I started recently as an SDE with a startup. It’s terrible, 60+ hours of work. Being forced to do full stack when I applied as a backend dev. Comp is bad, shit benefits. And overall terrible work culture. I’m in the process for Interviewing for a software tester position at epic. It’s basically half the pay but the benefits and everything else might be worth it. How easy is it to climb up the ladder there? I’m planning on staying for couple of years max before going for a masters program. #gaming #epicgames TC: Terrible don’t ask.
Epic is big enough that it varies a lot by team. In general though, speaking as someone who works with their engine/tools and works closely with some of their core tech teams, it’s fairly easy to move up and around in games including Epic. In general the games industry pays less. I don’t know how to fix that, but it is what it is right now. You don’t work in games for money. You do it for the people you working with and to work on interesting problems. The other thing to understand is the tech of the games industry. It’s built very different than the rest of the tech industry. It’s a mess. You don’t really get to build things from scratch, it’s always built on top of previous tech. Basically no one builds a new game engine. UE5 still has code that is old as sin. Epic is one of the worst for this. There are so many hacks built on hacks. If you care about clean code and modern coding standards, then the industry and Epic are not for you. Even new things Epic builds, such as their new build service called Horde, are full of hacks, hard coded secrets (found an active Slack web hook a few months ago, a users current password a few months before that), and just generally it’s a mess. I love the games industry though. Worked in a great other industries, always find my way back to games. I wake up and want to go to work. The people are awesome.
Do you want to be a dev in the end?
Yeah.
I haven't personally seen many folks make the transition from QA -> Dev. May be better to wait out for a better offer unless you're really interested in joining that industry.