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> I hope he avoids a game studio initally, they chew up these guys and spit them out as spent rags into the world suffering from post tramautic coding disorder.

I can second that one from experience. On the other hand games are an excellent school and will prepare you for anything from physics to systems programming. Once you get over the burn-out...

Third.

Happened to me on my first real gig. Weekends, nights, 4 all nighters in a row.

Not a game company, but ad agency.

I kind of wonder: what happens to people who start work at a game company, but just clock 9-5 and stubbornly refuse to work more? Are they fired, shunned, badmouthed in the industry? I never hear about them--kind of like I never hear about lazy medical interns, I guess.

It tends to suck you up. You might go there with the intention to do 9-5, but as a project starts to take shape and the deadline looms you can't help but try to do as good as you can and then a little more. I think if you can't stand high pressure environments then you will self-select for something a little bit more leisurely paced.

Surely there are such people in the game industry, it's even possible that whole companies can operate on a 9-5 schedule, just my bad luck that I haven't seen any :)

> I think if you can't stand high pressure environments then you will self-select for something a little bit more leisurely paced.

It's really too bad; I would love to work at a leisurely game company. Maybe I'll have to start one :)

9to5games.com? ;)

I don't know what's normal across the game industry, but I know that Valve uses a stack-ranking system: Every year, the least-productive 10-20% of the company gets fired.

Do you have a source for that? Gaben is an ex-microsoftie, and I doubt he would repeat their mistakes verbatim.

The Valve New Employee Handbook: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

Oh, they figured out how to measure "productivity" in a largely creative line of work? Surely they're not measuring LoC #s?

Recalling another HN article I read on Valve's process, and what Microsoft's own stack-ranking system is like, I think the parent's use of "ranking" is/was literal: each employee lists all the other employees in order of what they think their productivity is. These ranking-vectors are then multiplied together to give an average ranking. So nothing is being "measured" any more than polling the populace about the length of the Emperor's nose is "measuring" it. It's more a way of saying, the justifiably least-popular 10-20% are fired.

It sounds absolutely terrible. What prevents the organization from being filled with evil people just supporting one another? How come a organization filled with quiet hard-working people doesn't outmatch them?

No, they are ranked by their peers.

> Engage with the world, find the place where you can apply positive good with your skills and do that for a while.

Isn't that called getting a job?

Depends on how you define 'job', if its something you do to make money so that you can do the thing you really want to do, no that wasn't what I was suggesting.

Engage with people outside of your Internet friends, you can do that easily at most churches, volunteers are always scarce, or with your any number of organizations in your community.

Depending on your life circumstances and the time of year you might not be in a position to live as inexpensively as you would like but the problem our author has is that he loves to figure out systems (cool) but doesn't have any meaningful systems to figure out (bad) so he's rewriting the systems he can get his hands on to burn up creative energy. And yet there are lots of broken systems that could really really use his help, and they aren't all technical.

Lets talk about Aaron Schwartz for a moment, I met him at a small conference we were both attending and I got to talk with him a bit about his aspirations for making information available. Organizing around that goal gave him tremendous focus. Our author doesn't have a mission yet, that thing he's going to do. He needs to find it, and to find it he has to stop thinking job vs recreation vs my time vs work time. He has to think, goal, requirements to achieve that goal, next one on the list. That will organize his life for him and he won't be going crazy any more.

> Buy a one way ticket to another place and work your way back, drive from the polar circle to the southern tip of Brazil.

Replacing one quixotic fantasy with another will only leave him with the same void inside him when he returns home and finds that he's in the same situation, only a little bit older. "Finding yourself" is a strategy for avoiding having to look at yourself; otherwise you'd simply say "oh, there I am" and be done with it in half a second.

Of course, the half-second version of the existential journey doesn't generate much material for blog posts.