Mapping is one of my hobbies...

BTW, is maping (as a job) is lucrative ? what are the salary for such position ? 

Yes. Mapping for Quake is what got me noticed enough to get mapping in UnrealEd and then on to actual jobs. 

I rarely map now though, although it's what I'm best at.

Showing something you've made yourself helps, but having qualifications and determination will help a lot more.

Being able to show (modern engine) screenshots of your maps is good because producers like shiny things - put your Q1 masterpiece into DP or Tenebrae. 

Yes I 'map' for a living (my official title is "Level One Level Designer.) My portfolio consisted of largely Quake 1 maps and projects mixed with Doom3, TF2 and Prey unfinished works.

Oddly enough, I think the selling point for me that my portfolio had a daily-updated map WIP that my employers could look at and see the changes I made. They could see how I worked, and I kept previous versions up for comparison. So the finished works were good, but the 'map in progress' let them see how I worked as well. 

Zwiffle

If you don't mind my asking ... regarding "Level One Level Designer" - how many levels are there? And where do you work? 

That level one level designer thing ... basically means I'm a grunt. I'm level one out of three. Dunno when I'll get a title change to Level 2, considering I've been here for a little over a year. The industry norm I think is Junior Level Designer? I work at Human Head. 

Ahh OK, I figured it was something like that. 

I rarely map now because we only do DLC. 

Where do you work ijed? I'm realizing now that I have no idea where anyone works. Heh. 

So no Steam DLC :P 

I technically am not doing game dev at the moment (grrr.) but in general, yes, i do level design and game design professionally.

I got into the industry with a portfolio of quake and quake 2 maps (and some screenshots of a WIP quake3 map.) But it helped that I knew Yogi online, as he was already at the company that first hired me. 

Yep. A few (relatively crappy) Q2 maps got me my first position, and a lot of Q3 maps + some industry experience helped me to move on.

Interesting note: My first design job was 3 hours from my house, so I'd drive down Monday morning, sleep under my desk (literally) M-Th night, and drove home on Friday. w00t.

Currently working at Raven on Wolfenstein. 

is george costanza? 

"My first design job was 3 hours from my house, so I'd drive down Monday morning, sleep under my desk (literally) M-Th night, and drove home on Friday. w00t. "

WTF? That sounds absolutely horrible. 

I don't map at my current job, just do modeling, for props and characters.
Switching jobs to work at Ubisoft next month though, and might be doing a bit more level design there despite the job title being "environment artist", as they seemed quite interested in my level design work during the interview.

So yeah anyways amateur mapping definitely helped me get into the industry, it shows you have passion for the work and products. 

Is it well payed ? 

From my experience in france, in euros, rough salary, you can start out at around 1800-2000 as a junior in a proper company, hit up to around 3000 max as a senior, any more and you're in a "lead level designer" position or something. 

It depends on where you work. At Epic, we are very well paid but we're not the industry average. 

For the country we're in. 

I was just curious... 

WTF? That sounds absolutely horrible.

Well...yeah, it did kinda suck goat balls. And my wife is a saint. On the other hand, it was an opportunity to get in the industry, and I managed to get a hell of a lot of Q3 mapping done for about two years there.

I'd shut down whatever I was getting paid to work on at the end of the day, fire up Radiant, and work on the latest Q3 map until 1 or 2 in the morning. Rinse, repeat. Weekends were bliss.

At least they had showers on site?