#Reality Check, do newcomers have any chance?

144 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

limber plinth
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Hey everyone 🧐,
I'm from LATAM where graphics programming positions are extremely scarce. I've noticed even people with impressive CVs and extensive experience struggle to find work in this field. I'm finishing my Master's in Computer Science and have some freelance experience, but no industry experience or internships.
I have some questions about breaking into this competitive industry:

    1. Is applying to senior graphics programming positions without industry experience a complete waste of time?
    1. Would starting as a technical artist (e.g., in Unreal Engine) be a viable path to eventually transition into graphics programming?
    1. For those of you who started in regions with limited opportunities, did you relocate internationally or find remote work?
    1. What minimum portfolio projects would actually get a junior noticed in today's saturated market? I feel like creating my own renderer with cascade shadow mapping isn't enough anymore.
    1. Would contributing to open source graphics projects be more valuable than personal projects at this point?
    1. Which specific technical skills are currently most in-demand for entry-level positions?
    1. Am I being realistic about my chances, or is the industry too competitive right now for newcomers without connections?

I want to believe that experienced candidates who struggle are willing to do everything necessary, yet they still face difficulties. Any honest advice would be greatly appreciated!

final stag
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Is applying to senior graphics programming positions without industry experience a complete waste of time?
Nope, depends on the company
In some companies the entry level role is 'Associate engineer', but if you have a masters degree you join as a Engineer (i.e 1 level higher)

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Am I being realistic about my chances, or is the industry too competitive right now for newcomers without connections?
IMO you either need connections, or a really great portfolio to stand out
Whats a good portfolio? typically has been CSM + some PBR and stuff, but these days you might need DX12/VK with CSM, some post processing and stuff (I'm also not too sure on this)
Luckily the field is small and many people at twitter / linkedin help a lot with referrals and stuff

limber plinth
# final stag > Am I being realistic about my chances, or is the industry too competitive righ...

Tarun, ty for answering!

About the Nabla thing, I heard something about it and I find it very insteresting. But the link doesnt talk about interships, maybe that is old.

All your answers are really helpful, but I would like to make you another questions:

  • Is doing the PBR + CSM project the best way to land a job? Does a junior even touch that kind of thing in a renderer?
  • Also, all the job offerings are for seniors, there are no junior offerings (at least from what I see) so... Is okay to apply to a senior position even though I have no that much of a experience? Obviuosly assuming that I already built my portfolio
  • Is showing progress in twitter of a personal project the best way of making conections? Is there a special hashtag?

Thank you again

final stag
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Also, all the job offerings are for seniors, there are no junior offerings (at least from what I see) so... Is okay to apply to a senior position even though I have no that much of a experience? Obviously assuming that I already built my portfolio
Yeah honestly ignore the 'minimum requirements', if you match say 3/5 or even 2/5 no harm in applying
For the roles you do end up matching a lot of requirements, try getting a referral or message the hiring manager directly

Is showing progress in twitter of a personal project the best way of making conections? Is there a special hashtag?
Not really a hashtag, but when you post on twitter and ask people for help, they can see that you've atleast put some effort into it
Plus, if you follow a bunch of GP folks on twitter (who are very nice), they often put up post saying they are willing to help newcomers in industry

Is doing the PBR + CSM project the best way to land a job? Does a junior even touch that kind of thing in a renderer?
Not a rendering engineer so can't comment much, but it shows good knowledge of rendering + GP so why not

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About the Nabla thing, I heard something about it and I find it very insteresting. But the link doesnt talk about interships, maybe that is old.
Maybe reach out to @Anasta Zluk if it interests you

limber plinth
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Wow, ty so much for the fast response.

Its just that the market is harsh rn and well, I want to be prepared as the title of this publication says: being ready for the reality check of sending cv's and not receiving answers.

