What was your dream growing up before life kicked you in the nuts/vag?

Khane_sl said:

Anyone who believes there's a job out there that fits the "dream" description is fooling themselves. That video Borzak linked from Mike Rowe is so spot on.

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I agree with Rowe's overall point, but I don't agree that it's 100% true in all cases. There are lots of people out there doing their dream job, or something close to it. But they're probably only a percent or two of the population, if that.

For me growing up, as others have said, I didn't have any one single thing that I thought would be a dream job. But I thought it would be pretty damn cool to be a fighter pilot (saw Top Gun when I was like 6, fuck yeah), or to make video games for a living, or to be an astronaut, or maybe a race car driver. The usual shit that boys dream of. Unfortunately Canada has maybe 100 fighter pilots in the entire country, so that wasn't a likely option. I did go in to engineering, and after the first general year specialized in computer engineering. But I didn't even make it through the first term of the specialization. I quickly realized that it just wasn't going to be what I'd thought it was, and I also had shit study habits from high school, so out the door I went, and ended up in the family construction business instead. And I knew I wasn't superhuman, so I was never going to be an astronaut or an F1 driver.

I wouldn't say life's kicked me in the balls, at all, though. I don't much like what I do on a daily basis, but on the flip side, there's basically no realistic jobs that I'd much prefer over what I'm doing right now anyways. I mean yeah, it would be awesome to be a heli-ski guide in most respects (100+ days a year of powder? Fuck yeah!). But those guys get paid a pittance, live in vans down by the river, and work their fucking asses off in a high stress, high consequence environment with a bunch of stuck up Europeans as the majority of their clients. So yeah, maybe not such a dream job, after all. On the other hand, while I don't like what I do 40-60 hours a week, outside of that I pretty much do what the fuck I want to, and I'm very financially secure. I'm more time limited than I'd like to be, but hopefully I'll be able to start taking steps back over the coming years as I train other guys to do most of what I do.

Tenks_sl said:

I think the number of people who if they won the lottery wouldn't just quit their jobs is an absolute tiny amount. Regardless of what you job is there is something that annoys you and if given the option of being able to leave and do whatever you want while still maintaining financial freedom would be impossible to pass up. Even the hosts on Mike & Mike said if they win the lottery they'd probably quit. They acknowledged they love their jobs but unlimited family time and not having to obey a schedule would just be too nice.

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heh, if I won the lottery, even if it was only a couple million, I'd be out the door so fucking fast. I'd tell me bro he could have my shares in the company for damn near free in exchange for having as short of a transition period as possible, and I'd be somewhere in the mountains a couple months later, never to return.

I would still do the thing I do, however i would not be doing it WHERE I am doing it. I would do more consultation outsource part time type of deal. I couldnt go to the beach or sit at home without going a little stir crazy. I really would like to take a few weeks/months off and tour Asia and Europe, stay in some nice places, eat some great food, basically do the Anthony Bourdain thing.

Lyrical_sl said:

Given that the person who offered me the job is no longer there, and the company has changed hands, I'll say it. I was offered a job as a dev on DCUO about five years ago (back during the server hack). Given I'm such a rabid comic book fan and MMO player, it would have been a dream job for me. But I told them, my business is established, and I'm able to live well. I saw how many devs they've run through over there, and didn't think I'd have longer than a year. To me, the weirdest thing about that industry is that people only work on projects for one to two years, and then move on. I'm in my 40's and have only worked for two Employers after college. I just told them I appreciated it, and that I was available to talk about the game at anytime, and I kicked myself in the ass over it (and still do).

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It really started to feel like DCUO had 3 devs, and only 1 of them was semi-permanently assigned to the game itself. The others were being pulled around the stable and might hit DCUO once every month or so. I forget what it was exactly, but I remember every patch broke some trivial thing. But it was the exact same trivial thing. There was something deep in the game that had been done in some alternate way, and the standard they were using broke it every time till that one guy hotfixed it.

That was the only call that could be made. If you'd been like 20 fresh out of school or something it might have been an opportunity. 30+ and established it would have been a silly offer to take.

I didn't know the Iggles were industry!

My first programming class on uni was to filter out everyone who joined computer engineering but didn't like coding

They're generally pretty novel programs where you don't dive too deep into memory management. Like I had some credits to burn so I just took the C class at my college (it was really only for the EE people) and it was stupidly easy even though I was a Java/C# developer at the time. My AP CS classes in high school were all C++ and I don't remember having to delve that deep into the ugliness that can be some C++. But most people who can't/don't/won't be developers can't even understand simple concepts of nested loops and n-dimensional arrays and things like that -- which was mostly what my C class focused on.

C++ was the intro to CS course at my university as well and I'm pretty sure the final project was to create a blackjack program. It was a joke.

We had CS101 which was the intro course and basically just covered OOP principles and very basic programming. CS102 is where we covered pointers and memory management and things like that. I think that's typically how most universities do it.

The final project for my AP CS class in high school was to just make a game. No real guidance beyond that. We used the CMU graphics library which I guess you could say would be a worse version of Swing. This was back when I was all about counter-strike so I made the "Counter Strike Simulator" which was basically just a graphic of a CT that would pop up, juke around and you had to shoot it a handful of times to score a frag and it would shoot you every so often. It was actually kind of fun to play. I put it on my school's shared network drive and it had over 500 plays which I was somewhat proud of. Anyways the moral of this story is I had no idea how to use free() or really anything to do with memory and still did it. So these intro programming courses really are just to get the people who can't grasp basic logic out the door.

And here I sit.. the one guy actually writing in C professionally..

A success story, if you will

Noodleface_sl said:

My first programming class on uni was to filter out everyone who joined computer engineering but didn't like coding

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I ate that shit sandwich and continued on like a shit eating shit eater. I didn't have a teacher who spoke English until 2nd semester 2nd year.

Khane_sl said:

C++ was the intro to CS course at my university as well and I'm pretty sure the final project was to create a blackjack program. It was a joke.

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That was my exact final for high school computer science, I would of been bummed if I had to actually pay money for that.

Iannis_sl said:

It really started to feel like DCUO had 3 devs, and only 1 of them was semi-permanently assigned to the game itself. The others were being pulled around the stable and might hit DCUO once every month or so. I forget what it was exactly, but I remember every patch broke some trivial thing. But it was the exact same trivial thing. There was something deep in the game that had been done in some alternate way, and the standard they were using broke it every time till that one guy hotfixed it.

That was the only call that could be made. If you'd been like 20 fresh out of school or something it might have been an opportunity. 30+ and established it would have been a silly offer to take.

I didn't know the Iggles were industry!

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Which era? DCUO had the largest dev team for years at SOE. At DBG, I've lost every contact I've had. And it's clear, they are not staffed where they should be.

You dodged a bullet. Dcuo is one of the worst games I ever played