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Hey goons! I’m a bit stuck in my career at the moment and am looking for some advice. I’m currently a programmer in the video game industry. I’ve been in various positions in the industry for the past 20 years but the last 8 have been programming in c++ and c# (also dabbled in python and other assorted proprietary scripting languages). I’m a US citizen but recently moved to Sweden to work for a company here my current pay is laughable when compared to US salaries (about $60k/year, even back in the US my salary peaked at $120k but that was working for mobile games in San Francisco) but pretty standard for video game companies in Sweden. It’s been fun here but life circumstances have changed and I need to be making more money. I’m likely to get promoted to a lead position in a few months but I have no reason to expect that it will be a substantial pay bump.I’m willing to relocate to other countries (even back to the US if the job/pay is dream-level, Canada would probably be ideal due to closeness to family in the US but still having socialized medicine). My dream job would be either something in the “programming for good” category (or at least not morally bankrupt) or the automotive / racing industry. Willing to learn new technologies, of course, but I keep busy with side projects so the day job can afford to be boring. Thanks in advance! This is a great idea for a thread and it’s awesome to see all the success stories come out of here.
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Mar 6, 2022 07:39
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That’s all great info, thanks. I figured non-profit places would be a disaster, I mostly just want to avoid places like surveillance, defense, etc. My current plan is to stick with my current company until I get the lead job and spend a year getting hands-on leadership experience before trying to pivot to a job outside games. Sad to hear that automotive pay isn’t great but it’s better to find that out sooner rather than later I suppose.bob dobbs is dead posted:peeps who dont get out of bed for less than 300, 350, 500k usd total comp.
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Mar 6, 2022 15:41
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Yeah, speaking as an American who has a family with additional medical needs, once you get a taste of socialized medicine it’s hard to imagine going back. I could imagine going to Canada for CAD 150k/yr but going back to the SF bay / Silicon Valley would take a much higher number. Plus the gun crime, etc… not gonna go all d&d in here but if I wasn’t doomed to pay taxes to the US my whole life and didn’t have family there, taking a job in the US would be a pretty hard sell.
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Mar 6, 2022 16:57
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oliveoil posted:One this team I'm three months in and I am not responsible for anything, I just receive task and output code.  ) so they want to minimize changes.If you feel underutilized, talk to your manager about it, especially since you’re new to the team - “hey, I’m used to working like this, you’re working like that, are we aligned?”.
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Mar 9, 2022 07:27
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Achmed Jones posted:if you make faang figgies then you can support a family on one income literally anywhere in the US. if you care about owning a house on top of that, you can do it almost anywhere vv thanks! vv Artemis J Brassnuts fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Mar 10, 2022 |
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Mar 10, 2022 08:29
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Yeah, honestly it probably feels like it came down to a coin flip; I’ve been on the other side of that process and it’s tough when you have x openings and > x great candidates. Since they gave you feedback, that’s a good sign. Keep in touch with them, it’s possible that the contact will pay off later!
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Mar 25, 2022 17:30
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This thread is really making me appreciate my current job, which is “throw on headphones to drown out coworkers and solve interesting problems in the codebase”. Mob programming sounds like an absolute nightmare but luckily for me I can’t imagine any game studio will ever throw 3 engineers on a single problem, lol. Also got a surprise promotion to senior yesterday so that’ll be a nice pay bump when I decide to job hunt again.
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Apr 8, 2022 16:57
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Did they want actual clock cycles approximations? Is that a thing? If someone in an interview asks me how long a binary search takes on a single cpu, my answer is just “log N”. Granted, I’m in game dev so we just throw best practices at a problem and profile it once our frame rate drops; not sure if the polo-n-khakis crowd handles things differently.
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Jul 2, 2022 19:18
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Yeah and when you can wing several things at once you get promoted to senior. Maybe at principal / staff level people actually achieve with intentionality but I can’t personally confirm.
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Jul 23, 2022 16:54
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Surely there’s value in getting the lead title, though? I’m a little bored of my current job and I think I could get more pay elsewhere but I’m in line for a promotion from senior to lead and I haven’t found a company that would take me as a lead without the experience.
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Aug 29, 2022 07:55
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Yeah, having gone from the SF bay to Sweden I took an enormous pay cut. Now that I’m past the point to relying on my employer for a Visa, the dream is to contract for a US/Canada employer. They’ll still tax a huge amount of my salary but the base pay could potentially be double and I can get stock options without it being a tax nightmare; I just have to find a place that doesn’t care that I’m 6-9 hours ahead.
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Aug 29, 2022 18:27
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Out of curiosity, what sort of jobs do c++ programmers go after if they’re chasing TC?
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Sep 22, 2022 08:03
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leper khan posted:
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Sep 22, 2022 08:22
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In my experience, 1a is the absolute top of that. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some very smart people, who have gotten in at very good companies, and a referral is an almost guaranteed in (as long as the person thinks you’re worth referring and doesn’t just say they’ll pass your resume along). You still have to be able to do well at the interview, of course - your network can get your foot in the door and may even get you the benefit of the doubt in an uncertain situation but you’ve got to do the rest yourself.
