21–30 of 124 posts
And this was before AI. Imagine the amount of people who will never be able to answer similar questions. I am going to maybe have a bad take, but if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be working in the field until you do. It's not okay to wing it into new roles with more responsibility.
What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…
What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…
> The most beloved games have the shittest code Do you have data supporting that? My favorite games (Factorio, Noita, Song of Syx to name a few) all share in common devs' passion and expertise. I don't have any example of a good game with shitty code.
So he sat me down and explained: "Don, your job is TURD POLISHING. If you can just make your turd nice and shiny, we will ship it, and everybody will be happy with you, because that is what we hired you to do."
But then at least he gave me a few weeks to clean up and overhaul the worst code. The moral is be careful what you ask for, or you might have to be the one who shovels out all the shit.
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/TDSEditTo...
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/Comprehen...
> Then the interviewer asked me why I used Queue . I couldn't answer And this was before AI. Imagine the amount of people who will never be able to answer similar questions. I am going to maybe have a bad take, but if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be working in the field until you do. It's not okay to wing it into new roles with more responsibility.
What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…
I feel there was a very narrow time window in the 90s when a bunch of game franchises were started where the devs could get away with shipping stuff with a ton of bugs. The first two Fallout games come to mind. So does the original Deus Ex. This is definitely the exception not the rule though! Hardware constraints weed out shitty (or at the very least suboptimal) code very quickly. This is the exception not the rule…
Extremely well-written and honest post. The struggle with being self-taught is that you don’t know what you don’t know. This is probably even worse in areas like Unity, where the coding part is sort of a sideshow to the main event. Nowadays the problem is you lack the discernment to evaluate AI output. I wrote The Conputer Science Book ( https://a.co/d/01e62STx ) to act as that basic building block and help orient se…
yes, but he knew. i mean he should have known that he used stuff without knowing why.
i am mostly self taught too, and i agree with your statement, but i don't see an excuse for using stuff and not trying to understand why. i mean sure, when i follow a tutorial , at first i'll copy things i don't understand, but do that a few times, understanding should eventually come. that's how i learned how OO programming works. i followed the motions for a while, and one morning i woke up and it clicked. if you keep using something without understanding it, then it is time to ask questions. what is this thing that i keep using? how does it actually work, and what are other ways to solve the same problem?
things that i don't know are things that i never came across. i just recently had an interview that asked me questions where i honestly had to respond: i never touched this issue in my programming career so i can't give you an answer, just my best guess. but i never had a situation where i kept using something without eventually understanding why.
> Then the interviewer asked me why I used Queue . I couldn't answer And this was before AI. Imagine the amount of people who will never be able to answer similar questions. I am going to maybe have a bad take, but if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be working in the field until you do. It's not okay to wing it into new roles with more responsibility.
On the other hand, most people aren't curious enough to ask.