UK Games Industry Over the Hill?

Tinkle writes "A games industry campaign group has warned the UK is falling behind on coding skills because university courses are not up to scratch. But this article includes an interview with an industry coding veteran who believes a lack of creative home computing hardware (think: Atari ST) is more likely to be at the root of the skills shortage, and explains why Britain's games coders are getting a bit long-in-the-tooth."

Comments

BAD THINKING ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Think Amiga of course, not Atari... :P :)

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[Dogtanian]

The Atari ST *was* the leading 16-bit machine at one stage, probably peaking when they dropped the price to £300 circa late 1987. The Amiga was significantly more expensive at first, but did better and overtook the ST when the price came down a bit.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[eulernet]

It was a 32-bit computer.

A lot of games on the Atari ST came from well known english companies (The Bitmap Brothers, Psygnosis, etc...).
The Amiga had more games coming from other countries (like the Turrican serie from Germany).

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[Dogtanian]

It was a 32-bit computer. That depends how you define "32-bit". The 68000 was internally 32-bit, but its data bus was still only 16-bits. (Sinclair's QL, which was hyped by them as a "32 bit" computer was considered by others to be an 8-bit machine because its 68008 only had an *8* bit data bus).

Supposedly "(Atari) ST" stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", contradicting the "Sam Tramiel" acronym.

Anyway, I live in the UK, and I can assure you that the Amiga was definitely more popular here later on, because I made the mistake of buying an ST when everyone else had moved onto the Amiga.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[fitten]

That depends how you define "32-bit". The 68000 was internally 32-bit, but its data bus was still only 16-bits. (Sinclair's QL, which was hyped by them as a "32 bit" computer was considered by others to be an 8-bit machine because its 68008 only had an *8* bit data bus).

Yeah, but they'd be wrong ;) The 68k has 32-bit wide registers, 16-bit wide ALU, and 16-bit wide external data bus. Its ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example). The 68008 was the same processor (internally) as the 68000 except it only externalized an 8-bit wide data bus to save on pin count. You could actually build a machine around the 68k with 8-bit wide memory (the address/data buses allowed this) and it would have "looked" like a 68008.

The people who would have classified the 68k according to its external data bus width would have classified the original Pentium as a 64-bit processor ;) and it was clearly a 32-bit processor (at least, I have never seen anyone try to assert that it was 64-bit). People did try to say the i386SX was a 16-bit processor because it externalized a 16-bit data bus while being, internally, an i386 (complete with 32-bit wide registersr and ALU).

I owned an Atari 1040STf at one point and really liked the machine. My friends all had mixes of Atari STs and Amigas and the Amiga was a bit neater but the ST was still pretty neat.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[Dogtanian]

Yeah, but they'd be wrong ;) Joking aside, the Amiga and ST were widely-considered to be 16-bit computers by the standards of the day. Your comment about the Pentium shows that things have changed, but it also shows that the situation is more complicated than simple naming conventions imply.

Personally, I'd agree that the "32-bit" classification is more helpful when describing the 68000, but it doesn't give away the whole story, and it wasn't how it was described back then.

[The 68000's] ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example). That's what I meant when I said it was 32-bit internally.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[RedWizzard]

It was a 32-bit computer. That depends how you define "32-bit". The 68000 was internally 32-bit, but its data bus was still only 16-bits. (Sinclair's QL, which was hyped by them as a "32 bit" computer was considered by others to be an 8-bit machine because its 68008 only had an *8* bit data bus). The only measure that really mattered back then was the width of the general registers (later on the address width became significant too). By that measure the 68000 is a 32bit processor. The data bus width really is irrelevant.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[networkconsultant]

Not to mention the worlds first Bitplane synced Demos :D

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[fitten]

[The 68000's] ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example).

That's what I meant when I said it was 32-bit internally.

I wasn't disagreeing with you... I thought I was supporting you :) The ISA supported 32-bit operations but the ALU was 16-bits wide. The add.l would use two passes of the 16-bit ALU to complete the operation (effectively an add.w on the lower 16-bits followed by an addx.w on the upper 16-bits, but slightly more efficient). However, for the programmer, it certainly appeared to be, and behave like, a 32-bit processor (personally, I considered it a 32-bit CPU because the programmer's model was 32-bit... 32-bit registers, 32-bit operands for instructions... if it looks like one and smells like one, it probably is one).

The ST definitely seemed to stand for S(ixteen)T(hirty-two). The follow-on machine was the Atari T(hirty-two)T(hirty-two) based on the 68030.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[blackest_k]

actually the 68000 cpu was 16 bit as in the a1000,a2000 a500(+) and a600

The aga amiga's a1200 a4000 and cd32 had at least 68020 processors which were 32bit (hence cd32)

The a4000 had the 68030 or 68040 processors as standard I think the cdtv was a 68000 processor and the a3000 had a 68030 if you take into account after market boards then there were 68060 processors as well and also ppc processors

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[rhyder128k]

The naming scheme was arbitrary but it became a common colloquialism to refer to that class of machine as 16 bit. The press for example, refered to the Amiga, the ST and the Megadrive as 16 bit. I sometimes wonder if it's a bit of a UK/Europism though as US people often make that correction. Google for "16 bit era" to see how widespread the naming convention was. The 68000 had 32 bit data registers, a 26 bit addressing range and 16 bit data bus. Most people would refer to a machines like the C64 or the ZX Spectrum as "8 bit" machines for the same reason. Both of these machines had a 16 bit data register, the accumulator.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[Dogtanian]

actually the 68000 cpu was 16 bit as in the a1000,a2000 a500(+) and a600 Umm.... I'm not too clear what point you're making.

The discussion we just had was over whether the 68000 should be considered a 16 or 32 bit CPU. If you're simply making the point that "the 68000 was a 16-bit CPU", that seems to be going round in circles.

If, on the other hand, you're pointing out that later Amigas had "full" 32-bit CPUs (i.e. internally and externally), then... fair enough, I should have thought about that!

Though it has to be said that until late 1992 (*), all but the very expensive A3000 were 68000-based as default.

Yes... the CDTV was based on the 68000, in fact the basic hardware was very similar to the original A500, and changed little since the original A1000. It didn't even include Kickstart 2!

(*) By which time the Amiga market was already starting to decline under the onslaught of cheap PCs from one side and Mega Drives and SNESs on the other. The A1200 was okay, but it was too little too late. If they'd released something like it 18 months before, the Amiga might've done better, but they relied on the same basic hardware for over six years.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[RedWizzard]

The naming scheme was arbitrary but it became a common colloquialism to refer to that class of machine as 16 bit. The press for example, refered to the Amiga, the ST and the Megadrive as 16 bit. I sometimes wonder if it's a bit of a UK/Europism though as US people often make that correction. Google for "16 bit era" to see how widespread the naming convention was.

As someone else pointed out, if you are going to refer to the 68K as a 16 bit processor then you should also refer to the Pentium and later x86 processors as 64 bit processors. Since the press doesn't do that they have clearly seen the error of their ways.

The simple fact is that the 68K series implements a 32 bit ISA. The 68000 itself happens to have a 16 bit data bus but the data bus width has no relevance to anything.

Most references to "16 bit era" apply to the game console market of the time which was dominated by the SNES which had a 16 bit CPU.

Most people would refer to a machines like the C64 or the ZX Spectrum as "8 bit" machines for the same reason. Both of these machines had a 16 bit data register, the accumulator. Are you sure? I thought the 6502 had an 8 bit accumulator. It did have a 16 bit address width but other than that it's a purely 8 bit CPU.

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

The accumulator of the 6510 was 16 bits? Since when?

Re:BAD THINKING ;)

[Shorty1911]

Nope Atari/apple IIGs was first .. Amiga was later games where about the same .. amiga was in bed with EA but still atari outdid them 10 to 1 .. for a long time .. but who cares they both dead now.

This pal is probably in more than correct there

[Anonymous Coward]

Games and pretty much all other creative programming comes inside person itself and his/her experience, not from excessive training.

Creativity cannot be trained with today's methods.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[damburger]

Programming a physics engine does not take creativity, it takes intellectual brute force. They are moaning about the lack of heavyweight brainboxes, not guys who sit around having cool ideas.

But as I said already, they have only themselves to blame. They don't want to pay the price such powernerds require to keep them from finding work elsewhere. Essentially, they are asking the government to train loads of people, flood the labour market and lower their outgoings for them. I say fuck them. They need to start paying decent wages.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[xtracto]

I just finished a PhD in the UK. Granted, although I am not originary from Great Britain, I have the possibility of working here.

I have always wanted to be a game programmer. I have been programming small games since I was in secondary (school 12 y/old). While I was doing my Bachelors degree, I read loads of books on OpenGL, DirectX, game programming, game AI, etc. I even played with Open Source games (small contribs, patches, etc).

However, as I have got older, I have also realised that being a game programming does not have all the "magic" that it used to have (in the Amiga/PC DOS days).

Now I have two options, one is to kick-start in the game industry (say, as a Q-A at Sony, Rare, R* or any other UK game studio) or I can get into a Hedge fund as a junior Quant Developer.

When you compare the payment, benefits and vacations, it is evident that the game developer job has *no chance* against the quant job.

Both include maths and algorithms (I am specialized in A.I.) and both are very interesting for me. But I believe the obvious choice is to keep the game development as as hobby and get playing where the money is.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[arivanov]

Spot on.

The actual reason for the game industry to be short on talented new hires is the "We do not work for the money, we work for the cool" requirement for being hired.

I had one or two brush-ups with the industry while looking for a job and frankly as once upon a time said by Greg Lake they are getting "Whatever Christmas they deserve".

While it is possible to hire a person from time to time on the basis of "Kewl", it is not possible to maintain an industry this way. Industries operate on the basis of "I work for money, if you want (Loyalty, Kewl, etc... underline the applicable) get a dog"Â

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[stewbacca]

Programming a physics engine does not take creativity, it takes intellectual brute force. Bah, let the cpu do all that. Gimme a creative guy who can come up with a solid design first, otherwise the brilliant physics engine will never be worth a damn anyway.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming a physics engine does not take creativity, it takes intellectual brute force.

That's bollocks. Simply translating the equations for Newtonian mechanics into C isn't going to produce a working physics engine. You actually have to be quite creative about which equations you apply and how you apply them if you don't want to end up with some rather undesirable "emergent" behaviour.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[mdwh2]

Bah, let the cpu do all that. Gimme a creative guy who can come up with a solid design first, otherwise the brilliant physics engine will never be worth a damn anyway.

I think you misunderstand his point - he didn't mean "intellectual brute force" as in getting the programmer to work out the calculations by hand instead of the CPU! Coming up with a solid design is what requires intellect. It's not a hand-wavy "creativity" issue.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[jedidiah]

Brute force won't yield useful solutions anyways. Even if you've
got guys with PhD's in the relevant disciplines, they still need
to be able to look at the problems sideways in order to get
workable solutions.

These are GAMES, not simulations.

The software has to be usable on the available hardware and
be able to stand up well next to the 20 other products being
developed by the 200 other guys.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[mikael]

Another good quote from the game industry back in the 1980's, "We're not in the industry for the money, we're in for the love of programming/coding, the royalty bonuses are an extra. If you want to make money, go and work in the City". (City = financial centre of London).

Now, after certain MBA types having the absolutely brilliant idea of pushing every experienced programmer into middle management to "train up the next generation of programmers", just about all the veteran programmers have left to set up their own companies.

Well said Greg Lake.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[stewbacca]

Well he said "programming" a physics engine, so I imagine he wasn't talking about the design phase. I'm not a programmer, nor do I even pretend to understand it (outside of my sloppy ActionScripting abilities), so I'll just give you all the benefit of the doubt on this topic.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[Creepy]

In the 1980s most game programmers had no training and no degree. They coded for fun and got very good at it, but had poor code organization from a high level perspective. The only game programmers I know from that era (mid 1980s to the early 1990s) that actually got a CSci degree wrote 2-3 games before they were 20 and then went to school to get out of the industry (most game companies are run like startups, so there is a lot of work required).

These days, special programming, design and art schools are devoted to games. Even college classes are available - when I was in school in the early 1990s it was hard to even find a computer graphics class. It's a very different industry than it was.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[umghhh]

This and the fact that young people do not want to invest their time in (software) engineering because it is a big investment (education) and it is on their part, not on companies and this investment is a big chunk what software companies' costs are. This makes it easy to off shore the hell out all these expenses - that translates into no job security at all. Better to manage things than to produce things. Suing other people or big organisations seems also to be an attractive alternative.
If you cannot do anything but have good sucking skills and durable anus you can get some dough in entertainment, other than that you can become investment banker or politician - that is about the same skill level required i.e. no morals and good nerves.
I wonder sometimes why I became an engineer but I know I was under influence then. Or so it seems.

This of course is not all true but before people get to their senses things get lost. That is why UK have almost no manufacturing base at all.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[networkconsultant]

It's no different here, the industry think's that game programming being more fun then say Windows Administration deserves less of a Salary. So game programmers make a bit of coin, the big bucks are still with those that know how to design drivers well.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[Anonymous Coward]

A Ph.D is overqualified/on the wrong track for a Q.A. position. You would start as an junior programmer instead - very different job.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[Rycross]

Good design has less to do with creativity and more to do with experience and hard work. Creativity in a game is important, but its not nearly as important as a lot of people make it out to be. An idea can be very creative and make a horrible game. An idea can be creative and potentially be a good game, but be ruined by bad design. Comming up with ideas is easy. Fleshing those ideas out into a good design is hard, and takes more perspiration than inspiration.

In hobby game development, you tend to see a lot of newbies with super-secret ideas, because if everyone knew their awesome idea, obviously they'd steal it and make millions. One of the points that people try to drill home is, "Your idea is worthless, no matter how cool you think it is. Whats important is your ability to adapt that into a fun, engaging game."

If they don't emphasize creativity, sure, they will probably get solid but bland games. If they emphasize it too much, however, they'll get unique games that are about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[mikael]

I remember the 1990's very well. SGI had come out with the Indy workstation, which made the animators happy, but one class animation college (Sheridan college) became rather annoyed when another college (Centennial college) purchased 100 Indy's and started offering training courses in Maya as night school courses.

I'm at a university just now, and all the walls are decorated with game development competitions (Microsoft's Dare to Design), adverts for MSc courses in Game Development, Multimedia Technology and Content, Computer Graphics, High Performance Visualisation alongside the financial analyst adverts.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[MrSteveSD]

I say fuck them.

I would have to agree with that sentiment. They want geniuses for burger-flipping salaries which is pretty outrageous. There are of course companies that don't even think you need smart people in the first place and actually hire people who should be burger flipping. I find that equally annoying.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[p0tat03]

Supply and demand, supply and demand. Game dev is a "glamor" job (though I have no idea why, haven't seen the pits of it myself). The problem is also that people know very little about game development in general, and it becomes a blank slate for them to pin up their dreams.

You have no idea how many aspiring game programmers I meet who think they will get to decide on gameplay, or have some hand in directing cinematics, or all kinds of other "cool" things that aren't their job at all.

So in the end the industry is flooded with candidates, most of whom are grossly underqualified (big dreamers with no code chops), but there's never a shortage of people who are willing to give it a go, and burn out horribly a year later. This keeps wages down.

