u/Emotional-Map-372

Hello, I'm a Cse engineer.. and I was wondering about the probability of getting into valve. I'll share my current status and my trajectory, so you could get an idea.

So I'm currently in my second year (just started with my 2nd year), in India. I am a core cse student (no specialisation that's imposed by my college), and I'm also a part of my college racing team, participating in both national and international sae baja events. I just became a member around 3 months back and I'm still in my training phase. I've worked with tools like Solidworks and Fusion 360. In a couple of weeks I'll also have worked with lotus shark and ansys and other tools. I've decided to work with the vehicle dynamics department as I've done some reading, and found out that for game dev it can be a pretty good asset. I've got drivetrain ideas that might be patent worthy and for the vehicle dynamics department also I might be able to come up with some things, but for now I have nothing as such. By the end of my 3 year tenure, I should be well versed with quite a few mech tools and vehicular physics, and also have practical knowledge of physically working on the car. Currently I'm a pretty strong member of my batch who got selected, and I'm hoping to climb higher in the department ranks in my tenure.. and I'm also a bit of an odd duck cause I'm the only non mechanical student to have gotten into the team for the past few years.

For the cse side, I've done very basic c, c++ and Java and I'm a little more well versed with MySQL/sqlplus and python. I'm starting to work on improving my skills in c++ as I'm planning to work with Unreal 5. So currently I've made plans to develop more knowledge in c++ and concepts in dsa that might help. I'm hoping that in about 6-8 months I should be able to start with unreal, very basic projects. Parallelly I'm hoping to make a data rig, the first of its kind, for our racing car and use the telemetry to build physics engines. So there's that also. I'm targeting to use these as my trajectory for the next 3 years until I get my graduation.

Along with that I've also worked on Aseprite for custom drawings and animations, and if I get the time I'm planning to start with blender to make detailed animations and assets.. but currently I've not given it a rock solid position in my timeline.

I've heard that valve only acquires employees who have good experience, so I'm targeting to get into companies like Saber interactive or EA or Rockstar or other such companies. Work on teams developing AA and AAA companies for at least 5-10 years at the very least. After serving that tenure I'm hoping that it should update my chances of getting into valve.

I've asked claude and chatgpt to analyse my career trajectory and it's saying that I have a pretty decent chance as long as I am able to stick to my trajectory and not stray too far off.. but AI doesn't always give accurate data, and also makes it a little hopecore because of how they are modelled. That's why I was wondering I'd ask in this subreddit, and saw a bunch of other people asking similar stuff.

(If you have any suggestions for my career trajectory then please do let me know.. I'm still in the initial stages and trying to incorporate them would be great)

(Also I'm aware that game dev folks usually start with unity and godot, but I'm planning to not waste time there and get into unreal directly as I'm getting into it a little later than what my peers have done)

To save you the trouble, the song plays at around the 2/3 mark.. its just an audio piece with maybe 2-4 seconds worth of time where you can hear it. Tried real hard with Shazam and gemini, but couldn't find the song at all.