I spent tenish years in VFX. I moved away in 2014, because the hours and pay were abysmal. I still love the industry.
I moved to a large profitable financial news paper, which had cute scaling issues (ie they were all solved, so engineers tried to find new and interesting ways to unsolved them )
I then moved to a startup that made self building machine readable maps, which allowed me to play with scale again, but on AWS (alas no real hardware). We were then bought out by a FAAMG company, so now I'm getting bored but being paid loads to do so.
Once the golden handcuffs have been broken, I'd like to go back, but only if I can go home at 5 every day...
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I've been in VFX around ~6 years and was in the sw industry before (and the hw industry before it).
I find VFX really fun as far as job! Sometimes I do think about leaving mostly for Pay reasons but the pay has been decent enough recently (basically FAANG base pay without RSU/Bonus...).
It is interesting how we have a lot of big scale problems that goes unrecognized, I find the problems really challenging. Compared to when I worked in the software industry we had a team 10x as big for a problem 100x simpler.
Outside of some big tech companies, biology, oil industry and finance, I cannot imagine many companies having such a big scale on number of cores/memory/disk.
Working in Pipeline I haven't found crazy hours yet, has been mostly a 8h/day job that I can disconnect after I am done. Also with Covid some people even switched to 4 days weeks which is quite interesting.
Cheers