I wish people would stop glorifying how many hours they work and how little sleep they get, "You need to live without sleep (4 hours a night every day for years baby!)." Sounds juvenile to me.
Video games are an interesting phenomenon. They manage to pack many of the most interesting problems of computer science into one of the most superficial, yet profitable, applications. They're kind of like the warping of space time, an anomaly of extremes that manages to relentlessly suck brilliant minds away due to its siren call.<p>And yes, I love video games, and considered working in the field. But, stepping back you realize there are more important things to work on, and more useful ways to spend your time. That doesn't mean the temptation on both fronts (playing and creating) ever goes away.
It's worth reading this even if you're not interested in games or the industry that makes them. The game industry is one of the most mature industries in software and it offers a possible future for YOUR corner of the software world.<p>Besides being one of the longest running industries in software, it iterates teams and products rapidly.<p>Because of this it has performed a gradient decent more than any other software industry, and I would argue it is is sitting at a local minimum.<p>From that perspective it's very interesting to study.
I've worked for a couple of game studios over the years. Unfortunately, conditions were atrocious at both, something that seems to be fairly common in the industry. My hypothesis is so many coders spent their teen years playing video games, wanting to write them, that they are willing to work in sub-par conditions.<p>I won't work at another one, unless it's my own. Sadly, I'm not skilled enough to start my own.
Thumbs up for telling people they need to know some math. Even if you're not planning to work in the specialized areas that are mentioned in the article, it wouldn't hurt to be more comfortable with math than most developers are, because you may need to step in and help somebody in one of those areas, and (for me, at least), learning stuff like that on short notice is really hard.
Seems like many people here enjoy playing video games but they do not like that some very smart people chose to program them instead of "making the world a better place". Hmm.. makes me think why do you consider it like that. Its one thing to say that the gaming industry is bad because of bad working environment (a new info to me) and quite other to say that its bad to work for since it does not make the world a better place. A game is made because someone wants to play it. Why do they want to play it? Because life is a bitch and we get frustrated.(And I am fairly sure that people who are "making the world a better place" also experience that). So they try to escape the daily motions of life by shooting zombie faces or kicking someone's ass by making a avatar of them in a wrestling game. That brings us a sense of relief and allows us to fight another day or week or month (depending upon your gaming habits). So why not? My puny human brain cannot understand all this bad rap given to these poor game programmers who are maybe working in the worst environment possible (according to some comments here).<p>edit: Reading this again I realize that some people will argue that they are not against the therapeutic values of games but they get angry when people waste time on it. Hmm... interesting counter argument. Lets see, I can cut my hands with a kitchen knife so maybe I should throw it out right now. Dammit punyhuman you may fry your brains with this mobile crush it, right now. Punyhuman is surrounded by such things, they are all after me. Help HN people.
I posted a part 2 -- except I actually made it a prequel -- but it's new nonetheless.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937426" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937426</a>