Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#461

Post by literallycancer » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 10:53 PM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #233

derefr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion' So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs. In all these cases, you can quash su…

> So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? We could at least stop giving young people terrible advice like, "you can do anything, live your dream!" "Get a practical job to pay the bills, and do your dream as a side gig," is a pretty reasonable compromise. Most people are have a low tolerance for risk and it's a problem when they get into a field that requires being a risk taker. That tolerance for risk…

Actually, prostitution is relatively safe and predictable way to make good money, in countries that have the appropriate legal framework.

You can probably make as much as a software consultant if you play your cards right, get a nice house in the countryside and retire at 30.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#462

Post by lacey » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 10:54 PM UTC

literallycancer wrote: post #458

jackfraser wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or re…

It's almost never a good idea to start by charging less. The people who don't want to pay your rates are just looking for the easiest excuse and weren't going to become customers anyway. The bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings. A run-of-the-mill wedding probably costs about 50k, so to have nice pictures from it you'll spend maybe 10% (?) on a photographer. So 5k for a day and a half of work? This puts…

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret "the bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings".

Do you mean by total revenue, or for a given photographer?

I ask because in general people who do weddings tend to focus on those almost exclusively for their income (the same is true for some of the other categories I mention below).

The way I think of it is that there are perhaps only a few sources of steady income that pays a livable salary with photography:

- weddings

- headshots

- real-estate

- advertising / marketing

In many cases either photographers are being asked to do more these days (e.g. write the editorial that the photographs go with) or people who wouldn't traditionally have photography as part of their job are being asked to do the photographic work on top of their existing responsibilities (e.g. journalists who are asked to bring a camera along and snap some shots for a story).

[EDIT: I am not sure where the day and a half of work figure comes from, either. It is typical for something like an edited/touched-up photo album to be delivered a few weeks after a wedding shoot, with the photographer doing a few shoots in between and then sitting down and editing several in a batch over the course of a week or two until they are happy with the results.]

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#463

Post by Guereric » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 10:58 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #315

My video game developers need unions story: I was a core developer on a major feature of Sleeping Dogs/'True Crime: Hong Kong' for 2+ years. At one point, when the game was still being published by ATVI under the title 'True Crime: Hong Kong', ATVI cancelled the game and 100+ developers were laid off including me. Fast forward a few months and miraculously Square Enix decided to pick up the publishing rights for the…

Sleeping Dogs is one of my favourite games of all time. It got me hooked immediately from the login screen with the unforgettable soundtrack. Thanks for your contribution to the game.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#464

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 10:58 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #219

derefr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion' So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs. In all these cases, you can quash su…

>In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to pay to do that. Because of that, they see any job where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible. This is true for any job that is just an extension of a hobby. People put on local community theater productions in their spare time because they find it fun and fulfilling. You don't have to pay…

The way I usually put it is "I'll happily code for free, but if you want me to code up your ideas, you have to pay me more than all the other folks that want me to code up theirs."

Interestingly this holds up even though I'm now coding up my own ideas - even though I'm calling the shots on what I work on, they're still constrained by what there's potentially a market for, and so it's still not really passion coding. If I were completely free of constraints, I'd do stuff that's more useless, more prestigious, more beautiful, with fewer corner cases and fewer dependencies on outside software. That's economically unviable (and kinda solipsistic, too), so I don't.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#465

Post by watwut » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #414

murph-almighty wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IT'd be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes I don't want to nitpick but a lot of the strategy surrounding ending human trafficking involves cutting off demand, which means trying to stop johns from buying prostitutes. This sort of `cut off the demand` strategy isn't entirely unheard of.

That is a common strategy but, as far as I can tell, a completely useless one. The US govt has been spending resources for years pushing messages that people should just not do drugs, or that by doing drugs they are funding terrorists, destroying families, etc. I haven't seen any evidence that such campaigns work, and given drug use rates across time and countries I'm pretty skeptical that they do.

