[oliveoil]

there's something seriously fucked up with the game industry. A uni friend with a reasonably good theoretical CS degree tried to get a junior gameplay programming job last year and was told/signalled his knowledge and experience is not game-specific enough. So what I suspect is that the people who manage to get in have spent some sweet time getting there (perhaps even on specialized uni courses) and keep telling themselves this is what they really wanted (wasn't it just yesterday here on HN someone posted the wiki article about cognitive dissonance?). And it's the same across large portion of game companies at least, most notably those crunching out MMO games (there's a great blog about that that I can't find right now).

[nihilocrat]

From a hiring standpoint, the industry is very inbred. Most new hires (except maybe in QA) in my company come from other companies. Our industry can bet that there are a fair deal of experienced (if only slightly) people out there who were either fired after a project ended, quit because of burnout, or are otherwise available on the market, so it's not very common to look beyond this pool.

Academic preparation will usually get you nowhere, and for a programming job it will only help in a secondary way, or for a more "generic programming" job like tools programming. We generally only pay attention if you've done "cool stuff", usually written games in your own time or as class projects, or have experience at other gaming companies. Gaming degrees or gaming schools (DigiPen, Full Sail) will help, but only insofar as it provides you with an environment where you can easily make "cool stuff". We don't care about your gaming degree; we care about what you accomplished in class.

Now, one thing to point out is that there's not as much of an iron curtain in European companies. Based on anecdotal chats with some programmers from these companies, it seems much more common that they formerly worked in a "boring" industry.

[ido]

I never studied anything game-industry specific (I was a math major) & I'm working as a game developer now (albeit in a small company that does casual games, not EA and their ilk) and only worked in 'normal' programming jobs before that (doing mostly semantic-web and "enterprise" stuff).

Of the ~20 people working here only one (the youngest and most junior, probably also earns a lot less than most of us) studied in a games-specific program.

I think many people here don't have a degree or have one in an unrelated field (I have yet to find a CS-program graduate, the ones I know of mostly studied stuff like physics and math).

What you refer to might be AAA specific, or just untrue.

[NickPollard]

One thing to bear in mind is that the games programming domain is quite different from the typical web/application programming domain that many here on Hacker News are used to.

In much of Games Development there is a greater focus on optimization and efficiency, the programming is a lot lower level and you need to be able to squeeze as much as you can out of the hardware. All the Games Developers I have worked for and interviewed for always look for certain skills, like pointer arithmetic and bit manipulation, that might not be an issue if you're building a social network or e-commerce site.

[ido]

Maybe.

But in my experience my work here is remarkably similar to previous jobs I've had that weren't in games.

[sprout]

Casual games are more web programming. He's talking about the multi-million dollar productions that tax the top consoles to their limits.

[pcwalton]

From what I've seen, casual (iPhone, Facebook) game companies are far more open to hiring general programming talent than the mainstream. (Which, IMO, can only be a good thing for the industry.)

[ido]

Online/flash games here.

And yes, they do seem a bit more open and also a bit more laid-back.

The latter is probably at least in part because it's easier to make money in the casual space.

[robryan]

There is also a bit of a problem the other way to, I know people who would be much happier doing games development subjects at uni but are reluctant because future employers may not give them non games dev jobs. I'd say a lot of people working in the industry are quiet specialised or at least they appear that way to employers, plus there love of games development is used against them.

[oliveoil]

Couldnt agree more.

>I know people who would be much happier doing games >development subjects at uni but are reluctant because >future employers may not give them non games dev jobs

This is a good thing in my opinion, it could help regulate the talent flowing into the industry so the companies wake up and start making better environment for the engineers.