The problem I see in the game industry is the attitude that one has to work for the love of the game. While certainly I think all game devs (or devs in general) ought to care about what they're doing, IMHO it shouldn't be the overwhelming priority. With many shops I get the impression that if your life doesn't revolve around game development, you don't belong.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[networkconsultant]

Thus Carmack reigns king.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[Simon Brooke]

Programming a physics engine does not take creativity, it takes intellectual brute force. Bah, let the cpu do all that. Gimme a creative guy who can come up with a solid design first, otherwise the brilliant physics engine will never be worth a damn anyway.

Actually, you're wrong. All my programming career (now twenty-five years), games have been pushing the limits of the available hardware. In business software you can often say 'programmers are expensive, silicon is cheap, shovel some extra silicon at the problem'. With games you typically can't do that - you're driving the available silicon to it's limits anyway. So every cycle you can save through tighter code contributes to a better experience - faster frame rate, more photo-realistic rendering, more responsive controls - for the user.

Yes, game design requires creativity. But it also needs good old-fashioned algorithms and ultra-tight code.

Re:This pal is probably in more than correct there

[tehcyder]

While it is possible to hire a person from time to time on the basis of "Kewl", it is not possible to maintain an industry this way. Industries operate on the basis of "I work for money, if you want (Loyalty, Kewl, etc... underline the applicable) get a dog

The fact that the games industry can pay (relatively) low wages but still attract people shows that you are wrong, and a lot of people do, in fact, work for other than monetary reasons.

UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labour

[damburger]

The UK IT industry is notoriously tight fisted. They expect high standards from their employees but often pay barely above school-leaver wages for graduate positions.

There is no skills shortage in the UK. There is a shortage of decent employees, so all the skills are fucking off to the US and Canada where they can support themselves in the game industry without being a bartender in their spare time.

Re:Monkey programers

[IAR80]

Sorry! It was US. http://www.newtechusa.com/ppi/pressroom.asp#higher

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[IAR80]

I am continually spammed by UK recruiting agencies that request high qualifications and pay you 20K pounds and 50 hour week, but there is a plus to it. The uniform is provided.

Money not skills the problem

[fdobbie]

There are people with the necessary skills and intellect coming out of UK universities. I'd wager the real problem is that they're ending up working in finance, which has far larger salaries than the games industry.

Despite the games companies constantly bleating about how much money they make and how games are now a bigger contributor to the British economy than films, they seem unwilling or unable to compensate leading engineering talent. Is it little surprise that graduates go elsewhere?

Re:Money not skills the problem

[IAR80]

T

Despite the games companies constantly bleating about how much money they make and how games are now a bigger contributor to the British economy than films, they seem unwilling or unable to compensate leading engineering talent.

I still remember when UK software industry was boasting that it makes more money than the car industry, but I think this is because the state their car industry is in.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[damburger]

My dads pub makes more money than the UK car industry, on account of the fact is in the black.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[Sique]

To be better than an industry that is actually losing money it is sufficient just to sit around and do nothing :)

Re:Money not skills the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

This might suprise you, but both Jaguar and Landrover were in profit last year and will be this year too.

I don't know for sure, but I heard that Aston Martin is doing much better financially in recent years.

Bentley have so much demand for their cars that they can't make them fast enough - it has been in profit since 2004.

McLaren have produced decent profits in the last few years.

The British car industry has been through some tough times but, now that the dead wood has been stripped away, what is left is actually quite profitable.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[damburger]

I'm going to pretend I didn't read that. Failing car companies begging for handouts from foreigners are part of our national identity!

Re:Money not skills the problem

[superskippy]

Funny, but it depends on what you mean by the UK car industry.

We are actually manufacturing more cars than ever before. Difference is, they are all Toyotas and Nissans, which people probably don't count as "British".

Re:Money not skills the problem

[xtracto]

There are people with the necessary skills and intellect coming out of UK universities. I'd wager the real problem is that they're ending up working in finance, which has far larger salaries than the games industry.

Haha, I just read your post... this is true at least from my position.

Recently my father visited me and we went to see an old friend of him. In the middle of a discussion of why the UK is importing slate from Brazil rather than mining it, we thought that the main reason was because of the employment wages.

We then went to try to realize what does the UK export? What is the UK's main market? and the answer we agreed on was that what the UK economy is better at is money. Money and finance (which is of course closely related).

Therefore, if there is a field in the UK which guarantees a good job and QOL, finance is it.

The problem with game development (in the UK at least) is that it is impossible to pay UK wages and be competitive enough to sell games, compared to companies say, in the US or Spain...

The only remaining reason to choose a game programming career is because of pure love to the art. But the corporatism introduced by the huge programming studios have removed whatever was left for attracting people.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[tgd]

Wait, what? Excluding the production of Top Gear, there's a British car industry?

Does Jeremy, Richard and James know this?

Re:Money not skills the problem

[mottanano]

Well is true there's a lack of good programers in the UK because the amount of physics as maths, isn't fit fo the porpose at all. Any piece of good code that come out of there is for sure there's an indian guy behind it.Because they've been through tough degrees in their on country and at the end they didn't have a job so they used go to UK. but the sintuation is changing now in India and the results can be seeing in the UK, and this, is well known among the companies.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[DCFC]

You are right.
A respectable C++ QD is on around £80K base.
The distribution includes developers on £400K including bonus (OK, not *this* year, but still not poor). 200 K is above average, but not unusual.
Entry level is 'merely' twice what a games programmer gets.

I headhunt these people, so the numbers I cite are real.
The skills are remarkably similar. High end investment banking/hedge fund S/w is written in C++, with bits of maths/physics thrown in.

The working environment is wholly better. Bankers work shorter hours than games developers, and treat their staff with something that approximates to respect, usually

The technologies overlap in ways that are not obvious at all. GPUs and FPGAs have a growing role, and PPUs are being poked at to see what they do.
Banks use a mix of open source, closed, and a large amount they knocked up themselves.

http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/dcfc

Re:Money not skills the problem

[IAR80]

both Jaguar and Landrover

I guess you meant Tata. :) http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10910868

Re:Money not skills the problem

[Oktober Sunset]

Jaguar - Indian
Landrover - Indian
Aston Martin - American
Bentley - German

The foreigners own almost all of them now.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[Oktober Sunset]

Yes, they love to drive hand made supercars which are built at the rate of 1 a week.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[poot_rootbeer]

Despite the games companies constantly bleating about how much money they make and how games are now a bigger contributor to the British economy than films, they seem unwilling or unable to compensate leading engineering talent.

For every programmer actually employed in the gaming business, there are probably a dozen who would love to break in given the opportunity. With such an overabundant workforce, what would the companies' reasoning be for offering higher salaries than people are willing to work for?

Re:Money not skills the problem

[mlu035]

There are people with the necessary skills and intellect coming out of UK universities. I'd wager the real problem is that they're ending up working in finance, which has far larger salaries than the games industry

Parent is spot on. I know quite a few folks who work in London in IT, in the finance sector, earning a million plus GBP per annum, living in million pound plus apartments on the Thames, driving supercars and even a couple who've bought their own planes. Can anyone on here who's UK based and has friends working in the games industry think of anyone they know with that sort of lifestyle? All my knowledge of the games industry here suggests it's long hours and shitty salaries, unless you're the CEO of Rockstar in Scotland.

Back in the days of the 8 and 16 bit era, people could code up a game at home and get it published if it was any good (thinking Jet Set Willy here) and maybe make it rich (thinking the Darling brothers of recent news fame), nowadays, to compete in the market and get it published you need an army of programmers etc, who'll all work for average salaries. Is it any wonder we've all gone into the finance sector to make our money?

Re:Money not skills the problem

[mikael]

Twenty years ago, Thatcher decided that the future of the UK was "the service industry" ie. financial services. So, all the trade schools (plumbers, builders, carpenters) were closed down, and so we ended up with a shortage.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[stewbacca]

This might suprise you, but both Jaguar and Landrover were in profit last year and will be this year too. How's that Rover industry doing? I hear Mini is doing well now, too, as it is now BMiniW.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[Skreems]

To be able to attract more skilled workers, like they're bitching about in the article...

Re:Money not skills the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be a +10 funny mod rating for comments like that! Anyway isn't "UK car industry" an oxomoron?

Still I find it kinda ironic considering the UK car show Top Gear is popular with the global pirates. Mind you back on topic I also thought it was very ironic to see this BBC article a few days ago (slashdot always current...) after also reading about those thieving muppets: Steve Bovis, Tim Croucher and Laurence Francis who stole a few bits for the lame: limbo of the lost.

Mind you they are now apparently denying it... yeah right. oh yeah "lame" wasn't a typo on game. Maybe they should be called Loders as in "free loaders" rather than coders which clearly they are not. Fortunately there is still real talent CURRENTLY in the UK.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[16K Ram Pack]

Do you have a hyperlink to back that claim up?

Re:Money not skills the problem

[aembleton]

Aston Martin is once again British http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Martin

Re:Money not skills the problem

[mikael]

Comprehensive Reform in the UK.

As the middle classes grew in the UK, parents detested the 11-plus exam as labelling their offspring as "thick" for not being allowed into a grammar school, so she approved the "comprehensivisation of the school system" - all schools were to be converted into the American style comp
In the immediate post-war period
Britain had a tripartite system of grammar schools, technical schools and secondary modern
schools, selection taking place by means of a competitive examination. Twenty years later this
was largely replaced by a comprehensive system, with neighbourhood schools that catered for
the whole ability range. Northern Ireland, however, was left out of this process and it continues
to be organized along selective lines until this day. (See Breen, Heath and Whelan, 1999.)

Pipes, Houses& Searches (of various kinds!

The technical schools were encouraged to become universities, so they dropped the trade skills training and started opening new courses.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[16K Ram Pack]

I'm confused. You've blamed Thatcher, then said how Comprehensives got rid of technical schools, yet you've cited an article that says:-

"Third, in the 1980s Mrs Thatcher's Conservative government introduced various reforms that sought to unpick some aspects of Labour's comprehensive system."

It also talks about post-war, and "twenty years later" which would be mid-60s, at which time Mrs Thatcher wasn't either a Minister for Education, nor Prime Minister.

As for your second link, I know that in the late 80s (around the time Mrs Thatcher departed) there were still plenty of technical colleges teaching City and Guilds in trade skills. I don't have data to say that there was a decline, but certainly not all disappeared.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[@madeus]

Absolutely - jobs in finance, telecoms or virtually any other private sector organization pay far better, have lower barrier to entries and are less demanding.

Working in games industry may be "living the dream", but when the pay is half what you could be earning elsewhere, doing less work, with less demanding deadlines it's no surprise they can't attract enough good people.

Re:Money not skills the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so true. Why go and work in the tech industry or for a software house, when a career in a financial industry is likely to pay you more, and give you more opportunities. I've been looking for a new job for a while, and the experience that employers are looking for in comparison to the salary they offer is a joke!

Partly universities fault here

[Toreo asesino]

Having done a degree in London (I say, wot wot?!), I know when I was looking into CS degrees around various institutions, almost none offered anything even close to gaming programming.
This, I presumed was largely because a "Computer games" degree would be regarded by paying parents of the cretins in question as a dent on the quality and seriousness of the university in question. Of course, I don't know that for fact, but that was my feeling.

Parents want to know their offspring are programming serious applications; high-availability databases for blue-chip companies and so forth; certainly not running round a virtual environment blowing friends to kingdom-come with an RPG launcher.

So, with a small launchpad for gaming developers, is it such a wonder that game developers in the UK are going the way of the dodo? We're serious people us English people don't you know.

That's my thoughts on the matter anyhow. Please add yours.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[IAR80]

On the other hand most of the CS degrees around have physics courses attached to them, numerical methods, system simulation, image processing, advanced algorithms and do forth. No serious CS degree I know officially includes "blowing friends to kingdom-come with an RPG launcher"

Re:Partly universities fault here

[fdobbie]

I don't know about that. Certainly at Imperial College London (where I happen to study), the courses run by the Department of Computing are varied enough that a lot of the skills necessary of a games programmer can be gained (graphics, AI, computer architecture, etc).

Although it might fair to say Imperial has an unusually strong link with the games industry, e.g. the Games and Media Event and EA has run an event on campus in the past.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[Toreo asesino]

No, but CS courses relating to gaming specifically, are separate from the usual "CS IT systems" courses on offer; despite the fact, as you say, there is a often a cross-over. So for parents to pick between the two, in their eyes, the "serious" option would always be the more favourable.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[TheSeer2]

Ummmm, wouldn't the fact the parents are choosing the university degree be a bigger problem?

Re:Partly universities fault here

[caluml]

Having done a degree in London (I say, wot wot?!) Yeah. I'm sure you heard almost everyone saying that.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[Anonymous Coward]

Hull University has a CompSci & Game Dev course.

Includes AI, C++ 3D programming, shaders, etc.

Then again, its at Hull :/

Re:Partly universities fault here

[mdwh2]

Having done a degree in London (I say, wot wot?!), I know when I was looking into CS degrees around various institutions, almost none offered anything even close to gaming programming.

But on the contrary, I've also heard a lot of people saying that "games programming degrees" are often rubbish, and are much of the problem. TFA states this too (although it's rather unclear whether their point is "game programming degrees are rubbish, people should do proper degrees" or "game programming degrees need to improve").

If you have a degree in computer science or mathematics, you should be able to apply that to game programming. Or many other things - which is likely the problem for the games industry, in that the people with the relevant skills are preferring to work somewhere with decent pay.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[jedidiah]

Stop treating University like a trade school.

It all doesn't have to be spoonfed to you. Infact, it's probably
much better if it isn't. If you can't figure out how the various
departments in a land grant college would apply to your future
video game development career then you probably don't have the
creativity required for the field.

Any serious theoretical comp sci program should more than adequately
cover all the bases. Pick one that is stronger in the particular bit
you're most interested in (AI, graphics, software engineering).

Re:Partly universities fault here

[Opportunist]

It's not an isolated problem of the UK, you have the same in mainland Europe.

Specialized "computer game programming" degrees are virtually unheard of. Also, no parent would invest in that. I mean "What's your son doing?" "Oh, well, he's a stripper in a gay bar." "What?" "Well, no, actually he's a game programmer, but that embarrasses me."

For any non-programmer, you're working in a toy shop. Compared to little Jonny, that bastard that your parents kept comparing you all the time, who works for $big_company doing really serious business apps, you're just an oversized kid to them.

The problem is that you usually need a LOT more skill to be good at game programming than you need to write decent business apps. Jonny is a moron who can't tell a push from a pop and whose queries take .5 seconds longer to complete than yours because he has only rudementary ideas of what's going on in the machine, he barely managed to understand C# after being coddled for his career so far writing VB, but he's the hero to the outside world. Not someone who knows the quirks of a processor well enough so he can squeeze out a dozen more frames where everyone thought no optimisation is possible anymore.

Any coder will worship the latter and shun the former.

And that attitude is reflected in salaries. You slave away 50-60 hours (and more before a deadline) in the toy shop, then you go home with 20-30k a year, while Jonny climbs the corporate ladder, can still not code worth shit and earns about 50k a year for his 40 hours a week.

