Choosing Traditional Employment

I noticed one of my old posts I pulled out of the database mentioned that I was going to see if I could push revenue up so I could do game development and YouTube full time. I never really gave an update to that. Here's a bit of an update so it doesn't seem so out of place.

I ended up graduating with my computer science degree at the end of 2023 (2.5 years after that original post). Shortly before graduating, I reached out to a prior employer to see if they would be interested in hiring me with full benefits for 32 hours per week. They agreed, so I took the position. This gives me enough spare time to work on stuff I'm interested in on the side. 2024 was my best year for YouTube/gamedev revenue. While mostly just working when I felt like it on stuff on Friday/Saturday since I was working Monday-Thursday, I brought in ~$25K USD for the year before income tax. In 2025, I negotiated for a 27 hour work week for the same salary and benefits. After 10 years of grinding game development and school/work simultaneously, I mostly just took 2025 to rest. At the end of 2025, I got an unexpected promotion at my job, but went back to 32 hours per week. I haven't been too focused on revenue lately, since I don't feel I need that much more money.

Could I have just jumped into full time gamedev? Yes, but I decided it wasn't really worth the risk. For Florida, I live in a pretty low cost of living area, so my cost of living is around $30K USD per year. $25K/yr for probably an average of around 12 hours of work per week could easily be transitioned into covering my cost of living if pursued full time. However, my intuition was and still is that scaling up the hours per week doesn't linearly translate to increased revenue. There are heavy diminishing returns since YouTube drives the marketing for my games and brings in revenue itself. I'm in a small niche, so there's a fixed amount of people broadly interested in my work and they have a limited amount of time and money they'd be willing to spend. For reference, software engineers with a bit of experience in the US often make over $100K USD per year, which is a pretty tough number to beat unless I have some surprise hits in the games I release. Since I generally have a fairly low risk tolerance, I opted to lean more into traditional software engineering work.

Surprisingly, AI was a significant contributor in my decision to get a normal software engineering job immediately. In high school my original plan was to take a year or so after college to see if I could do well in game development full time. ChatGPT released around a year before I graduated in 2023. While it wasn't ever good enough to use on my assignments (since the senior projects are more involved), I was aware that many freshmen were able to do almost all of their programming assignments with ChatGPT. I knew how fast the field was moving and figured that the new freshmen could probably just make it through their whole degree heavily relying on AI without learning much for themselves. My expectation was that anyone in that cohort (whether by graduation date or years of work experience) would struggle to find good employment opportunities. Anyone reliant on AI without learning much themselves in their education (either school or self taught) provides marginal value over the average person with no experience in the field. Graduation date and employment experience become significant differentiators for employers, since it easily tells you which people are nearly guaranteed to have pre-AI experience. I ended up underestimating the speed at which AI progressed, but it seems I was right to try to stay ahead of that cohort. Nowadays, there's not very much demand for junior software engineers since the contributions they're normally expected make can be largely done by a senior with AI. It has pulled the ladder up on this career path and restricted the supply of senior software engineers. On a related note, I was also accounting for the possibility that the majority of traditional software engineering jobs get eliminated. I did not have and still do not have a good estimate of the timeline or if it will happen, but getting ahead in life financially is the safest bet in this environment. I generally disagree with the "permanent underclass" viewpoint that has become popular in the tech space, but there are some ideas there that seem to hold up to scrutiny. I'll probably make a post on that sometime.

As a goofy little insight into what I was looking at in college, here's an assignment I submitted in 2021 for my technical writing class. The assignment was just to write a short abstract of any article that interested us, so it was moreso summarizing and contextualizing than my opinions. I chose to cover an article on OpenAI and GPT3/4.