[fastbeef]

I did the same journey as you are about to embark on a year ago. It did not end well.

The job itself was titled "scrum master", but the description read more like a team lead/product manager role. I've done a little bit of both and was interested in exploring this career path and I jumped on.

The recruiting was not what I was used to. All in all I had 8 interviews over a course of 6 weeks. They focused heavily of my personality and I did a lot of self-assessments. No coding or case studies. When I reached the end of this I was so fatigued that I forgot to do the due diligence of my part, this turned out to be a BIG mistake.

- first and foremost, i inherited a team. If this is the case with you, MAKE SURE YOU CLICK. While I get along with most of my team on a person-to-person-basis in a team setting they've been working as six one-man teams for several years and Weren't interested in changing that.

- make sure you can tolerate the product you're building. If I had joined as a developer i would have quit within a week. This has an impact when you need to defend it/the team to the outside world. How much belief in the product can you fake?

- you will be alone. Your team won't be your friends anymore and neither will the managers above you.

Long story short, after almost burning out a second time in my life I resigned and am now looking for new work.

[Danihan]

What was wrong with the product / team?

You didn't know what the product was when you started?

[fastbeef]

Without going into details, the product was started 10 years ago by one of the programmers whom I suspect wanted to be a game developer, so the product is filled with gamedev patterns and due to a tech choice it's not possible to migrate to a modern architecture without rewriting the whole thing.

[herval]

Would be funny to see, say, an enterprise software filled with gamedev patterns. Would you care to elaborate on any of it? What kind of patterns were specifically glaring/out of place?

[logicallee]

you're right, that does sound pretty funny. "the database backend was actually on the GPU - it was all in openGL, just in case. We were Mobile first, too - got 1 GFLops on iOS. Unfortunately we sold irrigation controllers for large farms."

[fastbeef]

You don't know how close you are...

[partisan]

I can imagine someone using component entity systems where they don't exactly make sense. I worked with a manager who considered using it, under a different name and not tied to game dev, in a very LOB application because he thought the requirements were changing too rapidly to manage in a traditional way.

Another possible artifact would be a custom memory allocator or patterns around memory or object management that make no sense in an application that isn't memory constrained or allocating large amounts of objects in such a way that is causing a bottleneck.

Maybe the programmer was unrolling loops in the name of maximizing performance where it wasn't actually required.

I am sure there are plenty of other signs a game dev hopeful would leave in a code base if left unchecked.

[WalterBright]

One pattern is a high tolerance for "good enough" results or even wrong results, as such errors don't particularly matter in a game.