How good do you need to be at programming and math to get a job working on 3d game engine dev at a AAA studio or something similar? I know this is one of those fields that doesn't have to deal with hordes of jeet programmers because they don't have the intelligence for it and they can't fake their way into a job. So if I just spend time studying linear algebra and writing low level 3d game engines from scratch, am I basically guaranteed a job in this industry or is there still a lot of competition even at this high level?
Not that very good. look at games of today.
>am I basically guaranteed a job in this industry
Holy frick no. I don't even think anyone can get in at this point. It's easily the most competitive field out there for programmers, harder to break into than gayMAN and very poorly paid.
How can that be when it's such a high skill job that not many people can do? With web dev you have 1000 jeets who are good enough to do the job for every job posting, but with this you actually need to have intelligence and experience and very few people are qualified to do it. Is it just because there are so few positions for it or something?
Game studios run on a budget of approximately nothing, compared to your average "tech" company. There are WAY more talented people out there than they have the capacity to hire.
They're also rather paranoid about hiring lemons, so it's near impossible to get in unless you have experience working on a commercial game.
They'll sometimes hire inexperienced people for low salaries and (pretend to) train them up, but I don't think anyone's doing that at the moment, what with the state of the economy.
Then what about outside of the game industry? Is there no work in the software industry for people who learn advanced math and how to solve complex and difficult problems using it? Or is it just the 3d graphics field in particular that's fricked?
>advanced math and how to solve complex and difficult problems using it
Is that what you think game engine gays do? It's all kind of trivial. I mean they don't even ask you for a PhD in mathematics.
If you're smart enough for "advanced math", i.e. 140+ IQ, high conscientiousness, mild psychopathy and a good Adderall hookup, there are plenty of jobs for you in finance.
I'm not interested in finance because the entire system is a israeli scam designed to keep money permanently centralized in the hands of a select group of wealthy elite. And I'm not talking about the kind of math that academics do, I just mean learning math well and applying it to solving problems in programming, which is something very few software engineers today are actually capable of doing.
How can 3d graphics be trivial anyway? There's a constant need to improve and optimize rendering so they look better with every new console generation and more than ever now that moore's law isn't happening anymore.
Maybe you could get a job making engineering software. I mean real engineering like stress analysis, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and control systems.
Bad news for you. All programming in the world is simple, you just have to spend some time to get good at it.
>So if I just spend time studying linear algebra
The big amount of math in gamedev is actually not so big, these are 2 semesters of one subject, that's all. Basically you need to know what is a vector, what is a matrix and how to multiply them.
A guy who attends conferences often told me that he saw thousands of guys who learn by heart how you do screen space wienersucking, tripple buffer blowjobbing etc. Like they literally memorize the formulas despite that any moron that studied at least first year in university can easily understand what some method is after reading wikipedia article for 1 minute, despite it being absolutely useless knowledge and a waste of memory. They are preparing for interviews to top gamedev companies and still don't get hired. That's why they are attending conferences, to get referred.
If you are smart and you want to do some cool things and push the boundaries - try science. You will never be a genius programmer - a good programmer in the best case, just because there's nothing genius to do in programming.
If you can't afford to not work, if you like geometry and have a preference of 3d graphics programming - consider this option
Also every company on this picture is a huge piece of shit - they hate linux. Don't sell your soul to devil, if you still desperately NEED to work in gamedev, consider valve or epic games
>How can 3d graphics be trivial anyway
99% of the work is well known
>improve and optimize rendering
Most optimization is well known too and boils down to don't show things, make the things you show lower quality, and batch work together. The optimization at the bleeding edge is something a handful of people do and it's not like there are a lot of well optimized games out there
>If you're smart enough for "advanced math", i.e. 140+ IQ, high conscientiousness, mild psychopathy and a good Adderall hookup, there are plenty of jobs for you in finance.
What kind of jobs? Not for me ofc
>How can that be when it's such a high skill job that not many people can do
Look at animators. Becoming a good story board artist takes literal decades of hard, constant work. The problem is that, as it turns out, there actually thousands of people with the skills required to do just that looking for a job at any given moment, and there are marginally less openings. Any job that people actually, deeply want to do is going to be hypercompetitive and flooded with bachelors who are fine throwing their entire life away for the time being if they get to work on the next spongebob season or mario kart game or whatever else.
