I worked at a smaller studio for years in IT, and while it was absolutely grueling work, it was a crucible for pushing you to think creatively and pull together to make awesome things. The programmers are typically pulled fresh out of college for low salaries, but after a few years nearly all of them 'graduated' and moved on to jaw-dropping raises and positions at tech companies. The ones that didn't stayed for love of the community and culture, but over time the high performers got wise and learned their skills were highly sought after (i.e. creating account authentication systems from scratch, an in-house DB schema, system management tools,etc.). The freedom in that environment let all of us work on things that most companies would be terrified to tackle ; I learned as an IT person that programmers were either our greatest asset or our greatest liability
However, after getting sucked up by a large publisher, that spirit certainly began to dwindle a bit. Shortly after I got caught in a large layoff, however I too found that other companies outside of the gaming industry could benefit from my experience, and ironically it was a lot more money for a lot less work.
What I think can be missed is taking for granted the gaming culture in the workplace; when WoW had an expansion (or when Skyrim released), work 'STOPPED', and the whole company was talking about it. Watercooler talk about class specs or planning raids is something I really miss, as outside of the industry I'm typically one of maybe two people in a company that can talk about new game releases or announcements.
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I worked at a smaller studio for years in IT, and while it was absolutely grueling work, it was a crucible for pushing you to think creatively and pull together to make awesome things. The programmers are typically pulled fresh out of college for low salaries, but after a few years nearly all of them 'graduated' and moved on to jaw-dropping raises and positions at tech companies. The ones that didn't stayed for love of the community and culture, but over time the high performers got wise and learned their skills were highly sought after (i.e. creating account authentication systems from scratch, an in-house DB schema, system management tools,etc.). The freedom in that environment let all of us work on things that most companies would be terrified to tackle ; I learned as an IT person that programmers were either our greatest asset or our greatest liability
However, after getting sucked up by a large publisher, that spirit certainly began to dwindle a bit. Shortly after I got caught in a large layoff, however I too found that other companies outside of the gaming industry could benefit from my experience, and ironically it was a lot more money for a lot less work.
What I think can be missed is taking for granted the gaming culture in the workplace; when WoW had an expansion (or when Skyrim released), work 'STOPPED', and the whole company was talking about it. Watercooler talk about class specs or planning raids is something I really miss, as outside of the industry I'm typically one of maybe two people in a company that can talk about new game releases or announcements.