Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster

Quote:Again, in each case you need your BS in CS or they won't even glance your way

Degrees only really help with getting the first job. Once you have a published title, nobody cares about your degree.

More importantly than a published title are the skills to back it up. Once you get into an interview, the easy questions are talking about your experience and skills. The much harder part is getting up on the white board and working on some rediculously job unrelated logic problem. :\ But otherwise, yes that's correct.

It's not just having a finished game that's important. If you work at company A, ship a title, and then try to get a job at company B, the HR people at company B all know people from company A and will call them up and ask about you. The industry is tiny :).

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
I don't know as much about Tim Sweeney, but Carmack started his own company, entered the industry before it was the behemoth it is today...

Prior to the forming of id John Carmack (and others) worked as programmers for SoftDisk and Apogee. SoftDisk is where J. Carmack, Adrian Carmack, John Romero, and Tom Hall met. They didn't start id because they couldn't get a job the created it to have ownership, control, and all profits (or as much as possible) from their games. It also allowed them to create games with seemingly insane requirements.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
There's always the option to start your own company....

As if that were any easier. Programmers wanting to start their own company may have the skill to produce good code but that doesn't translate to the skills needed to run their own company or be successful. It also requires money. Banks are not likely to loan money for starting a game company - they don't view software as a trangible product they can take if you default on the loan. Getting fundage from VC isn't any easier even if it is more likely to occur.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
But if you are talking about joe coders going into software mills, a degree definitely helps prove that you are competent and have a decent work ethic.

A degree is not in any way a reflection of an engineers competence or work ethic. All it means is that you spent a certain number of years listening, reading, passing tests, and taking all the courses required for the degree. It says nothing about how much knowledge you actually gained, whether you can put that knowledge to use in a professional environment, of if given a complex task that you will be able to complete it.

Quote:Original post by helix

That's pretty much what I was getting at. I'm not knocking self taught coders and I'm not sure why you take such offense at what I wrote....

As a self taught programmer I didn't consider the comments offensive nor do I think you're wrong.

Quote:His style is decent and the code is well documented and he tried very hard to keep it organized and easy to use...yet the structure leaves much to be desired....

Self taught coders have a tendency to approach solutions as they initially envision them. Over time the solution either changes or mutates in various directions. This causes a "jagged code" situation because the approach usually changes (many times) in mid stream.

In many cases, if a self taught engineer produces code as you described it can easily be used to their advantage. A lot of times it's also an indication that they can think outside the box, are likely to consider more than just the standard solutions, can usually wrap their mind around very complex problems, and with a little bit of direction can have their rough edges smoothed over. It's not always the case but I think it's much more likely to happen with someone self taught. Being self taught they are also more likely to be very good at research - very helpful when complex issues are encountered.

Not having a degree doesn't mean they WILL have any of those traits. Likewise, engineers WITH degrees may not possess any of those skills. There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides. You just have to decide which ones are more important and look at them as individuals rather than categories.


Interestingly enough I think if we changed the words "coder" and "degree" to "Java" and "C++" the context of this particular topic would remain the same.

All good coders are self-taught, in the sense that most of what they know have been gained through reading stuff outside of school. If you just stick to the material they teach you at school, you have exactly 0% chance to make it. Are a few hours of programming or SE courses going to really teach you anything?
If you are teaching yourself AND get a degree you're in the best place.

But between a self-taught guy and a guy that all he knows he learned in school I would choose the first. Completely self-taught types may sometimes have weird ways of solving problems, but just-with-a-degree types most times don't even know how to solve real world problems. I have a friend who's also in IT, he passed all his courses and is getting his degree, however he came to me to help him with one of his last-year projects on databases(I'm on the same school, but I miss a lot of classes). I haven't even passed that course yet, but I had real life experience doing a real project for a company. Of course, when I get the degree I will have wider options because it's true many companies require one.

Helix, I would be interested to know what game programming courses have offered you that allowed you to get into higher level. What are they teaching there?

Misconceptions I've seen from my college class-mates and professors:

1) Games aren't real programs. (This came from a professor that spent most of his free time working on a Dots&Boxes game with insane AI last semester.)
2) Games don't need AI, I plan to make games and I don't see why I'd ever have to learn anything about AI. (student)

I see a majority of posts are asking the question of what it takes to get into the game industry.. 'is self-taught good enough or do you need a BS in CS.' From my experience I'd have to say it must be either both or self-taught, unless you go to a college that specializes in the field. In my second semester at this college I made a pretty nice 2D RPG using Cplusplus (and a proprietary 2D Engine.) Yet I feel I'd have no chance at getting into the game industry right away unless I picked up some books on OpenGL, DirectX, and Game Engine Development. I've been reading books on these subjects for about a year now and still feel I don't have the knowledge to create a game the way they should be created. Then again, maybe that's the thing about being self-taught for me, I can spend a year researching something without really doing much with the findings.. yet in a class, if I'm given a two week _deadline_ to research and design something, I manage to get it done in two days. I'm just lucky, I guess, that I have a class in Game Development the semester before I graduate.

One last note I just feel like including, most of the books I've read include a game, which is the ultimate goal for the reader to achieve. But for some reason they seem to always toss it into the final chapter, which is about two pages of "I hope you enjoyed the book and have fun playing this" instead of going into how and why it was constructed the way it was. Stop doing that.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
Helix, I would be interested to know what game programming courses have offered you that allowed you to get into higher level. What are they teaching there?

It was an extension program through the UW (http://www.extension.washington.edu/ext/certificates/gam/gam_gen.asp). The courses are taught primarily by people who work in the industry (and I've ended up working with two or three of them actually). It's really nothing you can't learn on your own, but their perspectives on the industry and focus on the coursework was invaluable. But for me, there was no reason I couldn't make the jump into the games industry before taking those classes (and I was already on the fringes by at the time having worked for a game technology company as well as a children's game company). It was just so much easier to learn about 3d programming and other game related topics in a classroom setting. Your mileage may vary.

edit: I just looked through the webpage I just linked for that course and they are now teaching way cooler stuff than when I took it! I was in the very first one they did two or three years ago and we didn't do anything with animation, etc. :(

[Edited by - helix on June 29, 2005 6:29:36 PM]

Anyone who thinks business or web apps are harder than games should take a look at what it takes to write a 3D physics engine. Someone said writing Avionics software, well, a (realistic) physics engine is not only THAT complex, but also not as specialized so it's much larger and more expansive, as you have to get problems working in a general form which covers all possible cases rather than those that apply only to avionics.

Anything that can be used in a business or web app can find an application in a game, depending on the sophistication level of the game and what it entails.