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- Year Of Graduation: 2019
- College/University: New York University
- Major: Film and Television (Minor in Computer Science)
What do you do for a living? Can you share what a typical day at work looks like? Do you enjoy what you do?
I’m a software engineer for a fintech company, and on the side I run a website called chillgames.net where I have free games that people can play. A typical week varies a lot though, it depends on if I’m on call. My company is medium sized, I would say. It still has a mix of startup culture, but it’s definitely pretty established and there’s a high bar for quality. If you make a mistake, it could cost customers money or mess up their business.
I’d say I’m in meetings maybe 20% of the week, and then 60% is a mix of coding or discussing projects. The last 20% is mostly admin stuff. It can be pretty stressful, like it’s a very fast-paced company. I do enjoy the amount of ownership that I get over my work, though. I can really define projects from start to finish and get a lot of say in how they’re done.
Can you tell me about your experience finding a job after graduation?
In film school, gravitated towards lighting and camera, but mostly lighting. I still liked directing and writing, but I think I just realized that there was a lot of opportunity to attach myself to good projects and work with interesting people if I got good at lighting.
I got connected with a professor at NYU who recommended me for a union fasttrack. So basically, you know, after graduating, I was working on network TV shows. I was essentially a stand in where if a union member was sick or couldn’t make it to work, they would go down this list and call people. If you were called, you were expected to come. You would only get a certain number of times you can say no. I hated it. It was like 12 hours a day you’re just hauling equipment and setting up lights. A lot of the people who were doing it were pretty resentful. It was just a job to them. I think that kind of jaded me a little bit, and it was not creatively fulfilling at all.
At the same time I had been starting to develop a portfolio website for my own films and some of my other friends wanted portfolio websites too. I started experimenting with ways to manage the content on all of our websites and I ended up building a content management suite of sorts, and that ended up landing me my first CS job, which was not glamorous at all, but I was excited.
Why did you choose your undergrad major? Do you feel your time spent in college was valuable? Why or why not?
It all started when I got a flip video camera in middle school. There was a YouTuber I used to watch that did a lot of tutorials on special effects, so my friends and I would go around with our airsoft guns and pretend to shoot each other. I’d record it on my camera and then I would edit it, and add gunshot effects. We had a bunch of these little movies.
From there, in high school I started to take it a bit more seriously. I bought a DSLR and I found friends who were also into film, and we would write scripts together and actually try and shoot them. There was a teacher at my high school who was also into film. He kind of mentored us, and he gave me a bunch of challenges to do, for example he’d say to make a film with no violence in it. I submitted a lot of the films I made when applying to NYU, and I got in.
I would say that film school was probably some of the best times of my life. I was surrounded by a bunch of people who were as committed as I was. We all worked super hard, for free. It was just like a creative sanctuary where we could talk and live film, and make movies. We turned out so many projects.
You pivoted pretty significantly, from film to software engineering. How did these interests relate for you?
Lighting is kind of the engineering of film. You don’t really think about it, but if you’re just relying on sunlight, you know, as the sun moves, the shadows aren’t going to match on an actor’s face. People are used to watching high budget movies or movies where this is done professionally but if it’s done cheaply, you can tell.
When you shoot a scene, the cinematographer will decide what the shots are like and how they want it lit. They’ll hand it off to the gaffer, which is what my title was on most of the films that I worked on. As the gaffer, you have to think about exactly where to put each light, where cables are going to be run so people don’t trip, where plugs are going to go so we don’t overload a fuse box at a certain location. AC has to run at certain times because lighting gets hot, but you can’t have it going all the time. There’s a lot of things you have to anticipate to ensure things go smoothly. It’s technical and intricate, and these are the kinds of roles I gravitate towards.
We’ve heard from others that film is a difficult industry to break into. What are your thoughts on this career path?
I mean, listen, it’s a lot of fun and the people I know who are filmmakers enjoy what they do and they have interesting lives. Every piece of content you see on TV, and maybe AI will change this, but for now, it’s made by a team of people. But like, when you go and you watch a Marvel movie, good luck. It’s probably not going to be you. If you’re interested in working hard, and want to have a job where no two days are ever alike, then I would say film is a good career to pursue.
The best way to describe the film industry itself is it’s kind of a battle royale. It’s a shrinking industry. It’s getting smaller and smaller and every year there’s a few thousand hungry new grads out of college who all are competing for this shrinking pool of jobs. In tech, there’s plenty of opportunity to move up because your boss could get a job at another company and suddenly there’s a spot that opens up above you. In film, no one’s leaving their companies. No one’s moving, so it’s extremely hard to move up.
How important is it to have a purpose-driven life? Why or why not?
What makes me happy is storytelling, and creating. I have set up my life in such a way where I do have time to do that stuff, which definitely feels fulfilling and purposeful. If you like traveling, if you like eating at restaurants, if you like wearing nice clothes, you’re going to have to sustain that somehow. If it’s not coming from your parents, it’s going to have to come from you. I’m grateful that I found a job that I’m good at, I like doing, and I still have time left over in my day where I can do other stuff that fulfills me.
What’s your biggest struggle right now?
I spend a lot of my day sitting at a computer, for my job and my side business, which is realistically not sustainable. So finding ways to break out of that is something I’m dealing with now.
What do you want to spend more time working on? What is stopping you?
I would love to have more time to make games. I would say that with the recent breakthroughs in AI, I’ve really been able to learn about and develop things in game design that I wasn’t able to do before. For example, if you look at the website today, mid August, all of the games are in 2D. I’m about to release my first 3D game this weekend. I was able to have AI help me with some of the math and and the logic there. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that was super complicated and now it’s not. I’m kind of excited about that. I do have ethical problems with using AI for game assets, like the art. I still do hire people to do that or do it myself.
If we traveled three years into the future of your life, what do you want to achieve? What would you hope has changed?
I would probably like to be traveling more. I would say that two or three weeks of vacation per year is very little if you think about it. So I would like to basically be in a position where I can travel more. I travel for work sometimes, like I’ll go to New York but I want to see other parts of the world. Quite frankly, too, I’d love it if my company IPO’ed. I have a lot of money tied up in shares, and that would be great.
How do you define being a successful person?
Success is having a way to sustain your life that you don’t hate, and having hobbies that bring you joy. I would say most importantly of all, though, it’s having friends. Some people who make way more money than me have just thrown away their whole social life to do it, and only hang out with other people who are making what they’re making. I would say that success is finding the right balance of all of these things that matter to you.
What’s the biggest lesson or piece of advice you wish you’d known earlier?
You should try to be the best version of yourself that you can be, but I think a lot of people put such a high standard on themselves that they end up doing nothing. I would say it’s better to do something to show your progress, even if it’s not perfect, because you can always iterate. Nothing is going to be perfect when you first try it, and that goes for hobbies, for work, or for creative pursuits.
Connect With Ben:
- Personal Website: benjaminhaber.com
- ChillGames: chillgames.net
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