Programming

I live and work in Japan where dev salaries are much lower so, if I could just get a contract gig in USD, that would be pretty big for me especially with 1usd being 150 JPY or more

I've fallen down the rabbithole. I'm reading a free course (from 2001ish) on Cobol.

COBOL is Maintainable

I now question everything. I mean, technically, basically anything is maintainable in that it's possible...

This isn't true. If you can get by while working part-time, you still have at least 40 hours every two weeks to work on your game.

It's one of my biggest regrets, that after school I immediately jumped into full-time job, even though I realistically could live comfortably with 1/3 of the pay I was getting, since young+no familly+no car+shared living reduces your living costs by a very large margin. My best friend did that and has been working only 2 days per week since. I was trying to keep up with him, working on our game in my free time, but it's simply not feasible to build on top of 40 hours per week of regular job, and then do anything meaningful on your side projects. I barely struggled to get myself to do at least 20h of work per month on the project, missing deadlines, and it sucked.

He, on the other hand, kept our game project afloat and moving forward, with 60+ hours per month, while also writing and running a large LARP for 100 of players, directing his own theater group, and in general successfully working on a lot of projects, including several smaller games.

The best advice I can give, if you want to be a game developer, is to 1) not work in gamedev and 2) work part-time. The IT salary should net you a comfortable life even on part-time pay, assuming it's not gamedev. Smaller studios will have difficulties keeping afloat if they need to pay you, and in larger AAA studio you will be the same code-monkey crunching JIRA tickets as you would be in any IT job, but for a lot less money. And the design freedom you get when your livelyhood doesn't depend on your art's success, be it games or anything else, is totally worth it.

For example, this game has been developed solely in free time, without anyone getting paid for working on it. It's not AAA and the development takes a long time, but it definitely doesn't need to be a fulltime job.

It won't be my first and I'm not going super ambitious or AAA. If it takes me 5 years to do it, that's fine.

I wrote my first game in straight C with no laptop so literally writing code on paper when not at a PC which I would later type in later

But we will probably see LLMs running deeply insightful life changing management workshops sometime roughly next week, since a trained parrot could do that.

Wasn't there a (successful) comany that replaced it's CEO with an AI?

As someone who has worked with it, it's not too bad. Lots of $$ if you know someone.

The biggest issue (that she goes into), is the lack of context. Why is the thing doing what it is doing is the hardest part

Like could I learn it enough to obtain a real job tho? That pays real money I mean?

TCL?

Like, 70% or more of the web runs on PHP. That's also not going anywhere anytime soon.

It's dead in a similar way to Latin where nobody learns it as a first language. Everyone who learns it does so for a specific purpose.

In Canada there are large organizations (including many in the government) who subsidize college courses on Cobol just to be able to get some fresh talent to learn it. In some cases they'll pay the tuition for the course entirely. Huge systems at the center of critical government functions still depend on Cobol .

Friend of mine maintains COBOL for an insurance company. He lives on the opposite side of the country from his business, and is only on call one weekend a month.

Dude got hired before he even graduated, getting paid 70k, and gets to live wherever he wants.

I would kill for that lol