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Work for a non-FAANG that pays well and doesn't stress you out, then work on a game for fun or whatever tickles your fancy in your free time.
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Mar 5, 2023 04:41
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Achmed Jones posted:lol don't go into the games industry wtf. if you're doing your own thing sure but don't kill yourself for blizzard or whatever Oh, I sure wouldn't work for someplace like Blizzard. "Work in games" carries with it an implicit assumption of "...if I can find a games company that doesn't suck". They do exist, you just mostly don't hear about them because a healthy corporate culture doesn't make headlines. Plus they tend to have few openings, because the people that get to work in games for non-abusive employers sure aren't in a hurry to quit. So I'll admit that this one's a bit of a long shot. Achmed Jones posted:imo work for a faang or a place that pays like one. if/when it sucks quit and make another game luchadornado posted:Work for a non-FAANG that pays well and doesn't stress you out, then work on a game for fun or whatever tickles your fancy in your free time. To be clear, when I say "committing" what I mean is "working 40-hour work weeks with no time for personal projects outside of vacation/sick days". The first 15 years of my professional career include a lot of trying to fit gamedev in around my job, and it just doesn't work for me. Even when the job isn't stressful like my last one was, by the time I get done with work, the last thing I want to do is more coding/productive activity. If I could find a place where I worked 20-hour work weeks for half pay, I would be extremely interested. Hence the potential attraction of contract work -- not that I expect it'd let me do 20-hour weeks, but more like "contract for six months of the year, work on personal projects for the other six", or something like that.
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Mar 5, 2023 05:19
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Yeah, game dev salaries will be a joke compared to FAANG - I capped out at $140k tc as a mid-level programmer in San Francisco. Plus games are famously mismanaged and expect you to give your life to them for like half a FAANG salary. Stability is terrible and you’re supposed to pay the bills with “passion” or something (no joke when our c-suite was asked how we can attract/retain people without competitive salaries their answer was “we get to work with a lot of exciting IPs!”). My dream is to leave game dev and get a job that pays enough for me to live comfortably and make my weird dumb games but I live in Scandinavia now so salaries don’t get stupid high afaik. Imo make your second game with knowledge gained from the first. You have unique ideas and actually managed to execute on them; that puts you miles ahead of lots of other indie devs.
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Mar 5, 2023 09:24
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Artemis J Brassnuts posted:Yeah, game dev salaries will be a joke compared to FAANG - I capped out at $140k tc as a mid-level programmer in San Francisco. Plus games are famously mismanaged and expect you to give your life to them for like half a FAANG salary. Stability is terrible and you’re supposed to pay the bills with “passion” or something (no joke when our c-suite was asked how we can attract/retain people without competitive salaries their answer was “we get to work with a lot of exciting IPs!”). Man. I knew the salaries would be worse but I didn't think they'd be that much worse. My TC right before I quit my old job was a bit north of $250k. quote:Imo make your second game with knowledge gained from the first. You have unique ideas and actually managed to execute on them; that puts you miles ahead of lots of other indie devs. This is tempting, but there's the minor issue that my first game took 3.5 years to make, and so far (~1 month after launch, plus 1.5 years of Early Access sales) I have made $-28k. Which, to be clear, does not count my own cost of living. I think it's likely at this point that I will make back my direct capital expenses in the first year, and if I'm fortunate the game will have a long tail and provide a nice stipend in future years...but it is in no way sustainable as a business. Also re: unique ideas, it's a pretty direct ripoff of a Playstation 2 game  And my idea for Next Game is basically "what if Nuclear Throne was 3D?"
