Still glad to be here....

I think I have set some kind of world record. Since being laid off in January, I have applied for almost 300 jobs. From those, I received about 20 followup calls, phone interviews, and programming tests. I have had only 2 face-to-face interviews. The result: 0 jobs.

This should really be no big surprise. According to some reports, over 5000 people were laid off in the game industry alone in 2008. There were 10,000 layoffs from Microsoft alone. The result is that the job market for both game programming and general IT has been flooded with job seekers. Employers have pretty much had the ability to hand-pick each position from tens, if not hundreds, of applicants.

This knowledge made it a little easier to accept 300 rejections, but I have to admit I was feeling pretty discouraged. In less that 1 year my game programming career seemed to be over! I figured this was another world record: world's shortest game career.

Of the 300 positions, about 75 were for general programming positions in IT. As much as I wanted to stay in the game industry, I needed a job even worse. So, I figured I would have to go back into the world of business programming.

One thing that surprised me is that I did not receive a single inquiry regarding any of the general programming jobs I had applied for. All of the followup I received was for game-related jobs. I expected it to be the other way around. As it turns out, being a game programmer apparently has the advantage of being a specialty. There are far more general programmers out there to fill IT positions, which probably explains why I didn't get a single bite for any of those jobs.
However, game programming is a specialized field, and this means that there are fewer game programmers out there to fill those jobs. So, even though I kept getting turned down, at least I was getting interviews!

Robert