Akuma posted:

its hard to say because it varies a bit... All I really know is what we offer. Unfortunately I also don't think I'm supposed to talk about it... in interviews I'll freely discuss it, and also never ask people what they're currently on, we just have a conversation about what they're looking for and what we think we can provide. Sorry, I don't think I should say :/

This article looks good, though 👀
https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/game-developer

I've interviewed a few people this week that have very C# heavy CVs and I've had to say the same thing to all of them - without strong C++ it's a big risk for anywhere that isn't purely working in C# to take you on because going from C# to C++ on the job is going to really limit the sorts of tasks you can take on, and thus the value you can add to the business. C++, especially in games, just presents a ton of very different problems and solutions. This is compounded even more if you don't have strong Unity to go with your C#, just a bit of hobby stuff over the years. I wouldn't offer somebody a job above entry level (see the article above) if I couldn't be reasonably sure they could do the job based on what they've done in the past, professionally or personally. The more of both you can show the less risky making an offer seems, and so the better the offer will be.

(Side note: for me interviews are more of a conversation about your past and what you want to do in the future than a series of test questions.)

Edit: oh btw Sumo has a studio in Nottingham, aptly named Sumo Nottingham, they put out Hotshot Racing late last year!
It definitely depends where you work. My studio is the best place I've ever worked, we built it to be a nice place for people, last year we won a best place to work award and was a runner up in I think 2 others, we're 50 people now and in the 6 years we've been going you can count the amount of people that have left on one hand. And we mostly work on ports!

Chernabog posted:

That's true, but just because it is not your kind of game doesn't mean it can't be rewarding. I worked on a Farmville-like game which isn't something I'd ever play but it was still pretty fun to make. And yeah, work is work but there are definitely levels of engagement.

Studio posted:

Games are fun, but if someone is going in with the attitude "I'm okay losing half my paycheck for a Games Job because games are so fun," it sounds like a recipe for disaster. It's still a job, quite often isn't fun, and has a notoriously awful work life balance. It's cool and exciting to see stuff revealed and events, but if you really want to make a game and are okay with a paycut, I feel like a better option is to just save money and try and run a micro project while inbetween jobs.

Akuma posted:

What the gently caress

This is some really weird advice. Oh you want to work in games as your day job? Have you considered working your preferred job in your spare time in addition to your day job instead?

Don't listen to this, Zaphod. Follow your dreams.

Zaphod42 posted:

I didn't say it was fun. I said I was spending my day job wanting to go home to work on my personal projects, which are obviously work too.

mutata posted:

I mean... I work in games and this still describes my situation.

Zaphod42 posted:

Sure, but "you don't have creative freedom" is a very different situation from "you want to have fun at work" and that's a pretty gross misrepresentation of what I said.

Y'all are being weirdly mean.

I've said this before but lots of people jump to conclusions; I have actually worked on a game before professionally. It was a lot of interesting engineering work and meetings that I enjoyed more than some other jobs. We just didn't end up shipping because the project was overly ambitious and got cancelled. I don't need y'all to tell me what I do or do not want, thanks.

mutata posted:

I mean, what I'm saying is that neither do I have creative freedom, nor do I have fun at work.

mutata posted:

But fine, what you originally said was "I'm willing to take a 50% pay cut to work in games" which you're obviously at liberty to say and do, we ain't your dads, but we're also allowed to grimace at that statement in general and read into it. Having worked in games yourself, you're well aware that people who take that mindset often times create lots of problems for themselves and others and get taken advantage of, so I think we're speaking to that mindset.

Zaphod42 posted:

...I know. That's the point? What about my last post makes you think I misunderstood this?

Zaphod42 posted:

Jesus christ dude. Just leave me alone, please. I literally have one goon making GBS threads on me for saying "I hope I can make more" and other goons telling me "expect to make nothing" and you're making GBS threads on me for saying that I'd be willing to take less? I cannot win with this thread, I swear.

Akuma posted:

What the gently caress

This is some really weird advice. Oh you want to work in games as your day job? Have you considered working your preferred job in your spare time in addition to your day job instead?

Don't listen to this, Zaphod. Follow your dreams.

Akuma posted:

Right. Especially when Zaphod42 has already been working in non-games for years.

Studio's projecting there. Maybe you shouldn't be in games if you hate it so much

mutata posted:

I mean, what I'm saying is that neither do I have creative freedom, nor do I have fun at work. But fine, what you originally said was "I'm willing to take a 50% pay cut to work in games" which you're obviously at liberty to say and do, we ain't your dads, but we're also allowed to grimace at that statement in general and read into it. Having worked in games yourself, you're well aware that people who take that mindset often times create lots of problems for themselves and others and get taken advantage of, so I think we're speaking to that mindset.

Zaphod42 posted:

Jesus christ dude. Just leave me alone, please. I literally have one goon making GBS threads on me for saying "I hope I can make more" and other goons telling me "expect to make nothing" and you're making GBS threads on me for saying that I'd be willing to take less? I cannot win with this thread, I swear.

Akuma posted:

If you're working a creative job and feel you're not paid well and also you don't enjoy it then maybe the problem is your job and not the entire industry.

mutata posted:

just that the mindset of "I need to get a games industry job at any cost, even if I have to severely undervalue myself" leads people to take bad jobs at bad companies and get taken advantage of. You've obviously had some great experiences in 'following your dreams'. Some of us most definitely have NOT.

