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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."

3 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.

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  3. 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.