I have another question. I am from LATAM. Is only doing remote work common? Or think in reallocation and on-site work the way to go

Also, I see job offerings that only has 1 week or a month old and they have not so many applicants. I see this like a good thing but at the same time, there are no junior positions. Why is this the case? Why they dont want juniors?

final stag
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I am from LATAM. Is only doing remote work common? Or think in reallocation and on-site work the way to go
I'm on the other side of the world so no clue. But that being said, probably be open for relocation if a good opportunity comes by

Why is this the case? Why they dont want juniors?
Additional cost for training + immediate results can't be expected. BUT some places are open to hire juniors but will only post senior level roles for some reason

And also, do consider putting your resume at #1020409275262173235 , maybe some people here can help in improving it

limber plinth
tidal crest
tidal crest
tidal crest
vale salmon
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First of all, are you applying for all the graphics programmer positions that you find? Regardless of the experience required?
I apply to pretty much every position I can find, though I did skip a few larger German studios after meeting some devs in the Frankfurt area.
Are you only searching for positions in your country or also in another countries?
I'm searching within the EU. I was considering also including the States at some point, but given the current going-ons over there I'd rather not.

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Why do you think that is so hard to land a position with all the experience and knowledge that you have?
Have my updated stats table, and this is what I wrote in my thread:
[...] confirming my suspicion that there's too many experienced people out there right now, so why should a company hire a mid level they need to train?

image.png
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What advice would you give to someone like me, near to finish my computer science masters and wanting to land a job in the graphics programming world?
I've already sent 66 applications mostly in the CG direction, and while I may sent a few more, I'm starting to look into other directions. Cause simply put: this isn't working right now, so I may try again in a few years or so.

silent flicker
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Your chance is close to 0. It took me (I had 4 years of GP experience) like one year of trying in the EU non-stop with hundreds of applications (probably close to 1000) to get a job and that was a year ago (2024) when things were easier I think. If I was searching for job now I probably would still be unemployed. I was also applying to everything, not just GP.

tidal crest
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btw LinkedIn and Indeed suck

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you stand a better chance of landing a job via connections than searching online

tidal crest
# limber plinth Hey everyone 🧐, I'm from LATAM where graphics programming positions are extrem...

but nr.1 rule, if you don't have any actual GP job in your CV (Junior or Intern) you need to contribute to a FOSS GitHub project, there's 100s of devs with small NIH OpenGL and Vulkan engines, and frankly and with all due respect, they're all basically what you could put together as a Uni student taking CG as an elective for a semester 4-6 hours a week.

So, to answer you:

  1. yes
  2. you may accidentally stay a tech artist for far too long, but its better than working a Webdev or AI job instead if you find nothing
  3. I just found remote work at 16 and continued ever since, I've never ever had to come into an office the last 14 years
  4. yes, it seems nothing is... a personal project would need to be hip, novel and outstanding... the minimum bar for that is basically #1019742762268098570
  5. yes because the bar is far lower than for (4) and you're showing a potential recruiter that you can be thrown at a large legacy external codebase, collaborate with people and be productive
  6. basic stuff, use all the tools available to you, Renderdoc, per-HW-vendor profilers and debuggers, if you're in #vulkan then all the validation layers and different tooling, ASAN, Tracy, Unit Testing frameworks
  7. well then get some connections, but yes, online job searching will be painful and pointless
silent flicker
# tidal crest btw LinkedIn and Indeed suck

Yeah, it's full of fake ghost postings and the for the few real ones, one has to battle with hordes of bots and web-devs to even get past the first stage random "recruiter" filter. Also linkedin is shitty site in general that promotes toxic corporate culture.

tidal crest
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The worst is that the plain old search function doesn't work XD

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You type in OpenGl and random frontend jobs pop up

silent flicker
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That's a given. Thanks to "AI" no search is ever expected to work KEKW

astral hare
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probably need to start a new project if i want it to be epic like that cause my current one is my first graphics project and suffers from skill issues