People do less drugs then they did in the past. Especially young people.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#466

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #171

CM30 wrote: post #97

> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few 'passion' driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten…

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion' So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs. In all these cases, you can quash su…

That's sort of the point of money - to convince people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do, because they're able to spend the money to get things that they do want.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#467

Post by prewett » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #435

slg wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is stronger language than I would use, but yes you declined an opportunity to increase the demand for glaziers. I imagine your are trying to allude to the glazier's fallacy [1]. However that is only a fallacy from the perspective of the entire economy. An extra dollar spent on a glazier is going to benefit the glazier. The problem for the economy at large is that the dollar might have otherwise been spent on the…

> However that doesn't change the fact that the increase in efficiency comes from not having to pay more money to software developers I propose to you a law that will increase the wages of all software developers: demand that no code can be written in a computer fabricated after 2010. * * Hint: Bastiat.

Ooh, I like that for other reasons: all those electron apps and bloated web pages would start being painful for developers. Maybe 16 GB of RAM would start feeling spacious again.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#468

Post by slg » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 11:32 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #435

slg wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is stronger language than I would use, but yes you declined an opportunity to increase the demand for glaziers. I imagine your are trying to allude to the glazier's fallacy [1]. However that is only a fallacy from the perspective of the entire economy. An extra dollar spent on a glazier is going to benefit the glazier. The problem for the economy at large is that the dollar might have otherwise been spent on the…

> However that doesn't change the fact that the increase in efficiency comes from not having to pay more money to software developers I propose to you a law that will increase the wages of all software developers: demand that no code can be written in a computer fabricated after 2010. * * Hint: Bastiat.

I think you are all missing my intent if you are trying to point out the absurdity of my argument. I was simply pointing out the absurdity of OP's argument by comparing it to something equally absurd that would be more familiar to the average HN reader.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#469

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #171

CM30 wrote: post #97

> For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few 'passion' driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten…

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion' So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs. In all these cases, you can quash su…

but—even in the most totalitarian state you can imagine—you can’t quash demand

Well, what you do is you subsume all of human discourse into a new, faster, online form which can use the powerful mechanisms of variable schedule of reward and monetized viral growth. Moderate and supercharge all of that with AI and Deep Learning. Make sure that you infiltrate all of the big tech companies with underpaid (thus easily radicalized) ideologues who would gladly violate company policies and laws for their cause, or at least exercise bias in the way they enforce them. Use this pool of radicalized confederates wielding this vast technological power encompassing and accelerating all of the industrialized world's most relevant discourse. Use it to control all thought and all discourse.

If people dissent, then use the power over all information online to enable your ideologue radicals to construct propaganda narratives to push your favored view of reality. Use the technological power to construct a hermetically sealed filter/search bubble for everyone willing to subscribe -- then make it addictive to them on top of it! At the same time, find, marginalize, and silence all of the dissenters. De-platform and un-person a few to make an example of them. Control all of the narratives, and if contradictions and inconvenient facts leak out, then craft narratives to explain those away. If pesky dissenters still persist, notice that toxic wacko fringes are unparalleled at drawing attention and generating vicious circles of outrage driven virality. Amplify and weaponize their messages. Start tarring the dissenters. Use unfair guilt by association. The more outrageous, unfair, and toxic the tarring, the better, as it will generate yet more toxic outrage.

Control all of the new digital media. Make it cool for young people to nullify "Free Speech." Make it cool and hip for them to say, "..then f##k your "Free Speech!" Control all of the speech. Control all of the ideas. Make it "uncool" or even socially unacceptable to have any kind of dissenting thought to the pushed narratives.

It's a scary sounding plan, with the potential for tremendous destruction of societal cohesion and culture. I don't think it will work in the end, however.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#470

Post by AgentME » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 11:53 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #294

It's incredible reading through the comments on this post and nobody seems to see the game industry for what it is: the canary in the coal mine. Programming within the game industry is sliding rapidly toward blue collar, and you'd be a fool to assume the problem is contained. The problem for programmers is simple - Supply and Demand. Thanks to a massive publicity push from big tech, the public is being sold - hook li…

Following this logic further, should we try to fight against education initiatives in general too? Educated people are more likely to be able to pick up programming, or take one of many other white-collar jobs. We could team up with people of other white-collar jobs and work on slashing funding for public schools, etc., to make sure future generations don't replace us too soon.

Somehow that doesn't seem right. I think it's a horrible zero-sum view of the world.