Surely this has been asked before, but a quick search didn’t find me much. What I’m wondering is: what’s the best path to land a programming job at a AAA studio?
I do have experience programming games (quite a few actually), but they’ve all been simple 2D games and I’ve never finished anything 3D of AAA quality. I do have a good amount of knowledge of 3D math and programming, but it’s all been self-taught. While I have a degree, it’s not programming related, and all the job listings I see ask for Computer Science degrees.
Right now I am considering going back to school for Computer Science, or trying to release a game that gets some success or attention. I could try to make a really high quality game demo (let’s say one short level, but of AAA quality) or several simpler “indie” games within the same time frame. I’m not sure any of those options are a surefire bet, but they seem the most promising.
Is the CS degree still worth it (considering it would probably be from a cheaper or lesser known college I could do online)? I know there are tons of indie games and most don’t get any attention. I’m not sure if that would be enough to land a job (unless it was a big hit). I also like the idea of doing a really small demo, but of super high quality, since it would work well as portfolio / demo real material. I’m not sure I’ll have time to explore all these options as school would take up all my free time time (since I’ll be working a day job as well).
Thanks, @Kiwasi , that was somewhat helpful. Sadly, the speaker didn’t really speak about college at all (despite the video title) but what was there was solid. Seems like having a smoking portfolio is the most important thing, but I’m still struggling with the Computer Science degree requirement and what exactly employers would accept as “equivalent experience”.
Make own game, ship it, and if it’s quite good then they’ll want you quite badly. Since shipping a full finished game pretty much taps on everything they need. From that point its a test of your talent and how decent you are at programming.
Network! It’s so important… like if a job opens up and they think “Hmmm that person who I was talking to at X event would be great for this”. If you can send off a email/facebook message that says “Hey, I saw the ad for a junior programmer and was thinking of applying could you have a look over my folio and give some feedback before I apply”
Just apply for all junior programmer roles, it’s good practice and will probably get you put on an internal list of people who’ve shown interest… Just a guess but if you get to a stage where they contact you and say you didn’t get it ask why and how they think you could improve when applying in the future(Sets the idea that you’re not done and want to improve) I’ve never done that though.
In an interview don’t try so hard to show your perfect that you don’t show who you are. I think this is one of the most important points as in an interview they need to know you, not some facade of a perfect person.
If they give you a test, they’ll probably say it’s supposed to take like “2-4 hours” but in reality they want the person who works on it for the whole weekend
When making a project never let the overall project make your skills not shine. If the games cool, but not very programmery then it’s no good. Showing your mad skills is really important. Also everyone knows that one person does all the work in student projects so make sure your that person.
Thanks for the feedback. After thinking about it more, and talking to some people offline, I decided to forget about school for now. It’s just a big time and money commitment, and I probably have a better chance of getting noticed by increasing my skills and trying to release some indie demos. Hope that’s the right choice at least.
An alternative to official schooling might be to get MSDN Certified. You can study at your own pace and complete the examinations when ready. It’s not a degree but it is probably the next best thing.
You will need to be lucky. There are some out programmers are there for sure but it’s very less likely in the USA. Many people want to make games but hardly anyone starts out thinking I want to be a systems administrator for a PBX or a backup administrator. Those I’ve seen many non-degreed and non-certified folk hired for IT administration jobs but the only person I know that had a job programming that didn’t actually have a degree in computer science got fired when they found out his degree was in music. A lot of the early musicians in synthesizers because quite good programmers but that matters little if the hiring place wants a computer science or similar technical degree.
My brother has some telecom and MS type certifications and at some places those will get you a better paying job and easier to find a job than the relevant college degrees for programming and IT jobs, especially outside a few urban development hotspots.
I’ve worked at a bank that’s hired degreed natives in other professional fields and had us folk with the relevant degrees and experience train and help the noobs out as a way to avoid paying ever higher salaries to people with the appropriate degrees ad technical work experience. It is not cheap to import foreign workers, even when they do as I did and pay their way to move to the foreign country and move back home when finished. Most technical jobs only require a tiny subset of what you learned via degree or certification and what the hardware & software is capable of.
So bottom line is even with a technical computer science related degree you are unlikely to get a job for a AAA gaming company. If it seems otherwise too you consider that you are on a game development forum. Plenty of programming jobs for other fields though.
Was he fired because he lacked a computer science degree? Or was he fired because he hadn’t actually told them what the degree was? Your wording is giving me the impression they didn’t know what his actual degree consisted of. Either way the example I usually give for having a degree is to point towards @zombiegorilla . Many people on his team either do not have degrees or their degrees are not relevant to game development.
