Ask HN: Dilemma of a Gamer and Programmer

Congrats on your accomplishments. None of the following is meant to lessen them.

When I was young and impressionable, it struck me as absolutely freaking magic that you could make whole hundreds of dollars appear out of the Internet without doing "real work" with an office and tie and deadlines and all those things that sounded a lot like my least favorite parts of school. Being older and wiser, I now realize that hundreds of dollars is rat spit next to the going market rates for engineers, and there exist plenty of options to get compensated in 2014 for things which are much closer to LoL than they are to office/tie/TPS reports.

I also hear you with regards to the social issues. I lost a lot of friends, including some of the people who probably knew me best, when I quit playing WoW. We made the usual non-specific promises for hanging out later. It never happened. I eventually made new friends, some on the Internet (waves) and some off.

I'd suggest simply titrating down on your LoL play per week (cap it to, say, 12 hours a week to start [+]) while you start getting ready for Adulthood (TM).

Also, although it's sort of tangential to the LoL issue, you may not be accurately apprised of the current state of the hiring market for engineers as a college student. God knows I wasn't. Here it is: it is absolutely on fire right now. You know how you've been in a cutthroat meritocratic competition for essentially every gate you've ever passed through in life up until now? Your next gate is going to be people bidding against each other to give you six figures in starting salary and a signing bonus larger than your career earnings in LoL. (Those are Valley numbers -- it isn't quite so white hot in every geographic area, but it's still a seller's market rather than a buyer's market.)

Bonus points: It's quite possible that you've learned enough about marketing over the Internet to be dangerous during your streaming career. The returns for having hundreds of thousands of people following you and moving them through multiple types of conversions are, for LoL streamers, not high numbers. Many of those same skills can be cross-applied to selling e.g. business to business software. B2B software is substantially more lucrative.

[+] Guesstimate of current play time arrived at by years of experience rather than by latent contempt for videogaming. It's, um, "more than 12 hours a week."

Just teasing, OP, hope you don't mind. Trust me that these are some excellent problems you have. When I graduated, my choice was a 40k/yr job in my hometown, or a 60k/yr job 2 hours away, in a job market that had just tanked. I envy you, and congratulate you on your options!

As for advice, I would say you don't need an extensive portfolio of "personal coding projects" unless you want to be seen by a Google or Amazon right out of school. The market is in such demand for good software engineers right now that you can should be able to get a good job for decent pay with just your degree and a good coding interview. Go interview around for practice, make a killer impression at a place you like, and negotiate hard for the salary.

That said, if you want to develop some projects, look to your gaming/streaming for inspiration. Can you build a members site for your fans? Code your own streaming player? Build some LoL web tools (stats lookup, character comparisons, etc)? Mailing list manager for a LoL newsletter? It is easiest to find inspiration from your own pain points, and easiest to maintain interest in projects you use yourself.

Also, somewhat relevant post on the question:

http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/miscellaneous/P...

In general they have been weekend projects where 90% functionality is achieved in one weekend, and then I spend months adding small features or fixes.

#1 Advice when doing a personal side project is to make it something you will use yourself. If not you might lose interest quickly.

As a software engineer that usually codes all day and plays all evening (4-5 hours), I'm saying there is no need to do a full stop of anything.

See if you can make both work out somehow. You’re not alone in this and there are many streamers that manage to pull in money to cover their living costs while still being able to pursue an education and the necessities to thrive (hanging out with friends, exercise, learning skills not related to anything in particular, etc.).

Try to combine your two passions somehow. Building gaming-related products and creative ways to give back to your viewers using your engineering skills would be good candidates.

Fanboyism aside, I find myself in a very similar situation. I've been playing DotA2 for years (and LoL before that, a littel DotA before that) and now run a Dota-community that has a fair amount of users.

Every day I need to decide between playing a handful of matches with my users or working on coding projects, and it's a hard decision to make.

What has been working most effectively for me is "code-weeks", I have at least a week a month where I limit myself to two (2) games a day, and make sure I'm spending some hours every day working on projects.

It's not perfect, but at least consciously trying to follow this pattern has pushed me to be more productive than I was in 2013, and quitting DotA cold-turkey is just not something I think I could stick with.

I understand what you're saying, it's fine to give up LoL and try out the professional life. But don't forsake it, my guess you'll pretty soon see the absurdity of app development.

Your clients are like the noobs that call "mid or feed," your co-workers and bosses care more about farming and jungling than helping solo gank. No wards, no missing calls either, everybody for themselves.

Watch a man play LoL/HoN/Dota2 and you can see how a man truly is. Work will always be there but a elite LoL player, that is livin' the life bro.

I wrote more about it here. https://danschnau.com/world-of-warcraft/

If you treat gaming like a proper career, where you research and actually care about things like ad hits, branding etc. it will actually make the stuff you do in gaming actually leveragable when you apply for other positions, especially in startups.

If you want to talk about this stuff, my email is on my profile. I have a few ideas on how a person in your unique position can make the most out of it, for both yourself and the community.

Best of luck mate.

About choices ... i belive you have something precious, a fan base: i would think about doing something middleground, something that can involve and interest your LoL users and give you something good to put on you resumee, don't underestimate the "popularity" !!!

Good Luck ;)