Moving to Seattle/Redmond, etc.

galen_myth1

I am thinking of moving to maybe Redmond, or one of those areas close to Seattle. I'm wondering if anyone lives up there and can tell me if it's nice or not? I'm kind of apprehensive, I want to find cool roomates since I won't have any friends up there (I live in California at the moment and have for years). Maybe some of you guys are looking for a good roommate? Ideally, I'd like to find a job doing entry level game testing (to start). Does anyone know if this is hard to do (i.e. realistic?).

Let me know what you think?

admanb

Save a loooooot of money. Three months of living expenses, minimum. Six would be better.

Dehumanized

Yeah, you'll need a lot of surplus living expense money. It will probably take you a while to find a job here -- and in the QA field, you can probably expect only contract work.

One of my friends is a product tester -- and you need to understand that you will probably be hired on as a contract worker. The pay will probably be slightly above minimum wage, but you can expect to spend 3-4 months of the year without work. My friend has 2 months of forced downtime written into his employment agreement, and you can expect that they will probably let you go a couple times in the year because they ran out of projects.

big l

Seattle is the best city in the region, but there are arguably more computer software companies in Redmond rather than in Seattle itself. You're going to want to live as close as possible to where you work - traffic from Seattle to the Eastside (Redmond/Bellevue/Renton) and from North Eastside to South Eastside is terrible. You don't want to have 2 hours a day round-trip commute so you'll need to have some idea geographically where you can get a job at.

Doc

I like it a lot here.
You should certainly visit before you just up and move, though.

Do you have any experience in QA? If so, you will likely be able to find work as a contractor for MS or elsewhere. Game testing, not so much. It's a pretty tiny slice of the QA jobs that are available at any given time.

a5ehren

Also, as has been stated on this forum (probably) 100s of times, game testing is really shitty work unless you really, really enjoy playing bad games many, many times to see if they fixed the texture bug on level 6 without breaking anything else...

And that's on top of the long hours, bad pay, and constant threat of unemployment.

Gylen

I moved here from Sacramento myself, and what everyone has said about saving money, 100% true. I've been here 9 months so far, going to college and still haven't found a job unfortunately but luckily I saved up a bunch of money from jobs I had and financial aid helps considerably. It definitely helps that the cost of living up here is cheaper here than it was there, too.

In my experience though, finding a job has better odds here than in Sac since I actually get interviews scheduled as opposed to almost nothing down there. For QA, it might vary though, I don't particularly know how that field has been doing up here.

TheConstantWay

All good advice up there. I work in product testing for one of these aforementioned game companies, and you better not have any illusions about the work. If you have no previous qualifications/experience, it's going to take you a while to get unreliable, low-paying, soul-crushing contract work. Most of the people who have skills that would be useful in the game industry (programmers, designers, etc.) end up looking for work outside the industry just because it pays better and is more reliable.

The Puget Sound is an awesome place, and there's no where else I'd rather live. But getting established here is absolutely brutal, so you have to be prepared to deal with tech's hyper-competitive job market and the realities of contract work.

finral

Yeah, be prepared for some really stiff competition in any jobs you apply to. 100+ resumes for an open position kind of thing. I'm leaving Seattle in a couple months and one of the reasons (although not the biggest) is that it is too hard for me to compete in my field here.

galen_myth1

Wow...thanks for all of the replies, that helps me to have a better understanding of the big picture.

What about CompuCom(/excell)? It seems like they are constantly posting looking for testers. I understand that it's not super lucrative, but I'm hoping to get some experience mainly so that looking forward I could eventually end up with a solid job in test.

Is this unrealistic? Also is Eastside boring?

aperlscript

galen_myth1 wrote: »

Also is Eastside boring?

Yes, exceedingly so.

Slider

galen_myth1 wrote: »

Wow...thanks for all of the replies, that helps me to have a better understanding of the big picture.

What about CompuCom(/excell)? It seems like they are constantly posting looking for testers. I understand that it's not super lucrative, but I'm hoping to get some experience mainly so that looking forward I could eventually end up with a solid job in test.

Is this unrealistic? Also is Eastside boring?

No, the Eastside isn't too bad. I lived in Kirkland for a while.

I worked for Excell a few years ago. My last project was Halo 3.

If you want to test games, you should also try Nintendo, Volt (recruiting agency), and Big Fish Games. Besides Microsoft, I can't think of any other big companies that hire Game Testers.