the future so I'm only working 40 hour weeks.

~~~
littletinman
This has been my strategy for the last few years. I've been making games on my
own dime for just a few years but I now have two self published games on
Steam, and a few Micro-Consoles, and a Job in entirely different industry with
great benefits and hard stop 40 hour weeks.

I absolutely love programming games! It's the most fun programming I've ever
had in the 10+ years of writing code. Nothing beats showing off your creations
with family and friends and them "getting it."

I've gone back and forth of whether I should join the industry but with a kid
and high priority of family time, I just can't do away with what's actually
important to me. I've never regretted working a solid job to support an
awesome hobby.

~~~
cableshaft
Yeah, definitely. I have become a little disillusioned with the video game
industry on the consumer side as well, though. There seems to be a lot of
"download the newest game, play it for 30 minutes (for an app, 2-3 hours for a
big game), then delete it and on to the next game" going on, and it seems very
difficult to make a name for yourself unless you're working on large, artsy
indie games that take many years to make.

I've started getting into the board game hobby recently and it seems like,
while you're never going to get rich off of it, there's much greater
opportunities to gain a reputation and while there's a lot of "play the game a
few times and move on to the next" in the hobby as well, because games are
physical they tend to stay out there and get reprinted for decades, instead of
stay out there for a few months, on average.

I tended to design board-game-friendly designs in the first place, so I
decided to pretty much switch to board games. As a bonus, there's a healthy
demand for mobile app versions of board games anyway, so you can get a
physical AND a digital version for the same game design.

Plus it's a hell of a lot faster to prototype new mechanics and build
prototypes with physical board games.

But that's me. Programming games is still a lot of fun, just sucks when gamers
spend so little time on your game before moving on to the next shiny thing.

~~~
littletinman
For me it's more about what I put in to it than what I get out of it. I
realized really quickly I wouldn't make much more than beer money out of this
hobby.

I think the most difficult thing about the video game industry is the amount
of drama in the hobbyest scene. Still trying to find a "group" that isn't
jumping on the latest "cause" rather than feeding in depth discussions of
randomly generated worlds.

------
lmm
Do those extra hours even result in anything productive? I suspect you'd get
more done in a regular 40-hour week - but of course it's much easier to
measure how many hours you were at your desk than how much you did.

People need to stop enabling this kind of nonsense - a big part of the problem
is so many people want to make games that they'll put up with terrible working
conditions to do so. Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same
thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization - but in a
parallel to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line, everyone believes
they're the best programmer, so no-one wants to do that.

~~~
dagw
_Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed
working conditions elsewhere - unionization_

I don't know. I've worked with ex game developers in Norway and Sweden, two
countries with fairly strong unions, and the story is basically the same. The
companies are very good at convincing you that you really want to work under
those conditions and that doing so makes you awesome. They also know that if
they insist on 'realistic', union approved, working conditions, the
publisher/studio will just hand the next game off to another, less difficult,
team. Hell, I've known people to straight up lie to their union rep about
their working conditions because they don't want the unions stepping in and
'ruining' things.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That sounds like exactly the conditions that an _industry-wide_ unionization
would fix. But that would be hard, because its so easy for a software shop to
up and move. Unlike heavy industry in the 'age of unions', which had large
fixed plants with heavy capital investment. So unionizing geographically, one
business or industry at a time, was workable.

~~~
borvo
Unions just create another power structure that has to be appeased. I'd love
to see the union rep telling the kind of engineers I work with why they're not
allowed to fix something right now. Cue lynch mob!

~~~
CyberDildonics
There have been multiple animation companies that have unionized and still
done well.

------
zodPod
His mention of the open floor plan thing resonated with me a LOT. I have 2
coworkers who have a tendency to get into discussions who work in the same
circle as me in our open floor plan. It makes it really hard to concentrate
when they're constantly yelling back and forth behind me. I usually just put
on some headphones and zone out but the obsession with open floor plans as
somehow innovative is crazy. It's backward. "I want these people to think
effectively and clearly and not have distractions. I know! Let's try an open
floor plan!" I'm sure that's not the thought process but I can't imagine,
other than control or cost, what the other one would be that would cause an
open floor plan to be chosen.

