He left a game QA job in Japan in January and moved back to the New York area. Then came nine months of unemployment — softened, but only just, by a weekend wedding job that paid around $1,000 a week for four or five hours of work. It kept him afloat. It did not make him employed.
The job he landed came through a major bank’s mass hiring round for anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer compliance, run after the bank was fined. The pay is less than ideal. He is not complaining: compliance hiring is hard to break into, and the weekend work continues.
He does not have a finance degree. He has a fine arts degree and years of game-industry work, where, as he put it, Excel is used religiously — the same spreadsheet skills, the same attention to detail, the same long lists of things that must be checked.
His point was blunt. Anyone who says a fine arts or liberal arts degree cannot lead to corporate finance, or another well-paid profession, is wrong. He had just done it, nine months and one mass-hiring event later.