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Actual difficulty in getting into the industry.

Started by Fibonacci One Apr 20, 2005 at 3:31 PM 11 replies 1.7k views

Original Post

Apr 20, 2005 at 3:31 PM

Today in my computer graphics class we filled out those surveys that you do at the end of the semester. For those that haven't done them yet, it's just a bunch of questions like "On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate this courses effect on your personal views and beliefs?" with a big blank spot on the back for comments. After the teacher left the room I asked what everyone else in the class was putting for their comments and it seems the general results were along the lines of "There's too much math," "It's harder than I thought it would be," and even "I was hoping we would learn to make games." This strikes me as a bit funny that so few people ended up enjoying a topic I find extremely interesting. So I went to the facebook and did a search at a random sampling of schools for anyone interested in "computer graphics". The results were typically from 0 to 10 people per school. (As an aside, I noticed that most of the schools that were closer to 10 were typically much closer to the west coast as well) Now, I know that thefacebook.com has some obvious flaws: 1) Not everyone interested in doing computer graphics for a living is on the facebook. 2) Not everyone that results from a search for "computer graphics" will be interested in computer graphics, or is and just doesn't want to get into the industry. However, due to the increasing popularity of thefacebook.com, I would say that the results are at least reasonable. This leaves me with a pretty small set of people that will be wanting to do computer graphics for a living. Considering the rising size of development teams and the rising size of the game industry in general, I would expect a larger set. So the question then becomes, when they say it is difficult to get into the games industry (or, considering the search I did... computer graphics industry) do they really mean that even if you are moderately to exceptionally skilled in computer graphics that you might have a hard time finding a job. Or do they just mean that you need to do a lot of hard work to get the necessary skills to get into the industry.

zer0wolf

Apr 20, 2005 at 3:53 PM

The Computer Graphics technology department at my school, Purdue, consists of roughly 300 students (rather small, I know). Last year I took a poll in a class of mine that was required of all freshman CGT students and there were like 60 students in there. Approximately half of them said they were interested in game development, half as well said that they would take a course dedicated solely to game development, and only like a fourth of the students said that an interest in game development actually caused them to go into CGT.

This means out of the current 300 students at my school in my major, only about 75 of them actually listed game development as one of their deciding factors on the major, not necessarily the only one. Despite all of these students being interested in the field, how many of them bother to actually do extra-curricular work in game development? The computer graphics field is all about building your portfolio. Grades aren't really anything at all.

I think that yes, there are alot of people interested in game development, but very few have even the foggiest idea what that really entails. Even further along those lines, fewer people know what they even have to do to get into the field. So you're an animation specialty type person... what can you animate well? Do you specialize moreso in modeling? Riggin? Character physics? Lighting and Rendering? Finding your niche is something that most people don't quite realize that they have to do and as they progress in their studies hopelessly squandering and not knowing what in the hell they have to do to get into the industry, they give up, which leaves room for the rest of us who actually are willing to do the work and are smart enough to realize that you really do have to specialize.

God bless their souls. [wink]

ParadigmShift

Apr 20, 2005 at 4:24 PM

There are a lot of reasons why getting into the game industry is difficult, few of which have anything to do with competition with extremely skilled people. For instance:

- Since the industry is small, finding game companies near you can be a problem. There are "hot spots" - Silicon Valley, Orange County/LA, places in the UK, etc. but in general if you live in Omaha, Nebraska you'll have to relocate.

- Most companies are small, and there is no one devoted just to hiring. Thus you can send a resume to a company and not hear from them for 6-12 months, simply because they're in crunch mode or otherwise busy. This happens more often than not. I still get calls about my resume, months after I've stopped sending it.

- The skills are difficult to aquire. You need access to developer tools which may be expensive or completely unreachable - you can't as a student make games for the PS2 or XBox, without some violation of user license agreements.

- It is very difficult to find internships or part-time entry points into the business, so you need to invest a lot of your unpaid free time teaching yourself the skills you need. This takes a lot of dedication.

In the end, I would guess that if you have some skills, show genuine interest in the field, and are willing to make the same sacrifices everyone else makes, you shouldn't have too much difficulty finding a job.

Tom

cwhite

Apr 20, 2005 at 4:51 PM

When I tell people that it's hard to get into the video game industry, it's usually a response to a 16 year old in the "For Beginners" forum telling everybody that despite his age and general lack of experience, he knows for sure that he wants to make hockey mmorpg's for the rest of his life. However, I'm graduating from college in May and have a handful of friends who currently sending off resumes/cover letters to various game studios. None of them have had any difficulty getting phone interviews and I'm confident that most of them will receive a job. The graphics courses that they took as undergrads gave them sufficient portfolios and experience to make them valid candidates for gaming jobs.