Computer game programmers need very high skill levels, you can't just dump someone into a two year course about C# and SQL and out comes someone who can write something useful, as it's done time and again with application programming. To write an engine, you need a lot of math, a lot of physics and even more programming. You don't get that easily. And as long as we (and management) doesn't understand that and pay it accordingly, it won't change.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[networkconsultant]

If only satire could sell computer games.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[Anonymous Coward]

It is just a fact that the Gaming Comp in UK are not the best in term of Tech and Coding. They are far behind, but there s a lot of great UK Programmers for Games, but they are in US an Canada. UK games are becoming really kind of behind, just name the last 10 UK game you can think about in 2008. NONE were above 7/10 Maxi and that s being nice.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[BigJClark]

I have a CompSci degree myself, and although games are one of my passions, I have never heard of a reputable "gaming college".

I had an offer to work at EA, because I have a couple buddies who work there. All I had to do was pick up DirectX (easy, learn as you go), I coded this ocean simulator with a boat, that fires cannons at icebergs (laughable, it was a demo!) and boom, I was in. I turned it down.

Point being, you don't have to have a "gaming degree" to build games. You have to be smart. Just like working for one of these blue-chip companies. With the right connections/resume, you probably wouldn't even need a degree, if you were smart enough. smrt.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[ombwiri]

Wasn't there that game... hold on a second it'll come to me...it was something to do with driving...damn, it'll bug me all day now...oh that was it "taking and driving"...nope no thats not it after all...maybe it was just me who played it, but I'm sure that I saw it get a couple of reviews. Can anyone help me out here?

Re:Partly universities fault here

[16K Ram Pack]

That's not why I wouldn't want a child of mine studying "game programming". It's because it's too specific.

I once worked with someone who had a degree in something vaguely computer multimedia-y. There was a big problem, though. The course was centred around building for CD media using something like Macromedia Director.

During the course... bang! The internet goes big and the whole shift of the industry moves towards doing all that stuff through the web, and a whole lot of what she learnt is worthless because it was too specific to current implementations.

One of the worst things is to create degrees specific to current needs. Degrees should teach things which are deep and fundamental as it encourages the free thinking that allows people to connect knowledge in one area with knowledge in another to create new and exciting technologies.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[Anonymous Coward]

I go to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, one of the best (top 50 when I last checked) colleges in the US. We have an "Interactive Media and Gaming Design" program. It consists of taking 70% CS course (from the CS department) and 25% CGI drawing courses (from the Arts department).

Re:Partly universities fault here

[p0tat03]

Having done a degree in London (I say, wot wot?!), I know when I was looking into CS degrees around various institutions, almost none offered anything even close to gaming programming.

... If you ever see a CS degree on "game programming", run very far away. It's generally well known in the industry that those schools don't teach anything, and as a result they're actually *less* likely to get hired into a real game dev job than someone from a traditional CS program.

The problem is really not that schools don't offer game programming degrees, it's that:

1 - Reputable schools do not want to sully their reputation by offering yet another game development "degree" that "trains" idiots who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.

2 - Game programming is *no different* than any other form of programming requiring specialization. That guy programming massively distributed databases for blue chip companies has just as much specialized knowledge as the dude optimizing OpenGL underneath a massive 3D engine.

Not to mention that every reputable CS program will contain courses on networking and graphics, which are the two big topics in game programming. Take those, and play with your own projects in your spare time, and you'll be as qualified as anyone when you come out. No amount of "game college" will do this for you. In my experience, the only type of people who go into game dev "degrees" are the types who can't code, aren't interested in actual coding, and are more interested in playing with a "build your own game!" kit.

IMHO the problem the game industry faces is that "traditional" dev fields are paying many times more now, sometimes triple or quadruple what game studios are willing to pay. Why should I pour hundreds of hours of my own time into learning the ins and outs of OpenGL, and make $60K, when I can put that time into distributed computing and make $150K at some financial company? The industry needs to step the pay scale *way* up if they want to attract the talent they need.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[Anonymous Coward]

Oi, there's nothing wrong with Hull that a few pangalactics down at Spiders won't fix.

Re:Partly universities fault here

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you rather have a deep education that allows you to apply your knowledge anywhere, including advanced game programming, or would you rather spend three years in a room full of drooling retards who think game development is all about making awesome elves in maya?

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[damburger]

Perhaps its a ploy to recruit more teachers. Its actually looking like a decent graduate job these days.

Re:I'm a game programmer

[damburger]

That is the quality of programmer you saw because that is the quality of programmer the industry is willing to pay for.

As a British (ex-ish)coder I can't really convince you that I'm any good because the bioinformatics project I am currently temping on is not mine to show. However, I assure you once you get out of the world of coding for tuppence there are plenty of solid British coders - its just that most of them have enough sense to not work for British wages.

Liverpool

[Kamineko]

Liverpool John Moores University courses are rubbish. Rubbish. Please remember this.

Re:Liverpool

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet you that those who modded it Troll are applicants and people modding it Interesting and Insightful are graduates.

game coding at universities?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do any other countries really have game coding lectures resulting in seriously skilled coders?
I am working for more than twelve years in the gaming industry (in Germany) and I never came across one person who didn't learn his skills all by himself, including gfx-artists and musicians. (cue jokes about the quality of German games.)

Of course, if you intend to code low-level stuff like a game engine, then it helps alot to pay attention to your mathematics teacher on subjects like vectors and matrices but you learn these neccessary basics before university.
There are some coders who studied CS though but it mainly helped them to organize large projects and code more readable.

Re:game coding at universities?

[SQLGuru]

I think Game Programming / Game Design programs are fairly new. But a computer science degree puts you in as good a spot as any to be in the industry. You've got the necessary skills (programming) as well as some helpful support areas (science) and probably spent many a night actually playing them (study?!? whatever).

There are some programs in the US now (CMU has a good one, DigiPen/FullSail not sure of quality). It will grow.

Layne

Re:game coding at universities?

[Opportunist]

Are you hiring? :)

Re:game coding at universities?

[Creepy]

In this respect I think the industry is changing. 12 years ago I couldn't name a game programmer with a degree. Today I could name about a 1/2 dozen (most through my open source project, and all but one are graduates of programs like DigiPen). I don't work in the game industry myself, but I have several friends and a cousin that do. I do OSS game programming and that reminds me why I do it as a hobby (hours are killer and keeping up with the technology is an uphill battle).

Re:game coding at universities?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if you intend to code low-level stuff like a game engine, then it helps alot to pay attention to your mathematics teacher on subjects like vectors and matrices but you learn these neccessary basics before university.

Only within gfx realm -- for most low-level stuff it's just basic discrete math, and little if any matrix calculation stuff. Fourier xforms for digital processing, maybe (sound). But really, neither physics nor maths in general are all that commonly needed for really low-level stuff.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[IAR80]

I would take a teaching job anytime for a job in the UK gaming industry payed twice as much. Not only that there is a meaning to what you are doing but you will have a life as well.

Games just take too long to make

[Rik Sweeney]

Games just take too long to make these days. Look at GTA IV, that took years and cost close to $100M apparently. A British studio can't afford that, they just simply don't have the budget. The UK might be able to churn out something low key and amazing, but it probably won't do as well as the games that the US and Japan create.

Let's look at the movie industry quickly, the most recent film I saw was Iron Man which had an all star cast (and Gwyneth Paltrow) and amazing special effects. You're simply not going to get that from a British studio because of the lack of a budget. The UK does provide some real gems though, such as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, for a more reasonable budget, but I'm not sure how well they did outside the UK.

Everything I know about games programming is either self taught or read from tutorials on the web. My brother and I have been working on Blob And Conquer* for over two years now and, to be perfectly honest, it's been a fucking nightmare. Games development is seriously hard work and the Universities don't really give you enough education.

*Shameless plug that has nothing to do with anything

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

Ehm, GTA IV from Rockstar North based in Edinburgh? Scotland is still part of the UK at present afaik

Re:Games just take too long to make

[benjymous]

Um, you do know GTAIV was made by a British studio, don't you?

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Viol8]

"some real gems though, such as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz,"

I wouldn't call Hot Fuzz a real gem. Really overrated more like.

Anyway , AFAIK neither of them used CGI so whats your point?

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, rockstar north, the developer for GTA IV, is a scottish studio...

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, GTA IV was made by Rockstar North in Scotland. The money was American though, of course.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[cliffski]

GTA IV was made in Britain wasn't it?

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few large games studios in Britain, mostly for American games companies. There are several in Newcastle for example.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[IAR80]

The analogy with Hollywood is perfect here. I am getting tired of the same crap repackaged over and over again on a bigger and bigger budget. I want new ideas not sims2 gaming programing package.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Cynic.AU]

I'd wager that the $100M was spent largely on graphics designer types - who, after all, had to create a huge glomping city.

It's not the programmers that do the majority of the work in a game like that. It's modellers, animators, mappers, texturers, etc etc. Just look at the credit reel for the game.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[AndyboyH]

An interesting but very flawed comparison.

The UK Film Industry gets tax breaks from the government, which is what the games companies want to get. So the UK Film industry is actually better off than the Games industry in that respect.

Despite that, the UK film industry hasn't developed a blockbuster title on the scale of GTA4.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[superskippy]

Trouble is, it costs more and more to make a game that looks good enough for an XBox 360 or a PS3. If you are going to bet $10M+, are you going to put your chips on "New Super Idea" or "Latest Franchise with Guaranteed Sales 27"?

This is what's so great about XBox Arcade, in my view.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[IAR80]

To keep the analogy with Hollywood going. Blair Witch Project ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project ) had a budget of 35K$ and made 248M$ in sales. So how many "New Super Idea" are you willing to invest a small sum of money in as opposed to 10M$ one "Latest Franchise with Guaranteed Sales 27" on the hope that the brainwashed consumers are going to make you 11M$. One day you might have a big surprise.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[xtracto]

The UK does provide some real gems though, such as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, for a more reasonable budget, but I'm not sure how well they did outside the UK.

And this is where the potential of the UK lays on. Just take a look at Battle Toads, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Worms, among others. The English humour is something that is really nice. I am not English (I am Mexican) but I know that the Battletoads games were a big success for my generation of videogame players (nes/snes).

Just when the market is tired of full blown million-polygons-per-second games which are deadly boring, UK studios should create games which are simple, funny and with a lot of personality. And of course, the presumably best console to publish them is the Wii.

Of course any other console would be all right, but people would compare such games in the PS3 with the last interactive-video Metal Gear instalment, which is not the case.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Mushdot]

How about the same crap repackaged on a low budget!

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, in Scotland actually. Same as GTA, GTA3, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas. That poster who reckons British studios don't have the budget is typing through a hole in his butt! British studios have produced countless big-budget titles.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[RiotingPacifist]

No offence to game programmers, but in most games there barely needed, most games just churn out a new set of graphics on an existing engine with a few tweaks. Sure somebody has to develop the next quake, source(engine), RAGE, etc but they're still about just too expensive to employ to make your average game.

This is probably an unpopular thing to say on slashdot, but its the artists that make/break the games not the geeks. I dont just mean fancy graphics though, it's storyline (or at least level designers) and feel of games that matter alot more than having the best renderer or physics.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[QJimbo]

Like what others have said, Rockstar, the developers of GTA 4, are a British Company. Before that they were known as DMA design and they also made the legendary Lemmings series. A really talented bunch of people right there.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Oktober Sunset]

Apparently he's never heard of James Bond either, he cites Iron Man as a film with a budget too high for a UK studio, but with a budget of $135 million it is easily outdone by Die Another Day by the British EON Productions at $142 million, and Quantum of Solace makes it look cheap with a budget of $224 million.

So he's made a double fool of himself.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[shish]

it's storyline (or at least level designers) and feel of games that matter alot more than having the best renderer or physics.

Isn't everyone always complaining that this *isn't* the case?

(Also, pet peeve: "A lot" is two words)

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Opportunist]

And just like with hollywood, I can't stomach 99% of what's churned out by big studios. Great effects and graphics, no content. It's true for both, movies and games.

And just like with movies, you don't need that multi million budget. Sure, you won't make the next action movie/game or the next monumental three movie LotR epos/MMORPG, but frankly, is that what you want? As a producer as well as the consumer? I want movies (and games) with content, that surprise me, that give me something new, challenge my senses not with flashy explosions and effects but rather with subtle humor and witty twists.

In both cases, what those orgies of explosions and violence hide is the sore lack of a script. Take any modern FPS or action movie and ask yourself: What's left when you strip the eye candy? Isn't it just the same old movie/game that was boring already ten years ago?

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

... what?

Re:Games just take too long to make

[16K Ram Pack]

It's all about how you feel about risk, really.

Backing a Blair Witch Project/Brothers McMullan/Napoleon Dynamite/Full Monty might make you a huge ROI, or it might fail and make you nothing.

The latest Tom Cruise might make you a very good return, or just a moderate return. Putting "Tom Cruise" on the poster is going to get at least some punters in, if only for the opening weekend.

Where I think they differ is in distribution. A small film that is doing great guns in the art house circuit, will get picked up and go into the mainstream cinemas. That doesn't happen with games. The interesting independent stuff that appears on sites on the net (I'm thinking Flash games on Kongregate) stays there. It doesn't cross over in the same way.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

What a waste of your time that game is. Fucking give it up, nobody will want it.

Re:Games just take too long to make

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you know absolutely nothing about the games industry of which you claim to be a part. EA, Criterion, RockStar North (the makers of GTA BTW), Sony, Microsoft Game Studios/Lionhead, Codemasters are just a few of the companies with studios in the UK.

>Everything I know about games programming is
>either self taught or read from tutorials on the
>web.
What's your point? To be a hobbyist game programmer you don't need any qualifications? If you ever try to get a (real) job in the industry you may find that a CS degree is somewhat more useful.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Kamineko]

I think your comment is a little mixed up.

When you say:

There is no skills shortage in the UK. There is a shortage of decent employees, so all the skills are fucking off to the US and Canada where they can support themselves in the game industry without being a bartender in their spare time. do you mean

There is a skills shortage in the UK, and a shortage of decent employees, as all the skills are fucking off to the US and Canada where they can support themselves in the game industry without being a bartender in their spare time. ?

Games development "degrees" are a joke

[Viol8]

Its just a cynical way for universities to make money and it does a disservice to the people who take it. Any good CS course should equip someone with the knowledge (if not ability) to work on games programming - theres nothing special about it apart from perhaps a slightly greater emphasis on physics and thats only if you work on a physics engine anyway.

There're no special accountancy programming degrees or degrees in insurance or banking programming so why games programming? Its just a cynical cash cow.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[SQLGuru]

There're no special accountancy programming degrees or degrees in insurance or banking programming so why games programming? Its just a cynical cash cow. Actually, there are. It's called MIS. To me CS is the broad degree that can apply to any programming career. MIS is focused on business apps. Both degrees can produce good or bad coders, but the classes you focus on in MIS make you better suited to write business apps. That being said, my degree is in CS and for my entire career, I've written business apps -- it just happens to be the most stable and generally highest paying programming position. I've actually taken classes at Austin Community College which has a decent (currently non-degree) program [ http://www.austincc.edu/techcert/Video_Games.html ] that is taught by game industry professionals. After talking with them, I'd have to take a $20k to $30k paycut, double my hours, and probably double my stress if I took a job in that field. I'll stick to it as a hobby, thanks.