You're telling me that there are tons of people who passionately want to study things like linear algebra and use it to write their own custom 3d rendering engines from the ground up? I find that very hard to believe when you look at how nearly every indie game dev uses off the shelf engines like UE and Unity. If this was a field that tons of people were passionate about we would at least be seeing some people develop stuff like this on their own in their free time. I think you're conflating people wanting to "work in video games" with actually being interested in the programming aspect of implementing your own custom engine. Most people who want to make video games don't even want to learn programming beyond the bare minimum required to use whatever off the shelf engine they choose. I don't even have any desire to make a game, but I'm very interested in engine dev.
Yes, there are far more people like that than the market needs or can support.
I'm one of them, I've done what you're describing, I'm probably better than you, and still I will never be able to get a job in gamedev.
There are like a million people who would wipe the floor with me, and they're all fricking unemployable as well, because game studios who do engine dev are actually, legitimately, no joke, full.
>You're telling me that there are tons of people who passionately want to study things like linear algebra and use it to write their own custom 3d rendering engines from the ground up
Maybe not tons, but certainly enough for game companies to be able to fill every related posiiton they need several times over, and although that might not be "tons" of people, it's genuinely enough people to make finding a job difficult for you.
>nearly every indie game dev uses off the shelf engines like UE and Unity
You won't be applying to these companies, so I don't know what that has to do with anything. These companies might as well be selling shoes or bubblegum for all they have to do with the skillset you're interested in developing.
>I think you're conflating people wanting to "work in video games" with actually being interested in the programming aspect of implementing your own custom engine.
If you've already got it all figured out, why did you post here? Besides, think of every fat know-it-all programmer you've ever met. That archetype of person loves games, and a lot of them are smart enough to shit out 3d engines in their sleep. Don't take my work for it. Just send your resume out and listen to the radio silence. Savor it because you're gonna need to get used to it before you hear "yes" from anyone.
I think you're confusing raw effort or aptitude you have in something with it entitling you to something in the market.
Bear in mind there are math PhDs living under the poverty line in America.
>I think you're confusing raw effort or aptitude you have in something with it entitling you to something in the market.
Why wouldn't being good at something entitle you to a job doing that thing? Isn't that how the free market is supposed to work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
>holding all else equal
It's in the second sentence right there. This definition doesn't apply to my question at all because there are always going to be very few people who are good at something in any field and the whole point of our economic system is to reward people who are good at things with money.
>the whole point of our economic system is to reward people who are good at things with money
Where'd you get that idea?
From living in America my whole life. I've never met a poor person who was smart. There's a lot of dumb people who become rich through sheer luck or whatever, but there's no such thing as a smart poor person unless they're severely mentally ill in some way.
>there's no such thing as a smart poor person unless they're severely mentally ill
Terry A Davis :(.
I still miss him. What a brilliant guy taken from us.
Welp I guess you've just found a bug in the matrix, anon. No existing economic or philosophical principle applies. Everyone trying to spoonfeed the answer to your room temp IQ ass is merely mistaken. I'm closing the tab. You're not worth any more energy.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just pointing out that the demand for a highly competent employee is going to be a lot higher than the demand for an average employee. It's not just one supply/demand graph like jobs are some kind of commodity being bought and sold.
nta but
>the demand for a highly competent employee is going to be a lot higher than the demand for an average employee
the bar for "highly competent" is naturally going to shift as the job becomes more desirable. why are treating a simple fact of life that even children understand as though it's subject to debate. are you a rockstar game engine dev? and I don't mean can you make a game engine. I mean are you a ROCKSTAR. the top 1%. better than anyone you've ever met. a fricking ROCKSTAR? no? then you might as well be that guy who followed a youtube tutorial because you're both equally unemployable. jobs with 500 applicants and 1 role to fill dont grade on a curve, anon
It's not really that hard to be in the top 1% of something. All it takes is some dedication to learn the skill really well. Most people don't even want to learn things so just having the desire to do it already gets you pretty close before you've even started.
