The 2025 Bum Thread
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CD Project Red were advertising on Twitter last month that they were looking: https://www.cdprojektred.com/en/jobs Poland or the US though!
Sumo Digital are looking too: https://www.sumo-digital.com/careers/
Not sure the missus is up for Poland. There is a really good job for my profile at a studio in Brno in Czechia atm which was tempting, looks like a beautiful city.
I am actually two stages deep into hiring process with a big UK studio that approached me a few weeks back. Pretty excited about this one and hope it comes off, but they are taking a while with feedback from the last stage.
Really need to get out of this fintech job, the pressure is insane and working from home it is putting my mental health in the gutter. I’m just not prepared to commit to the level they want and sacrifice my physical health and personal life for their startup.
I guess you are now finding out that indeed in some job sectors in software that 50-60 hours a week is actually expected
Honestly, i agree the work hours do not make sense and the stress and health impacts are not worth it. But i've never been successful in finding a job I'm interested in that expects less than 50+ hours.
I got head hunted by one of the new AI start-ups recently. TC of 600K USD most likely, but i could tell from the recruiter it would be a 70hour a week deal (or worse, silicon valley seems to be going for the 996 model). I'll stick to 50 hours ( rougly $400k TC, but a lot of RSUs so depends on ticker price and FX). Working consistently 40hour max would probably mean a drop to $150k, which I was considering but my family situation has changed (wife's cancer wont get better...) so I need to somehow balance more time for the children but maintain financial security with 1 less salary.
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I have a lot of time for the CEO of this company and consider him a friend, but his physical health has always taken a distant back seat to his work, and despite the multimillion pound house and private school and all the rest, he is not going to last long and will leave his 4 kids without a father in the coming few years. I find it all rather depressing and it’s one of the reasons I want to leave because I can’t be a part of that work culture anymore. It is not something to celebrate. I’ve watched enough people self destruct convincing themselves the job and the consumer lifestyle is more important than personal wellbeing.
I hope you find a balance that works for you and your family.
His kids won't remember the extra christmas presents they got, or when he came home at 8pm and they were just getting ready for bed, or the fact they had a holiday abroad twice a year when Dad was still ear on his phone or head in his laptop. They will remember when Dad missed the school play or their rugby/soccer game every week. Kids remember experiences, especially with parents, not possessions or foreign holidays when Dad may as well not be there.
Howard Stark said:
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Great choice if you want 50-60 hour weeks and more at crunch time.
Nothing properly formalised yet but will be going into a consultation period soon that I'm expecting to lead to significant redundancies being served towards the end of the year (reading between the lines on the specific terminology used I think there will be quite a lot). I expect to be one of those made redundant, because I'm relatively highly paid and am not doing anything that critical that couldn't be covered by others. Frankly it's the first time in my career where objectively speaking I feel making me redundant might make sense (it's never happened before, but there were a couple of times it was on the cards and without being arrogant, I thought it would be really stupid as I was adding more value than my relatively meagre salaries at the time).
So now I'm faced with a dilemma, do I either:
a) Start properly looking for another job and take up another opportunity if it arises
b) Wait for it to play out and collect any payout, start looking when it's clearer what's going on.
Option a) has the disadvantage of costing me money in the short term (no payout and realistically I may need to take a pay cut), but with the benefit of staying in permanent employment and 'keeping my oar in' when it comes to interviews and keeping my finger on the pulse of the job market etc. There's arguably not much to lose, like worst case scenario I don't get any acceptable offers then I'm falling back to option b automatically. It might also mean I can 'jump the gun' a bit instead of having to compete for roles elsewhere with my others being laid off at the same time, although there are not many with my skills and experience.
Option b) is a bit more risky, given the current job market I could find myself having a gap on the CV. On the flip side I suspect it could be more lucrative due to getting a payoff, earning more money over the coming months, potentially opening the door to contracting again as my 3 month notice period would no longer be a blocker. Of course there's a chance I get to stay with my current employer as I have a relatively broad experience in my field so could undertake different roles.
I have enough financial security that I can go without income for a few years without impacting on my standard of living, so leaning towards option b. I'd be happy enough bumming around for a bit if necessary, although having a gap on the CV might not be ideal. Writing this out however is making me reconsider.
So now I'm faced with a dilemma, do I either:
a) Start properly looking for another job and take up another opportunity if it arises
b) Wait for it to play out and collect any payout, start looking when it's clearer what's going on.
Option a) has the disadvantage of costing me money in the short term (no payout and realistically I may need to take a pay cut), but with the benefit of staying in permanent employment and 'keeping my oar in' when it comes to interviews and keeping my finger on the pulse of the job market etc. There's arguably not much to lose, like worst case scenario I don't get any acceptable offers then I'm falling back to option b automatically. It might also mean I can 'jump the gun' a bit instead of having to compete for roles elsewhere with my others being laid off at the same time, although there are not many with my skills and experience.
Option b) is a bit more risky, given the current job market I could find myself having a gap on the CV. On the flip side I suspect it could be more lucrative due to getting a payoff, earning more money over the coming months, potentially opening the door to contracting again as my 3 month notice period would no longer be a blocker. Of course there's a chance I get to stay with my current employer as I have a relatively broad experience in my field so could undertake different roles.