The statement is to know your worth and not settle for bad industry jobs.

(I'll also add that none of this is directed at Zaphod, I'm speaking generally now).

Zaphod42 posted:

I know you just said this wasn't directed at me, and I kinda want this whole thing to just move on, but at risk of opening a can of worms I wanted to just say something,

We live in a hosed up capitalist economy. I am making seriously 4x what my friends make as a back-end software engineer. Taking 50% of that (which was being slightly hyperbolic, I'm not writing a college paper here I'm speaking off the cuff), I'd still be better paid than some of my friends who are artists. Now, they deserve more, but so does the guy who works really hard as a janitor. I don't have kids to support. So just saying in a nutshell that because I'd be willing to take much less than what I make right now, you really can't make any objective determination about what that exactly means. Assuming that means I'd work for peanuts and would thus destroy the industry rate is not really fair.

Also, as I mentioned last page, I hadn't gotten to salary negotiation yet, but you can figure I wouldn't start by saying "Hey I'll take this job for basically nothing!". That was just me expressing that I wasn't holding out for more pay or something. I've done some research about the going rates in this area and would start with what I think is fair for those positions, which would be less than what I was making before but still plenty to live off.

mkvltra posted:

Have you ever imagined yourself as an entrepreneur? If you have that much disposable income you might be able to pay skilled freelancers to do most of your development work for you. You'd still be making games 'on the side', but your production speed would be a lot faster. I followed your VR development a little bit and saw that you utilize asset stores (which is smart!), but have you ever thought to expand on that idea by outsourcing more complex forms of labor?

(Totally just brainstorming, and trying to encourage someone who I can relate to, at least in terms of balancing pursuits of passion with professional output ).

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Oh sure. I just wanted to remind folks that "working in games" is not equivalent to "working on your favorite game(s)". Sometimes (and I'm not saying that necessarily happened here) people forget that.

devilmouse posted:

I have what I suspect many people would consider the perfect games job: I co-founded a company that's been trucking along for 8.5 years now. For the past few months, a non-trivial portion of my job is literally "ideas guy" who just spends the day writing up and pitching insane things. I'm paid well and love my job.

But there are some days where I would take a 50% pay cut to do ANYTHING ELSE because oh god is it draining. No matter how much I love this line of work, at the end of the day it's still very much work with all that that entails.

Chainclaw posted:

Some of my favorite games to work on were in genres or styles of games I wouldn't normally play (character action games). I also have zero interest in working on games I like to play (RPGs).

Also, licensed games can be a lot of fun to work on with the appropriate license. When I worked on a Wolverine game, Marvel sent us a ton of digital Wolverine comics, so during preproduction I got to spend a lot of time just reading Wolverine comics.

Zaphod42 posted:

I thought about it a little bit but I'm really just not a business type guy. I'm a programmer through and through, and the more time I spend on things that aren't code the more unhappy I am.

Chainclaw posted:

Ideally a place will have an individual contributor and non-IC career path for most roles. So for coding you would have a split at some point between engineering manager versus senior engineer. I know some game studios don't do this, the previous place I worked at didn't do that for the first few years I was there. They eventually created that split later because the downsides of not having it end up pretty huge. Situations where your strong engineers who don't actually like people managing end up as people managers because it's the only clear progression.

It's harder to have that split at smaller studios, you tend to need to wear a lot of hats in those cases.

more falafel please posted:

I skipped a page ahead but working in games is not worth working 60 hours. Crunch is literally killing you. It's a loving job, they're asking you to ruin yourself for bullshit you don't care about because you like Zelda. Don't do it. Better yet, organize your workplace.

DancingMachine posted:

As a software engineer, working in games you will typically make less than you would in random finance or tech industry job. But 50% is huge gap. I realize we are just throwing out numbers without data but multiple folks have said "half" or "50%". I think that's a bad thing to normalize or accept. There is no good reason people should take that much less just to work in games. Especially considering the skill/talent bar are higher, not lower.

Zaphod42 posted:

50% of that (which was being slightly hyperbolic, I'm not writing a college paper here I'm speaking off the cuff)

DancingMachine posted:

As a software engineer, working in games you will typically make less than you would in random finance or tech industry job. But 50% is huge gap. I realize we are just throwing out numbers without data but multiple folks have said "half" or "50%". I think that's a bad thing to normalize or accept. There is no good reason people should take that much less just to work in games. Especially considering the skill/talent bar are higher, not lower.

DancingMachine posted:

I very much doubt there are 20 people in the world that meet all of those requirements, especially the first and the last one. I always find it puzzling when hiring managers set requirements at a level that means they'll be waiting a year or two before they find somebody if they find anyone at all. It's fine if you don't actually need to fill the position and just want to have something open in case somebody perfect comes along, but that is rarely the case. Usually you have a team to build and a project timeline to meet.

The people they actually end up hiring for those positions I am guessing will meet criteria more like
- has some realtime 3d game dev experience
- has some mobile development experience
- has some UI development experience
(but probably not all 3 on the same project)

And even then they are not gonna build a team of 20 people that all meet all 3 of those requirements.

DancingMachine posted: