Debugging Your Interest (20Time Project)

A look into the occupation of programming

Research

Love It or Leave It?

When first researching people's opinions on the job, one answer tended to show up: that it is a "love it or leave it" job. Obviously people who love to code are perfect for this job, but of course not everyone is in that mentality and simply desire to see a functioning product. Others have said it is not necessarily "love or leave", but is definitely not for those who aren't willing to work hard. It is indeed hard work, and some programmers have had trouble keeping themselves interested in the programming itself with deadlines and long hours ahead of them. A tip about this declining interest is to code simple parts of the game/the specific assignment in order to gain enough satisfaction to maintain enough focus on the project.

Quitting the Industry

To bridge off the previous paragraph's ideas, another issue to address is why people would leave or quit their pursuit of the industry. When it comes to programming jobs in general, one reason veterans tend to leave is out of boredom. Sometimes the programs are repetitious, depending on the work, and thus there are those who seek a more varied job. On the opposite spectrum, there are also those that quit due to the tremendous amount of work that there is to do with the infamous deadlines and long working hours. Even the really passionate aren't safe from being demotivated, as in video game development, there are also the well-known lay off periods. To ensure a larger profit for the company in the final stages of game development, workers are laid off, forcing the employees to either search for another company to work for or to seek another game to wrap themselves in before they are fired from the other. Bigger-name companies can run multiple projects to specfically help the employees or even just temporarily fire employees while the company recalibrates and sets up the next project,but either way this process can be highly unpleasurable on paper due to the incredible unceretainty of the situations that rise. Often times, people will quit on the industry before they even enter it. This is due to the fact that people constantly seek connections into the industry to try and secure a job. By becoming a metaphorical pest, bugging people over and over to get a recommendation from an employee to go to the boss to enter in, potential workers become discouraged if they could not find such connections or were unwilling to do so. This idea did not pop up as much as the other problems, but the fact that it occurs quite a bit justifies its appearance here.

Entering the Industry

Speaking of entering in on the industry, there is some interesting things to know. As a general rule for all programmers, do know that learning programming languages constantly (1-2 per year is a recommendation) is a requirement. This is due to the various technology that constantly pumps out every year, and will sometimes require different languages for the advantage of the tech. That being said, what would be the best language to learn? In truth, there is no clear cut answer, but by researching the different engines that can be used, it is easy to find which languages are compatible and should be learned for that specific engine. A common recommendation, however, is to learn C++ (some say to learn C and/or C# first to get into it), as multiple engines utilize this. The more languages known by a potential employee, the better. A very obvious tip from other game developers is to obviously create games. As per previously mentioned engines like Unity or Game Maker, they are readily available to the public in which people can easily get started on their journey towards game development. Posting them out to places like Steam and potentially even gaining some sort of popularity is highly beneficial to build a good profile for review of employers and practice for the actual job. Another quite obvious tactic is to show enthusiasm. This should not occur just in the interview, but should be present in actions. For example, college education should not be enough, and the potential employee should be well read in various programming magazines, books, or even have attended seminars of other programmers to show the interest. Know the video games that are being made and show knowledge of how everything works, as someone working at a company with no knowledge of the kinds of games produced there is a very odd concept. Finally, do also know game programming jobs can be radically different from other programming jobs. Apparently, doing other kinds of programming jobs do not help people land jobs in video games, and sometimes could even hurt them if they don't present much more than "I've programmed [product unrelated to games] at some other company." This links back to the idea of enthusiasm: if a person with unrelated experience or can't even explain how the skills they had learned could benefit them in the career, how is it evident that the potential employee even truly wants to work on games?