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When Gaming Trains You For Work

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the my-sims-prepare-me-to-rule-the-world dept.

ac514 writes "Parents should review their education before punishing their children. BBC wrote 'Video game skills and a good poker face online are becoming essential job qualifications in the financial markets, with recruitment drives assessing potential star traders in online gaming exams'. I knew some day these extra hours would pay off."

7 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Game programming (hobby) got me a job by theluckyleper · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know if playing games has helped me much, but I know for sure that my game development hobby got me at least one job.

    I went into the interview with a CD-ROM of all of my past programming work, including a few of my partially completed game projects. When they asked me, "What qualifies you to be our programming guru?" I showed them my games, and they asked me when I could start! I think they understood that game programming is inherently quite complex, and that if I could make spaceships swarm and attack in real-time, I could probably handle the optimization of their relatively simple business applications. And they were right!

    Anyway, that's my story :)

    --
    Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
  2. They're not the only ones by HangingChad · · Score: 4, Informative

    The military has used gaming to identify potential recruits for some high value jobs and Google is famous for using puzzles and games to indentify individuals they might want to hire.

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    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  3. Re:Work? Try "life."-Backwards. by ScrewMaster · · Score: 2, Informative

    Helps in job interviews so you can read the interviewer's notes while he's writing them.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  4. Re:Hmm by n54 · · Score: 2, Informative

    lol funny story but I know why they did some of it:
    0. I'm sure they did backups of their data, making the "ultimate" offline copies for the archive is adding another level of redundancy to the backup.
    1. dragging your laptop from archive to archive (not the zip kind but the fireproofed steel ones) finding references from a mail can be cumbersome, even a tablet pc loses out to a sheet of paper (or many). Maybe some of those archives are digitized but for really important cases they would still want to find true carbon copies.
    2. same goes for inclusion into court papers, sumbission as evidence, contracts etc., being able to offer a paper printed at receival, stamped by a second person, in addition to an electronic copy carries more weight than just an electronic copy.

    Even with excellent electronic timestamps and digital signatures, paper (done right) will rule the legal world. The two formats aren't mutually exclusive.

    As for games as a learning experience they should get ample training in tediousness by harvesting everything in some of those micromanagement resource-based strategy games like Warcraft2 :)

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    this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
  5. bad use of words by nodwick · · Score: 4, Informative
    Its easy as hell to keep a poker face online. Why do you need to train for that?
    I thought the same thing when I first read the summary. It seems like a poor choice of words, since obviously you don't have to worry about giving away information through your facial tics or whatever online.

    The points they were probably trying to make come up later in the article:

    "It's the discipline of not getting too emotional about your transactions, and also the mathematical ability to keep track of numbers, as in card counting," said Ms McDonnell.

    "It helps to determine if people are bluffing, trying to make the market move one way or another," she said.

    "Poker-playing managers will be used to asking, 'did I play that right?'"

    Those three skills are probably the most important ones that would cross over. The last point is particularly often overlooked, since in poker (much like in the stock market) making the "right decision" doesn't always mean you win every time, because of the influence of random chance. Your opponent can play horribly and catch the one card left in the deck that gives him the win, but his strategy was still a losing one even though he "won" this particular time. Hence, unlike people without this background, poker players are already trained not to be results-oriented, but to be strategy-oriented (focusing on "given the information I had, did I make the right decision") instead.
  6. Just a marketing ploy to attract day traders by Swanktastic · · Score: 2, Informative

    First off, these 'employees' are really day traders who are paying a commission to get access to the firm's software and hardware connections into the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They're not real employees in any sense of the word. The more "employees" this Geneva Trading attracts to its company, the more money it makes.

    What better marketing angle to exploit than 'people who are good at video games can make tons as traders?' You get a bunch of suckers in there who are told they're great and they blow through their cash. The only beneficiary is Geneva Trading. These kids aren't investment bankers or anything even close.

  7. Re:I think you're missing the parent's point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    If you believe in the free market, then the trader is doing something that is essential for the betterment of humanity, although you (or indeed, he) may not see it. The whole point of institutional trading (indeed, the whole point of banks) is to move capital to where it may be used most effectively (to create wealth most efficently). It might not seem this way if all you see is some suit getting rich moving paper wealth around, but he really is helping the economy.