How I Became a Game Developer with No CS Degree!

hey what's up guys a little bit of a different video for you today today what i'm going to be doing is sharing my story on how i went from making about 28-ish thousand dollars in retail to making over a hundred and something thousand dollars a year as a software engineer slash game developer so um if you're interested in uh what i have to say i will be sharing with you my advice for making a similar transition yourself in the future so hit the buttons and let's get right into it so to start my story uh as a little bit of background i've been programming most of my life i started programming when i was like 11 did some c plus sucked at it because i was 11 and then did some web development did some modding for midtown madness too uh put my stuff on a website and then i went to high school in high school i did visual basic six and uh some java at the end once i left high school i did a couple of years of a cs degree while i did the first year of a cs degree twice one in one school one in another school i needed to work full time to pay for my apartment so i ended up dropping out of university and um working retail for the next six-ish years which is where our story begins so my story starts in i'd say early 2015 um i recently acquired an oculus dk2 and i've become obsessed with virtual reality like just straight obsessed i've been working on my dk on vr stuff mostly with unreal engine and um my friend one of my friends from one of the universities i went to contacts me and says he had an investor in vietnam so um he says he wanted me to come out there work on vr stuff what i could work on whatever i wanted he'd pay my flight they would pay my living expenses and everything sounded really cool now it was really long complicated story that i don't i don't want to go into right now if you want the full story leave a comment down below i'll give it to you it's uh 13 pages long i wrote it out yesterday anyways i got the vietnam things were kind of okay uh worked on vr for the first month uh then my friend who contacted me went home and i took over what he was doing which was cloud computing stuff at this point i had very little experience with real development real development so i um onboarded really quickly um basically i taught myself overnight and got a demo working uh fixed the investor relations so that i was getting paid at this point uh two thousand dollars an hour an hour i wish two thousand dollars a month um two thousand us dollars a month so i should mention that uh when i was working in canada before i went to vietnam i was making 14 an hour as an assistant manager at 7-eleven a month after i got to vietnam i was making 2 000 u.s dollars per month which i believe is more than 14 an hour canadian anyways so that's that was my progression within a month uh i took a risk i got to vietnam i only had a thousand dollars in my bank account had no way to go home and i didn't know anybody so when my friend decided to go back home for his own reasons that we won't get into i i was i'm not gonna lie i panicked a little bit so fixed investor relations had money and i worked on that project for about a year now during that year we built a bunch of different things we iterated quickly because i was still like i was still really green here and kind of like pulling pulling stuff out of my a um so uh i learned kubernetes and mesos and docker and google cloud and i hated azure and i hated aws and i still kind of i still kind of do but i built a fairly extensive project in golang they're using golang for the back end rethink db for the database and react for the front end and i actually i i like that stack i i coined it the ger stack um grr that substantial project took me through uh about a year um yeah for about a year that's what that's what i was working on and after about that year my the person i was working with i call him my partner at the time um he wasn't he wasn't particularly reliable he would live at the office he wouldn't shower and he had a bad tendency of completely tearing down all of our stacks to experiment or change directions uh without asking without warning and while i wasn't even in the office so i'd come in the morning and i wouldn't have my i wouldn't have my my instances running so i would have to completely rebuild our stack every more multiple mornings and then and then get a little bit of development done and then rinse and repeat the final straw was one day he went to china with investors money uh with the mandate to buy a bunch of computer equipment for the office and what we were doing also the investor had other projects he was working on and he needed equipment for that too my partner he went to china with the money came back without the money and without any hardware and with a lot of excuses at that point i was like you know what i'm done here i can't i can't keep carrying everybody and um eventually i don't want to get i don't want to end up dead in an alley somewhere because uh a slightly sketchy vietnamese investor um thinks that we ripped him off which was not my intent i've i don't want to deliver the project so i wrote a nice letter of resignation told him like sorry i my brother's sick which was true he my brother needed surgery i went back to canada for a little bit and then returned to hanoi now at this point early on in my vietnamese adventure about a month then i met a girl as one does and [Music] um in june 2016 when i quit uh working for these people um and i returned to canada i was still dating this girl and actually we had been talking about actually getting married so i returned to vietnam and i started freelancing the freelancing was hit or miss i did a wordpress plugin that generated word search puzzles i created an android app with react native which uh was like a tinder-like app for with the algorithm in the backend that did like product matching or whatever um i created a docker image where you could spin up an image of an ubuntu server with the vnc running so that you can with just google chrome so that you could bnc into just a google chrome hosted