indie games are still a hugely important part of the industry, Peak is a recent great example of a small team making something fast that is novel and successful.
My experience is similar enough to the author's though. I was a Masters level dueler in starcraft2 and had a huge passion for the game, and a huge part of that was that the community was exciting at that time. I participated in the subreddit, I wrote articles, I casted games on the side. My friends played the game. I eventually had a go/no-go moment where I could've kept pouring myself into the community, potentially worked with folks like Artosis and Tasteless, etc.
But all signals were that the community was dwindling and blizzard wasn't properly invested in the game, which lowered my motivation a lot over time. So my decision was No.
The only real complex problem a start-up has to solve is making the product successful. Engineers that love "complex problems" with no love for the product / space it's in is usually a recipe for disaster.
Comments here feel a bit rough. If you've got the time, I'd recommend a read here.
Regardless of the "stats" here (absurd price point, 2 days / 18 miles, plenty of supervision), it feels the author is as self-aware as one would hope. The article, longer than necessary to be sure, is still well-written.
His experience, his feelings throughout -- make any arguments you want about them, but it feels genuine. I learned a good amount about Black Tomato et al., and regardless of their merits, they do exist and people are using them.
Oatly is a successful brand and their marketing is clever, but that doesn't mean they are "The New Coke".
Oatly has never pretended sugar is good for you, it's listed on the box, we all see it. And I don't think they should be put on blast for their use of canola oil of all things..and by the way nobody is drinking it because of the health benefits of that.
The most effective thing they did from a marketing standpoint was an anti-dairy campaign. Their biggest achievement is making people go "Yea... cow's milk is kinda weird, why wouldn't I drink an alternative that tastes just like it".
Coke, cigarettes, sugar campaigns -- They sold you on this idea that life can be more amazing if you just use this product.
Oatly did something different. They said "Hey your life can be about the same as it is now, enjoying dope milk, but without drinking cow's milk like a weirdo". And it worked.
I like HuK, but his thoughts on WC3 are off-base. He says:
Economy/Resource - 2.8 / 10
"However when comparing it to the SC universe, WC3 has always been underwhelming to me when comparing its resource counterparts of mineral/vespene. Gold obviously being the most important, with wood generally feeling more like a chore than something I want to collect. To me the most limiting factor is the upkeep cost, a mechanic that not only limits strategies, but also deters expanding or larger scale battles."
This misses the point of WC3 vs. Starcraft / Starcraft 2. In Warcraft 3, one of the most important resources not present in Starcraft is your heroes and their levels. If you watch any professional WC3 game, there is rarely a discussion of who's ahead based on economy (although that is a factor at times) - but there is always discussion on hero levels. The importance of creep routes and disrupting creeping for heroes / races with favorable creep is a huge component of the game.
Also, upkeep is a specific choice meant to reward players who don't inflate their armies for the sake of it. Grubby said it on his stream, in Starcraft, it is universally a good decision to spend your money as soon as you have it. It's not strategy if it's always a good thing to do. Whether you spend it on X, Y, or Z is where the strategy comes in, but as long as you spend it something, you can be confident that it was better than not spending it / banking it. In WC3, that too is up for debate. You can spend on X, Y, Z (units, hero items, expansion, another hero, tech, upgrades) but at certain times in the game, it is also perfectly valid to hold on to that money for a specific reason. I think this is a smart design decision, and is one of the reasons why WC3 has some interesting dynamics.
This is my perspective as a really big fan of both games. They're different games, but it's clear HuK is using Starcraft as the rubric. No game is as Starcraft as Starcraft, Warcraft is its own game with its own complexities.
Article presents opinions based on a broad and incomplete picture. This might be the most harmful type of publication right now, the author wants to justify his feelings of "The U.S.'s liberty is expendable, but it doesn't have to be" when the reality is the U.S. was not equipped in the ways S. Korea were. He wanted to make a specific point and ignored the obvious facts that would make the point invalid.
I switched into software with a non-STEM background, been an engineer for about a year now and have heard / seen a lot of hiring conversations both during my process and since then at my company. Projects that you can point to and explain are valuable if and only if you can even get on someone's radar. The amount of "projects" that people are doing in their own time is becoming dizzying, and for employers to actually spend time to parse through what is a good project vs. what is a boilerplate tutorial project is not realistic.
In my case, my employer happened to hire people from my particular bootcamp, and had good experiences with those hires. Coming from that bootcamp is what got me in the door, no amount of "projects" would have done the trick. It's very hard to say "I'm legitimate, see all these projects I've done", because unless you can have a very clear timeline of "I did this project two years ago, and I've been diligently learning ever since as noted by this, this, and this project", it's just another person with another github with another project. Absolutely zero reason to bring that person in when you have other applicants with actual backgrounds + a project or two.
All this is to say, I don't think this advice applies nearly as much as people believe it does anymore.
What made you go back into academia? Based on this snapshot of your life, it felt like academia at its best gave you an outlet to explore the things you were really interested in, but at its worst, had a ton of obvious drawbacks. Even in this book, it seems a lot of the best experiences stemmed from or started outside of the program (MSR) and the Ph.D, while providing support and enabling these things to happen in the first place, was no longer an active contributor in.
I know you had mentioned you could write a whole book on this, so I'm sure there's a lot to the story.
I'd be curious to hear more on your schema validator. We've been using GQL for a little over a year and have felt some serious pain when doing big shifts in our GQL layer and even just when we're trying to clean out dead code / assess which resources are being used in which FE apps.
Brood War definitely requires a much higher APM, but the quirks of the game could make it much harder to decipher what is the correct action. It'd be interesting to see if/when the AI would discover things like muta clumping and if it would uncover new micro techniques...that would be very cool.