Layne

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[drakkos]

I wouldn't say they are of a neccessity a cheat - done properly, they can provide tremendous value by specialising. The trend in higher education is to 'dumb down' - things I did in second year in my degree ten years ago are now fouth year topicsi n some universities. There is some benefit to be had in arresting that process with a 'hard' degree.

However...

Certainly in the university that makes the biggest deal about how it introduced the UK's first gaming degree, those few members of staff who had previous industry experience have long gone (because of a lack of the authority neccessary to keep the material up to date). Those that remain, at least when I last taught there, are unspecialised with no games industry experience. Indeed, hardly any of them are gamers in general.

Done properly, a games degree has value... but that requires a significant investment in technological infrastructure, lecturers who know the industry (or have significant relevant experience in general) and who love games, and a commitment at all levels to continually update the course material. In today's climate of creeping managerialism in education, none of those things have the same value as a vanilla CS course with a 'games' label on it.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[morgan_greywolf]

Any good CS course should equip someone with the knowledge (if not ability) to work on games programming - theres nothing special about it apart from perhaps a slightly greater emphasis on physics and thats only if you work on a physics engine anyway.

Sure, you're going to learn the science, but not necessarily the application. If you know the science, you should be able to learn the application, but CS does not prepare you for real-world coding.

It's like the difference between getting a degree in physics and a degree electrical engineering -- the physics degree gives you the science, but the EE degree gives you the the application.

There're no special accountancy programming degrees or degrees in insurance or banking programming so why games programming?

Yeah, there is. I have such a degree. It's called 'Computer Information Systems' or 'Business Information Systems' or 'Management Information Systems.' These courses teach coding and application development methodologies used in business. Again, CIS is the application, while CS is the science.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[Viol8]

"It's called 'Computer Information Systems' or 'Business Information Systems' or 'Management Information Systems."

True , but AFAIK those courses are really business courses with some simplistic computing bolted on. They're not really intense CS courses that get down to the specifics of what you'd required for business programming - eg database tuning, normalisation and so forth.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[morgan_greywolf]

No, no. The curriculum I had covered databases (including normalization, tuning, SQL, UML etc.), networking, C programming, operating systems theory and practice, systems design and analysis, software development methodologies (SDLC, etc.). Yes there were some business courses, so it is kind of like a dual Business/IS major.

Much of this you do NOT get in CS coursework, which typically focuses on algorithms, languages, compiler development and so forth.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[Opportunist]

Maybe, but you could become a game programmer in far less time than it takes for a full blown CS degree. That's like studying physics to become an optician. Sure, it will tell you all you need about optics, and just learn a little more about the human eye and you're set. But you learn a hell lot of stuff that you'll never need again, ever.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Games programming does not involve CS. UK unis are free.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[axedog]

I agree that most games degrees are not up to scratch yet. But this area is in its infancy, and it will continue to improve. There are a number of games courses that are highly thought of in the industry, as approved by schemes such as the UK's "Skillset" accredited courses. CS degrees do not equip graduates with a complete skill set to work as a programmer of high-budget console games. Some CS graduates do have the skills, but not because they learned them at university - it is because they learned to write games in their own time! A professional industry should not rely on hobbyists; it needs formal training.

Read the Curriculum Framework published by the Independent Game Developers Association (IGDA) and then tell me of any CS degree that provides that skills portfolio. There is no such course that I know of! Skillset's requirements (http://www.skillset.org/games/accreditation/apply/article_6162_1.asp ) are even more demanding than IGDA's, which perhaps explains why only two games programming courses (and two art courses) in the UK were accredited.

Don't tar all game programming courses with the same brush! Many of them are still poor, but it doesn't mean that game courses are all a joke, or that it's a bad idea to teach game development.

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[BigJClark]

Totally agree. Get this though, I learned more gaming applicable theory from a linear algebra (second year comp sci) course, then in 'Advance Programming 431'. Theory is where its at. Any idjit can program, as is shown by our lovely microsoft application suites, but can you conceptualize normals, matrices etc etc?

Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke

[aj50]

Really? I do CS and did (or will do) all those things (except database tuning) and most of the modules involved coursework.

The CIS students did some business and management modules and missed out on C, Lisp, a lot of the maths and compilers. It certainly didn't seem like a good deal to me, but then I have no interest in business.

It's not a university problem, it's people leaving

[cliffski]

It's a staff retention issue. I blogged in some depth about it here:

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=16

basically people run games companies on the system of getting cheap graduates, treating them badly, and then replenishing them the minute they wise up and leave. This isn't a new thing at all.
Of my msn contacts from when I was in retail AAA dev, 70% of my ex colleagues now work in other industries or for themselves. That's the problem.

Coding in the UK

[Pond823]

A couple of thoughts...

1. Wages in the computer games programming market are very far behind what you can get doing a 9-6 mainstream programming job.

2. Younger programmers in the UK have very different aspirations to those of my youth, they are looking for a decent 'middle-class' career, not working in entertainment industry or being scientists.

3. Who the hell wants to work in the middle of freakin' nowhere. Tons of games companies moved out of the big cities to rural backwaters to get there costs down, but now the employees that had to move with them have left nobody wants in.

4. Games designers don't have to be programmers. It used to be that you had a great idea, wrote the code and $$$ profit. But now designers come through the level designer route and so don't fill out the junior programming positions.

I'd love to work back in the games industry but I have a life to support.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Anonymous Coward]

Same old UK companies. Won't pay for people with the required skillset nor will they pay to train someone to achieve the required skillset. Instead they just bitch to the media via one of their useless, self-aggrandising, all buddies together spin organisations about the poor state of UK education. All the time waiting for the government to cough up some money for an employment scheme that will change nothing but help put extra money in their pockets.

Hydra Game Development Kit

[BasilBrush]

If they think there's a lack of creative home computing platforms they haven't looked very far. Here's a system dedicated to learning games programming and comes with a good book that teaches it. The system has an 8 core microcontroller, and to program it, you get down to the bare metal, even writing your own video drivers to create a NTSC or PAL signal. I wish they'd had this back in the days when I was learning.

http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/PropellerProgrammingKits/tabid/144/CategoryID/20/List/0/SortField/0/Level/a/ProductID/467/Default.aspx

Re:Hydra Game Development Kit

[johannesg]

I think that's nice, but utterly misses the point. Why am I a programmer today? Because, back in the day, I owned a cool machine that everybody else owned and I wanted to explore it. Why would I want to own a piece of junk that nobody else has? Even if I build something great on it, noone will ever know!

Stick a keyboard and a halfway decent programming language on a PS3 or a 360 or a Wii (it doesn't matter which), and see the programming literacy soar upwards.

Oh, and with halfway decent I don't mean "some glorified scripting language". I mean something that gives direct access to the hardware, no matter how hard that may be to program for. That's where we all cut our teeth, that's where you can build some real skills. The goal is not to allow *everyone* to work with it, but rather to allow the smart kids to do stuff that noone else can.

Re:Hydra Game Development Kit

[CronoCloud]

[CronoCloud@midgar CronoCloud]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
PS2 Linux release 1.0

[CronoCloud@midgar CronoCloud]$ whereis gcc
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc /usr/man/man1/gcc.1

Re:Hydra Game Development Kit

[johannesg]

That's a very good point. I *might* have invested in a programming language myself if it hadn't been built in, but not immediately - it would probably have been much later before I had started to learn to program.

And I retract my comment on scripting languages: of course you need a beginners language. I started by drawing circles in BASIC; only when that turned out to be too limiting did I teach myself Z80 assembly language (initially assembling it by hand, and typing in hex codes!). But the fascination with the machine itself, learning its inner-most secrets, that I think will only come when you can actually explore it, unfettered by clean-looking API's.

Too bad PS3 doesn't come with a built-in BASIC.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[damburger]

I mean the universities are churning out a perfectly good number of coding whizzes, so there is no shortage at the source - however as soon as they come out of university they look at the opportunities available in the UK and promptly leave. So there is no skills shortage, just a continuous skills flight due to low pay which makes it look like a skills shortage.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[damburger]

Yup. You want to find the biggest benefit scroungers in the UK, they aren't the ones in the tracksuits drinking special brew - head to London and look for expensive suits.

The UK education system isn't the best in the world but it isn't far off, as much as we bitch. We produce plenty enough skills for our economy but the industry wants the government to saturate the labour market so they can top graduates for cockle-picking money. Essentially, they want the government to spend money on them. Signing on is at least honest about that.

Re:I'm a game programmer

[Dogtanian]

Also of note, I'm Canadian, and I would love to paint the British in a better light, but that experience was just horrible. Hope your "experience" isn't akin to that of the Canadian woman living in the UK who got a TV series on the basis of basically saying "All British men are crap in bed and repressed assholes", despite (a) Having got the majority of her "experience" from working at a right-wing tabloid newspaper and (b) Never actually having slept with any of them anyway!

I haven't read TFA Hmm.

Re:I'm a game programmer

[91degrees]

I'm betting this was either at least 10 years ago (possibly 15 or more) or the guy had been in the industry for some time. I've been in the industry for a while and the spaghetti hackers seem to either be old, or come from mainland Europe these days.

Nahhh..

[comm2k]

Nahhh not at all - with new talent like Majestic Studios, the UK is making a full swing attack at all the cheap-ass clones made by EA-Borg collective.

Who the hell...

[Dogtanian]

...would want to work in the games industry anyway?

It's generally reckoned to have some of the worst pay and the longest hours.

From what I've heard, the actual coding in commercial games is (contrary to what people expect) tedious and unrewarding minutae.

Couple that with the volatile and flaky nature of the games business that can (and does) see formerly successful companies go under very quickly after their latest game doesn't do quite as well as they'd hoped.

Anyone getting into the business is competing against naive entrants in their late-teens/early-twenties; the type who are willing (and able) to work for peanuts to do what (they think) they love, until they get burnt out and are replaced by more newbies.

I'm glad that I've never had any desire to work in computer games, because unless you're truly passionate about it and have your eyes wide open as to what it involves, it sounds like a no-brainer to avoid it.

Re:Who the hell...

[AndyboyH]

...but the look you get from kids (and grown ups) when you tell them you make games for a living makes it all worth it. ;)

In all seriousness though - if you're good, the pay gets good. You've got to go through an ordeal to prove yourself, doing the shit stuff involving the long hours and crap wages, but the rewards can be very worth it, especially if you make something that you're proud of.

Re:Who the hell...

[IAR80]

. Anyone getting into the business is competing against naive entrants in their late-teens/early-twenties; the type who are willing (and able) to work for peanuts to do what (they think) they love, until they get burnt out and are replaced by more newbies. I was wondering why all the games seems so puerile.

Re:Who the hell...

[Dogtanian]

I was wondering why all the games seems so puerile. Actually, I doubt they get much input into the design (hence the working on the minutae comment)- that's probably done by the higher-ups and largely driven by the marketing people who sell stuff that's more likely to sell.

Re:Who the hell...

[IAR80]

Well that explains why they are puerile and dumb. :)

Re:Who the hell...

[RogueyWon]

Exactly...

Too many people decide in their teens that the path to future job satisfaction must be to take one of their hobbies and make a job out of it. The inevitable result, 10-15 years later, is that they find themselves exploited, abused and burned out on both their job and their hobby.

I remember when I was 15 and deciding which A-levels I wanted to take. For non-UK readers, A-levels used to be (and in a modified form still are) taken at 17 or 18. Most students would sit between 3 and 5 of them and your grade predictions (and eventual grades) were the major factor in determining which university you got into. I was doing a fairly mixed spread of GCSEs (taken at 15-16), that left me with the option of going down either the arts or the sciences route. Being a huge gamer at the time (and involved in the fledgling Doom mod scene), there was a massive temptation to pick two Maths courses along with Physics and Chemistry, with a mind to an computer science or maths degree and a career writing games. Many of my friends did this. However, at the last moment, I got cold feet. I took Latin, Ancient Greek, English Language and English Literature instead, then went on to do a Classics degree.

Best decision I ever made.

A decade and a bit on from there, I'm earning the equivalent of just under $100,000 for a varied and enjoyable non-technical job with a good work-life balance. I come home in the evenings and, if I'm feeling stressed, I fire up a game and blast some aliens. Meanwhile, the friends I stayed in touch with who actually made it into games development are earning less than $50,000, living in some of the least desirable areas of the UK, working 60+ hour weeks and have little to no prospects of advancement, despite high-scoring degrees in maths and computer science from some of the UK's top universities. Worse still, two of them now openly confess to loathing and detesting games. Having spent their working day crawling around in the back-end of one under development, the last thing they feel like doing when they get home in the evening is loading up a different one.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad (for obvious, selfish reasons), that lots of clever people do want to work in games development. However, if anybody I knew or cared about, curently going through education, gave any kind of indication that they were considering a career there, I would beg and plead with them to think again.

The greatest secret I have found for career satisfaction is to keep your work and home lives separate. Certainly, you should try to find a job you enjoy; but this doesn't mean it has to be connected to an existing hobby. I've worked in some strange fields that I went into with very little previous knowledge (eg. maritime environmental regulation - although I've moved on from that now) and have found them fascinating. If you have an active mind, you should be able to find subjects that grab your interest in almost any field. Look for a career that will broaden your horizons, not confine them to what you already know and enjoy.

Re:Who the hell...

[PhoenixOne]

...because unless you're truly passionate about it and have your eyes wide open as to what it involves, it sounds like a no-brainer to avoid it.

That's the truth. I work in the industry. I work twice as hard as my friends in other computer-related jobs for about half the pay.

But I don't want to work anywhere else.

My co-workers (many in there late 20's and 30's) are highly skilled professionals. And the work inspires the best from you (fast, tight code that can handle anything a hyper-active 20-something can throw at it).

Working in the game industry isn't for everyone, but it suits me.

Rubbish!

[idries]

What a load of Rubbish. In my current place of work we pay reasonable wages and we have filled all of our programming positions.

In some places I have worked in the past, we paid less reasonable wages and didn't fill all our positions. The complaint here seems to amount to "there's a labour market and the prices are more than I want to pay".

Of course, then there's the other side of the problem which is that the relatively high cost of labour means that it's cheaper to run a studio in the Far East, Eastern Europe or Canada. So a lot of studios and individuals move there. I don't think that anyone can seriously blame universities or consoles for that!

Re:Rubbish!

[AndyboyH]

No, but you can blame your governments for not competing on tax breaks.

Canada for example offers high tax breaks for companies, and income tax breaks for foreign staff. Supposedly it's in the region of 40% of wages (iirc)

France has just received EU approval to offer similar breaks.

And even in the US, 4 states offer concessions for games developers.

Obviously you can't compete with cheap labour if your government is screwing you over and refusing to compete with other governments at the same time.

Re:Rubbish!

[damburger]

Is your place of work a gaming company? I only ask because if as you imply you've filled up with competent, well paid programmers, why can't a UK games company do the same instead of begging the government to saturate the labour market for them?

Re:Rubbish!

[idries]

Why should the government subsidize the games industry in the UK? As a UK tax payer I would be quite upset to hear of such an arrangement when the NHS and transportation systems are in such a poor state.

