I had to leave game development because my seven year old son suffered a tragedy which completely disabled him. Game development is simply too volatile and risky a career for someone with that kind of family obligation.
As for the transition, I had accidentally achieved some recognition as a researcher of land economics through various blog posts. This attracted the attention of a new friend who was inspired by my work to put a startup together, seeing real estate mass appraisal as the most important missing piece for policy reasons, but also a potentially great business idea.
Investors agreed with him and a startup was formed. This gave me an alternative to game dev when I needed it most.
As for the actual work transition, I had a lot of subject matter to learn which we facilitated by hiring experts from the field, including former IAAO researchers (that’s the relevant standards body) as well as local appraisers.
I’m still learning but a lot of my skills transferred. The biggest difference is this is typically a pretty low tech field so many essential skills are soft — all the tech in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t explain things in simple terms to a citizen. As I like to say “Prepare for a property tax protest defense, not a PhD thesis defense.”
The other big difference is cost structure and expectations and competition. Game development is essentially selling one of the hardest kinds of programs to write, to the world’s best served audience, under maximum competition, for the lowest prices.
In local government you can charge what felt to me like large prices and still be genuinely considered cheap compared to what existing vendors charge. And people are used to software that doesn’t work and customer support that never responds. So if you can exceed expectations that is an edge here.
But many tech people have failed in this field, because they can’t master the soft skills and they can’t communicate simply; that part is deceptively hard.
I had to leave game development because my seven year old son suffered a tragedy which completely disabled him. Game development is simply too volatile and risky a career for someone with that kind of family obligation.
As for the transition, I had accidentally achieved some recognition as a researcher of land economics through various blog posts. This attracted the attention of a new friend who was inspired by my work to put a startup together, seeing real estate mass appraisal as the most important missing piece for policy reasons, but also a potentially great business idea.
Investors agreed with him and a startup was formed. This gave me an alternative to game dev when I needed it most.
As for the actual work transition, I had a lot of subject matter to learn which we facilitated by hiring experts from the field, including former IAAO researchers (that’s the relevant standards body) as well as local appraisers.
I’m still learning but a lot of my skills transferred. The biggest difference is this is typically a pretty low tech field so many essential skills are soft — all the tech in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t explain things in simple terms to a citizen. As I like to say “Prepare for a property tax protest defense, not a PhD thesis defense.”
The other big difference is cost structure and expectations and competition. Game development is essentially selling one of the hardest kinds of programs to write, to the world’s best served audience, under maximum competition, for the lowest prices.
In local government you can charge what felt to me like large prices and still be genuinely considered cheap compared to what existing vendors charge. And people are used to software that doesn’t work and customer support that never responds. So if you can exceed expectations that is an edge here.
But many tech people have failed in this field, because they can’t master the soft skills and they can’t communicate simply; that part is deceptively hard.