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Sep 27, 2022 06:01
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I moved with my family from the US to the EU (Sweden) in 2017 and the visa process was 100% handled by the company (who mostly contracted the work out to Deloitte). Dealing with the Swedish bureaucracy once we got here was a pain, but the company also employs people to help navigate that. My advice is to land a job at a big company that hires internationally on a regular basis so they’ll be equipped to handle it for you - since this is the “old programmer” thread they shouldn’t have any problem proving to the local government that you’re a specialized tech worker, there’s almost always a fast track in for people like us. Practically, I would heed the earlier advice about checking the political landscape; there’s a few pockets of growing anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe. Being from the US will probably get you a pass but if you’re of middle eastern descent (or even a dark-skinned latino) you may get stares from the locals. I’m a generic white dude and even I’ve heard the “those drat immigrants / oh, not YOU, you’re one of the good ones” line. Also, as long as you’re a US citizen you have to file your US taxes and making money in the EU complicates that. If your destination country doesn’t have a tax treaty with the US y our will be double-taxes. Be prepared to take a pay cut; I went from $80k TC to $35k TC (my offer was even lower). Probably an extreme case and I’ve clawed a big chunk of that back but my general advice is “don’t work in video games”.
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Sep 29, 2022 05:57
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thotsky posted:You can use specific competences to land jobs sometimes, but a ton of places will just try to sus out whether or not you can program and whether or not you're a complete pain to deal with.
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Oct 8, 2022 09:26
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Speaking from the perspective of someone who followed their passion: life costs money and you can’t pay in passion. I’ve spent the past 20 years in AAA games and it turns out what I really wanted was to make my own ridiculous, unmarketable indie games, not “implement some auteur’s vision”. Could I still make my own games that sell 6 copies on itch while working at FAANG? Probably. Would I lament not being “gameplay programmer #80” on Call of Duty? Probably not. My wife’s dad wanted to be a painter and became a doctor instead. Now he has a huge house by the beach to hang his paintings in. As long as the job doesn’t suck the life out of you or take over your life, I think it’s totally okay to just let the job finance your dreams.
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Oct 17, 2022 17:03
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I’m not convinced that AI will change much. Firstly, I can’t imagine two disparate systems produced by AI to interface sensibly and without bugs/leaks/etc. Secondly, like basically all other AI it’s just informed derivation, it has no way to create anything wholly new. So it will never innovate. I can’t imagine AI taking over much in the games industry - I mean it would be nice to never have to implement a* ever again but even then I wouldn’t trust it. So much of my work has no real prior art or is bound by some specific performance constraint or locked to some un-googleable proprietary platform.
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Dec 5, 2022 17:59
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I think there also value in looking at what you CAN change, doing it, then crowing about it. I was in a similar position to you a year ago, where I wanted to be a lead but didn’t know how to stand out. How I stood out - without even really “making someone see it my way” or “convince someone of this or that” was to look at my systems critically and make some good changes. Like, I think we don’t have enough tools for reliably reproducing bugs in one of my features, so I wrote a test suite for QC to use. Told my boss all about it, talked about it in standups, etc. Literally nobody has EVER used that test suite but it got called out on my review that year as a great initiative and made me look like someone who has opinions about how we should be doing things. This year my review was all about trying to find a lead position for me in the org (I did other similar things throughout the year as well, it’s not like you just do one thing and you’re set). PS don’t tell anyone but I’m not even really a great programmer. Apparently if you can keep a ton of balls in the air without dropping them too hard then they’ll still make you a senior, at least where I am
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Feb 14, 2023 20:02
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raminasi posted:I wonder if I’ll ever get to a point in my career where I stop thinking of this kind of thing as depressing and grim. This isn’t a dig at you, props for playing the game, but “The celebrated centerpiece of my promotion narrative was me doing something that had absolutely no material impact on anyone at my company” just reads so bleak. I learned a lot while doing it and the feature would have been useful if I’d thought to do it earlier in the project, both of which are good to know for future projects.Would it have been cooler if people used it? Of course, but life doesn’t always go the way you plan. My point was that even though it felt like a bit of a failure for the reasons you mention, a good company will notice and reward the effort w/r/t promotions.
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Feb 18, 2023 22:30
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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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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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After grousing about my pay the other day I went off so see what openings I might be able to fit at Google and there was an L3 job I was immensely overqualified for but with a median base pay that was higher than any job I’ve ever had. Does Google “rank up” job titles if they get an overqualified candidate or do I just need to keep an eye out for L5 jobs? I know I’ve got a lot of interview prep & resume adjusting to do (and talking it over with my wife because it would take us back to the US) so I’m not jumping on anything yet; more just a general question.
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Mar 7, 2023 11:34
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Paolomania posted:I've seen people both over and under levelled. You basically come in where you are hired (usually down a level from a non FAANG position) and it should correct slowly over time. I dropped a level when I came in but eventually made it back to senior a few years later - in the mean time making way more than I had previously. Good to know, thanks!
