Over the last few months, I have been meeting so many programmers who said that they got into programming because of video games. So I decided to ask about this on twitter and frankly, the responses kind of blew me away.
The Tweet
You can read the thread here - https://x.com/_svs_/status/1821438228777357383, but suffice to say it went kind of viral and was full of amazing stories, some of people living life very much on the edge of legality, but the best summation of the whole thread is this -
The Outcome
And so I decided to explore this video-game-to-programmer pathway a little bit by....playing more video games. Luckily it was the summer holidays so my son could join me on this quest as well. He was playing Elden Ring and I was playing God of War Ragnarok (again). And I found so many reasons why video games are unreasonably effective at creating good programmers. So here goes
____________________________________ But before that, here's a couple of highlighted roles for my best clients:
If you haven't yet heard about the legend that is Sharad Sanghi and the team that built NetMagic in the late 90's and sold it to NTT, you should definitely do so. Here's one place to start - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSdt02fDuS8. They're hiring for a hardcore Linux sysadmin (think old school iptables maven) to help build an AI cloud for enterprises. This is giga-engineering, deep tech and in Mumbai, so if you're a Mumbai export to Bangalore and yearning to return to the city of dreams then this is a perfect opportunity for you.
If you're the kind of builder that is looking for a complementary entrepreneurial skillset - you know, sales, marketing, product, finance - then I have a really nice seed stage role for you. SARAL is run by Yash Chavan and he's bootstrapped it to a healthy ARR using contract developers. Now wants to take the team in-house so they can scale and raise and so is looking to hire a head of engineering. In my brief interactions with Yash I found him to be a solid entrepreneur who builds, ships and sells. There is enough proof and it's early enough in the lifetime of the company for this to be a very interesting opportunity for builders.
And since y'all all want to work at places with PMF, here's one for you. STAGE - OTT for Bharat. There is one amazing story of grit and determination to get here but if you're in NCR area and happy to work out of NOIDA, then this is an interesting role. Growing like gangbusters and looking to solve for scale. Check out their job postings on their page.
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...and now back to the video games :-)
Love. a.k.a obsession.
It is love of video games that led people to find out how to crack games, how to edit game configs to get OP, how to set up a Minecraft server - none of this would have been possible without the hunger to see something they loved come to fruition in the real world. Programming then was a means to create the perfect reality.
And contrast this with the 'default path' of making clones of things or doing projects handed down from a course and you will see that the energy of hacking video games is completely different from the energy of writing a Netflix clone in React. And the difference is the emotional investment in the outcome. In the latter you are learning concepts. In the former you are birthing a new world. And it is this instinct, this realisation of your power to birth a new world that is the programmer hubris that all good programmers have. The language then becomes a tool. It is important but not all important.
Power. Now that you've tasted the ability to change the world to your liking, there arises a hunger for more and more power. And this path to more power is a very well known path to gamers. You start of on level 1 and you're brute forcing everything, then you level up and need to understand the game mechanics and weapons in order to progress and at higher levels there enters an element of strategy in the boss fights. The quest then becomes to always make the task easier and easier by learning more. Sounds familiar?
This is what programmers do when they learn. They start with some procedural code, brittle and flimsy. When it fails, if you do not have the gamer instinct, you might feel like you didn't work hard enough. But the gamer does not fall into this trap. The gamer starts looking for knowledge, secrets. 'This shouldn't be so hard', they think. And they are right. It shouldn't. The reason it's hard is not because you're not expending enough effort, it's that you don't know enough - and so off they go looking for knowledge.
Aside - you should see my son fight in God of War. He is calm, centered, minimal movement and his in depth knowledge of the weapons and the moves makes his fights look like ballet - creative, elegant, effortless. All the qualities of a good programmer.
This shouldn't be so hard is basically the mantra of programmers. Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, said that the three most important qualities of a programmer were intelligence, laziness and hubris (arrogance). In other words, the arrogance to say this shouldn't be so hard.
So the next time you find programming hard, try and solve it the way gamers do - by deepening your understanding of the system and the mechanics that govern it.
All good gamers know that every boss has a few patterns that need appropriate responses. It's the same with programming.
