- College may have been a faster-paced work environment than you're used to, but it wasn't as much of life-changing experience as a real job. In college, you can still go out with your friends and skip a certain class or be late on a project if you want to. In a real job, you won't be able to be going out to movies every day or sleep in late. You will be on a strict schedule and will, at many times, have to sacrifice your personal life for long hours working to finish a deadline. This is why it is good to start making friends with other professionals or people who have real careers, as they will understand how busy your schedule is and choose activities that will work around your schedule.
- Nearly every studio has it's own tools and game editor. This is troublesome when most of the time you've spent in college was using the Unreal/UDK editor or Unity or some other popular and streamline toolset. There are many bad and convoluted and archaic editors that some studios still prefer to use, because it is cheaper for them to develop them in-house and programmers prefer having ownership and knowing the tools better than having to learn one of the other mainstream packages. So, much of your time in a new video game job will be learning to troubleshoot issues and how to access features that you know are in other packages. Your workflow may have been catered around a specific set of features that will not exist in a proprietary toolset, so you will have to change your work practice drastically and learn new hotkeys and methods to do your work. It is basically reinventing the wheel.
- There is not as much pressure to please your professor like their is to perform well for your boss/lead, so you probably didn't have your professor constantly telling you to finish your work or making sure you knew when you made a mistake. You have to expect this from a boss, especially if you haven't work an "real" job before (meaning service industries like a grocery or technology store). The best way to deal with this is to double and triple-check your work, even if it takes a little bit longer to turn in. It will look better in the long run that you didn't have to be corrected every time and your work has a reputation of being clean. One of the worst things you can do in a big AAA development project is breaking a build. If your check-in is so bad that it prevents other developers from doing their work, then it costs the studio a lot of money and makes those people unhappy and you will be put on high alert and will probably be given less important tasks until you can prove that you won't break another build in the future.
- When you enter a full time job the intensity of working is cranked up about three levels. The work is faster, you have to learn skills that you probably didn't even consider as part of your job description, and everything you do is put on a time limit. This means that prioritization and problem solving are two of the biggest requirements of your daily routine. Problem solving is more important than being creative, since the people who are more veteran and the leadership is usually in charge of coming up with the ideas, and most of the time you will be solving problems with tools or making sure a quest is not broken with the latest code check-in or that the existing art isn't over the memory budget, etc. You want to add your creativity when you see a solution when others don't, but you shouldn't be opinionated and trying to run the show at meetings or complaining about aspects of the game that you don't like openly. The general rule is to provide solutions, not complaints.
- Get ready to take full responsibility for your work. You can't use the excuse of "I don't know how to do this" as frequently as when a student or intern. People understand if you don't know how to use the tools, but if it is an essential skill that you should know (like Zbrush for an artist or scripting for a designer) then you should be researching online yourself to find out the solution. It's great that a lot of information is free or even on Youtube now, so leverage this and learn things that you know you're weak at. This will look even better upon you because those around you will think that you've known the skill the whole time rather than having to learn it on the spot. Also, this is a good example why developers should be doing practice work at home, because you have a lot of time to fail and use trial-and-error, that way you can sharpen your sword and be prepared with heightened-efficiency at work.
- You have to take initiative in order to meet people. In school, there are introduction classes and team projects when you are encouraged to work with others. In a big studio, there are tons of busy people with their heads down and comfortable doing their job the way they have without interruption. You have to introduce yourself or find a common ground with them or invite them to lunch. This means that you have to be more social than you have been in your life. If not, you will easily be ignored and eventually when you find yourself jobless you won't have a very big network to leverage or use for inside job information.
- You can't pick your boss or the people you work with. Additionally, if you talk badly about someone it may mean trouble for you and also affect your career or the amount of opportunity you have. In school, if you didn't like a professor you could easily pick a new one for the new semester. If you didn't like a classmate, you could just avoid and not talk to them. In a professional environment, you have to be able to get along with anyone, no matter how annoying or demanding you think they are. You can pick a different place to work, but this is complicated and will take a lot more time than waiting for a new semester to roll around, so you should not be complaining about people and just deal with your boss. Your boss will be used as your first reference when seeking a new job, so you want a good review or it will be difficult to keep momentum in your career. This is why "butt-kissing" is so effective, and you may not necessarily agree with this style of working, as I don't either, but you should still be friendly and pleasant around your boss instead of demanding and hard to deal with.
I could probably add many more points here but I think that this is a good amount for now. I hope that is helpful and make sure check out this article also:
-Ken
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