[gfodor]

Sure, and a fair one! I think there are a number of tradeoffs you can make when taking on a new project:

- Will this make me happy?

- Are the people involved good people I can enjoy working with?

- Will this develop my skills in the way I want for my future?

- Will this enable me to open doors later that are shut now?

- Does this have a positive impact on the world?

- Will this have a long-lasting impact?

- Is this ethical, will it be used for good or evil?

- Is it something that I can be proud of? That I'll tell my grandkids about?

I've been lucky enough to work on a variety of things all of which stretched these constraints in wildly different directions. In each case I've tried to push things towards a happy medium when it was clear things were tilted too far in one direction. I'm quite happy with what I am working on now, as it is with a great team, provides good technical challenges, and has a positive, real impact on thousands of people's lives in an ethical, positive way, while potentially having a long term impact on building sustainable, local economies as a whole.

The point of my post is not to 'judge' people doing things they enjoy. It's to point out that it's important to keep in mind these tradeoffs and be honest with yourself. At any point in my career I like to think if you asked me where what I was working on fell on these lines, I could give you an honest answer. I think there are many engineers who blindly follow technical problems wherever they lead, without thinking of the larger picture.

My original post was pointing out video games certainly, for the most part, fit into these tradeoffs in a common way. (Again, I am talking about applied software engineering in video games, not all facets of video games.) If you're working on fascinating computational geometry algorithms for the next game that lets people run around shooting each other in the head, I think you know where what you're doing falls on these dimensions, and I think it's important to know if you're comfortable there. (Yes, I play and love Quake 3.)

It's hard to phrase these things without people taking it personally, but I've known many engineers that wake up 10 years into their career and realize they've been working on incredibly interesting technical problems which are being applied to things they aren't really too stoked about.

[dan00]

"My original post was pointing out video games certainly, for the most part, fit into these tradeoffs in a common way. (Again, I am talking about applied software engineering in video games, not all facets of video games.) If you're working on fascinating computational geometry algorithms for the next game that lets people run around shooting each other in the head, I think you know where what you're doing falls on these dimensions, and I think it's important to know if you're comfortable there. (Yes, I play and love Quake 3.)"

Ok, you're saying, that you don't judge, but are doing it the whole time.

Your definition of meaningful is very simplistic. It's like saying, that exertion could be without catharsis. No, they can't be without each other. If they can't be without each other, than both are meaningful in the same way.

[gfodor]

The term 'judging' is a loaded term. It implies that the person doing the judging thinks less of people that are being judged. That isn't the case here. How could I? I've written video games and play them all the time.

If I had said something along the lines "working on your college degree is a better use of your time than gambling your money away in a casino" I'd not be 'judging' gamblers who do so. I'd be judging the acts themselves and how I see their relative merit and the rewards they'll bring the person doing them. I'd also be stirring up less controversy.

It's disappointing that people in this thread have tried to attack me personally or twist my words to be interpreted as 'judgements.' I don't think it's controversial to say that playing video games excessively is, in the long run, not the most rewarding endeavor. The question is, does this extrapolate to making a career of the construction of games themselves (exclusively on the software engineering side, the topic of this thread.) I happen to think that it does, particularly when I look at all the energy and talent that goes into creating them and the draw they have due to the fact that our generation was raised on gaming and that it offers enticing technical challenges.

[johnyzee]

I would rather tell my grand kids that I made a cool game that a lot of people had a lot of fun with, than try to explain how I helped an insurance company limp along without succumbing under the weight of their legacy IT architecture. Or contributed to make the world a better place for advertising. Etc. That kind of thing is how most programmers pass their lives.