It attracts truly extraordinary talent. One of many examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw . There is more technical ambition in a single slide of that project than an entire department at places I've worked.
However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep.
If I were to dive into the JIRA for any one of these "missing compression" incidents, I wouldn't expect to find an easy win, I would expect to find "missing compression" beneath a pile of much worse bugs like "level 2 crashes on AMD cards." So it goes.
> However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep.
Yeah, I've often heard that the advice for people who really want to make games is to get some friends together and try to put out something together as a side gig while you work somewhere boring to pay the bills.
SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is an awful experience. The expectations are high and the salaries are low because there's a seemingly unlimited bunch of young adults that want to make games.
And yes, it takes extraordinary talent. Your code needs to be able to generate a frame in under 16 milliseconds in order to maintain 60 fps. If you want to appease the hardcore players with these crazy 360 hz monitors, you need to get your game loop down to a mere 3 ms.
The amount of shortcuts and optimizations needed to pull that off is insane. At that level, you're trying to figure out how to minimize cache misses and branch mispredictions. How many Node devs are thinking about those?
>>SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is an awful experience.
Just as a counter point - I work at one of the largest AAA game companies and we have great work life balance(been here 9 years). Don't remember when was the last time I worked more than the required 7.5h/day, never worked on the weekend, the people I work with are all passionate about their work and want to deliver something great. The pay is "ok" - it's not exceptional but it allows for good quality of life. In comparison all my friends who went to work in traditional software development are paid somewhat more than I am but they all 100% hate their jobs, so......I don't think it's a bad trade off.
As for the infinite supply of people wanting to do this - it's only really true at junior level, as soon as you talk anyone above junior it's extremely hard to recruit and you might be getting a handful of candidates a year. We've been trying to hire a senior rendering programmer for over a year now and we've had like 5 candidates total.
However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep.
If I were to dive into the JIRA for any one of these "missing compression" incidents, I wouldn't expect to find an easy win, I would expect to find "missing compression" beneath a pile of much worse bugs like "level 2 crashes on AMD cards." So it goes.