Something With Media

A decade ago, something with media was what people said when they had no idea what they actually wanted. Your guidance counselor would nod. You’d nod. Nobody knew what the hell it meant. Now the industry is concrete enough that you can be specific. Game programmer. Motion graphics. VR development. UX research. Name the thing and there’s probably someone hiring for it.

What’s interesting about magazines that document who’s building what and who’s hiring—Code+Design being one of them—is what they prove. The digital industry has an infrastructure now. You can read interviews with people who actually made it, companies explaining themselves, job listings with specific skills. Where there used to be a void, there’s a map.

The magazine is free, which means it’s half ads. That’s usually annoying, but here the ads are the point. They show you where money actually flows, what companies need, what skills are in demand. If you’re trying to figure out whether this path is real, the ads answer it faster than any interview. They’re honest in a way interviews usually aren’t—companies are spending money to reach you, which means they’re actually hiring.

What strikes me is how new this all is. Not so long ago, media careers existed in the abstract, something you aspired toward without knowing what you were aspiring to. Now you can hold a magazine in your hands and understand the actual landscape. Read how someone did it. Read what they learned. The specificity is the thing—not the magazine, but the fact that specificity exists at all.