John Carmack: Career Advice
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John Carmack: Career Advice
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Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#2Survivorship bias. Not everyone has the opportunity to be a programming geek at the beginning of a new era of PC gaming.
Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#3Perhaps I’m missing something, but he moves past “learn deeply” as it doesn’t help with breaking in, but then offers “tool master”, and a tool master seems to me like someone that has done a fair bit of learning deeply for a specific thing.
Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#4Survivorship bias. Not everyone has the opportunity to be a programming geek at the beginning of a new era of PC gaming.
It's always good to be aware of biases in people viewpoints when considering their advice but I'm not sure that's that applicable in this case because he's advocating people don't do what he did essentially.
It's also as far as these things go pretty mediocre and obvious advice. The majority of the games industry today is focused on using and customizing a reasonably small set of tools rather than writing their own.
Further engines like Unity and Unreal actually have pretty big penetration outside of games making them even more valuable skills to have.
Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#5Tools change, fundamentals don't. I disagree that you should modify what you should learn in order to start contributing as fast as possible to a team. I think that the advice that he gave was a bad one.
Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#6Perhaps I’m missing something, but he moves past “learn deeply” as it doesn’t help with breaking in, but then offers “tool master”, and a tool master seems to me like someone that has done a fair bit of learning deeply for a specific thing.
Learn deeply basically means being able to make amazing tools from the bottom to the top. Be an expert in the tool means being able to make amazing things with it without necessarily being able to make the tool yourself. So low level versus high level.
For example the majority of webdevs probably couldn't write V8 but they can make JS sing.
Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#7Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#8Can anyone elaborate on what Carmack is suggesting here? To specialise in some tool early in your career? Or something else? I don't quite get it. (Or at least I don't get why it would be such a good idea.)
Carmack is usually great to listen to, by the way; check out some of his interviews or talks if you haven't before.
Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#9Obviously he’s the master, but it doesn’t strike my tin ear as great advice. Your manager will probably appreciate that you can tell your teammates tips and tricks for fit or whatever, but they usually just prefer when you build things that have business value. Maybe different in games world, I dunno.
Re: John Carmack: Career Advice
#10Perhaps I’m missing something, but he moves past “learn deeply” as it doesn’t help with breaking in, but then offers “tool master”, and a tool master seems to me like someone that has done a fair bit of learning deeply for a specific thing.
well, I think "learn deeply" there means really learning from the ground up, while you seem to associate it with investing time (which you need to do anyways). I think he argues that for employment in IT it might be better to invest time in learning build systems or webframeworks or firewalls, than learning from the ground up (starting with C/TCP-IP). Bad analogy: if you build a house, you study engineering (or carrying stuff), rather than theoretical mechanics. Once you are involved in the business, the deeper levels will inevitable show themselves at some point.
I think this has its merits (and actually I think, it suits me), but without any guidance your measurable and marketable progress is slow. For example, I build my scientific softwarestacks with spack, debugging build failures. Net result is, that I got into a random project of a colleague, fixed his C++-Makefile without having more than basic C-knowledge.