somewhere which uh which was pretty cool it worked out pretty well i should mention at this point that throughout the entire prog process uh early on when i was working on my vr stuff before um before working directly for the investor and then during my work with the investor i also did youtube stuff throughout there i did some uh that's one you would have seen uh i don't know i think it's still up my unreal engine with leap motion and um yeah and my yeah mostly i believe my unreal engine with leap motion stuff uh that's all from that era um when i left when i started freelancing um i had actually been contacted by someone who saw those videos and wanted me to work on a virtual reality desktop application because you like the way i did the windowing in with the leap motion stuff so uh that's when i started working on dream desk vr which ended up being a six to eight month long project i don't remember exactly how long i think we released in six and i had a couple months of bug fixes after that um it it released to decent reviews most people were happy with it some people ran into issues and my guess was just not not very powerful hardware maybe maybe amd graphics cards did worse than in video ones i don't know um but we he wasn't able to continue funding development so it quickly fell behind on features and bad reviews started stacking up it's still up today i'll i'll show you a link i wouldn't recommend buying it at this point because it hasn't been updated in so long that it i tried using it it doesn't it works it works but it that the controls don't work with the valve index unfortunately which um it's unfortunate if i select the code base i i might go in there and fix the controls but um so i built that and i did that until the end of 2016 where i got married to my no my beautiful wife after my wife i after my wife after i got married i spent about a month month and a half not really doing anything not working my wife took a month and a half off too we had we we had enough money saved up so that we could just kind of relax and enjoy the first month of our marriage before you know getting at each other's throats uh um but yeah uh everything was going well but at that point i was having trouble getting freelance jobs yeah and i wasn't finding contracts so i i ended up getting contacted by uh packet publishing to do a couple of unreal engine courses um one was mastering unreal engine um and the other one was multiplayer 3d platformer for unreal engine or something like that uh those those were really fun to to to make i would not recommend working with packet but that's another story um that you can ask me for down below um so i got those job that that ended up paying me like three grand up front and uh royalties which i didn't see for didn't see any royalties for a while and i wasn't finding any more jobs um so um at that point it was we decided that i'd move back to canada um or we would move back to canada not not just me and i started looking for a job uh in the top in as a professional programmer right so um it didn't take long apparently this work i did for that year with the investor was valuable it was on github i was a lot let people people could see it it was all open source and i ended up getting position with a company called embodix they end up getting bought out they're called snow software now but i got hired by a company called embodix and i was getting paid 110 000 a year which i asked for 80 and they came back with 110 i think the recruiter i was working with um upped my ask because he knew i could get more which you know what sometimes recruiters good stuff so at this point um yeah i was working at embodix for a year uh well eight months until april 2018. so um yeah so i i moved back to canada to work for them in august 2017 started working for them in september and i was let go from that position in april 2018. um i think it might have even been march 2018 but it was only a couple weeks before my wife joined me in canada now i lost my job according to them uh because they were phasing out my position is what they called it i believe however is that um i posted a spicy meme in the random channel on slack and it had caused the storm i think they didn't like the fact that i didn't apologize for the meme that i apologize i offended somebody um but yeah they they ended up letting me go a few days after i posted the meme the cto got mad at me hr called pulled me in and asked me a bunch of questions it was no fun uh but either way i learned my lesson no more memes and slack so i was stressing out at this point i had no job and my wife was leaving her country to come and join me which she was not impressed with the way things panned out but luckily enough getting that good job was not a fluke so uh shortly after um shortly after my wife got it got here uh i got an interview for a software engineering position at cisco uh i got a job offer at cisco for roughly the same amount i was making before so let's just say 110 and uh i was there for about three years so first i started off as a contractor um then i needed we were buying a house so i need to be an employee to prove to the banks that i could get a mortgage and then i got hired on directly through cisco instead of through the the consultancy i guess consultant agency is what you would call it um directly to cisco and work there for another year so in total i was there for three years and at the end of july 2021 was my last day at cisco now i am moving to a game development company finally and this is uh basically what i've been aiming for for a while now so basically since i was 11 i want to be working in games so i'm extremely stoked to be doing it that being said i'm not going to share with you the company yet i mean obviously i can tell you what is but i haven't started yet too so i'll just uh keep that under the belt i'm getting paid more than i was um at cisco yeah uh it's good so that was my story of how i became a software engineer now it's unconventional not everyone will have the upper opportunity to move to vietnam or move to another country where costs are low and you're