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Mar 5, 2023 18:37
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if you make a business and its a game, you basically magically lop off two to three zeros from addressable market. which is why any decent venture capitalist laughs you out of the room for any video game. all of the misery of the industry flows from there
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Mar 5, 2023 18:42
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wait you were l5 at a faang and only making 250k tc? where are you located? maybe clarification is in order: l5 at google is senior; maybe your faang has a different scale and we're crossing wires? i'm surprised that it's news to you that game industry salaries are terrible; i think you might do well to poke around on levels.fyi for a while and get a lay of the land. i know google officially has a thing where people can work 4 (8 hour) days a week and take a commensurate pay cut; I don't know how common it is for people to do that. I suspect it's not at all common, but something like that might be worth investigating even if it's a long shot for a new-hire when hiring is generally screwed up anyway. i have a really hard time that you'd do better contracting six months out of the year than you would working at a faang for a year or two and thereby subsidizing the next 5 years of your gamedev or whatever. contracting would also have all the running-a-business-now-youre-also-in-marketing overhead and that sounds frankly terrible to me. but my faang team is also good and cool and chill, so i'm coming at it from that position, not the one you experienced, which clearly sucked. to be super clear, i'm _not_ saying go do the thing you were doing before with its dysfunction and burnout and all. i'm saying find a team that's cool and chill and have them pay you gobs of cash that you can squirrel away to fund doing cool and fun stuff after a bit. you can quit after six months and probably have enough saved up to subsidize well more than six-months-of-not-contracting, so you won't have lost anything versus contracting for six months. well, won't have lost anything other than six months of "exists as a contractor," but you _already_ have a great portfolio what with the _freaking video game_ and all so that seems like a near-zero opportunity cost to me
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Mar 5, 2023 18:51
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Achmed Jones posted:wait you were l5 at a faang and only making 250k tc? where are you located? maybe clarification is in order: l5 at google is senior; maybe your faang has a different scale and we're crossing wires? This was at Verily, one of the Alphabet subsidiaries, in the SF Bay Area. I was terrible at negotiating. Fortunately, they locked in my initial stock grant immediately before a revaluation substantially improved the company's outlook, so my effective TC for the years I worked there was a lot higher. Fool's luck, I guess. What does L5 TC look like these days? quote:i'm surprised that it's news to you that game industry salaries are terrible; i think you might do well to poke around on levels.fyi for a while and get a lay of the land. i know google officially has a thing where people can work 4 (8 hour) days a week and take a commensurate pay cut; I don't know how common it is for people to do that. I suspect it's not at all common, but something like that might be worth investigating even if it's a long shot for a new-hire when hiring is generally screwed up anyway. When I was at Alphabet, I knew one guy who got the 4-day work week. He was also the creator of memegen, the internal meme site, and had a ton of cultural leverage. From talking with him, my impression was that you really needed a lot of leverage if you wanted to get the 4-day week going on. And yeah, I knew intellectually that games work paid worse, I just hadn't realized it was "less than half the pay" worse. quote:i have a really hard time that you'd do better contracting six months out of the year than you would working at a faang for a year or two and thereby subsidizing the next 5 years of your gamedev or whatever. contracting would also have all the running-a-business-now-youre-also-in-marketing overhead and that sounds frankly terrible to me. but my faang team is also good and cool and chill, so i'm coming at it from that position, not the one you experienced, which clearly sucked. to be super clear, i'm _not_ saying go do the thing you were doing before with its dysfunction and burnout and all. i'm saying find a team that's cool and chill and have them pay you gobs of cash that you can squirrel away to fund doing cool and fun stuff after a bit. you can quit after six months and probably have enough saved up to subsidize well more than six-months-of-not-contracting, so you won't have lost anything versus contracting for six months. well, won't have lost anything other than six months of "exists as a contractor," but you _already_ have a great portfolio what with the _freaking video game_ and all so that seems like a near-zero opportunity cost to me Thanks for the perspective check! My main concern with working at a faang for six months and then quitting is that that's the kind of maneuver you can only pull once or maybe twice before your resume becomes a toxic asset. But a year or two wouldn't raise any alarm bells, and you're right, it'd subsidize the next game nicely. That's more or less what I did with Waves of Steel: the aforementioned valuation lottery gave me a big enough cushion that I could justify three years of non-remunerative work.
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Mar 5, 2023 19:16
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I’m not too far off from your situation. Turning 33 in August, currently L4 at el goog and going  at the idea of going L5 in my current org (it’s a gigantic mess), not sure what to do next. Difference is that I got game dev out of my system like five years ago and am ideologically opposed to the games industry.I figure I’ll keep going until I have a fully paid off house, then try to FIRE and coast as perma-single until death. Which hopefully won’t be too far away.
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Mar 5, 2023 19:54
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Man. I knew the salaries would be worse but I didn't think they'd be that much worse. My TC right before I quit my old job was a bit north of $250k. Ugh I need to grind leetcode more so I can get out of this industry.
