Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

kotaku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 169 posts

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#111

Post by rmason »

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #27

The average age of the US farmer is 58. In Japan it is 68. There is less and less land available for agriculture. Less and less fresh water (agriculture uses 90% of fresh water in the US). The weather gets worse by the year to produce food. On the other hand there are more and more people in the world. So supply is diminishing while demand is high. That's why food is more and more expensive almost every quarter. All…

If you focus on just age you're not getting the whole picture. The average farm is getting much larger. In your grandfathers time you could raise a family and put kids though college on 160 acres. Nowadays it might take several thousand acres to do the same thing.

Outliers are managing 10-20,000 acres. To do that you need a lot of capital. The large need for capital makes it nearly impossible for an outsider to do a startup. Returns are small and farmers face risk with weather, markets and government intervention into the market.

Small farmers pay more for supplies and are at an extreme disadvantage before putting a single seed in the ground. Exceptions to the rule are niches like organic farming and greenhouses.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#112

Post by parfe »

vecinu wrote: post #89
pyre wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running a diesel engine off waste oil is > a great idea Once enough people are doing it, it will be classified as a fuel and politicians will be tripping over themselves to regulate and tax it. Also, at some point there won't be enough waste grease to fuel the market, and the prices of unused vegetable oil will go up possibly limiting its use for food.

To add to this, has anyone actually tested the diesel engine to make sure it meet all emission standards? How safe are the fumes to be burned around cities? Remember when we found out lead in gas was unsafe to be inhaled from exhaust pipes?

Unfun fact, the person who invented tetraethyl lead gasoline additive also invented chlorofluorocarbons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#114

Post by TimJRobinson »

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #78

My first job out of college was writing Super Nintendo games in Vancouver. My starting salary was $28.5K/year in 1994. Had I have been working 40 hour work weeks, this would have been a reasonable salary, but for 80 hours a week (which is closer to what I was working), it was less than McDonalds paid at the time. The difference is upwards mobility. It's hard moving up the corporate ladder while flipping burgers. It w…

It hasn't got much better, starting salary is games usually $35,000 in Australia (in 2008, fairly sure it's still the same now) And you're still expected to work crazy hours and weekends.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#115

Post by pilom »

tocomment wrote: post #68
pilom wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never investigated them. Have a summary link?

Here you go. I'd love to give it a shot, but it does look like more learning is required: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-07/marketplace/sn...

Interesting. If you're into repo'ing property I could maybe see it working. I feel like it would be easier for a similar reture to use something like LendingClub to loan money to people who actually want to pay it back, as opposed to people who are 1-2 years late on their taxes.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#116

Post by rwallace »

ziko wrote: post #15

Strangely enough, this idea has gone through my mind a couple of times, for a completely different reasons though. Mortality is closely connected with the hours we spend sitting each day. So that's one reason. The other one is that after working so hard and saving up enough for the rest of your life, you need something that is much more stress-free. And selling something so basic as food is exactly that.

Bear in mind that while selling food worked out well for the guy in the article, most game programmers don't need to make a move that drastic. For most game programmers, the right move is to just get out of the game industry and get a programming job in some other sector where the ratio of supply to demand is healthy enough that you can stick to reasonable working hours and have some time to spend outdoors.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#117

Post by jonnathanson »

justinhj wrote: post #47
alex_c wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that really sad? More people need food than games. More people want to make games than sell street food. The food business is brutally hard work, and I have a lot of respect for anyone doing it (well). There's no a priori reason why game programmers should be rewarded more than street food vendors.

You'd need to sell a lot of bread to make even an average US game programmers salary. The reason being that the work is creative and technically skilled. There are fewer people able to do it and that pushes up salaries. Like any industry there are exploitative employers, but it's just a case of finding or making a good place to work. The video game business is constantly changing in terms of the types of games people…

Salary distributions in the video game industry are starting to look a lot like salaries in the movie and TV industries. The bottom tends to pay peanuts and demand long hours, because there's an oversupply of willing applicants relative to the demand for low-level talent. (The question "Who wants to make games/movies/TV shows for a living?!" will always be exciting enough to attract entry level applicants by the boatload).

The top tiers of any of these industries, however, pay millions. I'm not talking millions because people started their own businesses and got acquired. I mean millions in salary and/or bonus per year, as employees. This is because, as you put it, the supply of extremely talented and skilled workers at the higher tiers is outpaced by demand. (And also because they're hit-driven businesses -- and, absent any real data as to a causal relationship between Superstar A's presence and Supergame B's performance, Superstar A receives the full benefit of correlation).

So you end up with a sort of pyramid structure to the business: lots of workers at the bottom, slightly fewer at the middle, very few at the top, and the compensation flows disproportionately from the top down.

A lot of industries function this way, but the various entertainment industries have especially interesting distributions because they're so inherently attractive to potential applicants.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#118

Post by officemonkey »

silencio wrote: post #97
criley2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We commonly say that hackers should save up 3-6 months of floating money, especially if they are in the self-employed or contracting/consulting world. You never know when the next job is, you never know what could happen. I don't see how being a small business operator of something like this is different. The source of income is different, the wisdom is the same. Hopefully they were able to set aside months worth of…

I co-own a restaurant as a side job. Saving 3-6 months or more worth of emergency funds for my personal use is the trivial part. The real problem is covering everything that the insurance policies won't cover to a sufficient extent: everything from building damage (maybe the landlord takes forever to rebuild/repair) to replacing equipment and any fees to go through processes and get all kinds of permits all over agai…

Actually, after a disaster, if you have losses that aren't covered by insurance, businesses don't initially get assistance from FEMA, they apply for a low-interest loan from Small Business Administration (see: http://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/loans-grant...) instead.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#119

Post by officemonkey »

RHSeeger wrote: post #108
bandy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provided you have insurance in the first place. (The rest of this post is seemingly invalid in California:) Contractor? No, you don't get insurance. Don't you have COBRA? You can't afford that? Well, golly, better hope that you don't get sick.

If you're a contractor w/o insurance, you're doing it wrong. You should be setting rates so that you can afford insurance. Health insurance, business insurance, vacation time, holiday time, sick time, equipment, etc. All of these things go into the calculations for your rates.

I did that when I was a contractor. The CEO wouldn't sign my contract because I would end up "making" more than he did in salary.

So I had to cut my hours. I took the 10 free hours/week as an opportunity to hunt for additional work.

Re: Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

#120

Post by rayiner »

ziko wrote: post #15

Strangely enough, this idea has gone through my mind a couple of times, for a completely different reasons though. Mortality is closely connected with the hours we spend sitting each day. So that's one reason. The other one is that after working so hard and saving up enough for the rest of your life, you need something that is much more stress-free. And selling something so basic as food is exactly that.

> And selling something so basic as food is exactly that.

There is very little that is as stress free as being a programmer. Certainly not the food industry. My wife's cousin is a chef. Her job is terribly interesting, but she works 80 hours a week to make 1/3 as much money as a programmer and has to deal with tremendously demanding situations (cooking at peak dinner service).

Post reply on HN