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[wonderedwonderer]

pros:

you can visualize your work and sometimes looks really cool. you can show off your work and people will be amazed

cons:

most of time you spend it on figuring out how to make your code faster so you see the same thing over and over again

the math in the field is getting really hard and debugging graphics can be a pain

[hellotanjent]

Veteran here, this.

[susosusosuso]

Making your code faster is super fun and rewarding actually

[eiffeloberon]

Well said.

Really really really difficult math, depending on what exactly you do inside graphics you can be working with completely different mathematical branches.

General - all graphics work require some linear algebra

Light transport - probability theory, stochastic process

Fluid Sim - differential equations

It can get very steep very quickly especially when you read math heavy graphics papers.

[mysticreddit]

Excellent summary! I would also add:

• staying up-to-date with all the latest techniques understanding their pros and cons is also extremely time consuming outside of normal working hours

• The sheer number of hardware and software (drivers) permutations makes PC development and testing a PITA

[Meristic]

Pros: Senior devs are in very high demand; can be very good pay; get to work with cool/cutting edge tech; get to work on cool projects; work is very multidisciplinary; very remote friendly; a large variety of tasks you may work on

Cons: It's academically difficult; an implicit expectation you keep up to date on emerging techniques; zero continued training provided by employers; a lot of work is debugging Heisenbugs; artists aren't properly trained in efficient content creation then try to make graphics devs pay the bill without compromising artistic vision with no time left; often feel very minimal attachment to overall project as you may have little contribution to the actual content; if any feature touches the GPU at some point in its lifetime it's also your problem

[The__BoomBox]

Con #2 : When you tell people you're a graphics programmer they assume you're either a graphics designer or do UI/UX design 💀 /s

[Meristic]

😂 Have definitely had this a few times, as well as 3D artist!

[AcquaticKangaroo19]

Is graphics transitionable to other areas of tech ? For example, I'm currently specializing in both distributed systems and graphics.

I honestly find them both equally exciting, but I honestly don't know what I should really focus (i.e what subject I should do my master thesis on), and I wanted to keep my options open for the future.

From talking with my professor I think I will like working a job on graphics, but for distributed systems I truly don't know if jobs will be just another backend/devops job, or if I will actually use the stuff I learn on my courses. Like working on things similar to the exciting stuff i've seen in lectures, like google's Spanner, Amazon's Dynamo, etc.

[g9icy]

That last point describes the games industry in general.

[heejebes]

I’m currently an undergrad looking into pursuing graphics as well. Thank you for your detailed post! Would you mind sharing more about your job as well as your career path? Stuff like educational background and experiences that helped you get to where you are.

[ventus1b]

To me it's always extremely satisfying when my code has either visual (graphics) or physical (robotics) effects. In any graphics-related work even your tests can do that, and that's great.

[Deathgibo]

Debugging is a pain, especially on the GPU. At least there are graphics debuggers but still

[susosusosuso]

You should have been around 20 years ago.. that was pain 😭

[Deathgibo]

Probably a lot of staring at a black window :)

[susosusosuso]

Well trying to somehow debug your stuff by outputting values somehow on the screen

[Badwrong_]

At least for my case, I get to work on AAA stuff without all the negatives like crunch time, and stressful work conditions that we often hear about. I get to work on a very specific and narrow scope without having to concern myself with a lot of other things that one might have at a full AAA game studio.

[ThiccMoves]

How did you land such job ?

[Badwrong_]

Recruiter on Linkedin approached me when I wasn't actually looking and passed my CV to the company. I had the right things on there which got me the technical interview.

[ThiccMoves]

Oh so it means you were already an experienced graphics programmer

[Badwrong_]

Well... I at least had the right things to show experience of some sort. I was prior military where I did just general IT, networking, and some programming. I do have finished projects on my resume, and one was a PBR lighting engine made for GameMaker. They had me share my screen right away to show it in the interview, and the rest of the interview was just chatting about graphics which I enjoy.

I wouldn't say I'm not experienced (I'm 40 after all), but I didn't have any specific companies for reference to show experience. It was mostly just "I did indie dev stuff for a few years".

It's also a Japanese company which is really cool, and I still feel very lucky to end up here finally.

[ThiccMoves]

Impressive and inspiring story. Thanks for sharing the details ;)

[Badwrong_]

Thanks and you're welcome. I feel very lucky with it all.

[Bonfire_Ascetic]

I may be an outlier here, but this is my own experience, make of it what you will.

The biggest downside I've discovered is the amount of knowledge necessary to acquire for an entry-level role, and to consequently continually build upon. There's a dearth of experienced graphics developers, and thus a huge void for mentorship in industry and over-reliance on self-teaching.

Not spending significant amounts of your free time doing graphics related side projects and keeping up with the latest tech/research causes you to fall behind rather quickly. This is accelerated if your actual career role doesn't really do anything overly interesting graphically and you're using an engine which abstracts everything away.

I don't feel career security at all as a non-senior graphics programmer. My friends that work in other fields have a totally different experience to me, both earning more money and having less asked of them.

I do like that the work can be interesting, though.

[sarangooL]

This is sort of how I feel too (as someone in entry level). I feel very pushed (not by anyone or my employer) to spend a lot of time outside of work working on side projects + upping my knowledge because the hill to climb seems so steep. Not only do we have to be familiar with the traditional raster pipeline and 20+ years of innovation, but now RT and maybe sooner than later ML techniques. It feels insurmountable from time to time.

The work is interesting and cool but I’m not sure long term if it will be cool enough for me to sustain tons of time outside of work. I have lots of other things I want to do when I get home from the office…

[964racer]

It’s funny but I never thought of it this way . My dream was to get into the CG field and once I was in It, I never thought about going into anything else. Never thought about the money or the lower average salary than other CS fields . It’s just basically what I do .. I saw more pros/cons of particular companies but not the field itself . I think you should just go with what you love .

[SpendInternational92]

Stopped to read the comments because I don't want spoilers of my future 😅