Oberon_Command:

1. Personally, I'd say obvious bending over backwards is actually a little off-putting in and of itself. It can make you look like you're desperate or you don't have self-respect. Neither of those look good, except to the kind of manager who would exploit you.
2. Too much formality would definitely be off-putting. The game industry is a pretty informal place. Most of us wear t-shirts and jeans to work. I could see an interviewer seeing this formality, and thinking that the candidate would expect everyone else to be as polite and formal as him, get pissed when they don't, and leave. I've also encountered coworkers who were too polite to the point where their mannerisms come across as fake, and I can tell you that meeting people like that is really off-putting for me.

This sounds much like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. It's as if the industry expects my friend to thread a too-thin needle - which doesn't really make sense as a job requirement. Now, certainly some standards of decorum are expected, but it seems to me that in this industry they are both un-intuitive yet ironically restrictive - your manner of clothing and behaviour can be relaxed, but precisely how relaxed is measured with a micrometer.

Note, this is from an outsider from a very suit-and-tie industry. Undoubtedly my observations are skewed.

Aha, the plot thickens. So your friend used to be a game developer, but isn't anymore? What happened? If he really was "shoved" out, it may be that word of him and whatever he did to get "shoved out" has spread...

In any case, someone trying to get "back" into the industry is an entirely different kettle of fish than someone who has always been outside trying to get in for the first time.

"Shoved out" is his words, and I must say they are inaccurate. All three dismissals were layoffs after business downturns, where many of his peers joined his ranks in unemployment. However, you raise an interesting point - could his reputation be falsely impinged due to this? It was my impression that this sort of event was common in the industry, but if there is an expectation of the rats leaving the sinking ship before it's under the waves, someone might get the wrong idea about precisely why my friend was laid off. How possible is this? Would three "strikes" means he's out of a career? Is there any way to counter this?

the best way to kill a programmer is to stop him from learning new things at the rate required to keep up with the rest of the industry.

Your friend should already know this if he was in the game industry before.

He knows this all too well; he asserts that his career has been "murdered" (yes, I know - he has a flair for intensity)...

because you won't post enough information to actually confirm what the problem is.

I can't post details, because he doesn't remember details - I suspect his injuries might be an influence. I also promised not to divulge any medical information or any information that can link these accounts to a real person. I apologize, but I don't know what else to do here.

The tricky bit is that you have to sell yourself a bit when you're shifting between industries and careers.

That's a big problem. His strategy has been to make himself so skillful that those skills sell themselves because due to his injuries, he cannot "sell" himself; it would be like asking a paraplegic to run a marathon. And before one of you says "some paraplegics do run marathons", this is where the metaphor falls flat - there are no prosthetics he can use to substitute for his lost ability. I only wish the ADA would recognize his condition for what it is, and call for equivalent "ramps" so that the many people like him can live fuller lives.

We are working at multiple removes, here, since we have deliberately incomplete information.

Layoffs are common in the game industry, having been laid off is certainly no bar to anything. And while in the initial round of job hunting, all those laid off are competing with each other, as years go by, the people you worked with previously should be your best path in to new jobs -- if they are at a company looking to hire, then "I worked with this person at Studio X, would love to work with them again" is the fast path to an in-person interview. If that is not happening, then the problem is more likely to be the applicant than the industry. I say more likely because if relocation is out of the question, or there is simply bad luck on hiring cycles, then that is not going to apply.

The rest of high tech is absolutely hiring, and is so desperate to hire that it will hire people whose programming background is "spent three months in a bootcamp". Someone with an extensive professional programming history in the game industry (a field which is held in unreasoned respect by the rest of technology, who presume it is more technically demanding than it actually is) should be able to easily move over. It is certainly not the case that the rest of high tech is *more* prone to ageism than the game industry is -- the game industry skews remarkably young in staff demographics.

So, as we said when your friend was posting here in person, the reported incidents don't match our experiences of how the software industry (in and out of games) works. Without more details, that makes the claims less credible.

He's understandably upset; he believes his career is over - at least in this industry, anyway.

He said if he had more time he could learn "back-end" (??) web programming, but he only has until the end of the month, then no more rent.

yaustar: This is the U.S. - I believe as long as his supervisor states it in the form of an opinion, he's in the clear.

At my present place of employment, we are not permitted to give any kind of employment references, positive nor negative.