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Comment by Syntaf | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but envy the engineers in this article as I sit here, procrastinating my fulltime career as a glorified CRUD engineer with complementary soft skills.

Maybe the grass is always greener, but it just sounds like an incredible opportunity for anyone working on the Valorant team. You get to solve challenging, interesting problems that hundreds of millions of users will benefit from, that's just so cool to me.

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I generally agree that "the grass is greener" is common for IT people I think. It's a huge field, and you hear about people doing cool things all the time.

But on the flip side, that one cool thing might be the ONLY thing they do, all day, every day, which might not be as cool after 6-10 years.

But I do think your point about benefitting large numbers of people is a strong motivator..that's partly what academia relies on to keep employees as below-market rates -- the mission oriented drive to make the future better. I don't mean to poke at that issue specifically, but it's a great example of how teachers, etc. will continue to work for pennies as long as they can afford it (it's almost abusive).. but that drive is a critical part of their personal happiness

> But on the flip side, that one cool thing might be the ONLY thing they do, all day, every day, which might not be as cool after 6-10 years

Yeah, sometimes I think I'd like to be a systems engineer and work on databases or similar but then I think about that being 100% of my work and realize I don't desire that kind of job.

This stuff seems fun until you realize it means you're choosing to specialize in something pretty niche. I prefer being a product engineer working on web stuff for now until I find something worthwhile specializing in.

The pressures at game studios are often very high. These game studios prey on people/gamers to “do it for the passion”.

Probably different at Riot? Not sure.

But companies like Blizzard/Activision and some smaller companies were described as very toxic environments.

Riot has a notoriously toxic work environment, and recently has had massive rounds of layoffs[0]. And it’s extra bad for women, like at most game studios.

[0]: https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update - 11% of staff let go

Talk to people who have actually worked in the games industry. It's terrible.

One of the things about a blog like this is that this isn't one persons job; it's the equivalent of something like this [0]. It's a design tenet of the application, and an engineering culture of the team.

[0] https://www.figma.com/blog/keeping-figma-fast/

NDA,

You're ever chasing the mouse. If it's not some hacker, it's some bug. If it's not a bug than its a feature and then all three.

Directors want results, 24 hour of stressful debugging to discover why some new person can now shoot through walls, creating a patch, replicating and ensuring it doesn't exploit or nuke any other feature and pushing the patch out without effecting gameplay is stressful. Partly why Overwatch had real-time patching abilities on each game.

You don't get downtime, no sitting on tickets. Hacking costs revenue and you got to ensure your work is correct.

Wake up the next day and start all over.

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