In Canada (where I have also worked in the games industry) the government actively promotes the games industry (and a number of other high-tech industries) with such incentives because it's a good way to increase Canada's skilled worker population, which is one of the governments' on-going goals. Additionally, I think that you'll find that a large portion of such breaks are actually offered by the Provincial Governments, rather than Federal. These breaks are not designed to attract such companies to Canada (the nationwide reduced operating costs relative to other western nations are enough to do that) they're simply an extra incentive to attract such companies to one province over another. In a sense, the provinces compete for the tickle down economic benefits of having high-tech companies around.

An incentive system like this would make no sense for the UK government. Here in the UK we already have a large financial sector which employs a lot of the best programming talent and pays them very well. Giving money to the games industry (or taking less money away from it in tax breaks) would be money well wasted from the point of view of UK economic policy, because it wouldn't create as much trickle down benefits as the finance sector (not even close!) and it might take talent away. Additionally, unless the breaks were *HUGE* Canada would still be cheaper.

The fact of the matter is that tax breaks or not doing anything in the UK is more expensive than doing it most other places in the world. If you're in an industry where the local economic environment influences your income as well as your operating costs, then this isn't a big problem. Although it costs more to staff a restaurant in London than in Vancouver, people pay more to eat at a restaurant in London.

This is not the case for games, no-one is ready to pay more for a game because it was developed in the UK rather than Canada.

Re:It's not a university problem, it's people leav

[NocturnHimtatagon]

From the IDGA website

* 34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years, and 51.2% within 10 years.
* Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience.
* Crunch time is omnipresent, during which respondents work 65 to 80 hours a week (35.2%). The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours (13%). Overtime is often uncompensated (46.8%).
* 44% of developers claim they could use more people or special skills on their projects.
* Spouses are likely to respond that "You work too much..." (61.5%); "You are always stressed out." (43.5%); "You don't make enough money." (35.6%).
* Contrary to expectations, more people said that games were only one of many career options for them (34%) than said games were their only choice (32%).

And this was also my experience when I was working as a game developer.

With all the offshoring, what do they expect?!?!

[Ice Tiger]

From an article linked by the one of those above:

'MacKinnon warned: "Without significant intervention higher education cannot meet growth targets [for the IT industry]." He called on the government to provide tax breaks and partner-with-industry to encourage internships and graduate entry schemes to get young talent into IT and help others transfer across from different industries.

The offshoring of entry level IT jobs has exacerbated the skills shortage by making it increasingly difficult for IT workers to gain the necessary experience to boost their skill level, he added. "Because we are not employing at entry level offshoring will kill our industry stone dead," he warned.'

and from the article itself:

"Because the US economy is depressed it's cheaper to develop there and people are looking at other places - everyone's setting up studios in Shanghai and Eastern Europe at the moment."

Even in the company I work for we don't have any entry level jobs any more in house and in the UK. I don't agree with it as it's causing problems such as lack of knowledge retention and the wool being pulled over managements eyes. But the IT director came in singing the offshoring song and so we'll continue despite indications it's actually more expensive than say agile onshore methods.

In the past I'd have recommended IT as a career but now I'd say go into building trades as at least your competition has to come here to the UK and you've got the same cost of living.

Basically we're turning ourselves into Eloi.

ZX Spectrum

[Half a dent]

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was perhaps the machine that really started home programming in the UK. There were various magazines with basic programs printed in them in the early 80s.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[cheroke]

This's not only the UK problem. All brains of the Eastern Europe and Russia are dreaming of "fucking off to the US and Canada" and majority eventually does it.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[antirelic]

With the new Anti-Immigration laws being passed in the EU, could this be a US type of shrill from the UK gaming industry to try increase the amount of H1B type visa's (not sure how this works in the UK)? I mean, if you cannot import cheap labor, than you are going to have to actually start paying people decent salaries... and that means less yachts and new cars for your little Johnny...

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[superskippy]

This seems to be true. I remember a few days back on Slashdot reading a story comparing Apple employees salaries to Google salaries in Silicon Valley. Well, believe me, all the salaries in that article are very high for UK programmers. Especially when you consider the high level of tax we have to pay over here.

starts to rant....
But I think it's all part of a general pattern of undervaluing technical, academic skills in Britain generally. In my first job working for a university, is was very noticeable how all the top academics had gone to the US. You'd often go on conferences to America and find that the top man in a particular field whose name you recognised turned out to be British when you met him, and he'd emigrated.

There is a lot of nonsense in the press at the moment about declining numbers of maths and science students, all the way through kids to university. There suggesting that it is because it's too geeky, and has a social stigma. Well, the real reason is people have got more sense. If the best jobs just require "a degree", no matter what in, you aren't going to pick something really difficult like Physics, are you?

Home coding on the Atari ST?

[gsslay]

Seriously, did any home users code on an Atari ST in the UK??? Its BASIC sucked and other languages cost extra.

Real coders learnt on the Spectrum or Beeb.

Re:Home coding on the Atari ST?

[Z303]

Tim Moss (lead on the first two God of War games) for one, he was in the Lost Boys demo group and did a few games

Re:Home coding on the Atari ST?

[fitten]

Yes, but by that time, most machines did not have a ROM based BASIC and other languages "cost extra". I'm not from the UK but I owned an Atari ST and coded with Laser C (and GFA Basic some, I think that's the one... it was a structured BASIC).

Re:Home coding on the Atari ST?

[AeneaTech]

Pffft, I learned it on the Atari XL and the Atari ST, yeah, yeah the ST Basic sucked, the XL's didn't though. And yes, for more than just simple Basic programs one needs to get hold of something else, me personally, I bought Turbo C (later Pure C) for the ST and DevPac for assembly development... Back then those things weren't as expensive as todays commercial development environments...

Re:Home coding on the Atari ST?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. You could code from power up on the BBC, Speccy, C64, etc. No extra software required.

e.g.

1. Switch on the BBC.

2. AUTO

  10 DIM code% 128
  20 FOR pass%=0 TO 2 STEP 2
  30 P%=code%
  40 [OPT pass%
  50 ... start 6502 assembler.

Do that out of the box with a new PC.

completely agree

[QX-Mat]

The problem is when choosing the general science route at A-Level, you do Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths, later dropping one at A2. If you don't much like either chemistry or biology, it's not a problem if you're interested in the gaming community. The problem lies with the fact that you can rarely timetable Maths with anything other than the 3 sciences. I didn't do A-Level maths, and I'm very annoyed that I didn't. My problem was 2 fold - the upper sets were full (we had 2 x 3 tiers since our year was divided into 2). I plodded along learning nothing in the middle set. I felt like I was a paper calculator! The interesting and applicable stuff was only introduced in the higher tiers - throughout my time at Uni I've been constantly annoyed that I don't understand introductory proof to things I've never been introduced to.

The second problem is the type of candidate the course wanted to attract. I did Computer Games Systems Masters at an ex-polytech. The course had a math element that largely went beyond me (however, I now have an appreciation for the fundamentals at a system level), having only a working knowledge of integration, and unable to show proof. How do you still cater for students that don't respond well at math? Give them system programming, internet programming, windows programming and hotsex programming modules! I enjoyed these because I didn't have to think about the work - I could program long before my Computer Systems undergraduate degree... finally however, I was using what I knew in fairly productive ways (and getting it right the first time).

So admittedly I am the type of candidate my course attracts - but that's not the whole story. There are other modules I had to do for my MSc that weren't related to Systems: Games Prototyping was a module where we took an idea, and prototyped a design: generally some kind of working model such as level. Here my course (as there were only 3 of us on it!) mixed with the Computer Games Design idiots.

Let me break for a paragraph there, because a break is required. Having done a systems engineering degree, systems programming for 4 years, and a genuine interest in technology, I had modules with CADers and Photoshopers who's only interests were in PLAYING games and hacking skins. They did NOT program, they did NOT care about the technology. For my group work in the prototyping module I actively ignored my lecturer since it turned out that he wasn't even a PhD candidate and had actually graduated through that University (one renowned for being poor at Science in the first place - albeit one with a fantastic employment track). I ignored the CAD stuff he was teaching me, I ignored the game design crap I could read about myself (his lectures consisted of photocopied material from a book!) and I ignore the fact that I was probably more qualified to teach when he questioned my analysis on throughput, net code, and the fact you couldn't realistically expect to host a 5v5 on a home broadband connection (he said he could do it on his XBox - so that made him right: if he reads this - f u c k o f f, and go study signalling).

I made the most out of that lecturers modelling by delving into the Hammer engine and coding some actually game aspects.

So what do I have to show for my masters in computer games systems? Not a lot. When people are getting degrees and masters in computer games design, and putting themselves out to games companies as great programmers having only studied a single module on C++ (not even covering allocation and collection let alone dependency garbage collection!), compared to the real engineers who were doing assembly on an ARM7TDMI in their sleep, they are destroying the reputation of the graduate industry as a whole.

As someone who drank myself stupid in my final year at undergrad, and came out with the worst possible grade given my ability, finding myself so much more technically able than those who got a first class in undergraduate computer games degree is a disgrace to any gaming graduate.

If I hired a

Re:completely agree

[Jellybob]

I'm a fast-track law student now.

Excellent, with a personality like that, you should get on just fine.

Seriously, stop acting like you're the only person in the world who knows what they're doing. Games design *isn't* about programming, that's not a weakness of the course, it's a weakness of your perception. Design is where you decide what you want to do, not when you sit down and hack out the first thing that comes into your head.

The "CADers" and "Photoshoppers" you talk about are in fact skilled professionals. It may not be your profession, but it does have a name. It's called an "Artist". You'd be pissed off if someone called you a "C++er" I'd guess, so have a bit of respect for other people as well. No, they're not interested in programming or how the engine works (beyond what the limits are), because that's what the developers are there for.

Re:completely agree

[QX-Mat]

That's the point tho isn't it - game designers are overshadowing the game programmers. Games companies don't care how skilled their CADers or Photoshopers are when they're likely to outsource most of that anyway, and since there's no shortage of them its not a massive problem. The problem lies with the fact CADers and Photoshopers and graduates who *think* they are not when they are, however skilled they maybe (terrific skills indeed - i submit!) wanting to get into the programming side because of the financial rewards. They've been subtly coerced into thinking that if they apply for jobs they'll get one. Many of them haven't heard of the Gems series, let alone own any!

I don't pretend to be the only person in the world who knows what they're doing, but I am as equally annoyed that what was once portrayed as a simple career path for the experienced and talented programmer is now one where you have to fight just to get an entry level job because the CADers and Photoshopers are taking up all the interviews proclaiming to be software engineers.

I have a chip on my shoulder. Fair enough.

Matt

Re:completely agree

[eulernet]

That's the point tho isn't it - game designers are overshadowing the game programmers. As an ex-game programmer myself, I don't see the problem. It may be a problem with your ego.
Game designers need to have an extraverted personality, and coders are better when they are introverted.

Games companies don't care how skilled their CADers or Photoshopers are when they're likely to outsource most of that anyway, and since there's no shortage of them its not a massive problem. No, they need to keep their graphists near.
On the contrary, coders use game frameworks (like 3D libraries), and outside of a few companies, the 'coders' are now 'scripters'.

financial rewards. Graphists have hard times finding stable jobs.
They work mostly for advertisement companies, so it's great that they can work on games.

Many of them haven't heard of the Gems series, let alone own any! Who cares about Gems ?
Frankly, I read some parts of them, and it was so boring and useless.

Frankly, if you think that you can code games because you read some books, you are so wrong !
Becoming a good programmer requires a lot of work and efforts. I'm coding since 20 years, and still learning every day, and trying to remain humble.

When I was coding games, the difference of skills was very visible, but now, it really disappeared, but you can still recognize the experience.

Re:completely agree

[TheSeer2]

"They've been subtly coerced into thinking that if they apply for jobs they'll get one." -- "you have to fight just to get an entry level job because the CADers and Photoshopers are taking up all the interviews proclaiming to be software engineers."

So they won't get the job, but they'll somehow make it harder for a qualified person to get the job? Quantum employment?

Also, stop perpetuating the outsourcing myth. It's bullplop. (look at the production costs of GTAIV)

Re:completely agree

[DoofusOfDeath]

So basically you're saying that:

1) You suck a math (for lack of proper training, you believe).
2) During undergrad years, you didn't take steps to correct that.
3) Then you chose your grad program poorly, because they required
      math skills that you didn't have, and
4) You *still* haven't done anything to correct your math deficiencies?

The main point I'm drawing from your story is that you need to be proactive about getting the math eduction you feel you need, but you're not willing to.

That doesn't inspire a lot of sympathy.

Re:completely agree

[QX-Mat]

No, they need to keep their graphists near. I beg to differ - beyond the core set of graphic artists, everyone else is a job related hire. Something like 70% of a design team now works for asset generation, with a large subset of them either agency employees or employees using outsourced material. The larger the company, the bigger the "pool" of non-specific title artists they have. Programmers tend to be for a title from day one, and hired as needed to implement less intrusive aspects (ie: scripted responses)

Frankly, I read some parts of them, and it was so boring and useless.
Frankly, if you think that you can code games because you read some books, you are so wrong ! Are you serious? If you're not keeping up with technological trends then I'm worried about the type of games you were involved with. I think you may have missed the portal and parallax/reflief mapping bandwagons by a mile. It's very hard to follow developments in RenderMonkey/orthatnvidatool if you're not following the publications or at least the implementations you find in the industry books.

I agree there is a subset of game programmers who can take on the roll of scripting. Lua itself and Lua-like clones are facilitating this. But the industry really wants lower level programmers. Guys who can think not in terms of object-think wait()-do()-wait(), but guys who can implement a smartptr system to create a better garbage collection system or guys who plan thread synchronisation rather than just wait and see.

Matt

Re:completely agree

[QX-Mat]

What I was demonstrating is the way schools introduce maths leaves a lot to be desired.

I chose my masters program perfectly, because the math element was functional and entirely introduced at a level I understood for the most part, only in the final few classes did it really begin to leave me with concepts like inertial tensors as they were a little abstract without an implemented framework.

I am regularly frustrated that I have to put in a lot of effort into understanding a concept I wasn't introduced to at school - in other words i have to learn and have been learning, but at the price of a few frustrated nights in. I wouldn't say I "*still*" haven't fixed my deficiencies, i must have to succeeded thus far, but I would argue that there are a lot of programmers who would be a lot better had they had the chance to study further maths.

Re:completely agree

[Blakey Rat]

I ignore the fact that I was probably more qualified to teach when he questioned my analysis on throughput, net code, and the fact you couldn't realistically expect to host a 5v5 on a home broadband connection (he said he could do it on his XBox - so that made him right: if he reads this - f u c k o f f, and go study signalling).

Wait, what?

I used to host 16-player Tribes games on a 56k modem shared between two people. Obviously I don't know the specifics of the problem, but to say it's impossible to host a 5v5 game on a home broadband connection, that's simply ridiculous.

For what its worth, your teacher was right: tens of thousands of Xboxes have done exactly that.

Re:completely agree

[Anonymous Coward]

You think UK students still get grants? Turn on the telly and find out what else has changed during your 15 year coma, thou pestilent plume-plucked canker-blossom.

