Comment by IceMetalPunk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IceMetalPunk | Hacker News Reader

My response to the post title: abso-fucking-lutely. I just passed my 4th year in the fintech industry, and am incredibly burned out and, yes, disillusioned. I'm currently about to take my first steps towards switching careers into game dev in the hope that (a) I can actually find a job in that field and (b) it'll be more fulfilling and less soul-crushing, as a result of being both creative and more aligned with why I got into programming in the first place. I don't know if it will, but I need to try some change or collapse internally.

All I can say is, if you go into a field you don't like, it will take a mental toll. My suggestion is to try applying to developer relations roles; they may want someone with more experience, but that doesn't mean that's all they'll accept. It's worth at least putting in applications to make yourself an option, and if they say no, then you're no worse off than you started.

In my journey, I'm currently trying to learn Unity as my "foot in the door" skill for applications (all my previous game dev experience has been with pure JS and Game Maker Studio, which no game dev company seems to be looking for), but I'll be applying before I really have experience with Unity anyway just to put my name on hiring managers' lists.

Good luck, friend; may we both find a fulfilling way to pay for the food we need to survive! :)

If you're burned out from fintech, what's drawing you to game dev -- one of the other famous meatgrinder industries for software developers?

I'm probably biased by my own experience, but if you've only worked in fintech... please give tech a second chance! I worked at one of the most famous fintech companies in the world for my first few years in industry, and I absolutely understand how it can burn you out and disillusion you. But I assure you that switching to a medium-size tech company that builds open source products for developers really refreshed my perspective on tech.

I'm currently at one of the biggest fintech companies in the world. I understand that game dev is at least as much work/grind, but the key difference is that it's creative. Even if I'm not making the top decisions, you can't develop a game with zero creative input; whereas I've spent the last 4 years implementing other people's function-first designs for a webapp, and the most creative things I've done here was implement a search filter and add an unrequested multiselect input to a form. And I'm not even exaggerating that.

I've been coding for 20 years now, since I was 12. I first got into programming for creative reasons, and every bit of coding I've done for myself in those 20 years has been game development or game related. It's why I got into programming, it's why I continued programming, it's why I got my degree in computer science. The only reason I didn't go for a game dev degree was because I'm not great at visual art and I assumed I'd fail the degree requirements over that. I just happened to choose the wrong game engine and language to learn all those years ago.

So I understand there will be crunch in game dev, but I'm fine with crunch as long as I can be creative during it. Coding to other people's uncreative specs is not worth the stress; coding to something I have creative input on would be.

A lot big game dev firms and even some mid-level indies will saddle you with work where most of the creative decisions have been made already and you are tasked with making it happen.

And that, my friend, is why these are the questions I will ask prospective employers during interviews.

Good luck! I hope you find happiness in the game dev space. I'm sure there are some great employers out there if you look for them. Just don't get lured into a big compensation package at a giant lootbox company that will crush your passion.

You'll have to aim for really small game dev companies, if not start your own, to have creative input that's outside of the technical role you have. Game dev is just as unromantic as fintech, once you get to a bigger project and the natural separation of concerns happens. sadly, which is why I personally dropped it when I did game dev. I was hired mainly for my computer science knowledge even though they said I could have input on other things. But you don't have a say over the others usually, since they are more experienced and there isn't time to make mistakes you can learn from. You're busy implementing stuff on a deadline as usual in dev. I wanted more creative control over the process, since I realized that was just as important to me, if not more. The small things I did where well received, so it was not that I had bad taste. So that was not for me, so be careful if you're hired for your expertise, it's going to be hard to do other things than that in a busy company, no matter what they say.

> Even if I'm not making the top decisions, you can't develop a game with zero creative input;

I'm pretty sure that, in any larger game dev company, you'll have producers/game designers for that. They can listen to your input but ultimately decisions will be theirs. It's probably different in indies though.

I'm curious since both you and the OP seem to have a similar experience working in Fintech. Might you or someone else say what is it about Fintech that is so bad? Is it cultural?

I can't speak for the industry as a whole, but for me at my particular company in my particular role, it's been 4 years of not just grind, but boring grind. And since the pandemic, upper management has continually made decisions that affect our ability to do our jobs negatively, with either no explanations or BS explanations that don't actually make sense and are just trying to use politics to toe the company line. In short, we as developers are hired for our ability to think through things logically and find why things don't work and how to make them work, but upper management expects us to be okay with broken policies without any logical rationale. With all that, and a recent crunch as we started bleeding devs (partly as a result of those policies), I need something fulfilling in order to be okay with the added anxiety and pressure... and there's nothing fulfilling about the job.

As someone who left the video game industry many years ago, I can tell you that it won't be that creative.

The real creativity happens in indie game development and smaller studios, not the "churn the latest AAA game using starry eyed low paid 20 year olds" mills.

If you want to have creativity, either find a cushy and easy boring job and make the game of your dreams on the side, or find some small indie studio working on stuff that interests you.

To GP: this is very true. The parent comment's third paragraph is a superb strategy to consider.

Of course, if your mind's made up, you'll just have to realize this for yourself, through first-hand experience.

I'm not looking for a AAA studio. An indie studio is fine with me (in fact, preferred). I know what my minimum salary is to afford my bills/mortgage/food, and I'm not greedy beyond that :)

I was one year in indie studio as art director. Yes, it is probably more creative than in AAA studio, but you never know if your game will pay your effort. So it is more like hazard.

Hah hah! Moving to game dev because you're burnt out... Smart

It is when the burnout is a result of lack of creativity :)

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