31–40 of 73 posts
"Optimize your career, not your salary" — and this is how gamedev is never lacking those new fresh naive developers. Poor souls.
Their checklist shares a lot with mine, and I can only assume money will come with having grown in supportive and great development environments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too would welcome a mentor! I've often thought this would be a good social network - online mentoring. Lots of upside for the mentee, not sure about the mentor...
People like mentoring, it's human nature. But that will challenging to capture online.
Unless there's some barrier to entry it would be difficult, and it'd probably just end up being a spam or meme fest like LinkedIn or Facebook after a while.
"Optimize your career, not your salary" — and this is how gamedev is never lacking those new fresh naive developers. Poor souls.
>and this is how gamedev is never lacking those new fresh naive developers
I think I know what you mean by this, but just in case, I really think it's the over-representation of SV and startup culture on the Internet. One of the biggest concerns I had before I started working full time as a dev was work/life balance. I listened to the Internet rather than asking peers. It turns out (in my experience) that it's fine in most places. Blogs, Reddit, and HN had me thinking otherwise, and I'm sure the people who drink the SV and startup Kool-Aid are the ones falling prey to this.
Finding a mentor probably helps most and is the hardest. I know a few good people who wouldn't have got where they are without a mentor. I never found one and I'm 10 years in the game now. So I'm probably cursed to mediocrity, haha.
I too would welcome a mentor! I've often thought this would be a good social network - online mentoring. Lots of upside for the mentee, not sure about the mentor...
Finding a mentor probably helps most and is the hardest. I know a few good people who wouldn't have got where they are without a mentor. I never found one and I'm 10 years in the game now. So I'm probably cursed to mediocrity, haha.
Call me a pessimist but I doubt the vast majority of people will ever find true mentorship. Would it be nice to have a more experienced and talented developer take a personal interest in your career and technical development? yes, of course it would, but it's unlikely at best. I'm sure self study, discipline and "grit" matter far more.
Sure, but mentors help ensure that you learn the right lessons from your struggles, gain the correct habits and don't go down certain silly rabbit holes and waste time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
I'm a bootcamp grad and I got lucky enough to find work. While I don't have a mentor in the traditional sense, everyone here knows my background and I can go to any of them for help. I may not be the brightest, but I work really hard and they see it, which I think helps when I go to them with questions.
I just can't agree with the recommendation to read the comments before articles you find online. Critical thinking is such an important skill for everyone, not just engineers, and this habit all but eliminates it. You go into an article with a framed opinion of what it's trying to convey, and spend the time reading the article looking for confirmation of that opinion rather than thinking critically for yourself. This…
HN is just as biased and unreasonable as any other forum. Just because the most vocal people here mentally masturbate each other over their inflated IQs, self-diagnosed autism and confounding mix of leftist and techno-libertarian policies doesn't mean that the comments found here are any better than anywhere else.
You can have garbage content without it being filled with profanity and memes.
I just can't agree with the recommendation to read the comments before articles you find online. Critical thinking is such an important skill for everyone, not just engineers, and this habit all but eliminates it. You go into an article with a framed opinion of what it's trying to convey, and spend the time reading the article looking for confirmation of that opinion rather than thinking critically for yourself. This…
It's a pretty good approximation for boring meetings as you've got a small amount of overall context (article headline::meeting) and small amount of specific context (comment::sentence before your name).