hi i live in athens ga.im 16, and i was wondering if anybody knows of some or one place i can job shadow in ga. like a game development company or something. i want to be a programmer and my school is doing a job shadowing day on febuary 23rd or the 24th. plus i get out of school for free! haha.

It'll be tough to do any job shadowing at a lot of game companies. They protect their IP intensely and the chance that you'd hear a bunch of news about unannounced, but potential future releases or other sensitive material involving the games themselves would be high. You'd most likely have to sign an NDA before being allowed in past the lobbey.

To actually watch an SE do work may not be the most exciting thing in the world as it's basically a lot of typing and the occasional meeting. Oh, it's plenty exciting if you're actually doing it, but I don't anticipate watching someone work on a codebase you don't understand would be exciting. Perhapse if you were watching an artist it would be interesting. But still, most of them are modellers and if you're looking at concept art that generally means quite sensitive information is all around.

Anyway, it might be tough to job shadow for a day at a game company (much like it would be tough to shadow at a credit card company or a bank with so much sensitive information around.) It would be a big risk for whoever accepted you, so keep that in mind.

I'm trying to do two things with this post: 1) make you aware of the disparity between playing games and making them and 2) make you aware of the difficulties involved in a company bringing you within its closed development studio.

Good luck though, ask any companies around your area, who knows, you might get lucky.

Hi Adam,
The challenge for you is going to be to find any game companies close enough to home. You can look up game companies at the following sites:

http://www.gamasutra.com
http://www.neoseeker.com/Companies/
http://www.gamesup.com/index.htm
http://games.ign.com/index/companies.html
http://www.frappr.com/gamesdevhouses

I just zoomed in on Georgia at frappr, and didn't see any. :o(
Good luck!
Tom

thanks alot, yeh i thought the security would be an issue, because i could be some kind of spy for another company or something lol, but im not, i just thought it would be neat to see the life of a *working* game programmer, and what my job would be like, but i think im going to check out colleges or something, like job shadow Ga tech(GIT) or some electrical or software engineering company. thanks again!