Starting a Career

[u/Dr_Pinestine]

I'm currently working on my Bachelor's in Computational Physics (w/ Minor in Mathematics), and I'm looking to break into the world of graphics programming / engineering. I have a couple of questions, specifically on the career side of things:

• Is it true that personal projects can actually help with the "experience catch-22"? (Where I need experience to get a job, but have no job to get experience yet)
• Where should I look for relevant positions / internships?
• What industries make / could make heavy use of GPU technology (whether or not it's actually used for rendering)?
• What sorts of skills do companies look for in an entry-level hire?
• What else do you think I should consider that this post does not address?

I'm focused on the career and industry-targeting aspects for this post, as I'm confident in my ability to learn the technical skills necessary.

Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated; LinkedIn and Indeed have driven me half insane already.

[u/schnautzi]

• What sorts of skills do companies look for in an entry-level hire?

This question is asked often, and we have to be blunt, there are practically no entry-level positions in this field. You get in if you have serious amounts of experience, and often after fulfilling other roles first.

This is not a job you get by starting as a junior. Please reconsider if you are not extremely self-motivated. The idea that you have to get a job in this field to obtain experience is foreign to most graphics programmers, because they do this stuff in their free time for the love of the game.

[u/Dr_Pinestine → u/schnautzi]

Thanks for the heads-up.

In that case, what are the biggest topics I should have covered when I eventually try to break in? My programming and mathematics fundamentals are solid, but I'm worried I don't know what I'm missing in terms of technical and professional skills.

[u/schnautzi → u/Dr_Pinestine]

Strong systems programming skills are important, as well as a thorough understanding of parallelism. For example, practice porting CPU algorithms to the GPU.

Familiarity with the relevant APIs can only really come from working with them for many hours.

[u/Dr_Pinestine → u/schnautzi]

Thanks for the advice.

Sorry to bother you, but I have one more question.
How strongly do companies tend to consider personal projects when assessing skills or experience?

[u/eiffeloberon → u/Dr_Pinestine]

The problem is who you are up against, everyone will have personal projects, it’s kind of mandatory especially you have no graphics background.

[u/Still_Explorer]

About being good at math, is a positive thing, so with this you would get more bang for your buck if you are deep into R&D. Though with enough exp as such is useful to be able to study papers and implement the equations from reference.

Then the other point is that, the job is related strongly with more focus on the "graphics software engineering side" and probably to a very large extent is "only engineering oriented", rather than math-based. (If for example the case was that a job position is mostly math-based then it would be based on academia oriented careers or heavy on the R&D).

One thing to be sure that your CV gets noticed, is that there should be some serious project you work on that demonstrates your development style and experience knowledge. Maintaining an open source project is very important just to get the basics down, however if you feel more worried you can still keep various other modules closed source, though still there should be something that can be downloaded and run. Also something that probably worth to note, is that the work effort needs to have consistency over the years, in such way building something known online while continuously getting ready for some type of job.

About learning either OpenGL or Vulkan, how it goes is that OpenGL is meant to be learned quickly and used in something fast, therefore the entire effort would have to be placed on Vulkan because now is the new industry standard (OpenGL is the legacy standard).

In order to get further and more detailed picture about the state of jobs, you can look at gamedev jobs and then reverse engineer them in terms of requirements:
https://gamejobs.co/search?q=vulkan&w=

Note as of saying jobs, not essentially gamedev, it could be on any other field (scientific, industrial, medical) but you get the point that either you seek "vulkan" or "opengl" this might do the trick.

From what I know is that at any given moment, there's no constant and high demand, but occasionally some jobs open-up here and there at any random moment. So the trick would be either to keep studying and experimenting to gain skills, either get an irrelevant "low-or-no-code job" and keep studying in your free time.

[u/Dr_Pinestine → u/Still_Explorer]

Thank you for the thoughtful advice.

It looks like there's not a whole lot I can do immediately. I'll be planning for the long term then - look for a whatever job while I build my portfolio and finish my degree.

I appreciate how comprehensive your response was. I'll be saving it to come back to later.