Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: James Russell Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Advice needed! Date: Wed, 05 Aug 1998 17:15:29 +0100 Organization: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Lines: 52 Message-ID: <35C88521.2DCE3E9@scee.sony.co.uk> References: <35C8656E.EC8288B0@nospam.easynet.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: mailgate.scee.sony.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5b1 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en Phil Gooch wrote: > > Anyone have any useful advice? Well, the best advice I ever heard was "Find a job you love, and you'll never work again for the rest of your life." which is certainly true (but it doesn't mean I don't do any work here at Sony! :O) ). Most people dream of doing their hobby for a living, so if you program the Yaroze for fun, imagine doing it and getting PAID for it too! There's about 5 or 6 professional PSX developers on this site, and I'm sure they'd concur the following: The Bad News about the games industry: o Remuneration (i.e, pay) isn't fantastic _in_comparison_ to some of the jobs you can get in IT. Not everyone will be creating the next Tomb Raider. On the other hand, you can get £100/hr programming Lotus Notes, but your life will suck for 8 hours every weekday. o You can spend years honing your skills on a platform (say, Saturn) which dies a horrible (and not very lingering) death. The Good News about the games industry: o The job is intellectually stimulating and challenging. You're always learning something new. That's something many IT jobs don't offer. o You get the chance of worldwide fame! o The demand for programmers is huge. The fact is, you'll probably be working in the computer industry for the rest of your working life. Once you learn one language or skill, its very simple to pick up another. So by learning C, you can pick up C++ and Java very easily. From there its a simple step to Visual Basic and many other languages. Similarly, once you learn Yaroze and the 3D concepts that go with it, it's very easy to pick up Saturn & Nintendo operating systems, because they're all quite similar in many respects. It all snowballs after a while. Once you've hit a 'critical mass' of knowledge about computers and operating systems, you'll find that it's very very easy to learn new systems, so don't worry about painting yourself into a niche career. Having good low-level knowledge of computers is even better, because knowing those fundamentals in turn increases your knowledge of how OS's, languages and applications work. As for the degree, some employers consider it gives you a lot of credibility. Not only does it mean that you know the fundamentals, it also shows that you can stick out 3/4 years at university, which many people don't/can't. I would say that most people who went to university believe that most of what they were taught was out of date and impractical, but that it did give them a good grounding in the fundamentals of the software engineering process and the linear algebra required for 3D work. Cheers, James -- == James_Russell@scee.sony.co.uk +44 (171) 447-1626 == Developer Support Engineer - Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Where there's a will, I want to be in it.