What happened to my career after 2010? (2021)

This feeling hits home! This may sound very cliche, but one conversation with my dad changed my entire view of life. In that conversation when I questioned him how he was so happy, he replied that he had never expected anything out of life.

The author also seems to find happiness out of the least expected things! He just tried things because he felt like it. Without expecting anything from it. It sounds selfish when people do things for themselves, but people like author needs these kind of work. The kind to let them go wild in their interest/imagination. Maybe author may find new interests, change his direction, and venture on new road. But that still means he is probably going to feel good about it.

I hope he is still having a good time (and hope that he has no issue regarding money!) Make the best out of your moment and good luck with your ML adventures. Cheers!!

I did my first hour of therapy this week and while I couldn't say anything unusual happened, I'm still in shock.

> I'm posting it here since HN rejects it with "that comment is too long.

My god just thinking that you typed all this in a text box and were one accidental mouse click/backspace away from losing it all is making me shudder.

That final link really resonated with me. thank you so much for sharing.

"...he replied that he had never expected anything out of life."

Something that helps is to lower your expectations of other people, then be pleasantly surprised when they "step up".

Aside the medical misfortunes your story is absolutely typical. The games industry has a tragic problem with churn. I see eager CS graduates go off to "get into games". Within a few years they get out, bitter and burned, and go into more regular jobs in medicine, defence, finance or whatever.

It's called the 20:20:20 rule.

Only 20 percent of creative projects ever get to the production stage Of those, only 20 percent complete production. And of those, 20 percent get through marketing and publishing to become "titles".

That means if you are put into a team on a new creative project it has a roughly 0.8% chance of being sold online, and then you can tell all your friends about it.

There are two further problems. One is that projects like games or films take about 2 years to complete. That means it's likely your first project will get canned. And your second. And your third. I have spoken to devs in the game business 6 or more years into their careers who have never seen a title release.

If you are lucky to have a successful title and get into the "pop" stream, then it's more likely you'll get onto a team destined to have another success, and a positive success loop can begin. Just like the film or music business, that can take you 10 or 15 years.

The second is that creative people really need validation and feedback. Each time a management team kill a project it's a gut-wrenching experience for creative developers. Unlike music or the theatre where you might play out a few bad nights before a show is pulled you lose everything in a single stroke. Often for "intellectual property" or "reputational" reasons they want to bury the entire project assets and act like it never even happened. This leads creatives to get depressed.

I've seen a lot of it and now warn students about "getting into games" or any other industry that subsidises 99.2% of dead-end misery with obscene profits it makes on 0.8% of mega-successes. But that's just the Pareto mathematics of high-risk creative work.