UIBuzz - Software and game development

Peter: 00:00

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the UIBuzz podcast. In this one, I'm gonna talk about careers, and just take this as always as my opinion. Right? Nothing says I'm right, nothing says I'm wrong, this is just my opinion.

Peter: 00:15

And I think that these days, we all know that the state of software development is rapidly changing, I think is an understatement. It's been that way for a while, but now more than ever, and that's for many different reasons. Right? I mean, of course, there's the AI discussion. There is the discussion of companies laying folks off in big numbers.

Peter: 00:42

And also from the perspective of developers, there's the angle of you've just had enough or you decide, you know what, I'm done with this BS and I'm gonna do something else or move on to another company, move on to another technology, and all of those kind of things. And also, you know, on top of that, you read reports of folks getting wage cuts and and all this kind of stuff. Right? The short TLDR version is, yeah, it's really shit to be a software engineer lately. And I think the perspective that you gotta take here is do what you need to do.

Peter: 01:25

Forget the right, the wrong, what everybody else thinks, what you desire something to be. I mean, in that case, don't, you know, don't let your dreams die, but they've gotta take second place to the thing of you need to do what you need to do. Right? We all have a career. We all have bills to pay of some type or another in various quantities, but at the end of the day, that's arguably what matters the most is is staying afloat, staying in the game as it were.

Peter: 02:02

And for that, you've gotta you gotta let some of your maybe self imposed rules go a little bit and say, okay. You know what? I'm gonna use an easy example here. I don't like AI, but my company that I work for is moving AI, and I've got to embrace it. Okay.

Peter: 02:25

Yes. Of course, you can take the rule of, no. No. Screw that. I'm out of here.

Peter: 02:30

Fine. Go for it if that's your your stance. But at the same time, stop and think to yourself, okay. Do I need to embrace this at least for now to keep paying the bills? Right?

Peter: 02:44

Now is not necessarily the best time to take what I would call the the engineer moral high ground. It's more a case of survive this mess until it plays out. And, again, regardless of what it is. Right? Job cuts, AI, state of the industry, shitty technologies, whatever it is that's going on that may be affecting you or about to affect you.

Peter: 03:12

Ask yourself, what do I need to do or what do I think I can do and achieve to survive this mess until, you know, the the water calms down a little bit and the ripples aren't so big and now I can go back and look at my options and how they compare to where I wanna be. Now yeah. Okay. It's easy for me to say that. But you know what, folks?

Peter: 03:38

I could be in that position tomorrow just the same as everybody else. Right? And therefore, again, be open to some things that may not necessarily be ideal and and meet your viewpoints, but you've gotta survive and go the distance. Alright? Because the other option is you leave the area of your expertise entirely and it's gonna take you time to either train for something else, go find something else, take a massive pay cut for something else.

Peter: 04:15

Right? What I'm saying is if you're in a position where you have a choice, really think about it because all the other choices right now may not work out. Right? I have also heard from bunches of folks who have transitioned to something else, some other company or industry or whatever, and it didn't work out for them. And now they've got nothing.

Peter: 04:40

Right? And they chose to do that. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but they have to live with that choice. And, again, that's why I'm saying, really think about it. Right?

Peter: 04:52

Sometimes you gotta look and say, you know what? That that old saying, lose the battle, win the war. Right? Just putting that out there as a short episode here, but I felt that it needed saying. And I hope that this even if I get one or two people who hear this and think about it and say to themselves, okay.

Peter: 05:16

What really is the best sensible option for me personally? Then I I feel like I've I've met my goal with this episode. So that's it, folks. Love to hear your thoughts on this, by the way. You know, either way, reach out to me.

Peter: 05:30

Peter Witham dot com forward slash contact. And, hey, if you want, we can have a conversation about it. I also wanna know how it worked out for you. If you, you know, made a decision of which way did it go and you feel like you wanna share something with folks to help educate all of us and give us all something to think about, reach out to me. That's it.

Peter: 05:52

Have a good one. See you in the next episode.