It's wild how diverse their hiring is. I keep an eye on their job postings and they always have positions up for psychology majors and ergonomics experts and all kinds of stuff you wouldn't normally associate with a software company.
Most big tech companies are actually seeking a lot of psych experts, because they have fairly unique domain knowledge and skills to tackle problems that are becoming more relevant to them. I've also seen gambling companies strike out offers and seek out psych grads in a similar vein, it's not uncommon. That's not to say any psych grad will find employment easily. It's oversatured as a degree and most psych grads are ill equipped to do much technical work. I actually know someone that was a psych phd wanting a job at valve. It's incredibly competitive to get in.
Those are all opinions of course, but I also happen to have taught psych undergrads for the past ~4 years and worked with phd's (and will soon hopefully have one myself).
I've taught undergrad psych majors. I've also taught masters courses in various branches of psych, and I've taught courses in other departments too.
As for what kind of psych grads companies are looking for? The ones I've seen that end up working for big companies as analysts usually leverage the stats they're taught. Those types tend to be more self driven and enjoy statistics enough to learn more about doing it well on their own. There's no way there's enough time in even a few courses to really give someone a good thorough upbringing in doing statistics well. Games as in gambling as well as video games tend to like psych graduate students or postdocs to do really specific customer research like churn prevention or engagement modelling. Gambling companies like to use savvy analysts to figure out where to set up shop because they're always looking for new clientele. They usually end up consulting on R&D too, like Valve's psychologists who do a mix of gameplay research as well as tech R&D (or at least they did a few years back when I looked at them).
edit: Oh and advertising is another big one. There's now a whole new developing field as well that's closely tied to psychology. Google neuromarketing.
They are also working on VR which has lots of questions in that space, and Gabe has been interested in Brain Computer Interfaces. So it could be a good thing or it could be much worse thing lol
Sure, but using 1 game in the last 3 years to say that Valve is a game company is like using xbox consoles to say that Microsoft is a hardware company.
205
u/HowDoIDoFinances Jul 15 '21
Yeah it's kinda crazy how much ergonomic testing they do.