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Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

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Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#221

Post by matwood »

SwellJoe wrote: post #150
rikthevik wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great sentiment. I'm not interested in getting super rich, I'd just like to do interesting work and have some freedom in my life. Hopefully that's not too much to ask.

I can assure you it's not. I'm not the most amazing software developer in the world, nor am I the most astute businessman, but after a little more than decade of work and persistence, I'm in a position where I can do pretty much everything I've always wanted to do. Part of that time was spent figuring out what I actually always wanted to do (age brings clarity of focus, I think). I travel full-time (I'm in Bozeman, M…

Your story is my goal. I don't need cars or giant houses, I just want the freedom to solve interesting problems and the responsibility of making the business decisions.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#222

Post by cmos »

acgourley wrote: post #103
InclinedPlane wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a: he doesn't make $350k every day b: valve pays well north of $50k/year c: valve likely has profit sharing of some variety, which could be quite substantial d: likely valve wouldn't just hire him but would purchase his company, giving him a several million dollar lump sum payment Factor that in with the temptation to use valve's resources in developing your game, it's not such a bad deal. Nevertheless, if one is mak…

I hear its not always that far north of 50k.

A senior programmer can get over $120k easily.. though at the end of the day, you have a job. For someone else. poop.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#223

Post by simonsarris »

watty wrote: post #216
clistctrl wrote: post #14

I get the impression that this game was built because he wanted to build something he himself would enjoy, not something he could become rich off. Maybe there's something to that philosophy ;)

I used to think that as well until I read about "Infiminer", the open sourced XNA Minecraft predecessor. Now I think he just saw an opportunity. http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Infiniminer

Oh my god, I used to play Starcraft with Zach back in college.

This is the first time I've seen him referenced "in the wild"

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#224

Post by runjake »

tjogin wrote: post #191
runjake wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS basically is Apple's standard OS at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac OS X was renamed to "iOS Development Environment" at the next WWDC. It seems pretty clear that at some point iOS (and a desktop version of its touch paradigm) will be the future on Mac desktops.

Apple created iOS because lightweight devices with a touch screen demand entirely different solutions and paradigms than mouse driven desktop applications do. They're not converging any time soon.

Let's revisit your comment in June 2011, shall we?

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#225

Post by rick888 »

Tichy wrote: post #208
henrikschroder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The grandparent argument that being employed would be great because of health care benefits assumes that the creator of Minecraft lives in the US. If he had bothered to read the first sentence of the actual article, he would have discovered that this is not the case. In this place, we read the articles before commenting. 2) What 15% fees? Health care in Sweden is financed through regional income tax.

Is it really so messed up that even if you have 3 Million $ in the bank, you can not buy health care in the US? Could you fund a company and buy health care through that company?`I don't understand that system...

"Is it really so messed up that even if you have 3 Million $ in the bank, you can not buy health care in the US?"

If you had 3 million in the bank, you could easily afford a plan through many of the private health insurance companies in the US.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#226

Post by abp »

statictype wrote: post #212
abp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but nonetheless submissions containing "java" in the title will get less upvotes then many other submissions with language names in the title, i think.

Java as a langauge is generally uninteresting to talk about. There are vary few "wow, that's a clever hack" constructs to be made in the language. But certainly, that doesn't mean software created with it can't be great. See also: PHP

I think you actually wanted to say something like "most of javas libraries are uninteresting". The language itself is interesting, i think. It lacks some modern and no-oop concepts for sure, but that don't make it actually bad.

The verbose libraries and configuration addiction of many java library vendors, including nearly all Sun libs i know, is the real problem.

You can, on the other hand, find a massive amount of really nice and concise libraries that make java feal great for many tasks. Even custom compiler extensions for language simplifications or cross breeding with groovy etc. aren't uncommon.

Also if you look at the JVM as a platform and java as the beginning of learning to work with a platform, you've got a great pool of languages to choose from, too. That wouldn't be possible without java.

I sometimes dislike java myself, but then i abstract the verbose parts behind some static builder methods, for example and write a lot less with great outcome in java.

The real shortcomings in the language design itself can suck hard. By ignoring these parts and using libraries for it and knowing what to watch out for, you can really get proficient with java. Keep Blochs "Effective Java" in reach and everything will be fine.

Actually i'm not programming in java that long. But I've written some desktop apps and some little JSP pages. Besides that i enjoy learning and following frameworks like the Play framework, because i think it's really promising and valuable for web development. Also getting to know many open source libraries is nice.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#227

Post by henrikschroder »

points wrote: post #124
studer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public health care doesn't mean that nobody pays for it. Since he's not employed by anyone else, it's part of the ~15% in mandatory fees that he'll end up paying in addition to the ordinary income tax.

I think the parents point was that health care in Europe is substantially cheaper than in the US. We pay similar rates of tax to in the US, but get Healthcare in that as well.

No, my point was that universal healthcare makes it irrelevant if he is employed or not, he'll get the same care anyway.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#228

Post by p0nce »

city41 wrote: post #127
SwellJoe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate Java and I haven't done any game development since I was a kid, and I thought, "Hmm...I should check that out!"

It's a well written library, however it's not an engine or a framework. All it does is enable OpenGL, OpenAL and game pads in Java. The LWJGL team just calls it an "enabling" library.

Derelict is an enabling library for D which provides more bindings than LWJGL, on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. You get native code and no plugins are needed. Just sayin'.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#229

Post by city41 »

p0nce wrote: post #228
city41 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a well written library, however it's not an engine or a framework. All it does is enable OpenGL, OpenAL and game pads in Java. The LWJGL team just calls it an "enabling" library.

Derelict is an enabling library for D which provides more bindings than LWJGL, on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. You get native code and no plugins are needed. Just sayin'.

Thank you for pointing this out, I had no idea. I've always been curious about D and at the same time am looking for the ideal toolset for cross platform game dev. Definitely going to look into this.

Re: Minecraft creator banks $350k a day, turns down job offers from Valve and Bungie

#230

Post by derefr »

lemming wrote: post #213
derefr wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I'm not saying Java-the-language is bad . Java can be the best tool in a programmer's toolbox for many things. But, overwhelmingly, Java schools make Java programmers that only wield the Java hammer on every nail they find. If your first language is PHP, or ActionScript, or Perl, it is very likely that you picked it up on your own—and thus are interested in the topic of programming in general, and will continu…

This also works out great for me since I can easily avoid the sort of startup that allows language prudishness to guide its hiring decisions.

I don't know how you're managing to read this as any form of language-prudishness. I'm not saying "startups should not hire Java programmers." I'm saying "startups should not hire programmers who have only ever programmed in one language," because they will either be inexperienced, or remaining willfully ignorant of the breadth of the field available to them.

By coincidence—not by any flaw of Java or the generalist programmers who happen to know it and like it—the language that will most frequently appear on the resume of a single-language programmer is Java. This means—in the same way that given races of people get tested for given congenital diseases because they are statistically more likely to be afflicted by them—that if you're interviewing a programmer and all the previous projects listed on their resume are Java projects, it becomes more important to ascertain whether they know any other languages, because they are statistically less likely to.

This point is just a combination of the famous and well-received "programmer vs [language X] programmer" rant, and a bit of Bayesian analysis to determine which people applying for "programmer" jobs (i.e. generalist jobs, of the kind needed in startups) are most likely to actually be "[language X] programmers" instead. If you trained a spam filter on generalist-y-ness, it would flag Java as having a high correlation[1] with non-generalist-y-ness—that's all I've been trying to say.

[1] ...which is very explicitly not causation, I think I have to remind everyone at this point.

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