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what do you nerds do for living? - discuss career possibilities

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ChadTower:

--- Quote from: csa3d on June 01, 2009, 08:18:40 am ---For the record, this career is a lot of fun, but it's a lot of hours and hard work to make it.  If you're married, make sure you research that and make sure your family is as committed as yourself. 
--- End quote ---



Quoted, bolded, and italicized for total effin truth.  I majored in cmpsci to get into that field and veered away from it after seeing firsthand what it did to family life.  If you want any sort of life outside of your job game development may be the wrong field for you.  Look up the current class action lawsuits against EA for proof or really any book on the history of video game development.  The guys I spent time with were all averaging 80 hour weeks, often 10-15 days straight before a day off, and were all either not married (and had no woman) or were divorced.

Oh, and they were usually making 75% of what guys with equivalent skills in other app development areas make.

dcchau:
i am working on my accounting information system degree right now. you may be interested in that. ideally its a slice of accounting and management information system.  you keep  business  records and  maintain its accounting system. This includes the purchase, sales, and other financial processes of the business. i am leading towards the security side.

Paul Olson:
I am currently working on a Computer Engineering degree. My school offers a game emphasis for this major, and I am going to take it. I discussed it with my adviser and mentioned that I probably would not want to actually program games for a living, but I want to learn how so I can try to write small games on my own. He told me to go ahead, if I don't go into games professionally, no one will ever care about the emphasis area. I am leaning toward trying to develop new game controllers. My school is doing quite a bit of research in that - if you have heard of Blind Hero (guitar hero controller for the blind), it was made at school. I am hoping to find something that I really enjoy doing. I am finishing up my core and math classes this summer, so it should be all fun classes from here on; Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. My fall schedule seems like it will be a blast, albeit a ton of work. I am taking my 3rd c++ class, and this one will hopefully teach me enough to actually write something interesting. I am taking a microcontroller class, so I will learn a little 8051 and ARM assembly, and we will also be using and FPGA. on the EE side, I get to take my first circuits class. Probably my least favorite will be a networking class, but I hoping I will find it interesting because it is probably one of the better areas for a job. To round out my schedule, I have my first Game Dev class.

I switched to Computer Engineering last semester after discovering that I had no interest whatsoever in Civil Engineering. Try to find a career that you are interested in! I was in Civil because I thought it would be easier to find a job, but I was dreading school, let alone the next 30 years of work. Now that I am where I think I belong on the computer side, I am really looking forward to school and my future career. It is a lot harder, and sometimes I get the feeling that my brain is slowing a bit (I will be 40 almost 40 when I graduate in a couple of years), but I am really enjoying the challenge. Except for calculus, I struggled through all three semesters :( . I think calculus is pretty easy to understand, but the algebra I learned and loved in the 80s has largely been forgotten. That made it really rough to actually get to the calculus part.

I am definitely listening to all of the people warning of the time commitment in Game Dev, but I am keeping the option open. I am really leaning toward the hardware side, but I will know more by the end of the next semester since I will finally get into the topics deep enough to decide where my strengths and weaknesses are.

If you decide to go to school, which I would recommend - it may not be absolutely necessary, but it surely cannot hurt - do not expect to be an expert when you finish. You will definitely be entry level and will still have a ton to learn. There are just too many topics to cover, and it looks like all you can hope to get is an intro to each during a 4 year degree. I have taken 2 programming classes so far, and received As in both, but I still do not really know how to write a program. I can write the simple stuff we did in class, but as soon as I try to do something that would actually be useful in the real world, I realize how little I know. This is where the coders will start off with an advantage over the college grads, there is no substitute for experience. I think I am learning the fundamentals better though - at least I better be! Two semesters, and they will still not let us use the string or template libraries.

Good luck! Find something you enjoy. I go to school with quite a few people who have given up 6 figure incomes to try to find something they enjoy doing. You are going to spend a huge portion of your life on your career, as someone who has wasted a couple of decades doing jobs that I hated, I can say with certainty that it is not worth it.

Hockeyboy:
I work at Intel Corporation, inside a cleanroom, where we put on the final three circuit layers of today's high-tech CPUs, including the Core 2 Duo line, the Core 2 Quad, and the newer Core i7 family. To get a job like this you need a minimum of 2 years of college with a technical degree or military electronics experience, be able to multi-task, and be open to lots and lots of changes that happen from hour to hour. We are much like an assembly line at a car manufacturing plant but our tools have all kinds of quirks and inherent problems that we are always trying to correct.

Oh, and Intel, along with other companies that do this, usually work 12-hour shifts on a compressed work week, meaning you work 3 days one week with 4 days off, then 4 days the next week with 3 days off.

And, yes, I get to see the next generation of product before it's announced in the press, but we're not allowed to tell anyone what we are about to introduce.  :whap

CheffoJeffo:
Officially, I'm the CTO ... but that role consumes a relatively small portion of my time. I do a lot of coding for prototypes and system design work, which subsequently gets fed to the official coding team if it requires refinement or extension. So, I more of a rogue codemonkey than anything else.

Originally, I was trained in Statistics and Actuarial Science but made a choice to change 10 years ago when it looked like I would have to work 70 hour weeks and travel 4-5 days a week in order to progress while continuing to do "cool" work. So, now I put in 70 hour weeks and 4-5 days of travel a year. The upside is that my schedule is completely flexible (I telecommute), I get to keep the lion's share of the profits (depending on how much I have to pay the coding team to clean up after me) and can mold my hours around time spent with the kids and the occasional good night's sleep.

Having said that, I'm not sure I have any career advice that is worth anything in the general sense -- I got into an industry, pushed my way into as many facets of the industry as I could (talked to people, asked to observe executive meetings, volunteered for industry committees, wrote articles for industry publications), looked for weaknesses, saw an opportunity and took a chance. I'd do it again (am doing it now), but none of that has anything to do with credentials, education or getting that first job.

Good luck in whatever you choose.

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