I tell people it's hard to get into the industry only because it's so hard to do the work necessary to make yourself competitive. However, once you get to the point where you're actually qualified, there will not be very many other similarly qualified people seeking the same jobs. A lot of those 16 year olds who want to make hockey mmorpgs with html# and variables++ will get weeded out from their graphics programs at University.

bah

Apr 20, 2005 at 4:57 PM

Quote:

When I tell people that it's hard to get into the video game industry, it's usually a response to a 16 year old in the "For Beginners" forum telling everybody that despite his age and general lack of experience, he knows for sure that he wants to make hockey mmorpg's for the rest of his life. However, I'm graduating from college in May and have a handful of friends who currently sending off resumes/cover letters to various game studios. None of them have had any difficulty getting phone interviews and I'm confident that most of them will receive a job. The graphics courses that they took as undergrads gave them sufficient portfolios and experience to make them valid candidates for gaming jobs.

I tell people it's hard to get into the industry only because it's so hard to do the work necessary to make yourself competitive. However, once you get to the point where you're actually qualified, there will not be very many other similarly qualified people seeking the same jobs. A lot of those 16 year olds who want to make hockey mmorpgs with html# and variables++ will get weeded out from their graphics programs at University.

Amen to that.

Fibonacci One

Apr 20, 2005 at 5:53 PM

Quote:
Original post by zer0wolf
The Computer Graphics technology department at my school, Purdue, consists of roughly 300 students (rather small, I know).

I'm not sure if you're being serious or not when you call that small, but my school (Tennessee Tech) doesn't even have a graphics program. I know a good amount of the CS majors here and I'm fairly certain I'm the only one who wants to do graphics for a living.

Quote:
God bless their souls. [wink]

lol.

Quote:
Original post by cwhite
When I tell people that it's hard to get into the video game industry, it's usually a response to a 16 year old in the "For Beginners" forum telling everybody that despite his age and general lack of experience, he knows for sure that he wants to make hockey mmorpg's for the rest of his life. However, I'm graduating from college in May and have a handful of friends who currently sending off resumes/cover letters to various game studios. None of them have had any difficulty getting phone interviews and I'm confident that most of them will receive a job. The graphics courses that they took as undergrads gave them sufficient portfolios and experience to make them valid candidates for gaming jobs.

I tell people it's hard to get into the industry only because it's so hard to do the work necessary to make yourself competitive. However, once you get to the point where you're actually qualified, there will not be very many other similarly qualified people seeking the same jobs. A lot of those 16 year olds who want to make hockey mmorpgs with html# and variables++ will get weeded out from their graphics programs at University.

That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Do you mind if I ask what school you go to? (and congratulations on the upcoming graduation)

Also, what sort of programs do your friends have in their profile? About how large (number of programs, lines of code, or any other way you wish to represent size) are these profiles?

cwhite

Apr 20, 2005 at 6:13 PM

I attend the University of Virginia. All the people I know who are looking for jobs have at least one full-featured game in their portfolio that they had to write for a class in real-time rendering. I know one of the games is about 17 KLOCs. They also have a few toy programs from a class in animation such as a rigid body simulator, inverse kinematics solver, and a motion capture blending program. Other programs in their portfolios come from things they do in their spare time.

One them has a published paper on his resume from IEEE Visualizations 2004. One of them did his senior thesis on photon mapping on the GPU and another did his thesis on distributed frameless raytracing. All of them have been involved in graphics undergraduate research in some shape or form.

Miranda

Apr 20, 2005 at 6:36 PM

Quote:
Original post by Fibonacci One
the general results were along the lines of "There's too much math," "It's harder than I thought it would be," and even "I was hoping we would learn to make games." This strikes me as a bit funny that so few people ended up enjoying a topic I find extremely interesting.

I found the same thing in a class I took in my last year at uni. The class was "Object Modelling for Games Design", so basically more advanced graphics topics, using OpenGL, C++ and CG.

I found that at lot of people didn't like it and complained about the maths and the fact that we didn't make and engine or something... This was weird because for the huge majority of the class, this is an elective that they don't need to do if they don't want to. It was a requirement of my course, but I figured if you are doing a degree marketed to game development, you'll like a graphics class!

I mean I found it hard, especially given that I'm not too good at Maths, but it was so rewarding when you actually get something done, that I knew that was what I wanted to do (and am now doing) once I finished uni. I'm still proud that I managed to get my head around quaternions!

Admittedly I didn't apply to any traditional games companies when I graduated (I was offerend a job before I finished), so I can't say how I would have done if I did. But I have spoken to a few people from local comapies and they told me that it shouldn't be too hard for me (or anyone from my double degree) to get a programming job, provided they have a decent portfolio. They say they are always looking for good c++ programmers.

