Don’t ask for advice, Instead ask how they got there

For this 365 days of blog posts thing I’m doing, If I have a random idea about what to write about when I’m walking outside, then I’ll write it on my phone notes app then sync it to a single Google docs document. I realised that I had two ideas which felt a bit like two sides of the same coin.

During the last few weeks of university in my final year, I remember talking to my classmates in the computer lab about what our plans were for after uni, just about the time when the head of the department came in to teach a tutorial class. I asked, quite trivially, what I should do after university. This was then met with an appointment in his office for another time. Quite strange I thought, as I was used to being a bit of a joker and asking lots of throwaway questions and generally trolling in real life. This jokey throwaway question had landed me with a meeting to go to.

As I remember it, the meeting was actually fairly stern. He told me fairly abruptly that he didn’t know what I should do. That he was not some wise man who just knew everything and would impart some wisdom at this meeting. This took me quite aback, because firstly, I wasn’t thinking that. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. At best I thought it was going to be a careers advisor style talk. The closest thing I recall to advice was that, whatever I do, I should at least earn enough money to pay my way in life.

10 years later, I found myself working alongside another graduate of the Games Technology course. Turns out she was one of the 1st years I taught in a tutorials class when I was in 4th year. In the passing, she said that she had asked the same teacher about what to do after uni, and she was also given a meeting in which she was given advice. However, the advice she was given was about specific programming careers, companies and places in which to apply for jobs.

I couldn’t believe it, two people at the same point in their careers, the same teacher giving advice, and two completely different answers! I was actually quite annoyed when I found this out, as at the time I felt like I’d been fobbed off with some non-answer. Fine if both of us got the same answer, but why would one person get a totally different answer, and especially of such wildly different content and quality ?

It took another 6 years so before I finally got back to this one in my own head to come up with a resolution in my head. The teacher had probably seen a whole production line of students coming to the end of their education and likely a consistent amount of those unsure what to do. Over the years, it’s likely that he had built up his own selection of resolution answers to give, and dispensed them according to the personality type of the student he was dealing with at the time. Maybe I should have asked other students who’d asked to find out what they’d been told… 

Another story that happened. 14 years after university and I was in Japan for a 3 month trip. End of 2019. I was helping my buddy out in Kyoto with a software project in exchange for free accommodation, think WWOOF or Workaway, but more ad-hoc and much, much more geeky. During my trip I had two different people ask me for life advice! One person was 17 and was still in High School and we met at a meetup for a walking trip to a mountain in Kyoto. I was quite surprised because I’d never had anyone ask me that before. It wasn’t a work-domain specific question, it was just a general life question.

 I came up with ‘Never get into debt’ as an ideal for how to live well. I think in retrospect, I should have said ‘Always aim to be as socially mobile as possible’ because another person immediately started arguing with me, saying that some debt was good debt. We ended up getting into a whole debate about how some debts are indeed good debt, like a mortgage, or uni loans, or for a decent car that won’t break down. The problem with those debts is that on the face of it are actually reasonable debts to have. Having the mortgage is the sign of being a responsible adult. Uni loans are a necessity to get a degree and then get a good job that requires it. If you are spending more time and cost on a cheap 2nd hand car that breaks down all the time, then surely it makes sense to take a loan for a car.

Trouble is, if you have loans then you need a job to pay them off. If I had those kinds of debt, I wouldn’t be able to go walk about mountains in Kyoto. I’d be back in the UK, working a full-time job in order to pay those things off.

Also, telling a 17 year old to never get a mortgage in their life is probably bad advice. I got a mortgage when I was 26 and 6 grand in student loans (8 including overdraft) Both paid off now.

Another person also asked for advice about getting into the games industry. This time I was a bit more cautious and didn’t say something like “Best thing you can do is to not get a job” which is where I was at, age 36. I said something like, make sure you know your maths and programming. And you can learn these things for free off of youtube. This is coming from someone who studied a 4 year degree course in Computer Games from the early 2000s. The theory was that because now we are where we are, Education is insanely expensive, youtube has free content (MIT open course ware or Khan Academy, for example) you could get the knowledge from there instead. Who needs a degree any more!

The trouble with the advice I gave in these instances is I hadn’t lived them and I was giving kind-of directions for an end-state using methods that I never actually used myself. How could that possibly be good advice.

But then I realised that the question was wrong.

Any advice I can give will necessarily be based on previous experience, which might not be applicable to the person in their specific scenario. Also, for the two cases, I’d known each of them for a couple of hours before they asked me. How could I possibly know what their situations were in order to give advice that was in any way useful.

I think maybe a better approach would have been to answer the question ‘How did you do it’ rather than ‘Do you have any advice’ in response to the topic they are asking. Because how can I possibly know what they should do in their current situation.

As for student Martin back in 2005, it would also have set up the environment in a way that the teacher could actually have given a more concrete, useful answer. If I asked “What did you do after you left university?” Then I might have gotten some better insights into the path of becoming a university lecturer. Or I might have asked “What did you do when you didn’t know what to do” and perhaps got some insights into what other people did.

