Is opengl worth ?

[adorn1]

Hi

I am about to complete my masters.

I am planning to do OpenGL. But before that I have few questions.

(1) Is OpenGL Worth investing 3 months..?
(2) What are the career opportunities after completing OpenGL in depth?
(3) What is the general salary freshers get..?
(4) I know, once in graphics you must keep coding.. and I am ready for that.. I have also heard that resources are very less in this industry
So will I earn good money? I mean as compared to service based companies?
(5) What are the chances that I will be going to London? I badly wanna live in London.

well, I would like to tell that I have some background in Maths and I like doing it also. But money is The Big factor.
Philosophically people can keep saying money is not everything but in real life it should not be and can not be treated as if its nothing

I do not know if this is the forum to post such a question
But I think most of the opengl programmers start from this forum only to solve their basic level questions;
and I guess this is the most basic question that will I earn money out of it?

[Nowhere-01]

it is quite unlikely someone's gonna pay you for bare minimum of knowledge and sitting there asking "CAN I HAZ MONEH AND GO TO LONDAAH YET???". with approach like that, i'm afraid, you should consider something like janitor. caring about money is logical. but for a start, you should care to make your time worth those money. and "investing 3 month into OpenGL" is really vague. noone here knows your capabilities. but anyway, it's a laughable amount of time to learn it without experience with any other API or graphics programming. you'd have some chances to get the job if you were interested in the subject and was capable of doing something notable to show to employer. or just doing something notable yourself and getting profit out of it. but seeing this naive attitude, it's not likely to happen. in that niche, underexperienced code monkey's are not widely appreciated.

"just for a job" there's DirectX, which is much more popular in mainstream game industry. and that's the place, where you have chances to get a job without much investment or experience. because they tend to do it like that: "just hire a bunch of programmers, they'll do something". you can relatively easily get into this crowd.

[V-man]

You need to ask yourself what industry you want to work in. There is the gaming industry which is probably the biggest that uses 3D APIs. In that industry, you need to be at expert level in DirectX, OpenGL, OpenGL ES and a few 3rd party libraries. There is also the rest of the industries : CAD/CAM

[tonyo_au]

But money is The Big factor.

First you're probably in the wrong career - get into hedge fund managing!

In IT, graphics is not one of the better paying area unless you are really lucky. The best money is being a software architect - ie knowing how to match software/hardware to real world problems. Here in Australia you can get $150-200 per hour. Graphics pays more like $50-90 and much fewer jobs.
But you won't get anything like that when you first start.

The UK is a bit of a basket case at the moment; it would not be my first choice for a work location.