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contributing to foss sounds like solid advice so ill also do that at some point

tidal crest
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I mean if you only have one project under your belt and you've just recently gotten into graphics forget about finding a job right away

astral hare
tidal crest
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@rugged moat was poking around in Mesa drivers for good 2 years on own free time before getting a Valve job to do that for money

astral hare
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im gonna look for interns for my third yr summer (2026 summer)

tidal crest
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I was poking around irrlicht and OpenGL for 3 years before someone paid me for it

astral hare
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fair

rugged moat
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poked the right stuff at the right time

astral hare
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pretty cool

limber plinth
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was the job market for GP better pre 2020? because I always read about massive layoffs every 10 years of smth like that

tidal crest
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then after covid rebound lots of jobs that used to be on-site became remote, also remember covid created a gaming boom

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so 2021-2022 with ephasis on 22 was ok too

limber plinth
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I will just wait for the job offerings about fixing AI code (?

tidal crest
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or learn some CUDA/cooperative_matrix, do some ML in Vulkan and call yourself an AI expert 😛

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Slang has autodiff btw

limber plinth
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well I will take advantage of your willingnes to answer hahaha

is it common for people in GP to have a background in not low level code jobs? Lets say, web dev per example. but obviously with the 3 years of open gl foss/recrational job under the belt

tidal crest
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there's a disgusting trend

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of people throwing together renderers in Three.js

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even self-respecting CAD companies

limber plinth
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What I was trying to say was more like a "oh I did a lot of full stack work and then switched to CG because its my dream" kind of situation

tidal crest
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you often build stuff Web-based cause people are already using React/Angular etc. to make all the UI, the app-dev people are either C# or TypeScript so your business logic ends up in WASM either way

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also in enterprise deployment is a PITA, so if you can remove the roadblock of the IT guy having to come around with admin access and install your software for you... you get much better conversion rate

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so there's no installers, no driver updates, no permissions, stuff just gets used from a browser

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also you don't have to write all the filesystem and windowing code 5 times for each platform

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and god forbid you actually want native-ish GUI

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React/Angular doesn't cost, even React-Native is better than Qt from a licensing perspective

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again, even if MoltenVK makes your life a breeze and Android drivers got updated.. you'd be adding on heaps of complexity or cost on the basic OS/UI side just to have a VKSwapchain to render to

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and its not like Vulkan SDKs or engines exist which are as royalty free as Three.js and as simple to use

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the problem is that the devs who are gonna write your CAD app, aren't SIGGRAPH material

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unless you're Autodesk

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so they need something easy and dumb to use

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and if you make something like that in Vulkan, you end up with a Three.js-like API which will perform... same as Three.js

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GPU Driven rendering and advanced techniques are not user friendly

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Three.js is for webdevs, people with a bare minimum knowledge of graphics and trouble grasping linear algebra

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but there's the magic, these people can make wrong-but-functioning CAD apps very quickly

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@limber plinth one of the leading CAD Graphics SDKs uses DirectX 11 and has 0 occlusion culling or compute shaders

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why use a big-boy API if you're not gonna use any of the big-boy features and just limit the platforms you can deploy on?

limber plinth
tidal crest
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its not entrentched legacy

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its entrenched mediocracy

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truth be told, unless you're working with someone who's already maxxing out the hardware (customer or devops) they can buy at a reasonable price, you won't be pushing the boundaries of graphics

limber plinth
tidal crest
limber plinth
# tidal crest truth be told, unless you're working with someone who's already maxxing out the ...

I was wondering, what could cause the need of more GP work? or taking graphics to a new limit? because graphics are top notch today, added to all the innefienct things that pop up in web dev like you say...

maybe you can upgrade the performance but if it is not because something like the then being local SLM instead of cloud based LLM in general, so better GPU or atleast better matrix calculation...

tidal crest
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and even console vs PC is a different story, why do you think everyone is complaining about poorly optimized PC ports ?

limber plinth
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but even games just use DLSS and dont care about performance

limber plinth
tidal crest
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PC ports get no love, you're supposed to get them done for least $$$ possible on a shortest timeframe possible, also you know that even if its not playable in 4k right now, it will be in 18 months when new GPUs come out

tidal crest
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you don't spend time optimizing, you spend time on workarounds for their shitty drivers

