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Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary

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

#91

Post by samatman »

pyre wrote: post #83
Mikeb85 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously if an investor was that bad, they shouldn't be an investor. Running a diesel engine off waste oil is a great idea, more people should be doing it. And no, food businesses don't scale well, but that's ok, because if you're efficient, and your food is good, you can make a decent living for your whole life.

> 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.

I've seen about six people go through this journey. Burning waste veggie oil, or even biodiesel, is considerably more annoying and labor intensive than merely filling a car. Unless this changes, it's unlikely to scale in the way you indicate.

The real threat is actually blends that use a small amount of biodiesel mixed with rock diesel. These can be burned in any engine, and there is so little food oil (animal and vegetable) compared to the demand for liquid fuel, that this practice can easily lead to the kind of effects you describe.

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

#92

Post by lnanek2 »

parfe wrote: post #62

I really dislike these type of stories. Basically saying "Investor buys lotto ticket; outperforms DJIA by 5 billion percent." Or a more realistic example, the stories that flow when gas prices spike. Like the person with the diesel engine running off waste grease from restaurants. It's nice this person found a profitable niche but the concept itself doesn't lend itself to even linear growth.

Considering it is a gaming industry site I think the idea was mainly to bring up how low paid many game programmers are and how poor their lives are due to the long hours. I know at China related events particularly it has also been mentioned you can get pretty much free office space in the right areas thanks to the government incentives as well. So if anything, the publicity on the low pay and long hours for game programmers might encourage investors/companies to start their own out sourcing branch over there/etc..

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

#93

Post by ufmace »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #73
parfe wrote: post #62

I really dislike these type of stories. Basically saying "Investor buys lotto ticket; outperforms DJIA by 5 billion percent." Or a more realistic example, the stories that flow when gas prices spike. Like the person with the diesel engine running off waste grease from restaurants. It's nice this person found a profitable niche but the concept itself doesn't lend itself to even linear growth.

Obviously if an investor was that bad, they shouldn't be an investor. Running a diesel engine off waste oil is a great idea, more people should be doing it. And no, food businesses don't scale well, but that's ok, because if you're efficient, and your food is good, you can make a decent living for your whole life.

Running a diesel engine off of waste oil works great, as long as there's enough waste oil. They usually seem to be talking about restaurant frying oil. A medium-size city generates enough waste frying oil for, what, a couple of dozen people to fuel their vehicles? Maybe a few hundred? That's nice for them, but what will the other 99% of the city use? Try to scale it up to fuel their vehicles too, and it'll rapidly get much more expensive and much worse for the environment than ordinary gasoline and diesel.

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

#94

Post by VLM »

pilom wrote: post #57
tocomment wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of passive investments do you have? It seems like you're lucky to get a 3% return on dividend paying stocks.

I just do US stock index investing. There has never been a 25 year period where the US stock market did worse than 3% if you include dividends. Let me know if you want sources. This year alone it is up over 10%. That being said there will definitely be down years but that is ok with me as they will even out over the length of my career.

"There has never been a 25 year period"

Just be aware that saying used to be 10 year period, until it broke. It hasn't worked in the last decade or so, therefore roughly speaking durations keep expanding to reach the eighties. I suspect in 2030 the phrase will be something like ... never been a 50 year period ...

The part that worries me is hearing about all those boomers having to cash in equities and real estate over the next couple decades to pay off the medical sector... Who, exactly, is supposed to step up and buy that stuff at current prices / PE ratios? AKA where's the demand?

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

#95

Post by Patrick_Devine »

maglos wrote: post #80
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…

Moving up might have been true in 94 but what about now? How soon are you planning on retiring/dieing?

Hopefully never. :-D

The video games industry is pretty difficult to cut your teeth in though. It's highly technical, it has a ridiculous amount of competition and the software produced has a very short shelf life. If you can make it there, chances are you can make it anywhere.

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

#96

Post by joshuaellinger »

angersock wrote: post #64
joshuaellinger wrote: post #63

The joke at Origin Systems (back in the day) was: "We train people for well-paying jobs in the computer game industry." It was funny on several levels... if you didn't work there.

RIP Origin bros. :( EDIT: I assume that joke is funny in the same way that you'll find "The Liberated Democratic Free People's Republic of Chernarus"?

Yep.

I never had the 'honor' of working there. One of my brother's did.

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

#97

Post by silencio »

criley2 wrote: post #25
potatolicious wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal weather you can plan for, but there are outlier events that can still wipe you out that's basically impossible to predict or prepare for. Sandy in NYC flooded a great deal of infrastructure and left buildings without power or communications for a long time. Large parts of downtown were completely depopulated for weeks on end - that sort of event takes out independent business owners, and you can't effectively…

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 again. That's if there aren't external factors in play that causes problems (like maybe everyone else in the neighborhood got fucked by a major earthquake too).

This is totally different from my freelancing mindset since I have to start thinking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars just for floating a brick and mortar business for even a couple months, whereas my biggest investment for my main line of work is...mostly a nice computer. All this after insurance, so then it's time to start thinking about FEMA and bank loans (as if the stingy as fuck banks will give out loans).

All of this is on top of other hassles (SF, Alameda and LA counties are ....nuts for restaurant owners, to say the least) and it just sucks to think about. Maybe food trucks get more leeway or whatever in a lot of areas due to flexibility and size, but if I'm having these thoughts about a pretty profitable decent volume restaurant I shudder to think about the smaller fish out there.

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

#98

Post by silencio »

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…

> The reason being that the work is creative and technically skilled.

Given how fast I've been going through potential (literal) burger flipper cooks at my restaurant, I'm not sure that's totally the case. Some people are surprisingly _terrible_ at a job that many people consider to be the lowest of the low.

There is also a never ending demand for food ;)

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

#99

Post by silencio »

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.

I dare you to take a food safety course. I sweat bullets just thinking about what might happen in the tiny chance that a customer gets sick from eating my food even after all the ten million precautions that were taken. Then I dare you to run a reasonably high volume restaurant during peak lunch/dinner hours. :)

Forget all the other stresses like how it's really hard to find good burger flippers in the bay area, even for $14/hour plus tons of overtime 3x meals and more. And the health inspector breathing down your neck giving you a 99/100 for something that has nothing to do with the safety of your restaurant.

Compared to my development work, running a restaurant is a whole different set of stresses and just as bad, all the time.

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

#100

Post by dubfan »

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?

From Wikipedia: "Biodiesel is the only alternative fuel to have successfully completed the Health Effects Testing requirements (Tier I and Tier II) of the Clean Air Act (1990)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_biodie...

Either way the tetraethyl lead situation was completely different. It was very clear early on that the stuff was extremely toxic. Lead was already known to be toxic, and workers at the refineries were dying left and right due to exposure.

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