Re:completely agree

[QX-Mat]

Not with any reasonable expectation of realtime - by which i mean a low ping of 50ms or less. its a question of throughput, and where throughput is maxed out, a question of delaying updatings and queuing. The reason you were able to play tribes is because everyone had serveral hundred millisecond pings (if not serveral seconds!!), and the tribes landscape is huge to boot unlike CS et al which focuses on precise headshots.

Modern fps games are tuned to 5-10ms response times, in otherwords you need a much higher transmit rate. a CS client will use ~10kpbs upstream easily. Most ISPs have 512k or 786k upstreams, so you can see my problem here. It all get a little complicated the lower the ping.

Matt

Re:completely agree

[Blakey Rat]

For the record, Tribes ran so smoothly because it had an excellent implementation of client-side prediction, and was very bandwidth-efficient and packet-loss tolerant. But its hardly the only game this applies to; I was running 8-player Warcraft II games on my Mac 68040 back in the day over AOL on a 14.4k baud modem, for example.

Like I said, I didn't understand the specifics of the problem, but I was sure that your blanket "it's impossible" line was complete BS simply because I've done it.

Most ISPs have 512k or 786k upstreams, so you can see my problem here.

Yeah, your problem is that you lack industry experience (i.e. you apparently were never exposed to multiplayer games back when modems were the norm), and you're kind of a know-it-all jerk.

Re:completely agree

[QX-Mat]

No need to make it personal. But Ill bite (i'm bored - and someone is wrong on the internet (XKCD ftw)).

Just to clarify a few things for you - just because u were playing tribes and warcraft, doesn't mean youre right either. It works both ways. This particular annoyance of mine arose from a presentation I did on a highly competitive game design pitch aimed directly at competitions a la counter-strike. Hence the frustration I got listening to a pseudo-lecturer telling me the same BS you're telling me. You are still both wrong - while the word impossible might be incorrect a 5v5 is still a 5 on 5 fps game to every modern gamer out there.

I think you need to look up signalling - specifically the nyquist rate and shannon-hartly sampling theorum - and imagine how a computer game would want to interpolate positional vectors for accuracy. Your comparison to WC2 is a moot point and I can only assume tribes is an extrapolation system since the client side prediction is as you claim so good. Either that, or it's not a sub 50ms game.

It seems you've lost plot and really missed the point. Tell me, have u tried setting up 8+ man fps games on an xbox 360? IIRC, Call of Duty didn't allow more than 8 players. I'm not a know it all and don't profess to be, but it seems u seem to know less than me which somehow makes me wrong for being educated (and right). You're a troll the internet didn't want to access broadband.

I can hardly call myself educated when I can't question the wrong tuition of a mere undergraduate lecturer.

Yours truely, a bloke who first started playing network games over DOS packet drivers and BSD stack,
Matt

Re:completely agree

[Blakey Rat]

Wow, you really come across as an asshole.

Just to clarify a few things for you - just because u were playing tribes and warcraft, doesn't mean youre right either.

The fact that I was playing them with bandwidth orders of magnitude lower than home broadband, well, that makes me just feel right on several levels. Also, I can spell the words "you" and "you're." (Yeah, cheap shot, I know.)

You are still both wrong - while the word impossible might be incorrect a 5v5 is still a 5 on 5 fps game to every modern gamer out there.

Oh yeah, I forgot that Tribes was actually a farming simulator and not a FPS game. Silly me!

I think you need to look up signalling - specifically the nyquist rate and shannon-hartly sampling theorum - and imagine how a computer game would want to interpolate positional vectors for accuracy.

I have a better idea; instead of bothering with a crapload of buzzwords I don't really give a crap about, how about I just trust my extensive personal experience with the matter?

Either that, or it's not a sub 50ms game.

Yes, if you move the goalposts, then you're probably right on the issue. But that's not what you said, not even close. You can't change the premise halfway through the argument.

It seems you've lost plot and really missed the point.

I've "lost plot?" English, please.

Tell me, have u tried setting up 8+ man fps games on an xbox 360? IIRC, Call of Duty didn't allow more than 8 players.

Moving the goalposts, and now cherry-picking titles. Awesome.

Halo 2 allows 16 players, hosted over a home broadband connection, which speech and all the other Live niceties. I hear rumors that this "Halo" series was kind of popular, you should check it out.

I'm not a know it all and don't profess to be,

That's why you bring up "Nyquist Rate" and "Shannon-Hartly Sampling Theorem" in a casual argument? Riiight.

but it seems u seem to know less than me which somehow makes me wrong for being educated (and right). You're a troll the internet didn't want to access broadband.

I can't even parse that. English, please.

I can hardly call myself educated when I can't question the wrong tuition of a mere undergraduate lecturer.

A "mere" undergraduate lecturer? And what were your credentials in the class, exactly? You're a know-it-all and an asshole.

Yours truely, a bloke who first started playing network games over DOS packet drivers and BSD stack,

Well, whoop-de-shit.

Look, I'm not saying "mere" undergraduate lecturers are always right. But that particular example, you know the one you told him to go "fuck off" over? He was right about that. If you hadn't added the "fuck off" I might have let it slide.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[damburger]

Well, I did.

I got my Comp Sci degree 98-02, graduating just in time to see the tech boom vanish over the horizon. I bounced between various jobs on the same salary level as people fresh out of school, then I decided to move on.

I'm now on a Physics course, using my IT skills purely to support me rather than as a career. I am so sick of playing the labour market game that I decided to go back into academia and may well stay here. That, or get some ridiculously specialised science morlock job in a neutrino detector or particle accelerator or the like.

The deeply ironic thing is I am currently at the best coding job I've ever had. Going back to university opened up opportunities for summer work in bioinformatics, which pays better than all my previous IT work. I still don't want to go back though.

Creativity is just a tiny small part of programmin

[Moraelin]

Actually, creativity is a tiny small part of programming. Programming is basically a funnily-formalized maths. And sometimes even that programming language notation isn't enough, and you actually have to do old fashioned maths with large matrixes and multi-dimensional geometries and theorems named after long-dead Greeks or French guys. And some domains of it need some other knowledge too: e.g., the physics engines another poster mentioned.

It's not art, where expressing yourself in unorthodox ways that make the viewer question the establishment. If it were art, sure, creativity would be everything. But it's an algorithm that has to execute on a very anal-retentive machine, and solve a very well defined program.

If Picasso didn't draw a human anywhere near correct, it's good art. If you make a program that's nowhere near correct, it's just buggy. If your code draws the polygons for the eyes in the wrong positions, like Picasso did, it's not some thought-provoking art, it's a graphics glitch and you get to fix it. Ditto if your shaders end up producing halos like in Van Gogh's paintings. If Picasso or Tzara ignored some centuries of accepted artistic methods, it was innovative. If you do the same in a program, it's just wasting your employer's money on reinventing the wheel, and usually doing a piss-poor job too.

You're not making art. You're writing a program. Art and creativity come into play when you come up with an idea. But then you have to sit down and actually implement it. That's plain old work and skill, and it _can_ be trained.

In other words, if you think you can just ignore two millenia of maths, half a millenium of physics, and half a century of algorithms, and you'll do as good (or even better) a job just because you're teh uber-creative guy... I'll call bull on that. It doesn't work like that. That's not just man hours, but many man-millenia that were needed to discover or prove all that stuff. And there were likely some guys in there that were both smarter and more creative than you, no matter who you are. You can't just skip all that and think you'll just get creative and invent it on your own in an afternoon when you need it.

Yes, it helps to have a little creativity, and combine those algorithms in smart ways. Fine. But you still need to learn them, or at least know they exist. In an ideal world, even understand why they work, and why they're better than the dumb brute-force stuff produced by teh creative people without training. But at the very least, know that they exist, so you can google them later.

Now all this may sound a bit harsh. I've been at the same point, and had the same dumb ideas, so you get _some_ sympathy there. But guess what? That was just the ADHD talking. It's just an excuse for lacking the willpower to just sit down and learn. But in practice, you're not _that_ smart, and I'm not _that_ smart either. You can't just snap your fingers and reinvent what others needed centuries to discover. I can't either.

It is true.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is exactly why i am skipping them all, the education system sucks horribly.

I know all i need to know to get in the business anyway, i have some of the coding know-how (learning low-level stuff just now), and seeing as i have the internet and know a good few developers and publishers, i have no need for them anymore. (and now i have the money to go about it myself, and not wasting it on Uni courses...)

I suggest anyone else who is looking into it also skip.
Most people have said that they want experience, a portfolio, they don't care about some silly little certficate saying you can do X and Y (go look at job listings for publishers and developers too), sad fact is that a good bunch of people doing these courses end up forgetting a bunch of it by the end of the course.
Just because someone passes a course, doesn't mean they know a damn thing about it.
If you have good people skills, you'd be better off learning things yourself, learning with other developers over the net and getting to know them, and publishers too of course.
The Uni way pretty much just costs more, and will almost certainly take longer (unless you are lazy, or play WoW...), and will probably be annoying for some of it if you already know a bunch of the stuff you are doing (the course i was on for software development... 2 years, wasted, never again!)

This is all my opinion of course, you don't need to care, but it is my 2 pennies ;)

Salaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people have said it, I'll just echo it: the games industry requires ridiculous levels of commitment in terms of overtime with pretty low wages.

I used to work for Free Radical, one of the graduate C++ programmers who did a lot of tools work was on GBP 19k. *19k*. Most people I knew weren't on much more than that. Halfway through Haze they started requiring employees to work mandatory Saturdays. You can probably guess what turnover at that place is like.

I'm out of the games industry now, working at a place with much higher salaries, a much better working atmosphere and am surrounded by happy coders. With 5+ years C++ experience, I am the kind of person the industry is crying over not being able to find. Well, they only have themselves to blame.

Re:Salaries

[Z303]

Just to agree with you, one friend left a games job a few years back to be an academic, not a occupation known for paying huge wages and got a nice bump in salary plus much better working hours

Re:Salaries

[tehcyder]

one of the graduate C++ programmers who did a lot of tools work was on GBP 19k. *19k*. Most people I knew weren't on much more than that

So leave and get another job, what's the big deal? Everyone on /. seems to think they have a right to earn a fortune the minute they graduate, well that's not real life.

Funny how people forget about supply and demand and market economics when it's their own job that's concerned...

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Tony Hoyle]

It's been true for a *long* time and it's not just gaming it's across the industry.

Basically employers only want the perfect employee - someone who knows their systems intimately has decades of experience.. and will work for about £15k.

Years ago the IT press were bleating on about their 'skills shortage'. At the time I was looking for work myself and knew over a dozen skilled programmers in the same boat. It wasn't that we didn't have skills - it was that we didn't have the *exact* skills that the employers wanted (even down to exact compiler versions and wanting insane number of years of experience of new applications.. I'm sure there's a job out there now that insists on '10 years JDK 2.1.1a' and the manager is bitching about how there's this skills shortage as nobody qualifies...).

Re:It's not a university problem, it's people leav

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares about your or your blog.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[damburger]

I used to worry that I was some kind of malcontent, but every time I post my complaints about the UK IT industry on any vaguely techy forum I get a chorus of agreement.

But if there is a supply of skilled IT graduates waiting for a decent employer why has no one jumped on the opportunity to run a business with top notch talent, and seemingly have very little competition for them?

Think ZX Spectrum...

[Gordonjcp]

In the early-to-mid 1980s *everyone* in Dundee owned a ZX Spectrum. Why was this? Because Timex had their UK manufacturing base there, and they build computers for Sinclair Research. This meant that everyone knew someone whose Dad knew a man in the pub who could "get them cheap".

The practical upshot of this is that everyone who was in any way interested in programming had a simple, powerful and well-documented (I remember John Menzies in the Overgate Shopping Centre having several feet of shelf-space of copies of The ZX Spectrum ROM Disassembly, and I still have my copy) home computer to go and play on.

Look at where the UK's computer game industry is mostly based now...

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[damburger]

It could be that modern computer systems are simply too complex for such treatment. I recall having a complete memory map and assembly language tutorial in the manual that came with my Acorn Electron - such a thing would be preposterous for my MacBook Pro. Its inner workings described to the same level as that 1980s manual would probably occupy a shelf.

What is really called for is a programmable games machine. Put keyboards back on consoles, include a good BASIC interpreter and watch the whizz kids develop.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[pjt33]

Look at where the UK's computer game industry is mostly based now...

Cambridge? Frontier, Sony, Jagex, plus I'm not sure how many smaller players. Who are the big names in Dundee?

Of course, Cambridge is also the base of ARM and Acorn, so may have similar hardware factors at play, and has the university and science/technology parks.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[Anonymous Coward]

The XGameStation is a good example of a programable console a person could learn inside out.

http://www.xgamestation.com/

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[Hal_Porter]

It could be that modern computer systems are simply too complex for such treatment. I recall having a complete memory map and assembly language tutorial in the manual that came with my Acorn Electron - such a thing would be preposterous for my MacBook Pro. Its inner workings described to the same level as that 1980s manual would probably occupy a shelf.

That's disingenuous though. Most of the MacBook is a standard PC. What advocates of open systems want is for Apple and others to document the non standard bits. You wouldn't get a shelf of paper, Apple would say "you have a NVidia XYZ" card and you'd go to the NVidia site and download a datasheet as a PDF file. It won't happen though. NVidia provide drivers and no documentation to anyone because they don't want some guy with a factory in China to clone their hardware.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[robthebloke]

A list I made from a couple of years ago. This excludes all the animation house and post-production houses i know about (which would add another 100+ companies).

But in seriousness it is a big problem. At NaturalMotion we started an Academic partners program for just this very reason. It is getting harder and harder to find good graduates so in response we've taken a fairly pro-active stance on the matter. i.e. Starting internship programs providing assistance to university courses in terms of software libs code examples lectures workshops etc etc. I'd happily advise any UK companies to do the same - it does pay off....
--[ Aberystwyth ]
Broad Sword (Games)
--[ Bath ]
Pivotal Games (Games)
--[ Birmingham ]
Blue Sphere (Mobile Games) Swordfish Studios (Games)
--[ Bradford ]
Four door lemon (Games/Software) PineApple (Games) Simula (Mocap)
--[ Brighton ]
animazoo (Mocap), Climax (Games), EuroGamer (Web Site), Kuju (Games), Relentless (Games)
--[ Bristol ]
HotHouse (Games)
--[ Bournemouth ]
Access Mocap (Mocap), GamesTM (Magazine), Runtimegames (games)
--[ Cambridge ]
Creature Labs (Games), Frontier (Games), Nicely Crafted (Games), Ninja Theory (Games), Sony (Games), Zoonami (Games)
--[ Cheshire ]
StrangeLite (Games), Team 3 (Games)
--[ Chertsey ]
EA
--[ Derby ]
Core Soft (Games), EuroCom (Games), Straw Dog Studios (Games)
--[ Edinburgh ]
Rockstar North (Games)
--[ Gateshead ]
Eutechnyx (Games)
--[ Glasgow ]
EM Studios (Games)
--[ Guildford ]
Kuju (Games) Lionhead (Games), Criterion (Games)
--[ Isle Of White ]
Stainlessgames (Games)
--[ Leamington Spa ]
blitz games (games), CodeMasters (games), Rare (games), Volatile Games (Games)
--[ Leeds ]
Code Monkeys (Games), Rockstar (Games)
--[ Liverpool ]
Jester Interactive (Games), Magenta (Games), Sony (Games)
--[ London ]
124 (Post Production), Artem Digital (Mocap), Asylum Entertainment (Games), Atomic Powered (Games), Bastion (Games), Bits Studio (Games), Blue 52 (Games), BlueSunflower (Anim), Capcom (Games), Climax (Games), Deibus (Games), Enlight (Games), Firefly (Games), Imaginery (Games/Animation), Intelligent (Games), Midway (Games), Morpheme (Games), Sony (Games), Sports Interactive (Games)
--[ Manchester ]
Bitmap Brothers (Games), Bizarre Creations (Games), TravellersTales (Games),
--[ Middlesbrough ]
Atomic Planet (games)
--[ Newcastle ]
Magenta (Games/Post Production)
--[ Newport ]
Mad Dog Games (Games)
--[ Nottingham ]
Bull Dog (Games) Free Radical (Games), NuGeneration (Games)
--[ Oxford ]
Audio Motion (Mocap), Exient (Games), Fuse (Games), Gusto (Games), Icon Games, NaturalMotion (Middleware), Rebellion (Games), Razor Works (Games), Vicon (Mocap)
--[ Portsmouth ]
Climax (Games), Vulcan Software (Games)
--[ Sheffield ]
Sumo Digital (Games)
--[ Sutton Coalfield ]
Head First (Games)
--[ York ]
Revolution (Games)
--[ Warrington ]
EA
--[ Warwick ]
Data Design (Games)

Ireland
--[ Dublin ]
Havok (MiddleWare), PurpleNose (Games)
--[ Muff (and i'm not even joking...)
TorcInteractive (Middleware)

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[MBGMorden]

Thanks for the link. That honestly looks like a neat little toy and for under a hundred dollars it's something that I could legitimately try out :).

