I have been working in technology for the last six years and I've been disappointed with the number of people in the industry that have no clue what they are doing. Mainly because the people that do the hiring, and sometimes even the managers, don't know anything about technology themselves. These people are allowed to squeak by, and many times flourish, through a combination of dumping work on those that know how to do it and kissing up. A "who you know" vs "what you know".

My question is, do you still run into these types in the industry, or are they usually weeded out somewhere in the process?

Wow. Surprised by the responses. Hopefully some other vets will weigh in as well since this is all just my opinions and others may differ.

Pulpfist: I only ever wear a tie when I good out for a fancy dinner, wedding, or similar. Never at work. The official uniform of game developers is shorts, t-shirts, and often flip-flops. For an interview you might want to kick it up a little, slacks, nice shirt with no coffee/coke stains. But if you wore a tie, most wouldn't trust you. It's what you know not how you are dressed.

JDUK: Libraries are fine, we all use them for certain things. Most don't need you to write rasterizers any more, we all use DX or GL for example. It is important to understand the tradeoffs and why you want to use them under what circumstances. When showing demos, use of libraries to enable you to show what is important and be clear about what you did versus the library. Some examples are a UI library is fine for a demo if you are not applying for a UI position. To give you some controls to tweak for a graphics demo, great. Even physics engines, if you used Novodex say, but wrote some heavy duty robotic controller that did a balancing walker or something and used the library for the physics and constraints, that would be fine particularly if you were applying to be the physics guy where they used Havok or something. But you should know the library and its limits well.

Bloodshed: There are always clueless people in any industry, but I have found they tend to get weeded out because they can't perform. I have been lucky to work with great people but when you have chuckleheads, it becomes clear pretty fast because everyone else starts taking up the slack.

Bluntman: I would say chances of a coder with good skills and a good work ethic getting work are great. The companies are all hiring like crazy to make the demands of the next gen consoles. School helps get through the first pass of resumes, but if you have a kick ass demo, send it in. People look at that stuff and the work is the scoreboard that matters. The images on your site look like a good start. If you haven't already, start looking into the procedural texture and geometry techniques in the Texture and Modeling: A procedural approach. Lots of great stuff in there. Perhaps make a planet editor that lets you modify all the base parameters and adjust with sliders and such the texture, surface topology, etc and view it real-time then let you save out those presets. That would be pretty cool.

Afro: Blizzard I have heard is tough. With the popularity of WoW they are getting tons of resumes and contacts. I am sure they need to ramp QA at different times but they are going to be very picky. You might want to start at a smaller or lesser known house if you don't have experience. Also many people start with the publishers in the big QA groups. Particularly toward the end of summer they all ramp up QA for the Xmas season. Many of the good QA people end up moving into production test from publishers test. From there you can move right up into design, production, etc. If you are local to Blizzard, go to the OC IGDA meetings, I know Blizzard guys go to those and you can start making one on one contacts.

BTW everyone. I posted a talk I gave to Fontana Middle school on the Game Tech site. I will eventually record some of these questions live and post that stuff there as well. But for now, if anyone wants to check it out and send me comments on improving it, please do:

www.game-tech.com/GameTechTalk

Whoops forgot CoderX75:

1. Content creation is a huge issue. Particularly with the next gen consoles and pc cards, just making enough art is one of our bigger challenges. We are looking at outsourcing more, and most of all better tools like Z-Brush that enable artists to refine big meshes easily. But also procedural content will play a big part...

2. As you can tell from my response to Bluntman, I am a big fan of procedural content. Particular with the next gen of graphics cards and needs for tons of detail, it is going to become more and more important. For one thing, while we can draw tons more, it takes a long time to make all that art and you can only manage so many artists. So any tools you can create that can add to that pool procedurally will really help. Also, the disc transfer speed is a bottleneck, just loading levels can take forever. So by creating it on the fly, you can save disc transfers. The benefits go on and on (LOD, detail textures, etc). The big issue is control. You need tools so your art team can still craft the look you want. That is why things like a procedural planet editor would be very cool. I have friends on the Spore team and they realize this very much and are spending lots of time making tools that the artists (and the home users) can use to create content.

So if you are into it, by all means work on ideas for new tools and techniques for procedural content. Check out some old procedural and evolved animation papers as well (http://www.genarts.com/karl/ for a good set), you will get really inspired.

Jeff,

Thanks for supplying your presentation on your website. That was a great introduction to game development at a level that I could understand. It gave me a better idea of what everyone's responsibilities are and how they work together on a project. I wish someone had given a talk like that at my high school. I would have paid better attention to my physics class. I'll be sure to sign up for the mailing list.