Exact same experience, except I've never gone back to a career in game development... although I've considered it at various points in my software dev career.
While software development in general is fun and continuously challenging there's a very special excitement to looking at what you're actually doing and going "holy shit, we make games!". I've had those moments when I'm in a meeting discussing design details and considerations when suddenly it just strikes me that we're sitting there discussing how to make a game more fun and that's part of our job.
I'm also really happy when people ask me what I do for a living and I can link a flashy trailer instead of trying to describe some web backend thing for a service they never heard about.
edit: probably the biggest advantage in game development is the unique atmosphere brought about by the shared deep passion for games throughout the company.
Nice to know there's good places to work in the gaming industry. I think I'm scared due to the number of bad stories that popup now-n-then and the over-worked scenarios to meet deadlines.
I think the problem now is I would like to build a game similar to UO but unless I did it myself I don't think it will ever happen. Kinda like the plot of Mythic Quest on Apple TV. He starts his own company to make the game of his vision.
No, but all those people making "Netflix money" aren't really changing technology, are they? I'd argue FAANG is stagnating it, and telling themselves differently.
I guess if you want to make gobs of cash, fine. You could also just go into finance and make more than FAANG money if you're talented enough.
Facebook is a major contributor (sometimes the primary one) to many famous open-source projects: Linux, mercurial, MySQL, React, jemalloc, PyTorch, GraphQL, and probably several others I’m not thinking of.
They’re also one of the top AI/ML research institutions in the world with a huge chunk of the papers published at top conferences.
I'd argue that Microsoft, Google and Apple have enabled massive growth in technology. New uses for OSs, new places for them to run, and ways to make starting far more accessible/collaborative.
Even if there is 2 step forwards, one step back, the overall benefit of options available due to the vast number of people contributing their creativity is only possible due to these companies.
And you also shut down from it... I suppose calling it the Stop Menu didn't seem like a good idea, though. Making it the Windows logo does make it more similar to macOS and its Apple Menu (which does less and less over time, the opposite of Windows, ironically). I vaguely remember Gnome used the G 'foot' symbol for its main menu, though it doesn't scale down very well, so giving up on that was probably wise. For all three I tend to just to invoke their launcher with the meta key (meta-space for Spotlight on the Mac, though I like Albert personally) and type what I want instead of digging around in the menu, these days.
I would say a lot of this confusion comes from the word engineer. Building software is not like building a bridge. You can't design it first and then go and build it.
So I would say engineer is a poor term, but also the only one we've got for now.
As I see it, it is more nuanced. When engineer designs a bridge she does a very similar work to a programmer. Programing it is like designing a very complex bridge without constructing it really, because when you finished your design it had been built already.
So it is not exactly like you've said:
> You can't design it first and then go and build it.
You can design, but you cannot build.
A process of building by a design can be paralleled with deploying software -- suddenly there is a hairy real world, not all the hair was considered at the design phase, and either we hack around existing software (i.e. design plans), or call a programmer to redesign.
No it's not like building a bridge. It's like thinking you're building a bridge but then the client decides he needs it to be moveable so then you have to give it legs so it can walk. Then the client's manager decides he wants it to be able to get to the moon so you then have to strap rockets and parachutes to it. Then after it gets installed and someone finally speaks to the users you realise all they needed was a canoe.
> You can't design it first and then go and build it.
You can't design it in full in one go, but you can design it and then incrementally update said design. Sadly many (companies) do not. But you can define the problem(s), the scope, the scale, and then design a solution appropriately to meet those needs (for a defined period of time). That's what distinguishes software engineering from hacking. They both have their place. Many companies claim to do the former but are mostly doing the latter. Software is still early in its life and as various kinds of system designs stabilize, so will the formalizations around what it means to be a software developer. Reading a book like Designing Data Intensive Application's you can't help but see those formalized topics budding.
It's exactly like building a bridge... if nobody never built a bridge before.
The only reason you can design a bridge beforehand is because (millions?) bridges have been built before so you can apply the lessons learned. Even if your bridge is "unusual", it will still be similar enough to older bridges so you don't have to invent the vast majority from scratch.
Other kinds of engineering don't have the luxory of leaning on the prior experience so much, simply because there is less of it. SpaceX's reusable rocket could not have been be fully designed before built, simply because nobody built a reusable rocket before. But it could be done through iteration, which is just another name for experimentation.
