

Why I Would Hire Game Developers for my Startup - mnemonik
http://paulbakaus.com/2009/10/06/why-i-would-hire-game-developers-for-my-startup/

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petewarden
I was six years in consoles, five in a big-but-cool corporation on desktop
apps, and the last year in web.

\- Game developers are high-energy and are there because they really, really
want to be doing their job. They could make more money doing something less
sexy, so they're self-selected enthusiasts.

\- My game projects tended to be under one year, with high pressure, clear
goals and a definite deadline. This, and the general culture of the industry,
encouraged lots of crunch time, and made any code philosophy other than
churning out code asap hard to adopt.

\- Driven by both their motivation and the project conditions, good game
programmers are awesome at creating a lot of decent code very fast.

So, judged purely on coding game programmers tend to be pretty strong. The
trade-off is that there are a lot of skills they don't have to develop that
you need in the web world. The whole mindset of _everything_ (apart from the
HTML rendering) running on a machine you control changes things fundamentally:

\- It's far easier to deploy fast and deal with problems as they arise, rather
than coding and testing defensively to avoid them in the first place

\- Optimization is a completely different beast. You now control the hardware
side of the equation too, so the old habits of improving performance can lead
you astray

Anyway, this isn't as clear-cut as I'm painting it (I'm sure MMORPG guys have
a lot more in common with web developers for example), but who's 'better'
definitely depends on which dimensions you're looking at.

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steerpike
Well, I for one can't wait for someone to come and show us whiny and
despairing web developers how it's done.

Moronic article that seems to think that comparing apples to battleships
somehow makes sense.

(Speaking as a game developer for 14 years and a web developer for 8).

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cmos
I've been working at a major gaming studio in between startups and I have to
agree with this - game programmers rock!

The only catch is that they tend to be obsessed with games. So if you want
them to build something else make sure they are tired of the gaming world and
want something new.

Anyone who can commit their software to a ROM disc has my respect.

~~~
berntb
My impression is that game developers mostly leave the gaming world after
burning out too many times. Some cynical advice might be to only hire them a
year after they stopped working on games?

Disclaimer: I only know a few game developers. They are really good -- and to
man burned out on that industry.

~~~
sgoraya
I am one of the burned out ones ;)

I worked in the industry for approximately 6 years (2 companies) and got out
due to the stressful crunch periods and associated drama of working in a game
studio - if you are working on multiple titles, the stress increases by orders
of magnitude. In addition to the bug fixing and testing there is the necessary
hassle of submitting the games to SONY/MS/Nintendo, marketing coordination
(with what seems like infinite number of mags and gaming sites), etc. and etc.

...now doing geospatial web applications.

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Readmore
While I share a lot of respect for game devs I'm curious about this quote from
the article.... What do you mean by "While web developers have been whining
for years and have been stuck in their despair"

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decultured
The offer for one of my first programming jobs I landed was due to my having
listed game development on my resume. The job had nothing to do with game
development (though I later went on to build a 3D data visualization in
DirectX that was a cornerstone of the software), but the people who hired me
had the same mindset as this article.

The idea is based on a few aspects that game developers almost universally
share: they are trained to think of new, innovative ways to solve problems
since each new game has to push the boundaries of what was possible before,
they tend to be passionate about development and doing cool things with code,
they are hardcore about optimization, and they are used to constantly learning
new technologies and algorithms.

That said, not all aspects of game development are ideal for other projects,
especially on the web. As others have mentioned, web development requires a
very different mindset than game development. One major example is that game
developers often build components from scratch, rather than re-using existing
ones. One of the hardest skill for me to learn was to avoid "reinventing the
wheel" and using pre-made off the shelf and open source components in
projects.

I am definitely biased, but my own experiences have caused me to pay more
attention to resumes I get that list game development experience, but not to
the point of excluding others.

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joeld42
I agree with this guy's thinking... but it's going to be hard to find a good
game developer who wants to switch to web stuff. Try and recruit people who've
just had kids. That's why I switched from games to something less crunchy (not
web, but still)...

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harpastum
I don't know any game developers, so I can't really speak to their production
quality/speed, but this quote just jumps out at me as a _really_ bad thing:

"For game devs, they know from the beginning on that the console they’re
developing for cannot handle the raw 3D data, so they need to find
optimization patterns right away!"

I understand trying to find the optimal pattern/process for completing a task,
but this seems like it's trying to say pre-optimizing is a good idea. I
couldn't disagree more.

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X0nic
This is like comparing apples to oranges. Game development is a more
specialized industry. This is like comparing OS developers to VB developers.
More people do web development, its easier to get into and therefore a lot
more people just plain suck. Anyone who is in game development is probably
already an above average developer, while an average web developer is, well
average.

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MarkPNeyer
It doesn't hurt that game developers are willing to work their assess off for
not a lot of money.

~~~
plinkplonk
"It doesn't hurt that game developers are willing to work their assess off"
_on games_ "for not a lot of money".

If you ask them to work on the your enterprise webapp , you can bet they'll
charge high rates. Programmers will take a pay cut for _interesting_ work. And
making games is interesting work. An accounting system, not so much.

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daredevildave
I'm not sure I agree with the whining part, there is also an awful lot game
developers could learn from web developers.

For example: \- Test driven development \- Deploy, measure, iterate practices
\- High level languages

Most of which are rare in the games industry but seem to be very successful in
the web industry.

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phsr
Game Development is test driven...When they play the part they just coded,
isn't that testing?

~~~
derefr
I don't think you understand the significance of the word "driven." Coding
something and then testing it is not TDD. In TDD, you don't write _any_
application code that a failed test doesn't demand in order to pass—and even
then, only just enough to make that test pass, even if it just means alwars
returning 4 from a rand function.

Of course, a "play test" is not an unit test, or an integration test (and is
only mildly similar to an acceptance test.) Playtest-driven development would
be an entirely new affair, likely involving gameplay freeze-states and kept in
version control, and a constant numerical analysis for the player's emotional
state (perhaps using some sort of face-recognition) given alternate code
paths.

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protomyth
game developers (who I respect immensely) aren't generally know for doing bug
fixing for realtime services (unless they work on a WoW or its ilk).

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icefox
Just curious, how much maintenance or code reuse do game developers have?

