Riot Games | Los Angeles, CA and St. Louis, MO | Full-time, ONSITE | Multiple positions
We aspire to be the most player-focused game company in the world. We were established in 2006 by a couple of entrepreneurial gamers who believe player-focused game development can result in awesome games. In 2009, we released our debut title, League of Legends, to critical and player acclaim. Over 100 million active monthly players.
I've done paid work in C#, C, C++, Objective-C, Python, Java, Javascript, x86 Assembly, a variety of flavors of SQL, Silverlight, Actionscript, Go, Node... Probably other things off the top of my head.
The thing is, I'm only really good at C# and C++. Most of the above languages use similar paradigms and just have some different syntax. The skill I actually want when I hire people is willingness to work on something they don't understand really well and get better at it. It takes a long ass time to get to very high levels of proficiency (where you understand all the underlying details of how memory works and the odd little bits about the compiler/interpreter/runtime) and I DON'T operate at that level with most of the languages I "know".
Many jobs don't actually require you to use windbg to track down issues in the .NET garbage collector. Situations like that are also highly varied and it's not something you can 'train' for, you just have to cultivate the skill of constant discovery.
This is predominantly the reason why I've spent as much time in a lot of diverse languages, in particular the ones I listed.
Sure, many of them are the same C/C++ family, both a lot of them aren't, and I tried not to repeat the ones that were isomorphic to something else.
To that end, I learned Haskell well enough to be able to "think functionally" and applied that to what I already knew about JavaScript, Python, etc. But I didn't go out of my way to learn Scala, even though I want to.
I learned MySQL and MongoDB because I needed them to complete projects, but didn't make the leap to PostgreSQL or Couch because I could just pick them up later, if it ever even came up.
I think the point is, know how to do a lot of things, but don't get locked down into doing it only one way.
People talk a lot about AI replacing a bunch of professional occupations but to some extent I've always internalized that as some futurist BS that might eventually happen.
It does, actually, it's just that a) nobody uses it and b) any time it gets brought up people rail against Microsoft for trying to tell them what to do with their computers.
These guys tried really hard to disrupt the domain business, even if they didn't always succeed perfectly. They made mistakes, but this kind of thing is how growth happens for entrepreneurs. I wish them good luck.
I find this about basically every Wikipedia article on a math topic. They are very precise - but basically completely useless for learning anything about the topic.
I once edited a Wikipedia article on an Einstein paper to make it much more clear. It was subsequently reverted. I understand the need for brevity, but the domain experts at Wikipedia revert many seemingly irrelevant edits.
The edit I made was to explain how Einstein made the leap to E=mc^2 by including the step that showed how E=mv^2 for particles of a given velocity. Of course this is well known to every engineer and physicist, but the article on the proof was so hard to follow without it.
We aspire to be the most player-focused game company in the world. We were established in 2006 by a couple of entrepreneurial gamers who believe player-focused game development can result in awesome games. In 2009, we released our debut title, League of Legends, to critical and player acclaim. Over 100 million active monthly players.
http://www.riotgames.com/careers