Well, after a five-month job search, it’s finally over - tomorrow will be my first day at Sago Mini as a Unity developer. This process felt very difficult for me, and as my first full-time job search, there was a lot for me to learn. I also had some specific criteria - mainly to do work that (to me) has a positive societal impact - that narrowed my options and took time to explore. My job search revealed the following questions and helped me begin to answer them:
I hope these guiding questions and my thoughts on them help you navigate your own job search and give you a fresh perspective on the process. Good luck!
I started with this question since my goal was to make a career switch out of the games industry and into a field where I could have the social impact I wanted. I assumed that the culture of any workplace making a positive impact would be one that I'd enjoy, and I felt that any developer salary would be enough for my needs unless it was so far below market rate that it implied that my skills weren't being valued. The factors that I considered important in a job were:
To answer this, I had to do a market analysis to determine if there was an abundance of jobs that met my criteria. Before starting down a career path, I wanted to make sure that it would be able to sustain me both now and in the future. My new field of work would need to have reliable and long-term financial growth in order to have consistent job opportunities, but meeting this requirement proved to be very difficult.
Initially, I wanted to work at a nonprofit so that I could be almost certain that my efforts would make the world a better place. Tech nonprofits are rare, and over time I found that many are funded in a way that sustains them but does not allow for growth (i.e. hiring). Compared to the for-profit sector, there's simply an order of magnitude less money to be found in philanthropy and government grants. As a result, there's an order of magnitude more jobs at for-profit companies.
As a result, you'll likely find your next job at a for-profit company where profitability competes with other factors that may matter more to you. This is a grey area that I find hard to navigate, and it's often unclear where to draw the line between what is and isn't personally acceptable. I fully expect this to be a lifelong balancing act between work I feel good about doing and work that can provide for me.
I started my search optimistic about moving away from game dev and finding a job using a more mainstream tech stack. I was confident that I'd quickly pick up this new stack, and I believed that the vast majority of my skills and knowledge were highly transferable. While my self-confidence and belief in transferable skills have remained, my optimism about mobility in the job market was totally flawed and led to me adopting what I call "the pessimistic perspective."
This perspective is based on the idea that companies prioritize risk aversion over everything else when hiring, and by a huge margin. The risk of hiring the wrong person - they could be incompetent, not a good team player, not focused on work, etc. - is so severe that you're only competitive for a role if you can build a high degree of trust by:
The exception to this rule is when you've already built trust with a person who can vouch for you. Someone who knows you, especially if you've already worked together, can make all the difference, and they can also give you honest insights into what it's like at their workplace.
This leads to my most important and positive takeaway from the pessimistic perspective and my job search as a whole: a kind person who is generous with their time and energy is the key to finding a job and enjoying work (and the rest of life). Seek out people who you feel good around and help each other out. Being an unemployed job-seeker is hard; you really feel like the lowest of the low, and most of your applications, emails, and messages will go unanswered. It will pass eventually, though, and when it does, I hope you can pay it forward and give your time to those who need your help.
I hope this was helpful, and please get in touch with any thoughts. Thanks for reading.