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Ask Slashdot: Experiences Working At a High-Profile Game Studio?
msheekhah writes "I have a friend who, when he gets out of college, has been promised a job at well known electronics company with a salary around $70k. However, he wants to instead go work for Blizzard or some other game company as a game programmer. I've read enough on here and on other tech websites to know that he should take the job he's been offered. Can you share with me your experiences so I can give him real life examples to convince him to take this job? If your experience is contrary to mine, I'd appreciate that input as well."
11 year veteran here - I've worked in a number of roles at an independent studio (as a programmer), and my advice to anyone wanting to make games is this: it's hard bloody work, which doesn't pay that much, and you'd be better off working on your own games in your own time. Very rarely do you get to work on games that you are interested in, the last project I was on was a Disney game with a MASSIVE budget. It was hell on earth and I got pretty down about my job - to the point where I considered quitting without having secured another job first. On the plus side - I have gained experience in working with large, complex code bases, and worked under tight deadlines with hardly any budget. I've accepted a programming job outside of games, and I'm counting down the days until I leave.
As someone who recently start working for a game studio that is profitable, incredibly player-focussed and protects its culture with both hands, I just want to say that genuinely good opportunities do still exist in the gaming industry - though it would be disingenuous to pretend that they're the norm.
However, more fundamentally, forget gaming or any other domain for a second and demand that the people you work with embody and project as much of the following as possible...
integrity
compassion
kindness
a determination to cross the finish-line together
enthusiasm for the work
intelligence and the ability to use it constructively
an expectation of open feedback in all directions
an effortless affection (or fondness if you don't like 'affection') for those around them
charity of spirit (never starting with the assumption that 'the other guy' is an asshole when things go wrong)
These are a few of my favourite things :-) and looking for them wherever I go has had an extremely positive effect on my quality of life and the quality of life for those in my care (both professionally and personally).
... take the bird in the hand (the job offered).... then work at the company making money and gaining reputable XP while trying to apply to blizzard and get in there....
Nobody is going to think less of you for working in your field. If anything, the xp will only help validate your friends' skillset and give more power to the application to blizzard.
Also, who the hell considers turning down a job offer in this economy? I had to win a grant to get my job.
After reading several comments that game industry jobs are all sweatshop work, I thought I might share my (different) experience. I work at Unity, so not exactly a games company, but game industry anyways. I've been here for quite a few years no and have always been (and I still am) very happy about my work. While everybody has done overtime work to get urgent fixes done at some time or other, this is not the rule, and we are far from the working conditions in many places described here. The development team has a great culture, we get to work on exciting stuff, and we get plenty of opportunities to try out things which interest us -- as a rule, similar to Google's "20% time", we have FAFF (fridays are for fun) to work on pet projects, as well as regular Hack Weeks, were the whole dev team is brought in to one location to form teams to try new ideas. It's fun.
If you're interested, check out http://unity3d.com/jobs/ - but then, I guess your chances of being hired for an engineering position when fresh out of colleges are somewhat slim, unless you have done some really awesome stuff besides your education. But that will not be any different in any of the other larger companies in the industry.
Write a web game, post it online.
Contribute to an open source game, be able to point to the github repo or list of contributors or whatever.
When I was interviewing people for a gaming studio, we had people do both, and they both looked very good on the resume -- they show both your technical skills, and your passion for gaming. You are clearly excited enough about this to go do it in your spare time, which means a lot!
I work for one of the top 5 developers on console games, as a programmer. Are there crunch times? Yes. Do you get comp time? Yes. I'm going to be taking 35 days vacation this fall. The work itself is vastly more interesting and personally rewarding (to me) than working on business intelligence software, which is probably where I'd be otherwise.
You get what you put into it, and you also get what you put up with. I don't recommend that anybody sacrifice their quality of life simply to be in games, and certainly some studios are worse than others, but in making games for 9 years, if you can put up with a some crunch every year or two, it can be a really fun job. Just put up resistance if you're being treated unfairly (80 hour work weeks? Never.) .. once you get some experience, you can move around. The entire industry is a game of musical chairs, so you should be able to find something at your 'pressure' level. Some people will put up with those insane for the privilege of working on a GTA title, but there is plenty of middle ground.
And as somebody else pointed out above, just because you like playing games (or even making them for yourself) doesn't necessarily mean you'll like making them in the AAA game space. I just wrapped up a title where the credits take about 40 minutes to watch, so there are lots of considerations in terms of how much time you're willing to put in, how much individual credit you're looking for, etc.
"Old man yells at systemd"