So basically I think if you are good at what you do and have the right qualifications, it shouldn't be impossible... Not easy, but not impossible...

SKATIN_HARD

Apr 20, 2005 at 7:27 PM

This kinda ties in with Ace's thread a little bit. You need try and find some
connections in the industry and you also need some experience. Which can be hard to obtain. Its just like a credit history. You want to have good connections but it takes time to build them up.

Phineas

Apr 20, 2005 at 8:31 PM

Quote:
Original post by zer0wolf
I think that yes, there are alot of people interested in game development, but very few have even the foggiest idea what that really entails. Even further along those lines, fewer people know what they even have to do to get into the field. So you're an animation specialty type person... what can you animate well? Do you specialize moreso in modeling? Riggin? Character physics? Lighting and Rendering? Finding your niche is something that most people don't quite realize that they have to do ...

What about for programmers? Should we specialize in topics like game AI or physics? From my research on getting into the industry I read a lot of "make lots of games and you'll eventually end up with one really good one for your portfolio." That doesn't sound like specialization.

EvilDecl81

Apr 20, 2005 at 8:42 PM

Quote:
Original post by Fibonacci One
Today in my computer graphics class we filled out those surveys that you do at the end of the semester. For those that haven't done them yet, it's just a bunch of questions like "On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate this courses effect on your personal views and beliefs?" with a big blank spot on the back for comments.

After the teacher left the room I asked what everyone else in the class was putting for their comments and it seems the general results were along the lines of "There's too much math," "It's harder than I thought it would be," and even "I was hoping we would learn to make games." This strikes me as a bit funny that so few people ended up enjoying a topic I find extremely interesting. So I went to the facebook and did a search at a random sampling of schools for anyone interested in "computer graphics". The results were typically from 0 to 10 people per school. (As an aside, I noticed that most of the schools that were closer to 10 were typically much closer to the west coast as well)

Now, I know that thefacebook.com has some obvious flaws:
1) Not everyone interested in doing computer graphics for a living is on the facebook.
2) Not everyone that results from a search for "computer graphics" will be interested in computer graphics, or is and just doesn't want to get into the industry.
However, due to the increasing popularity of thefacebook.com, I would say that the results are at least reasonable.

This leaves me with a pretty small set of people that will be wanting to do computer graphics for a living. Considering the rising size of development teams and the rising size of the game industry in general, I would expect a larger set. So the question then becomes, when they say it is difficult to get into the games industry (or, considering the search I did... computer graphics industry) do they really mean that even if you are moderately to exceptionally skilled in computer graphics that you might have a hard time finding a job. Or do they just mean that you need to do a lot of hard work to get the necessary skills to get into the industry.

Computer graphics is only one aspect of games - the most well known, but also the most difficult to get into. Not because of supply, but simply because the requirements for this role are increasingly difficult. There are _plenty_ of open positions in graphics, just not intro-level. Each generation of hardware the knowledge required gets higher and higher. I've seen plenty of graphics guru's become obselete because they didn't keep up (or were unable to).

Realistically, the body of knowledge is quite vast. There is a big difference between dabblying around and really understanding the fundemental concepts behind reflection, radiance, transport theory, sampling issues. Worse still, Computer Graphics classes are fairly poor training grounds for doing real time graphics.

Fibonacci One

Apr 20, 2005 at 9:13 PM

Quote:
Original post by EvilDecl81
Worse still, Computer Graphics classes are fairly poor training grounds for doing real time graphics.

Maybe a class like mine, where we went over the theory behind a decent amount of computer graphics to make a software rasterizer, isn't going to give the best introduction to **real-time** rendering. There's also the fact that nearly all applied classes (even ones that go over some more mordern techniques) can do nothing more than give you an idea of what to do. The usual "The teacher only opens the door, the student has to walk through it" sort of stuff applies here.

But where does this experience come from if not "dabblying" around? I'm going to assume you don't mean a dabbler as someone who just goes to nehe's site and copies a few lines of code since it should be pretty clear to everyone that, that is not enough. Where do you draw the line between dabbling and knowing enough to get into the industry?

zer0wolf

Apr 20, 2005 at 9:24 PM

Quote:
Original post by Joseph Mahsman
What about for programmers? Should we specialize in topics like game AI or physics? From my research on getting into the industry I read a lot of "make lots of games and you'll eventually end up with one really good one for your portfolio." That doesn't sound like specialization.

That's because those articles you're reading are BS. Game companies don't hire "general programmers" for their games. They hire sound engineers, physics programmers, AI programmers, shader programmers, an asortment of tools programmers, user interface programmers, network coders, etc. Pick one of those and get really, really good at it. You'll be in hot demand.

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