Would You Rather Have A Job Involving Robotics Or The Gaming Industry?

[davidthefat]

When you grow up and you chose to stick with programming, would you rather work at a place like NASA or in the gaming industry? I chose NASA because I would may be like to work there someday, but you can replace it with like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, any other robot/vehicle focused company. People will say since NASA have bigger time frames to work on a particular project, you will have less pressure to make the deadlines.
Won't you agree that even though a game programmer has shorter time to actually get the game finished, but they also have a lower risk. NASA on the other hand, one bug can potentially blow off billions of dollars in tax payer's money and even kill some people aboard the vehicle. That one bug can mess up years of work and dedication, its all or nothing shot. but the gaming industry is not an all or nothing shot, if theres a major bug, a patch can be released, you can recover from your flaws (not 100%). I would have to argue that the NASA job is more pressured in a sense. Now it really comes down to which will you enjoy more, personally, its the same for both... Honestly how many people can say that you worked on a satellite in space? or the hit game that millions of people are playing ad your name pops up in the credits.

Just a cool video regarding robots that I would like to work on someday...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHJJQ0zNNOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gi6Ohnp9x8

[Willdabeast]

NASA, hands-down. Some people have a made-up idea of what gaming programmers do. It requires a ton of time, and no matter how cool the game is, nobody really cares about the programmers. Yes, they get the occasional interview, but besides that they go unnoticed. That is certainly not to say that they don't deserve credit, because they do. Now I'm no expert, ill admit. It just seems like working at NASA would have a greater reward than programming games.

[,4lex S.]

You might want to ask yourself which job is a greater service to your country, or the entire human race. I would say NASA and other organizations such as the UN are in a completely different league when it comes to job satisfaction then programming video games.

Not that creating entertainment is bad, but I think working for NASA or equivalent pretty much wins over everything.

just my $0.02

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

People will say since NASA have bigger time frames to work on a particular project, you will have less pressure to make the deadlines.

But consider the FSU.

[Jon Stratis]

Just to throw in my two cents on the matter... For programmers, there are jobs in almost every industry out there - everyone uses computers, and almost everything is controlled in some way. In industries where people's lives are at risk, testing is the most important part of development. Think about your robot and it's code - how much testing have you done?

I work in the medical device industry, and can tell you... our products are tested almost beyond reason. 100% unit test coverage (not just lines, but path coverage) is just for starters. We have whole teams dedicated to functional testing - black box, white box, system, subsystem to name a few. Any industry where lives depend on your product (like aerospace) has testing this strict. A 0.1% defect rate kills people.

To give you an idea of how the testing goes, one of the projects i worked on last year i wrote 841 lines of code. I then wrote 2,893 lines of unit test code. That's 3 times as much testing as development. We also had one of our system testers working on developing tests for this same code for 4 months.

All that said... game development isn't nearly as test intensive. Yes, you have to do some testing to ensure it works right - but a lot of that is actually playing the game! I can tell you working on a system that has this much testing is extremely frustrating at times. But it's also extremely rewarding when you get to talk to patients who are alive today because of the work you did. A job in game design may be more fun, but it won't be as rewarding.