>It's not really that hard to be in the top 1% of something
Say that to the top 1% of violinists, golfers, horror writers, independent film makers, etc. These people have spent their entire lives on that one thing. That's what the top 1% of a skill look like. If you haven't already put a decade into learning how to make good game engines, you've probably already been lapped ten times over by people your age who've been investing in that skill since they were kids. Anon, there's a difference between being optimistic and dumbly assuming you can just Mr Magoo your way into being literally one of the best people on the planet at something. If you were as dedicated at is as your words need you to be, you wouldn't be here begging for validation right now. You'd be programming.
You're thinking of the top 0.01%. It's a hell of a lot harder to reach that than the top 1%. Those are the kinds of people that become world famous at what they do, like John Carmack. I'm just talking about being good to get a job in an industry that employs probably hundreds of thousands of other programmers, not being some kind of celebrity.
>I'm just talking about being good to get a job in an industry that employs probably hundreds of thousands of other programmers
There are not hundreds of thousands of game engine devs.
>You're thinking of the top 0.01% It's a hell of a lot harder to reach that than the top 1%
The top 1% of leetcoders can solve LC hards they've never seen before in under 30 minutes. That alone takes years to get good at, and that's just puzzle programming problems which are well defined and hardly change. You're talking about a dozen skills, constantly changing tools and standards, and a frickton other things that are going to absorb all your time. You will never be in the top 1% of game engine devs. You're genuinely too daft to even understand how much work that would apparently take, so I refuse to believe you're intellectually capable of something that math-centric.
> I find that very hard to believe when you look at how nearly every indie game dev uses off the shelf engines like UE and Unity
They’re not amazing engines man, there’s a ton wrong with them, especially Unity. To get the most out of them you need to understand how engines work, and the only way to really learn that is to make one.
hardware got so powerful that no AAA developer optimizes shit anymore. Even if we disregard raytracing, most of the games released today barely look better than games released 5 years ago, but need more potent hardware to run. As developers still chase the open world meme, but have strict budgets, they outsource most of the work to 3rd parties (mainly jeets). Look how unoptimized Starfield is (sandwich) and you will understand why it runs like shit. Another example is FFXVI. It looks worse than older entries, but sometimes dips to 720p on a PS5. Publishers don't give a shit about optimization.
>muh intelligence and experience
nobody cares, hardware is powerful enough and jeets are way cheaper.
>With web dev you have 1000 jeets who are good enough to do the job for every job posting
that's not really even true, there are 5000 jeets who apply to every web dev job but very few actually get hired or seriously considered. they just clog up the applicant pool so badly that the whole hiring process is fricked. if hr finds somebody who sounds half-decent at the top of the applicant heap, that guy will get hired instead of sifting through the terrible moron applications to find the actual best guy for the job (unless we're talking about actual wordpress monkey jobs, in which case yeah pajeets fills those out, but those are not the majority of web dev jobs and do not pay well at alll)
The game industry preys on a high turnover rate because there's so many people who will do ANYTHING to get a job. It's why crunch exists in game studios but not in a lot of other programming jobs outside of glorious nippon.
It’s not that hard to get into, honestly. Maybe it’s hard to specifically get into the conpanies in OPs pic, but there’s plenty of other dev studios out there. If anything there’s a real dearth of talent and we seem to let any old fricker in as long as they have some speciality. Practically zero people in this industry have actually made a game of their own, even an asteroids knockoff, let alone something fun to play.
t. Professional game dev
>"not that hard to get into"
>"practically zero people in this industry have actually made a game of their own, even an asteroids knockoff"
t. some anon on Ganker
meanwhile Tim Cain:
It's honestly not that poorly paid. If you're an engine programmer at a AAA studio your salary is probably going to be comparable to FAANG and you'd get bonuses that are comparable. Some of them don't give you stock and the ones that do obviously the stock isn't worth as much as say Meta's or Google's.
But that being said, it's definitely more work hours especially near release.
I'm the FAANG dev in ITT. We crunch near release lockdowns too or when a deadline is impending. Also, you probably don't want company stock unless it's something like FAANG because otherwise you're basically being given imaginary tooth fairy I-O-Us. I work FAANG rather than game dev because I want to minmax my income, but I'm too scatterbrained to do fintech and be a millionaire in my 20s, so I settled for FAANG and being a millionaire in my 30s. Game dev is basically the latter except you never get to be a millionaire.
