It’s funny, I don’t know anything about the industry but back in around 1999 I was working for a trading firm and we used to love hiring talent out of one of the big game companies - they’d be like “You mean I get paid the same money and I don’t have to sleep in my cubicle?”
I worked for a very successful “dot com” back in the day. EverQuest was like the crack pipe for the tech crowd, people actually got divorced over addictions to it.
My (girlfriend at the time, later wife) gave me a "it's me or WoW" ultimatum at the peak of my raiding obsession. I picked her. We had moved across the country for grad school and had no friends and I was using the game as a crutch rather than like, actually meeting people. I joined a softball team with some people from her program and made a bunch of lifelong friends.
More power to everyone who can play MMO's in a way that doesn't resemble a crippling drug addiction. I've learned that I cannot, lol. And my point isn't to disparage gaming friendships or relationships, it just was not ultimately for me.
I knew a WoW widow in college. Her boyfriend got completely hooked on the game, even to the point that he didn't want to have sex with her any more! She desperately tried to get his attention back but couldn't do it, and ultimately broke up with him. She was (understandably) very bitter about the game after that and wouldn't remotely consider dating someone else who played.
Thankfully as far as I'm aware the dude eventually got control of himself again and is living a pleasant family life these days. But the addiction is real for some people.
It was on the thirtieth interview when things went south. While excitedly explaining how they’d just scaled a business to eight million users the candidate casually picked up a shrimp fork and dug into the house salad with it!!
It was right then I realized we’d made a terrible mistake. I feigned gastric distress and headed for the restroom where I immediately called HR.
Months wasted but I feel we dodged a bullet on this one. Now it’s back to the drawing board but I’m sure we will eventually find a qualified junior web developer.
For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible.
Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety.
It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit.
Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.
Wat? CS is crawling with cheaters. Totally sucks. I can’t wait for the day when we have enough bandwidth that the entire game can be rendered on the server side and you just get a video feed. That would end most of this crap.
This. I used to jump at a DZ in the Midwest that has been in operation for like thirty years and had, I think, only one fatality. But we had great safety people in charge and were really careful with students.
My first jump there was a static line solo and they gave an hour long classroom session followed by time in a hanging harness practicing emergency procedures and malfunction recognition.
The thing that makes tandem jumps potentially more dangerous is that the gear is completely different from a regular sport rig - so it’s important to ask how many tandem jumps your tandem master has. He/she might have 10k jumps, but maybe only 200 on a tandem rig. As a former sport skydiver I wouldn’t go near a tandem jump unless the instructor had at least 500 tandem jumps.