All of the above said, it's not just them that are distracting. It's literally
just the effect of the open floor plan. Someone is talking 4-5 desks down and
your brain has to make the constant decision not to listen to them.

~~~
h0w412d
I have the same feeling toward them. They're chosen for the same reason new
technologies are often chosen: because they're new. The people doing the
choosing aren't concerned with effectiveness or improvement, only that they're
keeping up with the cool new thing.

------
lowbloodsugar
>In the end I was incredibly lucky, landing a junior role at a major UK studio
owned by a console manufacturer just after they had made some more experienced
engineers redundant.

Company that fires experienced engineers to hire junior ones? Doesn't sound
that lucky.

------
kozukumi
As I have mentioned before my wife works in the games industry (producer not
programmer) and her opinion is that the games industry treats programmers like
shit. Maybe a true mad genius programmer isn't treated so badly but the 99%
are seen as code monkeys that can be fired without a moments notice. It is a
pretty horrible environment from the sounds of it.

------
estefan
> You can identify programmers as the people with their headphones on,
> frowning at the screen.

Yes!

~~~
martiuk
Yep, even when walking between two places in the office (the toilets) for
example, I'll have my headphone in and connected to my phone, just so I can't
be distracted by the inevitable drive-by interruptions.

------
jorgecurio
good god, this article is basically me working at a local startup 5 years ago.

When you have someone who only makes decision based on outcomes from a black
box process with the counter productive passive aggressive nagging of when
will it be done vs. someone who understands the stress,emotions (yeah
programmers have them too),art and approximate effort management to avoid
burning people out will be a godsend.

You can absolutely become the latter without technical expertise, I would say
empathy is the biggest tool of someone who manages programmers.

The cigar smoking hunch back Soviet union styled factory owner who keeps
saying he survived the dot com bubble like it was some world war and getting
angry when programmers are trying to 'subvert' him by intentionally missing
deadlines. I think it's good that these type of industrial revolution era work
management culture is slowly eroding.

But yeah the disconnect between those on the front lines everyday with
headphones on vs. the schmoozing politicizing manager with 30 years of
restaurant experience is not going to be a good cultural fit. Eventually,
everyone abandons you, people check glassdoor reviews and then you are
finished, you can't hire anyone anymore without some insane turnover.

------
andywood
Games and graphics are the whole reason I started programming, but after 20
years of on and off game programming, I mostly agree with the article. The
technical details of how games and graphics work are very interesting, but the
actual process of finishing a viable game is some degree of hellish nightmare.
I can relate to the statement about being primarily a problem solver. There
are tons of interesting problems in games, but they only make up a fraction of
the necessary work. I've shipped a small number of both indie and studio
titles, but it took me decades to admit that I'm primarily a problem solver,
and probably not primarily a game-maker.

------
kbenson
This has been my impression of the industry for close to two decades now, just
from the stories. From what I understand, it's not all that secret for
programmers (remember EA spouse?). I remember counseling my step-cousin to be
wary when while in college he mentioned he wanted to get into games
development after he got his CS degree. It made me feel like an asshole, as it
feels like I'm squashing his dreams, but I also didn't feel I could in good
conscience not at least say something so he could look into it more if he
wanted.

I hold out hope that independent games companies are different, and from what
I've heard, they mostly are.

------
kosei
Let me just say that there are game studios that are not run in this way. They
may be hard to find, but they do exist - mostly outside of the console space -
and I've worked at two of them and know of others. If the OP lives in the
Seattle area, I'm happy to recommend a couple of studios that don't treat
their employees like slaves.

------
searine
Articles like this make me glad I went into science.

If I'm going to work 16 hour days, 6 days a week, I may as well be getting
something useful out of it.

~~~
zodPod
Living the life described in this article makes me WISH I had gone into
science. lol I don't want to work 16 hrs/day 6 days/week but, I'd rather be in
science. I'm almost 30 though and own a house and 2 cars and have a wife and
stuff so it's probably a little late for a full out career change... :-/

~~~
abrookewood
Mate, your 30! That is soo not too late for a career change. I've known people
who jumped ship at 50 and never looked back. If you're honestly not happy
doing what you're doing, start planning to do something different.

~~~
zodPod
Thanks man. I'll look into it! I feel so trapped with my current lifestyle. I
guess the idea would just be to slowly get rid of it...

