Ask HN: Why are game dev positions hard to find? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are game dev positions hard to find?

6 pointsandrewnc5 comments

I have been helping a number of friends who are quite competent find work. They work in the game development space but are really struggling to land interviews and progress in the process.

I understand there is randomness in the process, and a pretty severe covid inspired market contraction, but the gaming space seems to be growing like crazy regardless.

Anyway, I'm curious if there are market forces that I (as an outsider) am unaware of that makes finding work as a game developer challenging.

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I have nothing to back this claim but I imagine it is probably the most competitive tech field. When you ask people why they learned to program the answer is frequently because they wanted to make a game. Also, based on reading "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels", along with "Sid Meier's Memoir!" the industry appears to be very tight knit so having connections in the industry seems to be very important.

Games don't make money in general. A mediocre SaaS makes pretty good money, whereas games are more like the film industry where a select few make millions or billions, and 80% barely break even.

While the big ones hire more, there are probably more jobs with Google and Facebook than there are with Blizzard and Ubisoft.

And then there's the fact that many people already do games in their spare time. I started with games at 13, still code a little on them on weekends, and I still have no foothold in the industry. Someone who started making games at 15, took a game dev CS degree, and does some in their spare time... they're going to have a lot more advantage than the average person who works 40 hours/week.

Game development is too narrow a field when you ask people who want to work in game development. There are lots of companies that do games that game developers don't consider to be game development. There are also a lot of companies that do interactive systems or gaming systems or augmented reality or puzzle systems. Some of this is in research, some of it is practical, some of it is war games, some of it is simulators. There are companies that do gamification of trivial tasks. If you expand your definition of being a game developer there's lots of work out there.

Total anecdotes, but when I last did the interview gauntlet it included some game studios and I found the hiring pipeline was bisected for the engine/dev tools and games themselves. I was looking at jobs on the former because of my experience, but they pretty consistently hire. The latter seems like a crap shoot where you have to get contacted by a recruiter right around the time the studio decides to throw bodies at a game.

I've had zero luck with blind applications, every interview I had came from headhunters who sought me out.

I did interview for a very well known game studio and it had no engine questions. It was all problem solving, e.g. why our design doesn't use ammunition, or write optimized pseudocode to find a spot for the AI to go to.

I really like those kinds of interviews as they test work-related skills immediately.

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