It shifts the focus as well to the asker. You might have a whole list of options to choose from, or likely as I was, a seemingly infinite array of things to do, with no specific path of what to do. There really is only one person who can decide what to do. Every other person can only give their view. It’s up to you to decide. So why not ask them questions that can have concrete answers rather than their own predictions of your life, from their perspective?

In reality we all have an infinite list of options to choose from, but on many occasions there might realistically be only a few options, such as getting a job straight out of uni to pay off the debt incurred by going to uni.

As for me, I ended up applying to a post-grad course in Japan, applied to all the games companies I could find in my city as well as other software companies as backups. Events transpired such that I turned down the highest valued options, the fees-paid Japan trip and a job offer in a games company, for a job in non-games! So I screwed that one up pretty good… 

So that’s my advice for now. If you ask my advice, I would say “Instead of asking for Advice, ask how they did it, or what did they do”

App Recommendation

Thumper – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Drool.ThumperPocketEdition&hl=en_GB&gl=US

My friend originally recommended this game to me on PSVR when it was first released, probably about 2017. I was a fan of music rhythm action games such as DDR, Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Gitaroo Man and Mad Maestro, so naturally I got on quite well with this one.

Though it’s less about the music in this game. With other Rhythm action games I’ve played, the levels are designed in such a way that they correspond with the music being played. In essence, each game is a jukebox and you select a specific song. With Thumper, it’s much more Earthy. It feels like the sounds come together as rhythmic noises from your action that creates the beat, rather than a specifically crafted song but it still works.

It’s one of the more anxiety producing games I’ve played, particularly level 3 onwards. You have to concentrate pretty well in order to do well and proceed to the next level.

I got the game on my Android phone as it was cut-price at the time (as offered by AppSales) and I think the interface holds up really well. For what was once a VR game using a PS4 controller, you now control the beetle character with swipes, taps, holds and tilting the phone. I think it works really well

Youtube Recommendation

CarWow – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUhFaUpnq31m6TNX2VKVSVA

Carwow is a British price comparison website for buying cars, but also does car reviews for new cars. The presenter (Mat Watson) is quite entertaining and it’s a nice way of finding out information about new cars released. Think Top Gear before 2003.

Cars reviewed are of all sorts, ranging from every day regular cars to performance, sports cars with drag race comparisons. Sometimes the odd comparison challenge comes up, such as what is the best hot-hatch, or how far can these EV Electric cars travel one one charge up. Along with regular lambasting of car features that the presenter has decided is not good, such fake front grills, intakes and rear tail pipes, back windows that don’t go all the way down and flicking hard surfaces on the dashboard to hurt his finger. 

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Thoughts on playing Elite Dangerous. It’s basically learning to code all over again

In 2017 I bought Elite Dangerous on PS4. It was on sale and I had heard about the game beforehand. I’d actually played and completed a similar game called Rebel Galaxy the year before (Free on PSN the first month I got my PS4), a much smaller scale single player space-adventure and trading game. I really enjoyed that game. It was 40 hours or so to get the end-credits and had a western-theme to it. Believe it or not I played this game before I watched Firefly, something I only watched last year as a recommendation after watching Picard season 1.

I downloaded the game and proceeded to not play a single second of it. Instead I played Driveclub, Doom and Final Fantasy 15. I’ve noticed I’ve had this habit whereby I’ll read a review of a game, consider it to be something I want to play and then months or years later I’ll see the game on ebay or PSN for a price I can’t refuse. Thanks to CEX (A second hand DVD and Games entertainment chain store in UK) I now have a whole shelf of PS3 and PS4 games that I have barely played, but still plan to get round to one day.

Currently under the TV are some recent purchases, Yakuza 0, Rage 2, The Division 2, Dragon Quest 11 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I’m currently playing Yakuza 0 and Elite Dangerous only.

Possibly the reason I never got round to Elite was that I read online that the game required a huge tutorial to get through before being able to play the game, and that there wasn’t really a storyline per say, like in Rebel Galaxy. These were detractors enough for me to put off starting to play the game, over other games that have come and gone over the years.

It wasn’t until I realised that a new Rebel Galaxy game was released (Rebel Galaxy Outlaw) on PS4 that I thought about getting that one, and then I remembered that I still had Elite to play first.

Starting up was a frustrating experience. After the tutorial level there were no real directions. Getting out of the first station was an exercise in frustration and landing again was a pain. To land in a station you have to request to dock, which means knowing how to navigate through the menus to get to the station name in Contacts, and then request. If you are more than 7.5km away, they will refuse. If you try to land with no approval then they’ll shoot you down.

After figuring out the hard way they tell you a pad number to land on, which requires searching for until you find it. Then you have to land on the pad. With landing gear down. In the right orientation. Within the time limit. As I discovered, if you don’t land within the time limit, they shoot you down.

After a number of attempts I managed the huge accomplishment of landing in a space station. To then realise I had not collected the cargo I needed from the original station to drop off at the new one. I had accepted the mission, but not picked up the cargo, which is a separate step. My sense of accomplishment was utterly dashed when I realised I could never complete this mission.

