Money or Passion - Why I got into Software Engineering (Programming) instead of Animation and GameDev

Came across a topic (on dev.to) on Money or Passion asking how some devs got into programming was it for passion or just needing money 💰 here is my story.

My passion was Animation and making Games, since 2012. I really wanted to go into the Games industry as an animator or concept artist but here where I live the studios were closing such as Lucasarts back in 2013 and now Lucasfilm and exiting totally.

Across the bridge there is a thriving industry but mostly it’s a place for lower cost external vendors. Seeing this reddit you know there are scandals and it’s not rosy. I was a bit disillusioned and discouraged about this in 2017-2018 and tried to pivot into UX Design doing a bootcamp, thinking it would be better but it was not long lasting the short career stints, and finally I wrote about my pivot to Coding Web dev in 2019 desperate to gain some stability in career and earn some money.

Programming seem always in demand

Coding was the only thing in demand back in 2013. Even though layoffs abound now in 2023. There always is a steady stream of jobs if you are ok with doing certain types of coding jobs, such as web dev. Some notable coding jobs was Frontend and Full Stack Development that happened to be in demand.

I will probably write about my experience on how being self taught developer can be good or bad but it was a clear there were more jobs in coding than doing animation work or game dev which was so minuscule, you can count easily on Indeed job boards.

Pay Scale difference

The pay scale between the two was also different for starting out. A junior Animator back then in 2019, was about $3,200 avg per month and a Software Engineer (junior) was $4,500 avg per month. Just searching for developer roles you could make about $1,300 more easily.

These numbers are estimates from back then where I live and it could have changed, but the truth was many jobs in creative paid lower than Software IT Development.

This was the closest table I could find from that time period for developers salary.

Source: https://nodeflair.com/blog/singapore-computer-science-salary-trend

AI Threat and Automation

While one of the reasons was for money the other was a threat of looming automation in creative fields, as told by one of my lecturers. He did not say A.I. and referred to automations of lower values jobs in animation and games getting semi automated by the computer, on hindsight I feel that it was far fetched that AI would catch up this fast in the creative fields, cause everyone thought it would go for blue collar jobs first.

Thinking back it made me have this idea that it is better to program for the API code rather than work for the API.

Everyone should learn to code

There was the hour of code video and many goverments promoting that coding can lead to a great job in Tech.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/FC5FbmsH4fw

So there were a lot of coding bootcamps that sprung up not sure there are still around but it was an indication to go into Tech. So began the journey in early 2019 to look for a job in tech.

On Passion developed overtime

I look back and can say i went tinto coding, for the money but I do think I have a small passion on it as I learned more about coding. It gets developed overtime.

In conclusion, went in for the money but slowly developed a passion for it after a couple of years.