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Future Game Coders - Online Education or College?
An anonymous reader asks: "My cousin is about to graduate high school and wants to enter the game industry. I told him to get a day job (possibly as QA in a game studio) and get an online degree like DeVry's Game and Simulation Programming degree or The Art Institute of Pittsburgh's Game Art & Design degree. I have a BS and an MS in Computer Science, and I've only found what I learned mildly useful for my game programming hobby. Should he suck it up and get a 4-year degree, or is taking online courses focused on game development the way to go? Has anybody gotten one of these degrees and done well for themselves?"
...and regularly hire programmers. The job interview generally goes pretty much like any other engineering position. If he wants to code, he needs to know how to code. Don't know how to write multi-threaded code? Sorry, no job. Never heard of a pointer? Don't need you. That's not to say a four year program is required, we've hired people from game schools as well. Generally they have a background in CS (working in IT, another BS, hobby programmer) that has given them exposure to hard programming topics. I've found that in general game college doesn't give you any real rigorous CS training, and if you want to be a programmer its no different in this industry than any other.
Oh, and QA won't help you get an engineering job. It will take time away from school. Better off spending that time writing a demo or something, as that would be more impressive than saying how you tested X and thought Y would be a better way to do it.
I think "friends and networking" deserved its own bullet point (unless it fell under A). I wouldn't have imagined I'd maintain some of the contacts I have to-date, and they've led me to opportunities that would have been difficult to come by otherwise.