> After starting college I soon learned of the trials and tribulations of software engineers in the gaming industry.
Graphics is used well beyond the games industry! Anecdotally (talking to friends, getting recruiter emails, etc) Apple, Facebook, NVidia, and Google have been hiring like crazy for non-games graphics-related positions.
Google's comically bad at hiring for it though so I wouldn't count on them. When I interviewed there after having worked on graphics extensively at Apple and other places, they asked me how to load balance real time search suggestions and I failed, obviously.
Ohh I agree, but I had an entirely differn't experience.
I went through round after round of interview, passing the interviews without problem. But the team I was interviewing for wasn't able to get the information they needed, because I was just getting general CS interviews, so they kept trying to schedule more interviews.
Eventually Amazon reached out, I had some interviews and accepted a position within 2 weeks. I had to tell Google I wasn't going to do any more of their interviews.
They really need to improve their interview process for specialty positions, it really seems optimized to get recent CS grads into generic roles.
You don't understand. Interviewing at Google is not about recruiting outside talent. It's about making the inside talent feel special when we blow off another qualified candidate.... I was one of those special-feeling interviewers with 32 onsites and zero hires (I recommended 10 by the way). I finally quit that shitshow and left Google.
I started by writing games and game engines as a teenager (now ~14 years ago), reading "Real-time Rendering" and the "OpenGL Superbible". I've done a lot more with computer graphics since, writing pixel shaders for fun, building a web-based domain specific CAD tool (for a client) etc. Also been doing some computational geometry stuff more recently.
I haven't had much luck finding positions for 'graphics programmers' though. I've found things like 'lead engine programmer' for game companies—which is a bit out of my league, IMO.
But I'd love to work on things like the VR youtube player that Google did (doesn't have to be VR; 3D UI design is interesting to me regardless). Don't how to find these sorts of positions at companies like Apple/FB/Google etc., where I would hope they pay quite well (comments on that also welcome!).
A few projects I can think of requiring graphics programming at Google:
* Fuchsia was looking for graphics engineers at some point. I can't see a listing about graphics right now but maybe you could start as a mobile apps SWE and slowly move into graphics if you build the right contacts.
* Lots of Stadia jobs require Vulkan / OpenGL and general graphics knowledge, there maybe some of these offers that may be attractive for you! [1].
BTW I'm pretty sure even for specific roles as graphics programming, Google still hires generalists, so expect the same grind as everybody else has on the interviews (that is, whiteboards, algorithmic questions, etc etc).
Perhaps I just got lucky, but I started my first games industry job almost a year ago and I've been doing graphics work for the vast majority of that time. I came in as a regular junior level Software Engineer, mentioned I liked graphics and tools development, and was mostly given graphics work as a result.
I've also been writing engine/graphics code for fun since I was a teenager, my copies of those books are 3rd edition and 5th edition, respectively :)
The other large companies should have similar postings, and obviously games studios.
The harder thing you might run into though is they are generally pretty senior roles, with expectations of quite a bit of existing rendering knowledge, so it can be hard to get a role straight into rendering. My suggestion is to try to find a general role on a team supporting a rendering product. And then to slowly move into that type of work.
Huh. Well, it has been a couple years since I last looked, but nothing turned up for me before.
> My suggestion is to try to find a general role on a team supporting a rendering product. And then to slowly move into that type of work.
Not sure if that's in reference to my background or just a general comment. I do have about three years experience doing graphics programming professionally (1 year computational geometry), and many more doing it as a hobby, so working my way back up to it is not exactly an appealing prospect.
I could potentially see that being sensible for me though, depending on details about the job not included in the description. Graphics programming is my deepest specialty, but I am primarily a generalist.
For example, here's a video of the CAD tool I architected, built (the features shown), helped design and hire other developers for etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e21tqZebl60
I am actually concerned that the skill set involved there won't be easily usable to by Google scale companies though--that they'd prefer to have a few specialists for the different aspects of the project instead. So maybe this isn't such a good direction for me.
> Not sure if that's in reference to my background or just a general comment. I do have about three years experience doing graphics programming professionally (1 year computational geometry), and many more doing it as a hobby, so working my way back up to it is not exactly an appealing prospect.
It was mostly a general comment, but I think an important one. I've been a rendering specialist for about 10 years, and I still occasionally encounter the "rendering" role that expects me to have more knowledge of some special type of hardware or something, and I end up being under-qualified for, it's just that kind of field I guess.
Not really unfortunately :/ We were basically winging it without really digging into the research or anything, except for computational geometry algorithms.
Also many random smaller niches. I've been programming 3D graphics for machine learning (grabbing labelled data between videogame and D3D), for enterprise (too much 2D data + latency requirements, only 3D hardware did the job), for GIS (a competitor of google street view, image processing), for video broadcasting..
Programmers are generally much better off than artists in both VFX and Games. But the worse pay and bad deadlines and time management proliferates in both fields.
Graphics is used well beyond the games industry! Anecdotally (talking to friends, getting recruiter emails, etc) Apple, Facebook, NVidia, and Google have been hiring like crazy for non-games graphics-related positions.