I think OP you are on the right track trying to leverage your skills in one area by applying them to another.
I'm in the process of transitioning from IT to Law. This obviously takes longer than a year and it's certainly not for everyone. However I expect to be able to use my technical background (though not expertise per se) in legal work.
This article sums me up. When I started in my current job I had a really smart guy for a manager who was interested in hearing new ideas from his people and generally championed them. A couple of years ago we got bought out and I got a new IT manager with no real interest in technology or my job. Every idea I've had was ignored or shot down in flames. Unfortunately his attitude was symptomatic of senior management in our company.
I got disillusioned and got a reputation for being sullen and uncommunicative. I realized that even if I invented a perpetual motion machine he wouldn't be impressed (or even know what one was). So what was the point?
The happy ending is I got headhunted last week by my previous employer. My boss doesn't seem too worried about me leaving so I'm sure now I'm doing the right thing.
What do you think about the Anthropic Principle? Not only in the sense that the physics of the Universe is just right for complex life to exist, but also in the sense that if aliens 'got there first' we would never have been allowed to evolve to our current state? We don't observe alien civilizations because if they existed we wouldn't!
Life on Earth took almost 3 billion years to go from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular ones. 3 billion years is almost as long as the life of the Universe (~13.7 billion years). There's one data point that suggests that there was a big filter in our past.
I came in here to make the same point, though I too was pondering the karma hit. Have an upvote.
To drag another tangential fantasy/sci-fi reference into the discussion, in an episode of Blake's 7 Avon and Vila smuggled their supercomputer Orac into a space casino so Vila could play against The Klute, a wizened Davros-like house chess genius with a terrifying laugh. The prize for winning or drawing was 10 million space credits, lose and The Klute could choose your destruction.
Two years ago my employer threw out the 12-month old decent chairs my IT department bought for ourselves, and replaced them with spectacularly uncomfortable new cheap ones.
So I bought a 6-year old Aeron on eBay for my own use at work and have been very happy with it. Apart from a couple of small scratches on the feet it is still like new today. As an investment in my own comfort at work it has already paid for itself.
Do any of the sites use captcha? That wouldn't stop a human nursing a PC running bots, but it would stop someone starting a bunch of bots, then going to sleep for 8 hours.
Would cloud farms be practical if your assets lived on the cloud as well? That could solve the bandwidth problem both with the render cycle and collaboration with other shops.
Or would getting the assets there in the first place be impractical?
You're off the rails. If two things are "in the cloud" that can still mean they're in different data centers in opposite ends of the earth. The "cloud" just means outside your local lan. So it's the 99.999999...% of the internet you don't have any control of.
Meaning you'd still have bottle necks and bandwidth issues in getting them somewhere. That's why large projects just send HDDs.
Just have creation tools that allow you to capture and replay input. Then to send that multi-gig mesh or texture, you just send the input events from the artist and replay it in another instance of that tool (think doom2 demo file; as a YouTube video it is hundreds of megs, as a demo file it is a few kb).
There's no way that would be at all productive. It's not like the only thing that the artist is doing is typing characters on a screen. There's also a lot more going on than just echoing pixels like in an IDE.
For a character animator, there's an IK rig which, depending on the character, can be quite complicated, and IK involves a lot of math. Then there's the mesh deformation and blended IK/FK. And then things like hair and cloth simulation. And texture rendering. Doing that on a cloud would have latencies that would make it excruciating to work with.
Compositing would be just as bad; the amount of data involved is larger, and as you add layers and masks, filters that affect those layers and masks, you can pretty much throw any hope of interactivity out the window. Now imagine trying to paint out safety wires over a cloud...
Digital art requires a LOT more computing power than creating software.
Try playing a first person shooter on a laggy network, you'll get a sense for how frustrating and counter-productive what you're suggesting would end up being, though I suspect that it's because you're vastly underestimating how much goes on in digital artists' tools more than anything else.
It was claimed that assets couldn't be sent to the cloud because they use too much bandwidth. I pointed out that sending a replay of events used to create assets takes very little bandwidth. This has nothing to do with the latency you are talking about here.
I think he's implying that the bottleneck won't be an issue if (when?) we eventually have web-based software powerful enough to create those assets entirely within the same "cloud" that would eventually scale out to do the rendering.
When things are in the cloud, they don't have to be in different data centers. Cloud providers are starting to provide tools that give you control over proximity for exactly these sorts of performance issues.
Yeah, if I was an employer (and I have been from time to time) I'd probably read this, smile wryly, and move on. But someone else might not.
I don't have a problem with the guy asserting that he can pick up new technologies quickly, as long as he expects he will only be offered entry-level positions. You do not write Python the way Shakespeare wrote prose after six months.
I do however have problem with him not providing anything to back up his assertion. But he probably figures in a tight job market he needs to find a way to stand out, and this is it.
> Yeah, if I was an employer (and I have been from time to time) I'd probably read this, smile wryly, and move on.
I am an employer and that's exactly what I did. This is amusing, but I would never want a person like this to work for me. He's basically saying "I know nothing and proud of it... but I can learn! I can pick things up fast! Hire me! Why wouldn't anyone hire me dammit?"
> He's basically saying "I know nothing and proud of it…"
No he isn't. He just deliberately, explicitly refused to tell. I'd say this is a weak evidence that he indeed doesn't know anything. However, he clearly demonstrated writing skills. This piece is engaging and to the point. The ideas exposed are clear. Both emotions and facts are effectively communicated. To me, that's mildly strong evidence that he does know something.
As for why no one would hire him, I think he knows: because no one hired him yet. After the first month of job-searching (during which he made some obvious mistakes or just didn't have luck), he has to disprove the premise that there is no actual reason for his not being hired yet. As time passes, this effect becomes stronger and stronger. Some comments here that blame him actually ignore this, and if most employers do the same, they actually trigger the effect they ignore.
Ask yourself: say you see 2 applicants, one who currently has a job, and one who hasn't for several months. Which one will you most probably want to hire? Add in a few cognitive biases (they're not easy to overcome), and your decision may be based on this fact alone.
> Ask yourself: say you see 2 applicants, one who currently has a job, and one who hasn't for several months. Which one will you most probably want to hire?
The one who hasn't, obviously. (S)he's had several months to develop undirected skillsets on personal projects, is less likely to be burned out, and would be far more likely to happily accept a lower offer.
That would be great if you actually mean it and are in position take decisions to this effect). Unfortunately, to most employers, unemployed applicants smell as if they stopped bathing the day they stopped working.
The only solution I see to this problem is lying on your employment record. But I must admit I'm uncomfortable giving this advice.
I have helped plenty of people solve problems in languages I don't know. I would not suggest that this makes me an expert or even all that unusual. However, I suspect that a great C++ programmer would be more useful to a Python project than an average Python programmer in about 3 weeks.
Is the person who hires you willing to risk their reputation or job that a C++ programmer can do the job when there may be other Python programmers out there?
I have never gotten a job because I was a specialist in the specific language they wanted. From what I have seen the most important questions are can the program and will they flake out. After that it's just a question of how well they fit into the team.
PS: Outside of a tiny startup few people really risk much with any given new hire.
This stunt is an attention catcher but he can't seriously expect to get a job without at least an interview. And not some bullshit where he interviews the company. There's no way in hell I'd hire him without first checking his competency.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting using the contact form to ask him interview questions, or just to setup an interview, but if it's the former that's ridiculous.
I'm in the process of transitioning from IT to Law. This obviously takes longer than a year and it's certainly not for everyone. However I expect to be able to use my technical background (though not expertise per se) in legal work.