What happened to my career after 2010? (2021)

[0] https://trevcan.duckdns.org/blog/hello.touch.html

I am always advocating for taking responsibility for your mental health, finding a therapist, and getting on medication if you need it.

So we had a chat, and I discovered something: Half the table was on Prozac. Some of the men, and basically all of the women. Apparently Prozac helps a TON with PMS.

Another thing happened: I was talking to my brother, and he told me he got on a new medication. Yep, Prozac. It is like he is a different person. Happier, more artistic, more productive, more competent at work, able to procrastinate less.

I hear it over and over again. PROZAC IS A MIRACLE DRUG.

It is extremely helpful for people with anxiety, and can often massively reduce the symptoms of PMS.

(Groan, I sound like an ad...)

If you are struggling with anxiety, you do NOT need to talk to a therapist to try Prozac. Most medications are actually prescribed by your normal doctor. Just ask them, and they will likely give it to you. It's not like it is a party drug...

It's not hard to understand what happened to our generation as teenage geeky culture turned into a multi-billion global business in less than a decade. A ton of brilliant programmers got left behind and left out. Not just because there's only room for a few John Carmacks or Tim Sweenys, (there's a good deal of luck in navigating an unfolding culture), but because rapid industrialisation changes the very nature of what it touches.

Industrialisation of games had many unfortunate and unexpected effects. It made creativity a liability. Gaming is one of the most conservative industries on the planet, way, way ahead of music or film production for having cast itself in stone.

Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap.

Like the music business, in the past 20 years the industry has functioned by burning through a lot of aspirational talent. It leaves a trail of broken hearts and dreams. As educators we have been complicit in overselling it, and feeding it with souls.

You can always tell an industry is a hustle when the marketing machine harps-on about how to "break into" it. Young people are made to feel that if they were privileged to get a job it would have little to do with their merits and talents, but their guile and grit. If you wanted a job you had to "break in to", become a burglar. The hours and the pay are much better. Maybe that's why many of the kids I taught to code switched from chasing that rainbow to being hackers.