able to take risks or throw out everything you own and stuck just pack two luggage and take off i understand that but there are some things that you can take from my story and apply to yourself the first one is that you need to be able to take risks if you're going to change a career i know many people who stay in a job for far too long because they're afraid of failure everybody fails sometimes and that's okay secondly i highly recommend that you try to find something that you're truly passionate about for me it was vr um vr pushed me into programming in my spare time which led to people noticing i was programming again to which led me to an invitation to go to vietnam which led me to where i am today you can tell me i'm lucky but you know what i didn't give you the whole story it was not easy um there was an incredible amount of hard work not enough food not having an apartment for a little bit and being in a country with no way home so it wasn't easy to say the least another thing i would recommend if you want to really make a living at this and not be not take 10 years to get there one is to build something really substantial and unique um too many people are going into interviews these days with either a basic to-do app uh which you've seen plenty of videos on youtube telling you just make a to-do app make sure it has login make sure it has a database and everyone's going to hire you that's all they need to see it's not true at least not anymore everyone we've seen we've seen a million to do apps don't don't give us that crap also uh one thing i've heard a lot of people are making cobid tracker apps these days i don't know if there's a youtube video out there that's telling people no the 2021 thing to do is to create a kobit tracker well i mean specifically you need to make it unique so that they know that you can take a description a set of requirements and turn it into an application without needing them to tell you every step of the way finally my last advice to you and this is something that i believe and i've heard other people say is don't take junior positions just don't do it they're the same job as a real and like real engineer position the only difference between the job description of a junior and a job description of a regular engineer is like 50 000 a year and honestly if you can do one you can do the other don't settle yes you might not be able to be applied at every job but if you go if you go into the hiring process with a base salary that you're willing to take we're worth a lot more money than thirty forty thousand dollars a year we're worth more than eighty thousand dollars a year and if you're good at what you do you're worth a lot of money good companies are willing to pay you what you're worth lastly if you're new to the industry and you especially if you don't have a cs degree build your portfolio and reach out to recruiters you're never going to get past those automated application filters i still don't get past those automated application filters before you have experience and especially if you don't have a degree and you don't have a portfolio you're never going to get past an automated screening so when you submit your application to these companies on linkedin or on or directly through their websites like the cisco website has their own thing and amazon has their own thing they basically look for keywords and if you don't have the keywords or you don't have the experience you don't have the education they don't even like it basically auto deletes your your resume right so reach out to recruiters you're going to make more money because one recruiters get paid more if you get paid more you're going to get better contacts because they have direct connections with people actual employers and you're also going to have someone in your corner so the benefit main benefit of a recruiter is that he's going to be like i talked to this guy he might not have a stellar resume but he has i've spoken to him he's a really smart person he knows what he's talking about and you know what talk to him i believe that you're going to to think the same thing i do and oftentimes hiring managers will give you that chance because of a recruiter that you wouldn't get otherwise one thing that i know my wife was concerned about um and you know it's a legitimate concern is that recruiters you're making less in your potential because recruiters are taking a cut off the top which is true and not true at the same time so recruiter generally from my understanding will get paid a one-time commission of a percentage of your yearly salary after you've gone past the probationary period or something like that now in theory you could say that well that thirty thousand dollars could have gone directly to my salary but assuming that you're an employee who's going to stay for at least three years that thirty thousand dollars the one time payment and is cheaper than paying that ninety thousand dollars if you say three years right so i don't think you're losing any money by going with a recruiter it's kind of like if you go with a mortgage broker um they will get a commission from the bank but you're not going to get a worse rate right so it's kind of the same thing but in the end that's actually my my story that's where i'm going to end it today it's gone on for a while and if you enjoyed uh this story and you want to learn more about either my story or get some more insights into the field or any of that there's a bunch of stuff down there do it do it now and i'll see you next time

Channel: Ozzadar

Views: 398

Keywords: game developer no cs degree, gae developer no cs degree, gale developer no cs degree, Gael developer no cs degree, software engineer no degree, game developer no degree, change career no degree, software engineer no cs degree, how to kickstart your software engineering career, software engineer career, software engineer, software engineer career path, software engineer career change, no degree software developer, no degree no problem, computer science, game development

Id: CisgnVBfKGA

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021