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Mar 5, 2023 20:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:What does L5 TC look like these days? levels.fyi is pretty accurate in my experience
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Mar 5, 2023 20:38
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Jose Valasquez posted:levels.fyi is pretty accurate in my experience OK, that's reporting in the $350k range depending on company, looks like. I wonder what my odds are of hitting L6...? Probably slim, given that I left my old job at L5 to go work for myself, but who knows. I guess the other question is how I best leverage my gamedev experience here. The obvious take is "hey, this guy started a company, conceived a product, and drove it all the way through to launch by himself, he's clearly a capable person", but that's kind of non-specific, you know? But the actual specific skills I developed during the game that I didn't have before are things like art direction, sound design, level design, etc. which a) aren't generally called for in non-games industry work, and b) I would guess I'm not as good at as someone who focuses in that domain. I've always been a generalist, though. My strength is being able to hit the ground running in practically any domain.
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Mar 5, 2023 22:25
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:This was at Verily, one of the Alphabet subsidiaries, in the SF Bay Area. I was terrible at negotiating. Fortunately, they locked in my initial stock grant immediately before a revaluation substantially improved the company's outlook, so my effective TC for the years I worked there was a lot higher. Fool's luck, I guess. What does L5 TC look like these days?
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Mar 5, 2023 23:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:OK, that's reporting in the $350k range depending on company, looks like. It is much easier to interview into an L6 role than get promoted from an L5 role, and you can ask recruiters if they will place you into an interview loop for that level. However, you need to ask yourself if you want to do that amount and type of work.
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Mar 5, 2023 23:15
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:OK, that's reporting in the $350k range depending on company, looks like. I do a loooot of UI design as a lowly tech lead. So all those design skills are probably very useful no matter where you go.
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Mar 6, 2023 05:27
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interrodactyl posted:It is much easier to interview into an L6 role than get promoted from an L5 role Yeah this is the common wisdom by far.
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Mar 6, 2023 05:44
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interrodactyl posted:It is much easier to interview into an L6 role than get promoted from an L5 role, and you can ask recruiters if they will place you into an interview loop for that level. However, you need to ask yourself if you want to do that amount and type of work. I was able to watch two L6's at work, and I'm fairly confident that I could do that job. But as you say, there's the question of whether I'd want to. I could be quite comfortable just doing L5 responsibilities; that's the kind of stuff I can churn through day after day quite reliably. L6 carries a high likelihood of getting embroiled in the political side, I feel like. LLSix posted:I do a loooot of UI design as a lowly tech lead. So all those design skills are probably very useful no matter where you go. ugh, UI is the worst I mean, I can probably do it, but even after making a game that has waaaaay too much UI, I still don't really consider it to be one of my strengths. And I'm no fan of front-end (i.e. webpage) development. Achmed Jones posted:oh, i mean, i'm talking as-vested here not as-granted. in general you're looking at ~350+, plus appreciation (which is, uh, having some problems now D: ) Just so we're clear, what I'm saying here is that when I was hired, they set up a grant that would allocate N shares over 2 years, where N*(current share value)=X. Then the share value went up by, IIRC, almost a factor of 3, before any of my shares vested. So my effective compensation went from below-average to above-average. Imagine how good it would have been if I knew how to negotiate at the time! I can't imagine that'll ever happen again to Verily, and it's a bad idea to gamble on it happening anywhere. But it's nice when it does.
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Mar 6, 2023 06:08
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yep that's the distinction i was pointing at
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Mar 6, 2023 06:31
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If you were aiming for an L6 role, going off and working on a solo project for a couple years is pretty much the opposite of what you'd want to do. It's not impossible depending on what you were doing beforehand, but it'd probably be a lot easier to get an L5 position again and jockey for experience that would allow you to interview for an L6 position elsewhere.
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Mar 6, 2023 15:56
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I'm looking at pivoting out of a decade of data analytics work and landed an interview for a Database Engineer position next week. As this is my first foray into the Database Engineer world, I could use a little advice on relevant questions to ask the manager and team in regards to a Database Engineer role. I'm thinking along the lines of:
Any advice on "make sure to ask them about X"?
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Mar 6, 2023 18:30
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go to yospos interview thread, look at first post on first page
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Mar 6, 2023 18:32
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Well, I pulled out the ol' resume, which I haven't really touched in the better part of a decade now. Any thoughts? (Google Docs link)
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Mar 6, 2023 21:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Well, I pulled out the ol' resume, which I haven't really touched in the better part of a decade now. Any thoughts? (Google Docs link) Doesn't scan well. Reformatting to bullet lists would make it read easier. You don't have and almost certainly need a bucket for the word salad that will get you through the resume filter.