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you're scared to use a new feature/extension cause some phone with a stale driver will probably break becuase of it

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look, the only time I get calls to do some hefty Vulkan CAD work, is if the company in question literally can't tell their customers to buy a better CPU & GPU cause they've already bought a Zen 5 threadripper and an RTX 5090

limber plinth
tidal crest
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like you need to be talking no occlusion culling, 12 polygon drawcalls levels of inefficient for this to even happen

limber plinth
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it seems like a snowballing problem}

tidal crest
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yeah but you can afford to have a 20 year old snowball no problem

limber plinth
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so that kind of heavy cad work that you talk about is from very old implementations?

tidal crest
limber plinth
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that dont use new op code or something like that

tidal crest
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this we got asked to rewrite from GDI to Vulkan

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nobody touched the 2D rendering in about 14 years

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it just worked

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GDI used to be GPU accelerated in Windows XP and before 🤣

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then it became software rasterized on newer windows versions

limber plinth
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The other day I was surprised that the FLIP (Fluid Implicit Particle) algorithm of houdini doesnt use gpu, and the recommend you to have a threaddripper but I am sure that using the GPU it would work faster. But reading you, it makes sense. Jsut buy the new cpu. I think that something that would cause more need of graphics programmers would be if you just cant buy a better gpu, like the chip shortage of 2022. do you think it is related?

limber plinth
tidal crest
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so their choice was.... CUDA and Nvidia vendor lock-in or CPU ?

limber plinth
tidal crest
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scaling CPUs is easy

limber plinth
tidal crest
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GPUs is hard

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multi-GPU is often PITA

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esp without CUDA

limber plinth
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but the casual joe is not going to be able to do his FLIP simulation of water

tidal crest
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but houdini gets used by power users

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you wanna do a FLIP sim for a movie, you rent 20 AWS nodes which cost $0.2/hr with shittons of RAM

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whereas otherwise you'd have to rent 50 nodes at 1.5$/hr cause GPU nodes are just expensive for some reason, and RTX cards come with puny 8-16 GB of VRAM

limber plinth
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yeah I just that you need a lot of ram for storing the "particles"

tidal crest
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you can stick 128GB in any desktop machine no problem

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more than 24GB on a prosumer GPU ? forget it.

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a threadripper is still cheaper than a Quadro with > 24GB VRAM

limber plinth
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yeah xD

tidal crest
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almost nobody writes multi-GPU code cause its PITA to deal with

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NVLink is fast, but not as fast as GPUs local memory

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well at least its not PCIE

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the thing is that to scale GPUs properly you either need DXG-1 or non-RTX cards (Which command a 4x premium) which can do infiniband or DMA ethernet

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its just muuch muuch more hassle and cost than CPUs which provide same power

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its the reason why movies were and still are rendered on CPUs because GPU doesn't like out-of-core that much

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actually the main reson is precision, not so much scaling and VRAM

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your run of the mill Geforce is 100x slower if you use double in your code instead of float

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Quadro is faster, but still like 30x slower

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CPUs don't have such perf cliffs, the doubles are half as fast as singles

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Even Quadro GPUs have a 1/32 rate double float

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only the Tesla accelerators have "sane" amounts of double ALUs

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I'm not saying that doubles are necessary for large world rendering or FLIP sims

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its just that its simpler to code them up mindlessly

tidal crest
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with GPUs there's no "just buy more RAM" or "plop 2 CPUs in a multi-socket mobo"

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a multithreaded program will work the same on 2 CPUs (albeit it will suffer if it doesn't know about NUMA and use core-affinity thread-pinning)

limber plinth
tidal crest
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without even knowing you have 2 CPUs

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developers cost more than hardware

limber plinth
tidal crest
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anyway I need to get back to work

limber plinth
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ty so much!

cursive loom
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With no experience or strong hobby gp portfolio in go your chances are basically 0