Another tribulation was the Frame Shift Drive (FSD). The distances in the game are vast. Measuring up to Light Years away. The default ship (SideWinder) comes equipped with a FSD so you can go travel to adjacent systems by selecting them in the Galaxy map, then use the FSD to travel between planets and varying speeds measured in km/s, to Mm/s then C. The fastest I ever got to was 1,100C. Switching between the different modes requires a checklist of closing Hardpoints, Landing gear, Scoops and also being far enough from a planet or station to not be ‘Land Locked’, All of which show up as errors when you try to engage FSD, but trying to work out how to solve each one requires knowing which key combination to press. Square opens/closes hard points, Circle + Down toggles landing gear, Circle + Up toggles the Scoop. And there is a light at the bottom right to tell you if you are too close to a station.

Each new step felt like a blockade with no straightforward directions to inform you what the solution to each step was. More than a few times I gave up in frustration to come back to it later on. Each of these steps felt like they should have been simple steps to accomplish (and they were, so long as you know what the key combination or step required is)

Over time I got into the process of doing the right steps to achieve the desired outcomes and finally, after maybe 10 hours of in-game play, I was able to take off and land, select missions that I had the slightest chance of being able to do, and upgrade my ship. Auto Landing module being one of the first purchases.

I’m probably about 40 hours in, and I’m doing various missions like cargo deliveries and killing pirates. I can navigate the menus to discover where I can buy items to complete missions and can outfit my ship with the correct modules to do things like landing rover missions or large cargo, or have the extra shield to protect against attacks when it will be needed. So I guess I’m more or less indoctrinated into the games core mechanics now. I still need to do things like work out how to do mining, as well as certain attack missions. And I haven’t sold anything on the black markets, so there’s still scope for new things to do. It has grown to be an enjoyable experience, befitting of playing an actual video game.

In many ways I’d liken this game to my career as a programmer. Recently I learned up Ionic + Vue development for cross platform development on Android and iOS. To start up is easy enough because you can just follow the basic tutorials from the Ionic website, but to start making reasonable apps it does require learning different features such as NPM, what files interact with it, the folders that get committed in to the repo and what shouldn’t be. But going back a few years I remember learning git to be a frustrating experience. Some files not showing up (thanks, .gitignore), branches, remotes. There are always tutorials for each of these individual components, but the moment you start using these things for your own project or as part of a team, I always felt a bit derp because the specific nuances required to solve the problem in real life were never quite specified in the tutorials or manuals. Even asking for help is difficult because trying to explain the problem requires knowledge of keywords or a way to adequately describe the situation that, if you could do so, would probably mean you could get to the solution by yourself in any case. In the end, it’s just a case of plodding through, searching for other people’s similar solutions, modifying them to your own case and then over time you build muscle memory for those kinds of problems in the future.

I’d say that for anyone learning programming, they’ll likely be facing a similar set of constant barriers, roadblocks and frustrations. However, it has been my experience that, like my time with Elite Dangerous, as you improve you do start to feel a sense of accomplishment and even start to enjoy the process. The added advantage of programming is that it is an extremely in-demand skill that pays well. Well enough for me to ‘retire by 35’

I realised that I actually mentioned 2 recommended apps yesterday, instead of 1 app and 1 youtube channel. Not sure how I managed to miss this mistake, but today I’ll do 2 youtube channels to even it out.

I currently maintain a spreadsheet of apps and youtube channel recommendations. These are entirely ones I already use or watch myself, I currently have about 20 of each that I just pick for each day, but I will run out pretty soon so part of this challenge I’ve set myself to showcase an app and youtube video will require finding new channels and apps to talk about. Truth be told I’m not sure how this is going to go, but because I’ve got so much time and I spend so much time on my phone and watching youtube, I figured it might be an interesting challenge. Lets just see how badly this goes…

Youtube

Jim Sterling – https://www.youtube.com/user/JimSterling

British Game Reviewer, Games News and General News covering the state of the Games Industry. Every week he has the ‘JimQuisition’ show where he lambasts current issues with the games industry. It’s entertaining in a dry-humour sort of way, which I love. Issues such as excessive overtime, poor company management, exploitative monetisation, poor gameplay and bugs are covered. As someone who once worked in a games company, some of the stories do ring true, and stories from friends who have worked in AAA companies do correlate. The games industry does appear to be very competitive and it’s definitely not for everyone.

Youtube

Mentour Pilot – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpHKudUkP5tNgmMdexB3ow

A veteran pilot gives frequent blogs about his life as a pilot, explaining various different facts and stories about the aviation industry. To a regular flyer in commercial airlines, there is always a sense of mystique about the whole process of flying. As a passenger I am very familiar with the steps required, like packing my bags correctly (under the required weight), finding the right tickets, preparing for the trip and then doing check-in and navigating the airport. But there is so much behind the scenes that occasionally I get glimpses of, but never a full explanation. Such as where does the luggage go when I hand them over, what do all the strange looking vehicles do on the runway, what are the controls on the aeroplane, what’s it like to fly a plane. What is the lifestyle of a pilot like? What about other crew?

Also, when major aeroplane related news events occur, this channel often chimes in with a pilot’s opinion of what’s happened.

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