{"id":299,"date":"2008-02-04T22:46:12","date_gmt":"2008-02-05T02:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rakkar.org\/blog\/?p=299"},"modified":"2008-02-04T22:46:12","modified_gmt":"2008-02-05T02:46:12","slug":"blizzard-hiring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/02\/04\/blizzard-hiring\/","title":{"rendered":"Blizzard hiring"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tI heard from 3 unrelated sources today that Blizzard<\/a> is on a mad hiring spree. I’ve never worked there but from what I’ve heard<\/p>\n

A. They pay hourly, 9 hours a day max, with 1 hour of that overtime
\nB. They pay up to 40% of your yearly pay as a bonus (not sure if this is true, or how true it is, or who it is true for)
\nC. The work is easy (at least on WoW) because you are tweaking a game that’s already done.<\/p>\n

They are only a couple of miles from where I live too. The problem is I don’t see anything on their job board I am well qualified for. I have too much experience for their network programmer position. Tools I could do, but I don’t know C# (though I could learn quickly enough). Also, I’m sort of ambivalent about working on tools, since that is most of what I’ve done in my career.<\/p>\n

Looking over their listings makes me think of what kind of job I would like to do. In my opinion here’s how things rank:<\/p>\n

Most to least enjoyable<\/p>\n

Graphics – You get all the attention from the big wigs
\nAPI – You get to design systems
\nAI – See above
\nGameplay – Fun to do a good job and make a good game, but can be high pressure
\nAudio – Easy to do, low pressure
\nPhysics – Moderately hard, low credit and visibility
\nNetworking – Very hard, doing a good job means people don’t complain.
\nMaintaining systems – Who likes guessing at bugs caused by other people?<\/p>\n

Best pay to worst pay:<\/p>\n

Graphics – Highly specialized, high demand
\nNetworking – Highly specialized, critical in games that do MP
\nAI – Everyone thinks they can do it, but if you have experience you can get a higher price
\nPhysics – Many middleware libraries drives down price
\nTools – Slightly specialized
\nGameplay – Not specialized
\nMaintaining systems – Grunt work<\/p>\n

Difficulty<\/p>\n

Networking – Takes less knowledge than graphics, but much more thought and bugs are harder to fix. Everything is asynchronous.
\nGraphics – Requires lots of up-to-date knowledge, great math
\nAPI – Doing a good job is hard, which is why so many do it badly
\nMaintaining systems – It’s all about experience at reading other’s code, which is hard
\nGameplay – Average
\nAI – It’s not hard, it’s just a matter of designing what you want before you write it
\nPhysics – Lots of APIs out there, just integration
\nAudio – Lots of APIs out there, just integration<\/p>\n

Probably I would like to do graphics, but my skill isn’t great enough to get a job doing that on its own at the pay I usually get. It would be good to do this in a training capacity again. After that gameplay or AI. There’s too little demand for API authoring, and usually lead programmers take that upon themselves. Speaking of which, I’ve gotten 3 interview offers for lead programmer over the last few months. Galactic Melee really helps on this point. Maybe one of these days soon I’ll be moving up on the industry.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard from 3 unrelated sources today that Blizzard is on a mad hiring spree. I’ve never worked there but from what I’ve heard A. They pay hourly, 9 hours a day max, with 1 hour of that overtime B. They pay up to 40% of your yearly pay as a bonus (not sure if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}