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[CastrTroy]

Isn't that what MS XNA Game Studio hopes to accomplish. Let the little guys get back into programming games. Sure there's a small fee, but it's not much more than the cost of a couple games. And if you are really into creating games, it's a great way to get started.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[ganly]

In the early to mid 80's I had a a Commodore VIC 20 then a C64. I would have loved a Spectrum and a BBC too.

I wrote and released a couple of games which earnt rather more pocket money then my teenage mates were working for. I then went on to do a CS degree, caught the Unix bug and have done some form of consultancy ever since.

Now the point of the "long in the tooth" second article reflects changes in hardware people learn on.

On the 8 bit micros there were no protected memory systems - even the video ram was just a part of the normal memory. Writing values all over the video ram was a great and simple way of visualising data.

In real time too - remember those program loaders that had flashing horizontal bars whizzing all over the screen? That was an increment on the background colour register for each block of data loaded from the tape.

When working on a longish routine you could increment the border colour at the start and decrement it at the end and see - visually and instantly - how long your routine took. About half a vertical inch on a display updating at 50Hz - that's quick enough because there's 3 more inches before the scanning beam comes back round to the top of the display.

You could do this in BASIC, but once you see the lack of speed you'd grab an assembler. These weren't free by the way - the cartridge for the VIC20 cost about GBP35 at the time - 6 weeks pocket money.

Moving onto Unix systems and you get the ideas of protected memory and decoupling your programming libraries. Great concepts for what they're needed for, but you get further and further away from the hardware and that has an effect on the kind of software you think about writing.

From what I understand of the console hardware now it's a bit more like the "whole machine to yourself" 8 bit micro's of the 80's. But then the development tools cost 6 months mortgage instead of 6 months pocket money.

Shame the console vendors have their hardware lock in practices and the idea of modding circuit boards is increasingly legally sidelined.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[Joe Jay Bee]

You forget one of the real biggies: Rockstar North (nee DMA Design) who created the Grand Theft Auto series.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[Skuld-Chan]

Its probably an unforeseen side effect of moving all manufacturing to China and Taiwan.

Seems like when I was a kid there was more interest in programming these kinds of machines because for a long time thats what you had to do to make them do anything.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[pjt33]

If you're going to count an Edinburgh-based company towards big names in Dundee, can I count London-based companies towards Cambridge? The distances (by road, at least) are within a few percent.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[Dogtanian]

If you're going to count an Edinburgh-based company towards big names in Dundee, can I count London-based companies towards Cambridge? The distances (by road, at least) are within a few percent. Rockstar North was founded and originally based in Dundee, back when it was known as DMA Design. It only moved to Edinburgh later on.

Re:Think ZX Spectrum...

[mikael]

The IBM PC used to have a complete guides to the BIOS and VGA system calls. These covered everything from setting up keyboard interrupts, sending sounds to the speaker (basic frequency tone), setting the video modes and cursor shapes. It was enough for anyone to write their own 256-color games.

I used to program in Atari Basic - having to renumber your lines when you extended a subroutine was a pain in the ass, even with utiity line renumbering functions. A C/C++ compiler is essential these days.

But just to program a console system today requires knowledge of what used to be high-end animation techniques (Scene-graphs, parallel processing/scheduling, texture-mapping, character animation, etc...)

A mindset that perpetuates failure

[jonnyj]

There is a problem with the British education system with respect to IT skills.

In 1979 when I was 12, my maths teacher taught the entire class to program in BASIC using pen, paper and a single teletype terminal with a 110 baud connection to the mainframe in City Hall. 1000 pupils shared the computer, but, if you were in the top maths class, you were expected to learn to program. Shortly after we learned FORTRAN and an educational pseudo-assembly language called CESIL. We loved it, and when the ZX81, BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum were launched, many of my peers bought them to continue to program - not to play games. The emphasis on coding continued throughout school and university - mathematicians, engineers and scientists were all expected to be able to cut code.

I'm an accountant now, but when I have some complex data to process I often write a program (much to the distaste of our IT team who don't think that I should be allowed to intrude on their domain). And, as a result, I invariably wipe the floor with colleagues who only know how to use Excel and MS Access.

My son is now 12, and his school has literally hundreds of computers. But programming has been removed from the curriculum and been replaced by lessons in Word, Powerpoint and the Windows GUI. Coding is deemed to be too difficult for the masses and is restricted to a few older puplis who show particular interest. But all my children enjoy programming at home - even my 9-year-old has a go at it.

Perhaps worse, very few PCs now come equipped with the tools needed to write some code. Even Ubuntu, a geek's operating system by any normal measure, has no obvious desktop coding environment - if you don't know that python's hiding away on the command line, you won't find it and even GCC's not installed by default. As for Windows or OS X...

So kids aren't being taught to program in school, and they don't know what they can do with the equipment that they have at home. Is there any surprise that there's a skills shortage?

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[GrahamCox]

As for Windows or OS X

Every copy of OS X comes with a complete set of developer tools - GCC, Xcode (integrated IDE), Interface Builder, GDB and plenty of other stuff. *If* you're interested in learning to program and you have a Mac, it's all right there in the box.

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Alioth]

If you want your kids to be able to have programming, get a Speccy off ebay. I'm serious. Get a +3 with a disc drive. You just turn it on and it's ready to program and it's still absolutely fine for learning the foundations. (Or even get an emulator, but it's not the same!)

Get into assembler and you can learn the principles that still underlie today's PCs. You very quickly learn why buffer overflows are bad when you see your assembly program write too much data and stomp all over its return address.

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Tim C]

Perhaps worse, very few PCs now come equipped with the tools needed to write some code. Even Ubuntu, a geek's operating system by any normal measure, has no obvious desktop coding environment - if you don't know that python's hiding away on the command line, you won't find it and even GCC's not installed by default. As for Windows or OS X...

Windows doesn't come with any coding tools by default (and I can imagine the cries of "monopoly abuse!" if it did...), but you can download free (as in beer) Express editions of Visual C++.NET, C# and VB.NET from the Microsoft website. (Not to mention your choice of other languages and environments from third party vendors)

Just because we were spoilt in the old days (I cut my teeth on Sinclair BASIC on the Speccy) doesn't mean that it's impossible to code for free these days.

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Tim C]

Get into assembler and you can learn the principles that still underlie today's PCs. You very quickly learn why buffer overflows are bad when you see your assembly program write too much data and stomp all over its return address.

Ah, happy days - trying to work out wtf my assembly program to fade-wipe the screen on a Spectrum was instead covering it with random blocks of flashing colours...

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Kingston]

I was disapointed to learn that my son, who is 8, is also being taught MS Office applications at school. This shows a real lack of imagination. At home I have avoided introducing them to him as knowing the ins and outs of a particular 14 year old app will be irrelevant by the time he starts work. It seems the school is preparing them to bore each other silly in meetings with dull powerpoint presentations.

Instead I have got him started with scratch which he loves. It's much better for introducing maths, logic and generic programing skills and it's a lot of fun.

He has done several homework projects in it which have been well received but I discovered recently that the teachers need to view his work outside of school because the local education authority firewall has a rule to actively block access to scratch ! I wonder if thay had a powerpoint presentation at couty hall with a slide labeled Scratch - Must stamp out.

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[networkconsultant]

I once spoke to a CS Prof here in Canada, he mentoned that year (four years ago) that his student's do not know what a command line is. :P

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that I would like to see more simple programming present in the curriculum at all levels. however, part of what has changed is the perception of computers since we first cut our teeth on them. Back then, they didn't exactly offer a rich set of services - to do something you had to program it. These days, the computer is an appliance to most people. Some the effect we are seeing is just that early computer users were self-selecting.

I also agree that it is a shame that most PCs just don't have programming tools easily available, but only in that Windows still is "most". Sure, python is "hidden" on the command line in Ubuntu (and pretty much every other Linux distribution), but how much effort does it take to open a terminal? How did we find BASIC and Fortran? Someone told us it was there. It isn't like it is difficult to add more tools either. Right there in the menu, there is an option to add software, and a whole category of development tools are a download away. Sure, they could be installed already, but for most people, it is just bloat.

Also, if anything, OSX is at least as good as Ubuntu in this respect, if not better. "Hidden" away on the command line, we have perl, python, ruby and java already. less hidden is applescript and for the really low barrier to entry, we have Automator. The full developers kit is right on the main install disk and available as an option at installation time.

For that matter, every modern computer has one development tool that is usually over looked - the web browser. We may look down on javascript, but any reasonably recent web browser supports it and it can easily be used to write simple things with HTML providing a GUI.

The real problem is education, and we need to start by educating the educators...

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with this. The GCSE IT qualification teaches how to use word, excel and access. There are no programming options available until A level and even then at my school the course is poor for programming. We did do a small amount of logo at GCSE however this was virtually nothing and nothing like actual programming. The majority of the time was spent copying down code presented in a word document.

People who I know at school regard programming as being difficult and are put off from wanting to learn it.

I also have spoken to a university admissions tutor and they said that it would be preferable if I did not take the IT course that my school offers. Other subjects such as maths or physics or a general academic subject is preferable to IT even for a computer science degree.

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Eli Gottlieb]

Oh please. If anyone wanted to, they could modify a Linux distribution to boot up and display a Python interpreter running in a console on top of X on a whim.

Heck, why hasn't that been done? Right, because adults see no value in such a thing.

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[GrahamCox]

Whoever modded me as "Troll" for posting this below is a fuckwit. This is nothing but a simple statement of fact.

"Every copy of OS X comes with a complete set of developer tools - GCC, Xcode (integrated IDE), Interface Builder, GDB and plenty of other stuff. *If* you're interested in learning to program and you have a Mac, it's all right there in the box."

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[euri.ca]

Haha, Scratch is awesome!

I wish I was still 8 so this would be impressive instead of an appalling waste of my time: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/eurica/193902

Re:A mindset that perpetuates failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu though easily remedies this.

sudo aptitude install pick-your-language.

Sure, it may not come with everything installed, but it has plenty available to it.

Plus Java, netbeans, groovy, ruby, thousands are out there!

Back in my day, it was basic and 'poke'.

So stop bellyaching that the computer doesn't have 100+ languages installed by default, and pick one.

Symptomatic of UK iT

[Fuzzypig]

IT courses in this country simply consist of teaching kids how to use MS Office and calling it IT/Business skills! I remember learning my GCSE computing was all about BASIC and how range checks are performed, random access is performed in database. No wonder the rest of the world is beating us in IT skills and how we have an IT skills shortage in the UK, we have to hire people from outside the UK to come and work here.

Re:Symptomatic of UK iT

[TheThiefMaster]

And then there are the Universities advertising Java and Flash courses as "Computer Games Programming". It took me some digging to find a uni that actually taught C/C++ and 3D games programming.

Surprisingly it was in Middlesbrough. The University of Teesside. They taught me C, C++, Direct-X (3D, Input and Play), OpenGL, Linux programming, Windows programming, AI, procedural texture generation, vector/matrix/quaternion/boolean maths, ...

See here if you're interested:
http://www.tees.ac.uk/Undergraduate_courses/Animation_Games_&_Visualisation/BSc_(Hons)_Computer_Games_Programming.cfm
They've also added "Computer Games Science" and "Games Graphics Programming" courses since I was there a few years ago, as well as having "Games Art" and "Games Design" courses.

You might notice that the entry requirements don't require A-Level or even GCSE IT, which is good as those courses are generally "how to use MS office" as you said.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Fred_A]

I am continually spammed by UK recruiting agencies that request high qualifications and pay you 20K pounds and 50 hour week, but there is a plus to it. The uniform is provided. Phew, that's good to know. My sewing is really terrible.

At my last job I had to make my own uniform and the kids threw stones at me. It really sucked.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Fred_A]

There is a shortage of decent employees, so all the skills are fucking off to the US and Canada where they can support themselves in the game industry without being a bartender in their spare time. What is this "spare time" you speak of ? This thing is undefined in the gaming industry.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Shultz]

No way to agree... The russian IT is rising in the recent years.

Re:I'm a game programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, he's been here for quite a while. He was tech director. And I ended up doing his job for him. But it's really comforting to know that things are changing.

Re:Creativity is just a tiny small part of program

[Tony Hoyle]

Programming *is* mostly creative.

You have to take an idea and give it form. There are a nearly infinite number of ways of doing so - some will work, many won't... that's where experience and knowledge comes in.

Just because you can't go abstract like picasso doesn't mean it's not creative. A building has to be correct (much more so than a program, as there are laws involved), but you try telling an architect that what they do isn't creative and they'll just laugh at you.

You can't train someone who doesn't have the aptitute to be a programmer. I've seen it loads of times - people who went through all the graduate stuff, read lots of books, fart algorithms in their sleep.. and can't code their way out of a paper bag. Not because they don't have the knowledge, but because they simply don't have the aptitude. The problem is I've seen attitudes like yours promote these idiots into places where they can actually do harm, like project leads.

To solve a problem in a new way you need to be able to think differently, not just copy what someone else has done. That's the difference between a code monkey and a true programmer.

Re:Monkey programers

[RiotingPacifist]

Never trust any computing news served on an asp page.
In fact never trust anything on an asp.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Tony Hoyle]

Some do, but of course they fill their vacancies real quick. There are a few companies around here that only hire on recommendation now because they've got far too many people want to work there.

Speaking as a UK CS grad

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated from the UK equivalent of MIT (Imperial College) a couple of years ago. The university is currently ranked (as if that matters) 5th in the world.

