i.
the bungie layoffs obviously aren't about me, i didn't get laid off, i've never worked at bungie, but i am a game developer who's been without a job for over a year now so it makes me think about stuff. not to toot my own horn too much, but you see what i post on here, i've got career skills out the ass. i do all this shit! i'm a good programmer, a good writer, i edit video, i make music and know my way around audio production for podcasts and stuff, i can do all this shit and it doesn't matter at all! once you become an adult you kind of have to realize that it's all a lie, everything your parents and teachers told you as a kid was a lie because the truth is too depressing: it doesn't matter how hard you work or how smart you are, you're fucked from birth just the same as a medieval peasant.
ii.
it's weird because everyone knows that their life is hard and miserable because they weren't born into wealth. and yet when i talk about how i've been unemployed for more than a year and i can't find a job, people always go "really?? you're like the most talented person i know." they still have to on some level believe that your life is somehow under your control, that there's something you can do, that you have choices that will make your life either better or worse. we all live in the brutal cult of deserving. if your life is going well, you must believe that you deserve it, or else you are a monster. it follows logically that if someone else's life is going poorly, they must deserve it. i see it in the eyes and hear it in the voice of everyone who knows me. my existence is a momentary lapse of reason.
iii.
i am haunted by a tweet from years ago by someone who i will not name but who remains a scene darling to this day where they exasperatedly condescended to people who work in games about how they could be making so much more money if they just worked in tech instead. they moralized about how much we were doing ourselves and everyone else a disservice by letting ourselves be exploited like this. first, fuck you. second, we don't work here because we want to. i've said this before in another post but no matter how much you see our work as being similar to work as a web developer or whatever, web companies don't see it that way. work at a games company is resume poison. employers outside the games industry see it as basically a toy job. it's not much better than being unemployed. in fact, it can be worse: i have been explicitly rejected from multiple software engineering jobs because my history of game development experience led them to believe i would abandon them as soon as i got an opportunity to make games full time. i'd be more angry, but they're not wrong. what can i say, i crave a job that doesn't actively make the world worse.
iv.
the longer you're unemployed, the less employable you become. every interviewer asks you why you haven't had a job for so long. i don't know! it's your fucking fault. i didn't choose to be unemployed for a year, you did this to me. maybe i don't get jobs because my seething hatred for job interviewers seeps through. they don't need to do that shit. they don't need to bring you into a zoom call to watch you squirm. they do it because they're twisted sadistic freaks. they ask you shit like "so why are you seeking full time employment after being independent" like they don't know the fucking answer. it's because i need money you fucking asshole! if anyone who has ever interviewed me asked me a question because they actually wanted to know the answer, that's even more damning, because that means they're insanely stupid. "why do you want to work here," because you'll pay me. "walk us through how you would solve this technical problem," look at my github you fucking clown. every job interview is a meeting that could have been an email.
v.
many of my friends are freelancers and there's this constant gnawing tension whenever we talk about work. they know that i could do anything they do, and i know they could do anything i do. it's a game of social connections, not of skills. whenever you hear about a job opportunity you'd be insane not to snatch it up, because jobs don't grow on trees. you never know when you'll need your savings to get you through a dry spell. no real friendships can exist under capitalism. your gain is their loss. their gain is your loss. freelancers are starving buzzards. when you die they will eat your corpse and feel nothing.
vi.
i had a conversation the other day with a friend who said that one of the reasons he left is software engineering job to work in games was that his software engineering job was too easy. none of the things they asked him to do were hard. that's really the thing that drives me the most insane. games engineers are some of the most talented programmers on earth. they make absolute miracles happen on a daily basis, and get paid peanuts. web programmers are fucking clowns who take json from one api they don't understand and feed it into another api they don't understand and then take home 200k a year. i had a friend who went to a code bootcamp to learn ruby and javascript, then got hired fresh out of the bootcamp and within a year was promoted to a senior role and was making more money than i could ever dream of working in games. i'd been a programmer for like six or seven years at that point. we don't really talk much anymore. this is a major reason i am insane: i have to interact with so many people who get paid double or triple my salary to do shit that's way easier than anything i do and act like i don't wish they were dead.