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Mar 7, 2023 17:25
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prom candy posted:Have you ruled out ADHD? Yeah I was gonna post this; undiagnosed ADHD is a big thing because of toxic views about mental health in society at large. Exhaustion can also be a sign of anxiety - if your spend your day worrying about a lot of things that mental labor can also make you fatigued and diminish your ability to focus. It might be worth considering if you think that’s something to talk to your doctor about as well.
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Mar 20, 2023 17:22
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This is too real; impostor syndrome never gives up. I was stressing out this weekend because some tasks in an area I’m typically responsible for were moved to someone else, and I’m thinking that I’m going to get PIP’d or something. Came in today and found out that those tasks had been moved off me to free me up for more important responsibilities.
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Apr 11, 2023 21:37
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Is college really that dire? Part of my impostor syndrome comes from the fact that I don’t have a CS degree or barely any college but just bootstrapped my way with personal projects and books. I can obviously do the work but sometimes one of the big brains at work goes into, like, the assembly instructions in the debugger or something like that and I miss the random “I’ll never need this” bits of knowledge you pick up from classes.
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Apr 20, 2023 10:19
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luchadornado posted:I don't think it's a bad thing to get a degree unrelated to CS if it helps shore up the soft skills - that's where a lot of devs really could use help from my experience.
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Apr 21, 2023 07:47
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bob dobbs is dead posted:"devs have poo poo soft skills" has been the conventional wisdom since charles babbage failed to sell his analytic engine to parliament, its not some unknown obscure problem Acknowledging the existence of the problem is the first step. That has to happen before we can de-normalize it and paves the way for actually correcting / preventing it.
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Apr 21, 2023 08:44
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It seems like you’re saying it’s a lost cause, which I disagree with. If someone’s been treated poorly their whole life then it’s going to be harder to learn kindness but not impossible. I refuse to just shrug and say “generational trauma am I right?”
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Apr 21, 2023 10:20
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Question for the FAANG peeps - how is the work/life balance in general? My wife and I sometimes talk about moving back to the US to be close to family again but they all live in the expensive parts of California, so the only way it makes sense is if I’m pulling in like 200k+. She’s concerned that if I’m getting paid that much then they’re basically going to own me - crunch, overtime, etc. Any anecdotes to confirm / deny this?
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May 4, 2023 15:13
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Thanks for the answers; that’s good to hear - working remotely in SoCal for an SF company was one of my first ideas so I’m glad it’s viable.fawning deference posted:Not sure where to ask this, but does anyone here have experience as someone who was an engineer in the US and got hired/sponsored by a non-US company? For the EU, her work visa will allow you to work as well, so if you’re already in Europe for her job then it should be pretty simple (from a bureaucratic standpoint) to get employed in the same country. //Edit to add: Swedish companies that hire internationally all have English as their official work language. UNofficially, that varies. Artemis J Brassnuts fucked around with this message at 17:41 on May 4, 2023 |
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May 4, 2023 17:20
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One extra thing to consider with CoL calculations that a website can’t determine is medical expenses. Almost any other country is going to have low-cost health care which can make a huge difference, depending on your situation. The best part about living in Europe is that I know there is no accident or misfortune that’s going to bankrupt me. A close second best is that in Sweden, sick days are paid by the government and don’t come out of my six weeks of PTO and if my kid gets sick, I can take a different kind of day off that the government provides which, again, is separate from my employer’s vacation plan.
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May 4, 2023 18:24
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I’m in the interview process for a (game dev) start-up company, to potentially be a lead / principal and one of the first 10 employees. It feels like I might be in a position to start talking equity or something like that. Has anyone got any advice for what’s reasonable to ask for, or recommended resources for learning more? It’s EU-based, if that makes a difference.
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May 30, 2023 18:13
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Great, thanks!
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May 30, 2023 19:24
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Have we got any software security peeps around? I’ve always been interested in it (decompiling, pen testing, etc) and I’m considering making a pivot to it because I’d like to get involved in more meaningful things. I’d be grateful to hear any takes on the topic, required reading, learning resources etc.
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Jul 21, 2023 11:00
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Sign posted:From talking to various pen testers it takes a very specific mindset to do that. Since you try 10000 things with the expectation that 9999 of them will fail.
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Jul 21, 2023 12:12
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minato posted:it can be disheartening because InfoSec groups are constantly having to cajole unwilling users who just see them as irritating friction. And it's worse in a company where InfoSec have no real teeth to enforce recommendations.
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Jul 21, 2023 15:38
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That’s lots of good stuff to think about, thanks!
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Jul 21, 2023 22:26
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Always take what the recruiter says with a grain of salt. On one occasion after speaking to a startups cofounders, a recruiter told me they “couldn’t have been more impressed with me” and I still didn’t get the job. What’s more important (imo, I am not a recruiter) is how fast they say it. If they respond slow, they’re either not interested or disorganized, and neither are a good sign.
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Jul 22, 2023 10:06
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