How I learned to love #gameplay engineering and say goodbye to #backend (for now),

A thread about going through a tech identity crisis and transferring domains.

My first “real” internship and job had me doing iOS and backend services engineering, respectively. When hired at Riot I had the equivalent of 2 years exp with my most recent year at Microsoft being the only full time industry experience. On paper I was a junior backend engineer.

I knew I wasn’t satisfied doing backend at Microsoft. I thought it was because I didn’t connect with the product and spent the majority of time writing E2E tests. I thought my feelings would change once I started at Riot and got to work on my favorite game. Little did I know...

. @SNazerine came up with this metaphor: backend services is like plumbing. As an IC, most of your time is spent fitting the right pipes together and the coding becomes trivial. There is room for designing for scale, but for the most part there’s always an obvious solution.

Most backend engineers I spoke to who’ve stayed in this domain love identifying bottlenecks and serving things at scale. 8 million concurrent users! Platform and missions response times in sub 50ms! I had to admit none of these aspects of engineering really appealed to me.

Looking back, the most joy I got out of building things were when I worked closely with artists and designers to execute on a vision while optimizing for low level performance. I wanted my creations to look and feel buttery smooth. You don’t get that building a microservice.

An exercise my manager made me do was to stack rank all the frameworks, languages and tech stacks I’ve ever used and justify it. Graphics was high up there with services and web bringing up the rear.

Yes, you read that right. Gameplay wasn’t even my top choice.

Doing this ranking exercise helped me identify the common threads of what aspects of engineering work brought me joy, and which aspects I dread. Not everyone finds all parts of software appealing, and that’s okay.

If you love improving graphs for services, bless your heart.

Honestly that’s what makes a career in tech so enticing. You can keep exploring as long as that aligns with the needs of the company. I never intend to settle into a tech domain and think I’ve mastered everything. Maybe one day I’ll go back to backend for different reasons.

Aside from soul searching w my manager, I sought out 1:1’s with folks across Riot and the industry to understand the tech landscape and which teams would have upcoming openings and how my interests aligned with those needs. Less than 10, more than a few. Lotta research.

Also, I couldn’t have done this without a trusted network built up over time. I felt safe opening up to a manager that only wanted the best for me. A lot of my initial inquiries where people gave advice or support happened because we shared overlapping communities or interests.

Some of them are on Twitter: @heyjulesfern @bobbydigitales @eplawless @RiotJag (most aren’t). They helped w everything from explaining what they love about their fields, to being a sounding board, to interview prep.

The process from my internal jobs board application to when I received a verbal offer took a month. The first time I verbalized missing client side work to my manager was back in June. A couple times I came close to finding a team but it didn’t fit, or the timing wasn’t right.

In short: it wasn’t easy but it was worth it. And my journey still isn’t over.

Hope some of y’all find this useful as you navigate your journeys across different tech domains and #gamedev.