I recently hit a milestone in my professional career – it’s been exactly 9 years since I made a move into games industry. This may not sound like something profound or significant but the circumstances of my transition from regular software development were rather interesting. I think it’s fair for me to say I was quite lucky and found myself in the right place at the right time. Today I want to share something I always bring up when talking to students or people who want to get a job in games REALLY bad but don’t know who to ask or how to start. This is the story of how I unintentionally and accidentally started making in games.

Even though it’s been many years, I can still remember my first days in school after I started education as a little kid. I truly admired and looked up to teachers who, to me, were the living embodiment of knowledge. I think I was really lucky because I was taught by people who truly had the calling and for a brief moment I even wanted to become a professor myself. However, as the years passed on, I developed a feeling that I would not make a good person to share what I know with others. My patience was low and I found it tremendously difficult to discuss things that were obvious to me but a novelty to others. Becoming a teacher turned into a nightmare job for me and I quickly realized this is something I want to stay away from as far as possible.

It’s that time of year again – recruiters on LinkedIn are starting to send out messages and job ads faster than anyone can read them. This is something I think every tech person experiences after spending substantial amount of time registered there. What suprises me is that a vast majority of people I know despise getting this kind of mail which, at the first glance, seems contradicting to the purpose of being on a professional social network. While different people may have different reasons to being registered on LinkedIn, I seem to have a rather unpopular approach of treating it as an opportunity to possibly land my next job – something that happened to me before, twice. With that being said, I accept all contact invitations unless the account is clearly recognized as spam or completely unrelated to my line of work (and that doesn’t happen very often).