Using "white" as a casual negative adjective is weak. I can respect non-whites using it as a term of anger or hatred. We're all big boys. But seeing it used as a term of self-hatred leaves me feeling more than a little disgusted.
Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
11–20 of 177 posts
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#12Using "white" as a casual negative adjective is weak. I can respect non-whites using it as a term of anger or hatred. We're all big boys. But seeing it used as a term of self-hatred leaves me feeling more than a little disgusted.
> I can respect non-whites using it as a term of anger or hatred.
Did you just say it's respectable to hate on white people?
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#13I really, truly, honestly believe that above 9 hours a day for an extended period of time actually ends up hurting your development efforts. You want developers who come into work and WORK. Not work a little, check a little HN, work a little, eat, check a little Reddit. Living at work forces coping mechanisms like this on you because you really only have a finite amount of creative attention.
btw, this is coming from someone who once lived in his car (in the parking lot) at work for 6 months, so I know what i'm talking about!
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#14I really, truly, honestly believe that above 9 hours a day for an extended period of time actually ends up hurting your development efforts. You want developers who come into work and WORK. Not work a little, check a little HN, work a little, eat, check a little Reddit. Living at work forces coping mechanisms like this on you because you really only have a finite amount of creative attention.
According to a recent study, 4 hours a day of focused work was the best way to maintain long-term creativity and focus.
http://www.newser.com/story/117942/why-successful-people-wor...
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#15Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. A lot of suckers want to get into the field, and the employers know this. I know people who work in haute-couture shops. They typically clock in 14+ hours per day, and regularly work insane hours on the weekend. The weeks leading up to a fashion show / collection are brutal. These people have years of experience and managerial responsibilities, yet their sa…
Similarly, a rather sad thing about the magazine publishing industry (especially fashion) still is that many workers are unpaid (except, perhaps, expenses) interns for years at a time fighting to get a tiny number of paid jobs. We even see the intern thing in our own tech industry: http://techcitynews.com/2013/04/08/were-hiring-join-our-team...
I think this article goes a way to answer why young people dominate the games development industry, but not really why they tend to be white or male, if that's true.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#16I as well quit the industry because of this. While I never had it that bad (I knew I couldn't be productive after 8-9 hours so I just left at the time) nor was I ever 'attacked' for it, I can imagine I may have been overlooked on raises/promotions for it.
But there is one good thing I would say about the industry. You LEARN ALOT. C/C++/AI/Shaders/Animation and the intrinsics of low-level hardware, all in a days work. Compared to most folks I know that didn't spend time in the industry, their only experience with those topics was a semester in University.
Just yesterday there was a topic here in HN about python/ruby being slow, and while going down to C was suggested, I find appalling that most of the replies to those were 'it is hard to find a decent C programmer' or 'most of the ruby/python devs don't know C'. I can honestly say I this isn't an issue for me and for most I know that I worked in the industry. Heck my previous job had me writing nginx C modules and C++ cross platform (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows/Linux) download/caching/audio code.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#17As someone with 5 years experience in the industry, this article is spot on the money for everything I experienced. It's a huge problem, both by discriminating against people unwilling or unable to put in ridiculous hours, and by driving away those talented women and men who are finally becoming experienced experts when they become so burned out they have to leave the industry. I worked in games for 5 years. I no lon…
I'm a software engineering student about to start an internship(Paid, 4 months) at a major game studio.
I am considering applying for a job once I complete the internship if everything goes well.
I would like to see if the studio where I will work has a decent workflow. If not I would be willing to tough it out as a generalist programmer while trying to apply to other jobs that interest me in another industry. The idea is to have decently impressive job on my resume and to have fun at work.
Do you think this is a reasonable idea?
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#18As a 30-year old childless white man who left the games industry after a short 8 months in order to get married and spend time with my spouse, I can tell you that the assessment is fairly spot on. If you weren't putting in 12 hours daily, something was wrong with you and it was 'bad for team morale'. I was also pretty horribly underpaid, as evidenced by raising my salary over 200% by leaving. Seems to me the 'white'…
Not really. That kind of environment leads to a lot of prejudiced thinking. You see it happen in the rest of tech, too: people who have the screws twisted on them, willingly or not, cope one way or another... and most people cope by reinforcing their self-esteem with delusions of superiority.
That's one reason why we have religious wars over operating systems and programming languages and tool sets that you don't see in other engineering cultures. (And also why more relaxed companies focus more on the mantra of "right tool for the job".) Since I don't touch gamedev with an eleven-foot-pole, it's not clear to me how much of a cost has been incurred by this.
And it's this exact kind of thing which lets unexamined biases manifest in the hiring process, leading to an overpopulation of white males.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#19[deleted]
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#20Using "white" as a casual negative adjective is weak. I can respect non-whites using it as a term of anger or hatred. We're all big boys. But seeing it used as a term of self-hatred leaves me feeling more than a little disgusted.
> I can respect non-whites using it as a term of anger or hatred. Did you just say it's respectable to hate on white people?
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