Bro stop the larp lol. I worked at Meta for 2 years it was the easiest job I've ever had, we never did any crunches or anything remotely even close to 50 hour weeks. The biggest downside working for meta is that 70% of your co-workers are pajeets or autists who "minmax" their salary and don't have any personality or life or anything they enjoy outside of putting 70% of their salary into the stock market and telling you about it.
>I worked at Meta for 2 years it was the easiest job I've ever had
Then you were dead weight to your team, and you wouldn't have cleared the recent layoffs.
>70% of your co-workers are pajeets or autists who "minmax" their salary and don't have any personality or life or anything they enjoy outside of putting 70% of their salary into the stock market and telling you about it
You've never stepped foot in a big tech office if you really think all we do is sit around gushing about our FIRE accounts all day.
They laid people off based on salary lil bro. I got laid off because I was earning disproportionately more than other people with similar experience.
>You've never stepped foot in a big tech office if you really think all we do is sit around gushing about our FIRE accounts all day.
You clearly haven't if you pretend it's not what most people talk about lol
>lil bro
Did you learn to argue from modern warfare 2 voice chat?
>I got laid off
No reason to be smug about how easy your FAANG job was when you got laid off.
>because I was earning disproportionately more than other people with similar experience
What a cope. This reminds me of when MSFT devs were hypothesizing that the Sting concert resulted in another round of pips. No, layoffs aren't uniform like that. Org C-levels pass mandates to skips. Skips ask your manager for a list. You were on that list, probably because of whichever work-life balance you had that led you to believe dev jobs at top companies are easy.
>You clearly haven't if you pretend it's not what most people talk about
I started my career are Google. Went to Amazon, then Microsoft, then start-ups, and now I'm back at Google. I can't remember any particular times I've talked about finances with my coworkers in any depth. If everyone you talk to immediately pivots to the most boring, asinine shit, the common denominator here is (you). If you're not larping, you're certainly boring. I can attest to that, lil bro.
>now I'm back at Google
Does this actually happen? I would think quitting a job would permanently burn any chance of getting hired there again.
Why would it? Do you flood the bathroom and piss in the shared kitchen every time you leave a job? As long as you were a dependable employee who left on good terms and did impressive things since you left, nobody cares at all. It's very common for people to hop companies like this.
>Why not just hire good people to begin with?
Give me a couple-sentence plan for how we should hire good people at the scale of companies which employ hundreds of thousands of people.
Simple, hire only white men.
You've gotta be 18 to post here.
They call it boomerangs and when you work with high skilled people it's normal for them to get restless at any job and either want to strike out on their own or try different niches. If you did a good job and people like you there's really no problem switching jobs every 2 years or so.
>autists who "minmax" their salary
What does this mean? That they find ways to do the least possible amount of work? Why are gayMAN companies hiring basically scammers with no interest or passion in doing the work?
People like the guy you just replied to are despised at FAANG. We hire people based on a heuristic that nobody really likes, and then people like him slip through the cracks, drag their feet to every single deliverable, take 5+ years to hit senior, and then they wonder why they got the boot when layoffs came around. He's choosing to cope by saying it has to do with his TC, but frankly, everybody who I worked with who got laid off this past year was a nocoder, and I'm glad they're gone. I'm sure his team is glad he's gone, too, seeing as he's under the impression that the job is meant to be easy and that all anybody there cares about is vesting.
Sounds like a moronic waste of money. Why not just hire good people to begin with?
Can't really speak to games in particular, but I'm a senior software engineer at FAANG. People on here post about how bad we are, and frankly it's a cope. The average FAANG dev works longer hours, is more productive, did better in school, went to a better school, and is generally more capable of getting work done, whether it's software construction, design, or even something more abstract like data recon.
Again, FAANG != top game companies, but the level of rigor is likely very similar. My advice is find out what you generally need to know to just get ANY job as a game dev. That alone will probably take you a while because game dev is difficult, competitive work. Now imagine doing all that, fighting for scraps at a no-name company, throwing your weekends away working on personal projects, and generally turning a hobby, vidya, into a science that you approach with the same mentality you would when mowing a lawn. Dry, calculated, almost robotic. That's how you need to approach cracking into a top company.