ZombieGorilla and Disney aren’t the only degreed programmers and business, respectively, in these forums and in any event ZombieGorilla doesn’t represent Disney. It is true though it is easier to get a technical job without a degree than in years past but it’s strictly a cost cutting measure and those type jobs are usually manning small portions of a strictly established production line that require a small bit of technical knowledge to do the job. Heck, that’s my interest n Unity too - I only must do small snippets of coding and configuration to make a game or app. That’s also how the bank and other places I’ve worked at managed to hire folk without degrees in CS to do the jobs after a bit of training. However, first sign of trouble they’d always have a degreed CS professional managing the program because they could be rather scary - LOL, or rather your boss’ reaction to the problem could be rather scary, still such a setup is huge cost savings and practical too given the lack of CS degrees and the widespread adaption of computer technology. It’s sort of the difference of running a cash register versus programming the cash register. Both can be a bit nerve racking to do good by but they are much different in the amount of training you have to do (well not really - the person running the cash register at least went to school from 5 - 16 years old besides all the social graces they learned).
Anyway, they must of fired the music man for not having the degree he claimed to have had and for several years at that company. Of course HR wouldn’t tell us exactly the reason and I’m not going to give the businesses’ name. At any rate he’s still the only programmer I’ve worked with in a programming capacity that didn’t have a degree in computer science or related fields. I’m sure he probably got another job not too long afterwards, he was one of the better programmers they had.
I don’t think they goofed they just didn’t check that often and some places never checked in the days when that man was hired. It used to be uncommon to be given drug tests and criminal background checks but for all but a few select jobs but now I have had more drug tests and criminal background checks then convicted drug dealers out on parole.
This is true. My posts/comments are my own, and representative of only myself and my experiences. I do not (and can not) speak for Disney.
To be fair, this may be accurate or not, I honestly don’t know.
As @Ryiah commented, I don’t have degree, I don’t think anyone on my team(s) have a degree in anything game related. Some have degrees, some have unrelated degrees to what they do. Many are self-taught. (our sr. engineering manager among others). But our studio hires based primarily on experience. On the development side, we pretty much only senior level, and those with many years of professional industry experience, at which point degrees don’t matter, they have already proven themselves. So they have been at it quite a while. It may very well be the case that it may have been easier in the past. It may also be the case that those who last this long are just good regardless of academic background.
You’d see a different type of requirements to be hired by the government or working for a business that has a contract with the government that they are working on. If you need a degree and a certain number of years experience you must have them to get hired. 38% of the jobs in DC are government and 12% in Ohio are government. I googled that.
In short you have to be amazing, there’s so much competition today that you really need to be able to bring something to the table. I’m not just talking technical skills as well, you need to be extremely hard working and have excellent interpersonal skills.
You will get training on their various in-house technology, but they’ll expect you already to know the concepts / fundamentals and implementations for pretty much most scenario’s relevant to the position you apply for. The lines between low / mid level engineer and specialist has become extremely blurred.
If you’re a programmer, things like language type and contexts are irrelevant… No matter what they throw at you (LUA / Python / C++ / C / C#) it should not be an issue, it’s about the “implementation methodology” not the language. Also you should have a large grounding in concepts outside of games (general API’s, editor functions etc.), you should be aware of common issues and effective solutions around large 3D games with ample grounding in scalability and modern technology implementations…
I can give you example topics, but the best thing to do is try building a very small version of an advanced 3D game. Make it work the EXACT way it would do in a stereotypical AAA game… Some of the “tech” demo’s I’ve seen from people applying for jobs are insane. Sometimes with a slight sweat on my brow thinking, how the hell did they do that? Whilst being ice cold on the outside …
As for degree’s, well that’s down to you… Not sure about the US, but in Europe they cottoned on years ago you won’t have the applicable knowledge from a degree alone to make the cut. I’ve never seen an instance where a degree decided if you’d get the job or not. Although this is specific to the position you’re going for, in a lower level position which requires aptitude as opposed to outright experience they may say degree or 3 years equivalent experience.
When you get to engine specialist / senior developer / specialist tech artist… It’s pretty much 5-7+ years experience as a mandatory requirement, but you’ll not start out in a position like that anyway…
It’s caused a bit of an issue within itself, 10 / 20 years ago a degree at least gave you a chance to get the interview but not necessarily the job… Today most companies will require that you have field experience (because a lot of people have degree’s and they know it doesn’t automatically mean you can do the job). Issue is how can you gain that without getting the job in the first place? It’s a little bit cyclic in nature… But just keep trying, you may find someone gives you a chance.
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