I have enough financial security that I can go without income for a few years without impacting on my standard of living, so leaning towards option b. I'd be happy enough bumming around for a bit if necessary, although having a gap on the CV might not be ideal. Writing this out however is making me reconsider.
Well, I got a rejection through yesterday. Disappointing, was definitely a bit rusty mind. It did really galvanise for the me that I’m much more motivated to get back into games than continue this fintech job….so I submitted my resignation yesterday as well.
Officially a bum again by the end of the year.
Officially a bum again by the end of the year.
Well, thoughts start drifting to what I'm going to do next.
Definitely back in the games industry.
I don't want another fully remote role, for sure.
A limited number of studies within commuting range, and little hiring at the moment.
Going to be busy for the remaining 2-3 months in this job and I want to focus on making that parting of ways as amicable as possible, so I'm not going to kick off any more hiring processes.
Seriously leaning towards working on my own game. Can't blame anyone but myself for how that goes
I've got the money to self-fund several years of development, before needing any external investment. Low overheads. Need to try and form this into more of a concrete plan and look at what a realistic timeframe is to get something that at a minimum could be put in front of publishers to secure funding to complete and publish.
Definitely back in the games industry.
I don't want another fully remote role, for sure.
A limited number of studies within commuting range, and little hiring at the moment.
Going to be busy for the remaining 2-3 months in this job and I want to focus on making that parting of ways as amicable as possible, so I'm not going to kick off any more hiring processes.
Seriously leaning towards working on my own game. Can't blame anyone but myself for how that goes
I've got the money to self-fund several years of development, before needing any external investment. Low overheads. Need to try and form this into more of a concrete plan and look at what a realistic timeframe is to get something that at a minimum could be put in front of publishers to secure funding to complete and publish.Seriously leaning towards working on my own game. Can't blame anyone but myself for how that goes
Surprised you haven't do this already.
My cousin is finally releasing his game on Steam after working on it for years on his own.
Well, it's a pretty big financial risk, when the alternative is earning (reasonably) good money as a lead programmer. Being realistic, just getting a few thousands pounds back from a year's effort would be optimistic for a first title.
Realistically I need to burn a minimum of £20k to get something released, something more than a toy demo at least. That's going self-funded, I can chase a publisher to try get investment but that's a whole other ballgame.
I need to do a fair bit of budgeting and see what's feasible. I've got the money to do it but not so much that I don't have to think very seriously about committing that sort of cash....when maybe I'd be happier just working in a studio again. Needs thinking about.
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Isn't the big question whether you have a great idea for a new game that people will want to buy? Presumably if you want to make any real money, it will need to stand out in some way from the other 100,000 games on Steam.
Not really, ideas are the easy part.
Getting something ready to ship before your money runs out is the hard part.
Really? To be clear I'm not doubting the challenges of the actual coding (plus other business key aspects such as funding and marketing). However, I would have thought that coming up with a viable, standout, new game concept wouldn't exactly be the easy part for someone working on their own.
I can sit with a pen and paper, or even bounce things back and forth with an LLM, and come up with a bunch of decent ideas quite quickly and easily. It's not the part that takes years of experience and time and money.
I've worked on five titles in my career. They've all been solid enough ideas. The problem is that the idea you start with might not survive the first prototype playtest and the feature you were pinning your hopes on being the backbone of your game loop is just bit **** and you need to pivot and try something else.
There's no science to game development, ultimately it's about putting a controller in someone's hands and trying to elicit some kind of emotional response from them through visuals and audio. You don't really know whether the gameplay 'works' until you actually get people playing it. You can deliver something technically solid and bang on your initial design vision but ultimately feels soulless and bland and suddenly you find yourself up a multimillion pound **** creek with a big team burning money real fast and a core game loop that doesn't work. Yikes. Got that T-Shirt
People not in the industry think it's all about coming up with a great idea and going to a publisher to get it made. Nuh-uh. No-one's interested in your ideas, they are worthless. All they care is about have you got a team of people that are capable to executing on that idea and delivering a quality game......that's *really* hard, and why the industry in a bit of a state at the moment with all investment drying up after the covid binge when all these VCs thought games was easy money.
Officially a bum from the end of the month. Hoping a startup opportunity is acted on by the end of the year otherwise I'm going to feel a bit lost.
3 months PILON (only gave the staff notice I was going today, they wanted me out by the end of the week!), full holiday allowance paid which is basically another month and redundancy for 10 years. Should be stable until I figure out what to do next.
I've tried doing a couple of online courses and a few in person recently but I'm struggling with the gap between how simple the courses offered are vs how challenging using the concepts in real scenarios really is.
3 months PILON (only gave the staff notice I was going today, they wanted me out by the end of the week!), full holiday allowance paid which is basically another month and redundancy for 10 years. Should be stable until I figure out what to do next.
I've tried doing a couple of online courses and a few in person recently but I'm struggling with the gap between how simple the courses offered are vs how challenging using the concepts in real scenarios really is.
For AI - you can download the AI and run them locally. If possibly use a virtual machine and then download into that (it keeps everything in one place). You can practice prompts etc easily and the local AI will work without a GPU too.