What do average schmoes do to get their average schmoe jobs? Do twice as much as that. Learn to look down on those people. Not for their sake or because of any genuine vendetta against them, but you can't compare yourself to average schmoes if you want to be a top performer in a field as competitive as game dev. Just focus on being so much better than the other candidates at whatever heuristic game dev onsites use, and you'll make the cut eventually. Then your prize will be 65-hour work weeks and substandard pay, but hey, at least you'll be able to say you did the code for one part of a single overwatch hero's kit, or what grunt work you'll end up with after all the trials are done.
cynical eastern euro and/or chinese post
I'm white and living in Boulder, CO. Cope.
>FAANG
Its gayMAN, anon.
millions of other morons also have the "dream" of working for the video game company so it ends up being harder than NASA to get in
do people even buy games anymore
it's just not a good business. all games are more or less the same so they're easily replaceable and substitutable. no moat, can never be monopolies like FANG
Gaming as a medium generates more money than movies, music, and books combined IIRC. People are spending more money on games than they ever have.
Yet devs that work for aaa studious are still underpaid.
Because there are a hundred similarly skilled devs in the interview loop at any point who'd gladly take your job the day you quit, and they'd do it at 60+ hours/week with a smile on their face.
It would be great if there was a way to meet and organize for indie projects. Something like LinkedIn for game studio startups. I'm interested in rigging and 3d modeling if anyone has something in mind.
Wasn’t it valve that has one of the highest revenue to employee ratios out of any tech company ?
> Gaming as a medium generates more money than movies, music, and books combined IIRC. People are spending more money on games than they ever have.
Games that sell, yes, but you’re only counting the hits. Most games released do not break even. Most projects do not get released. Only a tiny fraction of games made make any money, there’s a metric frickton of failure to fund. That’s why devs don’t make that much, even in successful studios. Games are a fricking crazy way to make money.
>Games that sell, yes, but you’re only counting the hits
The initial statement is about games sales relative to the sales of products in other mediums. What's the use in saying
>akshully most games are vaporware or release to modest sales figures
when you could say the same about any product in any part of the entertainment industry?
Why? You can get paid a lot more and have your love for vidya untainted by working in the industry.
Just build your own game in your spare time.
>I know this is one of those fields that doesn't have to deal with hordes of jeet programmers because they don't have the intelligence for it and they can't fake their way into a job. So if I just spend time studying linear algebra and writing low level 3d game engines from scratch, am I basically guaranteed a job in this industry or is there still a lot of competition even at this high level?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_India
The awnser to your question is you do need to be relatively good at the practical level and confidently good at the theoretical level. Lastly do not be moronic and be someone who you would assign to micromanage jeets. So be assertive and have some knowledge of what you are talking about.
Remember what happened the last time Rockstar outsourced game development to jeets?
>How good do you need to be at programming and math to get a job working on 3d game engine dev at a AAA studio or something similar?
Go to their websites and ask them.
What the frick use is it asking these braindead dorks on Ganker?
Come to think of it, asking here proves you will not get a job doing 3d games. You are mentally unfit
Already 20 candidates for this:
Strong knowledge of C/C++
Strong interest in rendering algorithms
Good knowledge of all low-level graphics APIs
Ability to debug graphics using pix, renderdoc or similar tools
Strong understanding of real-time and multi-threaded systems
Good time management and organization skills
HOW DO THEY EXPECT ME TO KNOW VULKAN + DX12 + PROFILING + MULTITHREAD SHITTTT
I JUST GRADUATED, I ONLY KNOW OPENGL, IT TAKES ME A MONTH TO HAVE A GRASP OF MODERN RENDERING TECHS FOR SHADOWS!!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
install gentoo
They don't expect YOU to do anything. They want someone who can make their overcomplicated trashfire run well enough to ship, i.e. someone who has done that before, preferably on several games.
>I know this is one of those fields that doesn't have to deal with hordes of jeet programmers because they don't have the intelligence for it and they can't fake their way into a job.
