Since I have found interest and started researching the game
industry, I have found that it doesn’t really make a whole lot
of sense. I completely agree that 30k is way too low for an
entry level producer. I have been playing games since I was 7
on nintendo and a 386 IBM. Although the graphics have gotten
much better since then, the quality of games has not. Maybe
companies should focus more on their management and design
resources, because almost every comp sci major out there wants
to be a programmer. I know more computer programmers than I
could shake a stick…

So what kind of people does 30k attract for a job? The ones that
just need to work with games and can’t do anything else. At
first glance, this seems good for the company. But I think
that setling for 30k when you can get better elsewhere is
irresponsible and screams ‘I love games hehehe’. I would more
readily start a new company, even with no experience but good
management and design skills, if every company offered only
30k. Let us think about what other types of jobs make 30k…
without a college degree!

That in no way implies that a producer must understand the innerworkings of the advances themselves. An effective producer needs only know how to best uses those technological advances to his/her game’s advantage.

I do not have to be an application developer (or have any experience of writing any kind of code) to realize what a certain application could mean for a project I was in charge of after being told what it can and can’t do.

Basically, there are two types of people. Those who can be great game producers and those who can’t.

An engineer, a mailman, a carpenter or a Navy Seal could be either from either camp, and being one of these professions does not imply which camp they may fall into.

Until we can abandon the old school programmer-reigns paradigm, we need to give up complaining that our medium is marginalized.

For example, I am no artist, I could not realisticly tell an artist I expect you to have a completely photo realistic drawing of a model on my desk by tomorrow, that would be asking far to much of the person. In order to truly understand this concept, I would need to learn to draw so that I would at least have some idea, what is a good amount of time.

I guess the point I am making is this, producers need experience in order to be good producers, and the only effective way for a company to discover this is by having you work for them as a programmer first.

1. I say the least stressful job on a game team is a junior engineer. Junior engineers usually have hard constraints for which to measure their success and therefore it is very satisfying. Junior artist is a close second and is only more stressful because you have to communicate qualitatively so much with your lead, and that is prone to misunderstanding.

2. I’ve seen engineers successfully transition to producer. They get more respect from their teams than when entry-level producers transition to full producers. The latter have to deal with more bullshit from people who don’t respect them.

3. Leadership is not for everyone and the strength of character required to lead a team is not found in only the technically savvy. Sometimes the technically savvy believe that “hell is other people”. The mix of characteristics required for an effective game team leader is worth 120+K. These same people could work as executives and earn at least that much, so the games industry is going to continue making mediocre games till they pay up.

I’ve worked in this industry for almost 18 years and that is what I found to be true in my circumstances.

In addition, I think that traditionally Producers have come from the non-production areas of the game company. Part of this is because going from art or programming to producer would typically result in a pay cut. So instead, producers come from the lesser paid areas of the game company — qa, tech support, administrative. I’d say 75% of the time entry-level producers come from QA.

I’ve seen really bad producers come from QA, I’ve seen some really good ones come from QA — what’s more important than where they come from is how the team sees the producer — if they respect the producer for his knowledge, experience and abilities, things usually go pretty smoothly. The teams that don’t respect their producers are usually the ones that fail to release product on time.

Here’s some free career advice. If you like designing so much more than programming, you need to become a designer.

I started in the late 80s as an engineer, when that role also had a lot of design responsbility. Then I became a Lead Designer, then an Executive Producer. After all that, I can personally attest that engineering is the least stressful of those jobs. Being able to focus on a technical task is not only less stressful, it’s more fun in many ways. Furthermore, technical jobs often have less accountability, because most managers don’t have technical experience (or CURRENT technical experience) and thus can’t hold their programmers to task for screwing up. Meanwhile designer and EPs are always under the gun of upper management, marketing etc.

In all seriousness, you seem to be indicating that your experience shows that design is more fun than programming. The Technical Director I hired would disagree with you 100%. He wants to solve technical problems every day and doesn’t want to deal with the design/production side. If you agree with him, stay in programming. Otherwise, ask for some design responsbility and switch career tracks. You will be happier in the end.