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Mar 6, 2023 22:21
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it's not a very good resume. you're missing a skills/competencies section - fix that. you don't need that many words about jobs that happened in 2015 or further back. even you have them at all, just have the company, title, and dates. nobody cares what Your Contributions were a decade ago. you have good content for a resume, that's not the problem at all - the problem is that it doesn't do a good job of marketing you you can drop the hobbies section. also feel free to keep it - but don't have it take up so much space. at your level of experience, i'd say that 2 pages is OK (though there are many people who would say "no, keep it to one") but you have to have that two pages be more meaningful. don't just say what you did, provide numbers where possible. you do a reasonable job of this for the game, but talk about valuations or stock prices or something for verily. i'd say something like two sentences for the game (with numbers). one with numbers for verily. zero or one total for the work before that. if you have oss stuff, conference talks, academic presentations, etc. you can have a section for that.
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Mar 6, 2023 22:32
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70% of peeps dont care about 2 pages, 20% will care a little, 10% will just immediately trash your resume if you have 2 pages it would be nice if those 10% were uniformly douchebags, but lots of times its like a dumb hr screen or some other thing
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Mar 6, 2023 22:49
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bob dobbs is dead posted:70% of peeps dont care about 2 pages, 20% will care a little, 10% will just immediately trash your resume if you have 2 pages Don't have a 5-page CV unless you're applying for an academic position, but most people are much more interested in your career progression than the context-free salad of bullet points that emerges when you cram complex jobs with lots of projects and responsibilities onto a single page
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Mar 6, 2023 23:02
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bob dobbs is dead posted:10% will just immediately trash your resume if you have 2 pages
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Mar 6, 2023 23:04
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I have trouble imagining a good use of any space beyond a second page, but maybe that's just me.
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Mar 6, 2023 23:05
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Well yeah. Academic-style CV's with multiple pages for every project are how you get 3+.
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Mar 6, 2023 23:06
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the boomer advice would have it as 10 20 70% not 70 20 10%, but that 10% does exist
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Mar 6, 2023 23:08
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this inspired me to look at my resume and holy poo poo i don't remember how to use almost any of the things in there v_v i guess nobody will care that i don't remember how to administer redis and passenger and stuff but still, feels bad. i have a lot more stuff ot add i guess though Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Mar 6, 2023 |
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Mar 6, 2023 23:09
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Most companies here use an online CV thing with a style that pretty much guarantees your pdf will have at least 4 pages.
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Mar 6, 2023 23:19
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Thanks for the feedback! I reformatted it and streamlined it a bunch; how's it look now? And yeah, I'm used to resumes just getting ingested by automated systems, which ruin all the nice formatting work you did. It sucks.  EDIT: vvvv good idea, done, thanks! TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Mar 6, 2023 |
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Mar 6, 2023 23:30
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that's 100x better, nice work. I'd put your skills right after the summary and before work experience, but I doubt it matters too awfully much
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Mar 6, 2023 23:38
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hey yall - I could use some help figuring out skills/keywords to put in my skills list. stuff like "leadership," "vision" etc is bullshit business speak that every lovely MBA uses despite being incapable of either. as such, i think their inclusion would actively work against me; it might be the case that this sort of thing just can't be effectively listed in a skills section. right now, my skills section has sub-sections for "languages (proficiency), languages (familiarity), frameworks and technologies, other (proficiencies) and other (familiarity)". I added a sub-section for "leadership (proficiency)" and added the following skills: Technical design and review, mentoring, project planning, team development, program management, operational scaling any thoughts/advice? Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 00:29
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That's probably the right approach, but make sure you have a specific story behind every leadership skill you list.
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Mar 7, 2023 00:55
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ultrafilter posted:That's probably the right approach, but make sure you have a specific rehearsed but natural-sounding story behind every leadership skill you list.
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Mar 7, 2023 00:57
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basically if you have like 6-8 good rehearsed and pertinent stories you can pattern match peeps questions to a story and go off
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Mar 7, 2023 01:08
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haha, yeah, mentoring used to be this big deal, but at my last place it didn't really have a formal backing? so I took the initiative and worked with some senior management to set up a more formal program to replace the social ad-hoc thing, makes sure that everyone benefits from that resource without someone falling through the cracks and ending up behind
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Mar 7, 2023 01:08
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I don't know anything about vision, but for leadership definitely have a half dozen examples on hand that make it very clear what you did specifically and what the impact of it was.
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Mar 7, 2023 02:48
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as far as stories and resumes go: holy poo poo my old promo packet was awesome for fixing up my resume. had the quantified impact and everything. idk how structured other companies' primo processes are, but if they're like google they make it real easy to keep your resume current
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Mar 7, 2023 02:50
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