If you want to be hired you need to be an ignorant junior with no knowledge of skills. The industry isn't for people with skills, its for pumping and dumping as many people as possible for the lowest cost possible regardless of how shit of a product it causes
why don't you just build a game to sell yourself?
oh wait, youre not actually that good
Not OP. I've started on and will finish the entirety of LearnOpenGL (as an intro to graphics programming) then will move onto Vulkan and will stick with that. Aiming for a 3D engine with DOD, genre-opinionated.
So, when it comes to game & 3D graphics programming what math and programming subjects should I delve into? Any specific book or online course/series recommendations? Only got an Associate's in CS, so I got up to Calc2.
Soon I'll have a lot of time to sink into this.
You need to be extremely good at math and programming to be a game engine programmer. Ultimately it's a lot of trig and calculus and on top of this you need to write extremely optimized code so everything runs in real time and this is double so today when all the work is in the following fields: neural networks, real time raytracing, large agent simulations and complex physics.
You really don’t need calculus unless you’re writing your own physics engine, which no one does these days. While there’s plenty wrong with Unity and Unreal, PhysX and Havok are fine. It’s definitely handy but I’ve yet to need it and even veteran coders who specialise in working with game physics look at me funny when I talk about maybe needing to learn calculus.
Trig/3D math/vectors you need a ton of, yeah, though it’s actually pretty easy once you had the hang of it.
>How good do you need to be at programming and math to get a job working on 3d game engine dev at a AAA studio or something similar?
Very good.
don't do gamedev if your only reason is not wanting to work with pajeets. it's a fricking grind with constant crunch and deadlines. gamedev is for people who are too passionate and moronic to do anything else. it's not some "hur dur i get to play games all day" kinda job, it's very high stress as far as programming jobs go
Get a job in the govt instead. It's comfier there + you don't need math.
> am I basically guaranteed a job in this industry
no, you're competing with the most autistic people in the industry, people who put their life and family on the line for some shitty soulless game. You're not gonna make it if your only motivation is avoiding jeets and wbeshitters.
What you need to do depends on what area you're going for, but generally you have to make a game. A complete game, with some substance, not a copypasted snake game from a tutorial. Dicking around with a low level graphics API and making a triangle is fine if you want to do engine dev (which is extremely niche) but it's a waste of time otherwise. Also right now it's even worse than usual, there's layoffs in the gamedev industry too, and most of them aren't hiring any juniors
>get a job working on 3d game engine dev at a AAA studio or something similar
Why would you want to? The pay is shit and the hours are long.
> I know this is one of those fields that doesn't have to deal with hordes of jeet programmers because they don't have the intelligence for it and they can't fake their way into a job.
Not true at all and that's part of why games run like shit these days.
>I know this is one of those fields that doesn't have to deal with hordes of jeet programmers because they don't have the intelligence for it and they can't fake their way into a job.
holy mother of cope, you're definitely not ready for the real world if you thing engine devs are any special.
there is NOT A SINGLE field without morons crawling around the office.
>So if I just spend time studying linear algebra and writing low level 3d game engines from scratch, am I basically guaranteed a job in this industry
No.
you over estimate the field, it's not that special programming-wise, if anything, they're stuck in the past and ignore progresses and newer AND BETTER tools that everyone else adopted but them.
this is one case where being stuck in the past is NOT a good thing, you definitely don't want to deal with C++03 or older, or to use whatever proprietary garbage lib based on openAL with an even worse doc and API.
I still have friends who work at various big studios, we often talk about our jobs and holy shit I'm glad I left for defence.
>or is there still a lot of competition
there is competition, like everywhere else, if anything there are much more morons like you with inflated egos who think they're special because they can compute external product or some shit.
>even at this high level?
it isn't that high level and they mostly hire young people, I've worked on some engine for a very big studio and the oldest dude around was 29.
they're squeezing young people dry while underpaying us until we leave so they can hire the next wave of modern slaves.
turnover in gamedev is insane, you definitely won't make it your career, I can guarantee it.
if you know the meme about finding 40yo devs, you can safely use 30 instead for gamedev, you won't find a more soul-crushing dev job.
avoid gamedev, try companies that build engines for 3D movies instead, much better work conditions, less soul-crushing, more r&d-oriented with a better salary.
>if you know the meme about finding 40yo devs
What meme?