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What Game Companies Want From Graduates
simoniker writes "Game education site Game Career Guide has a new feature talking to recruiters from notable game companies like EA, Insomniac Games, and THQ. They discuss the best university courses and qualifications for getting hired to be a game developer. EA's Colleen McCreary comments on the rise of some TV-advertised mass market game schools: 'Our concern with for-profit institutions is that students may not learn the fundamental tools for understanding and solving complex issues... We are most likely to hire someone who has a BFA or MFA from a traditional art college and a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science for our entry level artist and software engineer positions.'"
If you're not already in the industry, you don't get into the industry.
God spoke to me.
As an ex-EA employee, let me lay my cards down.
:).
1) Graduates are a cheap and renewable source of grunt workers. Peons, if you will (for the Horde!). Looking at that list of requirements, I'm shocked. All they will use a new graduate for, in general, is the usual and mundane runner work. As long as you can string a few lines of code together, and step through someone else's code to debug it, you can do the job.
2) I've watched this cycle happen again and again. New graduate joins, is elated to have a job at (ZOMG!) EA. Said graduate works his ass off, earnestly, and has no qualms about being taken for a ride with 80 hour work weeks, because he feels he's up-and-coming. Six months later, the burn-out takes hold, and he quits, with nary a smidgeon of job satisfaction in sight.
3) We all know that the number of letters after your name means very little when it comes to being a good developer. It's not about how much "rote" knowlege you have, or about how many ways you've learned to solve the travelling salesman problem. It's about being able to come to grips with other people's code. You need to be able to pick something up, turn it around, find the bugs, update it to the next generation of the source base. Especially important is the finding bugs part - when you're working with a foreign multi-platform source base hundreds of thousands of lines of code long, you need to have a big L1 mind-cache, if you'll forgive the metaphor. It's about capacity. Simple hard work and devotion will not cut the mustard on these sorts of projects. The managers know this - the qualifications mean next to fuck all in this industry. They just need to keep the positions looking attractive.
For the Horde!
-posted anonymously, so as not to offend any of my ex-coworkers who might still be at my old studio (and no, we had *nothing* to do with WarCraft, despite the references
I've seen this problem myself, you get the for-profit colleges promising the world and more to a few kids who don't know the first thing when it comes to developing games. I'm attending one myself, and in our very first quarter we had tons of people, who hadn't the slightest clue. Myself and another classmates came from a modding background, so we had a good idea of what we were getting into. We have lost beyond 50% of our initial classmates as the quarters roll by (now about halfway). The students who came after us are no better. Game companies don't really have to worry, the people who don't know what it takes are generally filtered out in the three years or so it takes to get a degree, or if they do graduate, they will stand out amongst their classmates. If an employer is competent, they'll be able to see past the garbage. The problem is actually in modding too - how many times do you see people in mod sites talk about an awesome mod (so awesome, he can't tell you specifics) ask for a massive team to do all the work and just listen to him? Yes, these projects die, fail, crash and burn, and so do people in game programs who don't know what they're getting into.
What he said makes sense to me. If you want to make a specific game, start a company. Big games are expensive and no established company is going to let a person fresh out of school do anything important like design their next game. Therefore, if you have a very specific game in mind, your best bet on getting it made is to start a company.
Maybe not
I work for a large game development studio. The slave labor approach only works for low innovation products. There are definitely studios that make those sorts of games, but even with aggressive overtime an inexperienced workforce will never return a superior value:cost ratio to warrant such an approach. We just finished managing a team of over a 100 people. We were trying to innovate, but such a large team made us too slow. Every new junior person we added after about 80 people probably lowered the overall quality of the product due to the increased communication overhead. Management in many development studios know this and are trying to make their teams more effective.
As it relates to "what developers want": We want smart people who like video games. We'll pay them well and send them home at 6pm. Slave labor studios will continue to exist, but innovative studios are on the rise and hiring aggressively. Ubisoft and Vivendi are two that come to mind.
If you didn't go to school, but you are energetic, disciplined and passionate, apply for QA roles and then commit to understanding the mechanics you see when you are testing. I know an Executive Producer of an extremely successful 2006 game that started in QA and absorbed the processes he saw around himself. He moved into design years later and applied this knowledge while absorbing process from new disciplines around him. Then he was a respected Producer for years, mainly because he understood what it took to get things done in each area. Most recently he applies all of this with a talented team and makes a great game.
Even young punks who think they know it all can grow up in QA. It is quite an eye-opener for these know-it-alls to be around disciplined, confident CompSci graduates who really do know their stuff. They often mature during this process can move onto more responsibility. The ones that don't are easy to spot.
If you have the education, the only thing that you need if you are missing experience in the games industry is modesty and passion. Modesty to work on the boring systems, and passion to make those seem exciting. The industry really needs more candidates. We routinely hire talent from other countries because we don't get enough local resumes.
There is actually some fascinating research that can be done in game design (graphics, computer music, discrete math, HCI, modeling, etc.)
Whether these companies will allow employees to pursue that research is another question entirely.
Like grad. school? :)
I'm a lead server developer at a MMOG company in the Bay Area. What do we want? We want talented programmers. If you can hack it, then education, experience, resume, all that crap is immaterial. The most important stuff you have to teach yourself. Learn what's out there, play with it, use it, fix it, rewrite it. If you know it, the job is yours. And by job, I mean that literally, since we're actively hiring. I'm not very hard to find.