Software tends to be less like bridges and more like rockets... all of which falls within the spectrum of "engineering".
In Canada, engineer is a protected title. There are software engineers and you get professors who stress to you the importance of testing and safety, and there are safety and ethical requirements. It’s not very strongly enforced though, lots of people here get away with using the title
I mean, I'm and audio engineer, a fire protection engineer by degree, and a software engineer. Your bridge building analogy doesnt hold up, there is always changes and refinements of guestimations.
Hmm, 'developer' has a cheerful kind of vagueness about it - it comes close to describing the iterative process of starting to write something one way, then realizing your original approach wasn't quite right and rewriting it. At least, I don't think mechanical engineers do that too often...
It doesn't have anything to do with specificity, the Space Shuttle was just the only manned spacecraft powerful enough to get out to Hubble's orbit and back, and that had an airlock so you could actually access Hubble.
The Space Shuttle is the only vehicle ever built that can do in-orbit service. It's not that the Hubble is special in that regard, it is that the Shuttle was special.
ISS has airlocks that allow you to leave without removing all the air from the rest of the ship. Vehicles like a Dragon can attach their port to ISS, board, and then perform a space walk through the ISS's airlock.
Hubble is different. It's not like it's a ship that you can board. So you need two things: Ability to attach yourself to Hubble, and ability to leave Dragon to perform a spacewalk. It's not clear whether you can just have everyone in the Dragon suit up and open the hatch. And even then, you still need to attach yourself to Hubble somehow. I think you can via the port... but then you can't leave. Unless you go out the other door? Can you open that from the inside and get out with a space suit?
My rambling isn't meant to be an actual answer. It's more to show that it's wayyyy harder than "Let's just send up some people to Hubble!".
These problems could be solved. However no current space craft is designed the right way. Maybe it is a trivial modification to Dragon (making it bigger...), maybe it is better to start from scratch. That is a question for domain experts who probably haven't given the idea enough consideration to give a good answer.
> So does this also mean that the ISS is no longer able to get serviced, or are there projects to work on in-orbit service vehicles?
AIUI, The ISS can be serviced from the ISS if the appropriate supplies and personnel are sent up, but it doesn't have the delta-V to zip around other orbits servicing other satellites, so it is okay without the the shuttle for itself, but doesn't substitute for it for other things needing orbital service.
All the operating human launch systems are just capsules meant to either free fly or dock at a station, they don't have airlocks to let people out so using them for a Hubble repair would require a lot of modification and danger to use the whole capsule as an airlock. [0]
[0] Except Soyuz I guess their orbital module would allow you to keep the descent module pressurized but it's still way outside the design so there's no telling if the module would remain operational.
Soyuz has been used for spacewalks before, and the cabin is tolerant of vacuum. They haven't done that in ages, so it's possible that's been optimized out, but I'd suspect that requirement's been respected over the years.
Neat, didn't know that. There are of course other issues like how do you keep them in proximity while you do the work that could stretch days, ships don't usually free fly that close to each other for long the Hubble missions done with the shuttle all included hard captures of Hubble with the Shuttles.
I'm in the US and have been approached by multiple recruiters who explained the the first part of hiring was a leetcode-like online assessment, and a later part of the process was a full day onsite (which I understood to be leetcode-like, or systems design questions, just like other big tech companies). I did not actually go through the process.
They might not be using leetcode.com itself, but they are doing similar things.
I've interviewed there twice and both times the first step was an automated coding assessment. Not leetcode but very similar. You're given a prompt and the expected function signature, and your code must pass a dozen or so test cases.
But again, the parent comment was it was ironic because it was posted on leetcode. If they're using some other platform there's no irony there, notwithstanding any alanis morissette-directed conversation.
The question is... what is a sane amount of alcohol? It’s surprisingly carcinogenic. It’s just the alcohol industry, much like the tobacco industry of yesteryear, has successfully suppressed this info.
This is what I keep thinking about. I feel it’s going to get even darker on the internet when these influencers have to begrudgingly hand the reins over as they get traded in for the newer models.
Hasn’t that been happening for a long time already? We’ve had social media and reality tv for over a decade now and plenty of people have fallen from their pedestal. The truth is that the cycle keeps getting more vapid and depersonalized so these kids will be tossed aside and forgotten very quickly.
