HN user
Gameplay Software Engineer at Riot Games
Riot Games | Los Angeles, CA and St. Louis, MO | Full-time, ONSITE | Multiple positions
We aspire to be the most player-focused game company in the world. We were established in 2006 by a couple of entrepreneurial gamers who believe player-focused game development can result in awesome games. In 2009, we released our debut title, League of Legends, to critical and player acclaim. Over 100 million active monthly players.
I've done paid work in C#, C, C++, Objective-C, Python, Java, Javascript, x86 Assembly, a variety of flavors of SQL, Silverlight, Actionscript, Go, Node... Probably other things off the top of my head.
The thing is, I'm only really good at C# and C++. Most of the above languages use similar paradigms and just have some different syntax. The skill I actually want when I hire people is willingness to work on something they don't understand really well and get better at it. It takes a long ass time to get to very high levels of proficiency (where you understand all the underlying details of how memory works and the odd little bits about the compiler/interpreter/runtime) and I DON'T operate at that level with most of the languages I "know".
Many jobs don't actually require you to use windbg to track down issues in the .NET garbage collector. Situations like that are also highly varied and it's not something you can 'train' for, you just have to cultivate the skill of constant discovery.
People talk a lot about AI replacing a bunch of professional occupations but to some extent I've always internalized that as some futurist BS that might eventually happen.
Maybe it's going to happen a lot sooner.
It does, actually, it's just that a) nobody uses it and b) any time it gets brought up people rail against Microsoft for trying to tell them what to do with their computers.
These guys tried really hard to disrupt the domain business, even if they didn't always succeed perfectly. They made mistakes, but this kind of thing is how growth happens for entrepreneurs. I wish them good luck.
I find this about basically every Wikipedia article on a math topic. They are very precise - but basically completely useless for learning anything about the topic.
Unrelated fact: Desire2Learn likes to employ large quantities of first year CS student interns.
This is one of several reasons why most developers don't announce a game until they have a reasonable chunk of it done.