The CS course teaches you more than enough to do games programming (which I have done in the past), as well as producing some of the finest programmers around. Some of the people I worked with truly were brilliant.

Most people I know from my year (and others) now work in the square mile (the london financial district) for various investment banks and hedgefunds, where believe it or not, you do get to do *some* interesting stuff.

Starting salary at the bank for me was £45k (roughly $90k) and others i know got higher. After working 2 years I am on £65. This excludes our yearly bonus, which normally comes in at around 40-50% of our salary (or if you are at a hedge fund, maybe multiples of your salary).

The games companies that offered me jobs were willing to pay £18k/20k. With very little increase, and little-to-no bonus.

Thats why we don't have many good games programmers.

Re:Speaking as a UK CS grad

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I should add, that from the age of about 15 it was my plan to go into computer game programming. It was something I really did want to do.
This held up until I had nearly finished my masters and was looking for a job.
The salary difference + travel/moving (games companies seem to be based out of london), changed my mind.

Re:Speaking as a UK CS grad

[Anonymous Coward]

I am about to finish my degree in games programming and have decided to do something else. I was 100% sure I wanted to work in games until I realised that it's basically slave labour.

As one of those ST games programmers...

[Joce640k]

...I'll take issue with "tiny bit".

Some programming is very formulaic (eg. data processing, accounting...) but games programming or any type of programming where you're interacting with humans takes a lot of creativity and imagination.

The "art" in a game is in the interaction with the user. You can't see it, you can only feel it.

Yes, you need to know calculus, etc., to be able to implement your ideas but even then you can't just do it in a formulaic way because you need to wring every last cycle out of the machine and the formulaic way is rarely the fastest way.

Put another way, games programming takes talent. Not everybody can do it. If it were uncreative then that wouldn't be true - monkeys could be trained to do it.

Re:As one of those ST games programmers...

[Moraelin]

The "art" in a game is in the interaction with the user. You can't see it, you can only feel it.

That's game _design_, not game programming. Even if sometimes the same people do both, that doesn't make it a part of programming.

Put another way, games programming takes talent. Not everybody can do it. If it were uncreative then that wouldn't be true - monkeys could be trained to do it.

Heh. During my somewhat brief time in game programming, my impression was that half those people _are_ trained monkeys. Actually, make that: _poorly_ trained monkeys. With delusions of grandeur. Most of the game code I've actually seen from them... well, not only it wasn't especially smart (most seem to confuse obfuscation and optimization, and achieve only the former), but some of it was worthy of The Daily WTF.

I've been in both camps and, as I was saying, I've had funny self-important ideas too. "See, I'm so cool and smart and all cutting edge because I'm doing games. Unlike those boring suits doing non-creative, boring database stuff in VB. I bet they're there just because they're not smart enough to code games."

Heh. Man, I had my head so far up my own arse, I'd have made some yoga gurus envious.

In practice, having seen both sides and been on both sides, I can tell you that the only real reason they're not in games, is that they're smarter than to be paid a pittance and get 80 hour week demands.

Now don't get me wrong, you can't teach everyone to be a good programmer. Or for some people to program at all. But if you could teach someone to be good at coding, they'll be just as good at coding games. That domain simply isn't special in any form or shape. Yes, anyone who can think algorithmically and design and implement a good program in any other domain, could do game good programming too. No worse than any other kind of programming.

Not paying for skills vs. poor education

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Won't pay for people with the required skillset nor will they pay to train someone to achieve the required skillset. Instead they just bitch to the media via one of their useless, self-aggrandising, all buddies together spin organisations about the poor state of UK education.

Do you believe the two phenomena are mutually exclusive?

IT businesses in the UK aren't very good at giving their best people a remuneration package that matches the value those people offer the company. Of course, outside sales, management and finance, the really good people in most fields get screwed by employers, which is why so many of them give up and start their own business or go freelance where they can set their own rates. (How sales, management and finance people wind up in senior, well-paid positions when they are obviously a net liability to a business remains an eternal mystery to me.)

On the other hand, the UK education system is without doubt on a slide. You can dress up the exam results and league tables as much as you like, but right now we have people reaching university to read science subjects who are unable to do maths that the kids of twenty years ago all learned three years younger, and we have examination questions appearing on first year university CS course papers that are almost verbatim copies of questions previously set on A-level papers (for the non-UK readers: A-levels are the exams we take at around 18, before leaving school and possibly going on to university). Heck, according to one of the cited articles, there are now 81 video game degree courses offered by UK universities. A case study, I can understand. Lectures that cover subjects like graphics algorithms, mathematics and AI, those are fine too. But what the #!$& is vocational training doing masquerading as a complete university degree?

Everyone in industry knows darn well that what you get from a new graduate today isn't what it used to be. Heck, anyone with the slightest ability to think critically could predict that if the government is trying to get 50% of people to go through university now when it used to be only 5–10% then you aren't going to get the same standards maintained if the degree classes awarded follow the same distribution. Of course, people without critical thinking (who are now getting degrees or teaching those getting straight-A exam results) find this rational debate upsetting, and argue that we're just cynical old folks who are devaluing the hard work of the youth and teachers of today. It doesn't seem to occur to them that by giving away pieces of paper some of us really did work hard for, they are the ones devaluing our efforts...

So yes, I think IT bosses do have a point when they bitch about the education system. They just don't come across very well when at the same time as they say that, they aren't putting in much genuine effort to cultivate the talent and skills we do (or could) have.

Re:Not paying for skills vs. poor education

[mikael]

(How sales, management and finance people wind up in senior, well-paid positions when they are obviously a net liability to a business remains an eternal mystery to me.)

Nobody else wants the job - IT staff realize they can earn more, have less stress and have a stable career by being self-employed.

Re:Not paying for skills vs. poor education

[Marcus Green]

"81 video game degree courses offered by UK universities."

Because students will apply for them in droves. I taught 16 - 18 year olds and loads of them who couldn't program a simple loop wanted to be computer games programmers. I had to try to explain the difference between playing games and writing them. Hey kid what would you like to do write business database apps or create Kewl Gamez, yeah no contest.

Re:Not paying for skills vs. poor education

[TheRaven64]

Heck, according to one of the cited articles, there are now 81 video game degree courses offered by UK universities. A case study, I can understand. Lectures that cover subjects like graphics algorithms, mathematics and AI, those are fine too. But what the #!$& is vocational training doing masquerading as a complete university degree? It's often the other way around - a computer science degree masquerading as a buzzwordy vocational course. Applications to study computer science have been dropping since the dot-com crash, but if you advertise a computer science degree as something like 'game programming' you can get a lot more applicants, even if the only difference is a few more graphics, simulation and AI modules (or the same modules but with slightly more practical coursework).

Re:Not paying for skills vs. poor education

[Fweeky]

On the other hand, the UK education system is without doubt on a slide. You can dress up the exam results and league tables as much as you like ... we have examination questions appearing on first year university CS course papers that are almost verbatim copies of questions previously set on A-level papers Quite. The first year of my computer science degree barely covered what my computing A-level did; the second year barely covered what I'd done on my own during my A-level just by being interested in the subject. We had people who'd supposedly done 8 months of C programming courses, in addition to Visual Basic and Java, who didn't understand what a pointer was, and struggled with basic data structures, yet were otherwise doing ok.

I've heard similar stories repeatedly, from students, ex-students and professors; courses are basically being optimized for passing people who arrive at the course having never even touched a computer, and who mostly want to spend their time getting drunk. If you actually know anything and went into higher education to deepen your knowledge, you might as well ignore as much of the course as you can get away with and treat it as an expensive excuse to spend a lot of time in a hopefully decent library.

Of course, my own experience and that of most of my friends were years ago; possibly things have improved since then. Somehow, I doubt it.

Long in the tooth at 30?

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw you and your ageist ilk. Come back to me when their coders are in their 70ts.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Escogido]

Well the profits in the IT industry may be too low so they have to struggle. Off the top of my head:

1. The IT company owners are too greedy
2. The revenues in IT are too low
3. The costs of running an IT company are too high (taxes, infrastructure...)
4. The country may have no problem hiring techies, but there's a lack of qualified producers/project managers
5. (I'm sure there's something else...)

Sometimes you just can't make good profit in an industry, no matter what. Merely stating no one offers enough compensation does not mean this is the root cause.

Falling Behind?

[kellyb9]

A games industry campaign group has warned the UK is falling behind on coding skills because university courses are not up to scratch. Falling behind who? The US? I personally don't think the stuff being taught at US schools is not "up to scratch".

Assembly language?

[Joce640k]

There were C compilers for the ST, etc., but they mostly sucked. Using the OS graphics functions to write a game would have sucked even harder, I don't remember ever seeing a game written for GEM.

Nope. The ST/Amiga was all about assembly language programming. HiSoft Assembler was one of the most widely pirated programs on the ST.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[n3tcat]

I'm sure you already know the answer to your own question, but just in case: Nobody jumped on the opportunity because... First you have to come up with the great idea. You know the one. It involves a 4 step process and number 3 is ???. After you come up with your four step business model, you secure capital. After that you hire talented programmers. This can go in one of two directions. One direction is to hire fewer programmers and have them learn all the tools needed for the job on your dime. This also means they could then potentially just walk out the door the next day to another better paying job that has specific requirements for what you just had them taught. The other direction is to open the door to more programmers but offer low salary and specific requirements.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Noroimusha]

look around first in europe before declaring UK taxes are high. for example in Hungary everything is expensive compared to the wages and you reach quite easily the 40% tax rate . and i do agree on that they have poor recruitment technics here in the UK, I luckily found a company which was prepared to train me because they saw possibilities in me. BTW education degrades everywhere in the world.......

He has a point

[SpinyUK]

I'm now a J2EE architect, but my lineage was a ZX81, Sharp MZ80K, BBC micro then an Atari ST. My first job after graduating was for Kuma here in the UK writing ST software. There's free dev tools on all the main platforms, but how do you get started on something cool that's small & someone else hasn't already written? I guess people need more inspiration. Bring back the BBC & brown cardigans!

I have my doubts

[Kupfernigk]

That anybody who actually did a CS degree in London would go around saying "I say, what what". Unless they had CS degrees in the 1920s, which I doubt.

Why would a CS degree teach games programming? That is application, not science. Games programming involves the skills of real time programming and, I imagine, a good healthy dose of OO (some early graphics subsystems had the objects built in.)

Some "Universities" around London are anything but -basically they teach designing web pages- but to take University College, (disclaimer: family connections) the CS degree includes, after the intro year:

• Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists
• Concurrent Programming
• Logic and Database Theory
• Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction
• Compilers
• Databases, Networks and Graphics
• Mathematics and Statistics
• Computational Complexity
• Operating Systems
• Technology Management and Professional Issues
• Practical Software Engineering

I've highlighted the stuff that is obviously relevant to games but I hope you get the point. Perhaps the possibilities of working in some of UCL's preferred research areas is actually more fun than games, and seen as more useful to society. Somebody working on, I don't know, controllers and sensor systems for operating theatre robots might feel that his life was more fulfilling than it would be if he was making avatars simulate sex in GTA5.

Re:Monkey programers

[Peter Cooper]

I'd like to see them write Grand Theft Auto 4 with VB ;-)

Yes, GTA4 is a British production.

Some differences...

[fitten]

"Back in the day", while you *did* need to be very clever to extract performance out of the hardware you had, you didn't need to know how to do great graphics, realistic physics, or a host of other things that require a fair amount of mathmatical knowledge. Also, your program usually had full control of the machine it was running on, which can make some things more simple (it can also make things more complex as you have to hand-time some of the loops and code counting clock cycles to make it run fast enough). The programming models of today are a bit more complex as are the maths behind them.

However, gameplay was first and foremost back then because you couldn't have great graphics and, therefore, couldn't be used as a crutch (eye-candy). This didn't prevent plenty of games from being crap, but there are many games from back then that are clever and fun (still fun to play even).

Just as an example of complexity (both programming and graphics/content), there are lots of games from back in the 70s and 80s that were written by one or two coders, or a team of two to twelve people total when you include even the box cover artists. Compare that to today... how many people were involved with GTA4? Halo? etc. Although, you should also look at how many people are actually coders vs. the artists and 'overhead' types (managers, marketing, etc.) ;)

Re:

[clint999]

It's been true for a *long* time and it's not just gaming it's across the industry.Basically employers only want the perfect employee - someone who knows their systems intimately has decades of experience.. and will work for about £15k.Years ago the IT press were bleating on about their 'skills shortage'. At the time I was looking for work myself and knew over a dozen skilled programmers in the same boat. It wasn't that we didn't have skills - it was that we didn't have the *exact* skills that the employers wanted (even down to exact compiler versions and wanting insane number of years of experience of new applications.. I'm sure there's a job out there now that insists on '10 years JDK 2.1.1a' and the manager is *****ing about how there's this skills shortage as nobody qualifies...).

The problem

[ledow]

It's partly the universities, mainly the schools but in the end it also comes down to the coders and their equipment at home.

1) Most people who go in for CS degrees know bugger-all about computers. It's sad but true. These people will probably NEVER program again once they leave, they will end up either typing in data all day, fixing computers or (in very rare instances) coding trivialities. I can name five top ICT teachers who programmed in COBOL and all sorts of exotic languages and who NEVER did it again for any reason. I can name twenty of the same who now specialise in English or Science or some other non-related subject.

Student's knowledge of algorithms is purely a memory aspect in order to pass the exams. This is because they are taught in school that "computers are the future" and "you should learn computers", so they fiddle on a machine and install iTunes and think they could be the next ID Software. Most teaching staff in schools have absolutely no idea what's involved in CS and just recommend those who "are good at computer stuff" to get a CS degree if nothing else beckons. Many of these people hate mathematics and drop out quite quickly. Most of the rest of the students just think it's cool to get better access to the computers and mess about on them for three years.

2) Of those that *do* end up programming, there are two types: those who probably started programming long before anybody "taught" them how to do it. Those types (we'll call them the hobbyists) probably know more languages, constructs and algorithms before they start a CS course than everybody else does *after* the course. The other type are those that find they can knock up a program "good enough". These types of people are rarely interested in coding as a hobby and will usually go on to make business apps, if anything. The hobbyists would *love* to code games all day long.

3) You don't get many of these "hobbyist" programmers at all because most of them code for years before being taught, by which time they "think they know better", or they have something missing: Access to hardware, languages, artistic teams, etc. There is no hobbyist programming platform anymore (like the ZX Spectrum, etc.) - to get started on programming for a simple device you either have to use extremely high-level "games-creators", or you're into setting up development environments on "hacked" or "chipped" hardware, or buying expensive development suites. Most of these things you end up paying money for, one way or another. There is no "pick up and program" system any more where back in the days of Codemasters, etc. it was ALL that was available. Every computer you found could be easily programmed without having to do ANYTHING to it. They came with languages BUILT-IN. The IBM PS/2 - turn it on, you're in BASIC. Programming tools just don't come with computers anymore - it's all development kits, seperate programs, etc.

4) The fun of programming was in fun languages, with crappy interfaces, horrible programming principles, and low-level techniques that required you to use your brains in order to squeeze the most out of a pittance of cpu-cycles - misuse goto and save yourself twenty cycles. You found most things out by accident or experiment and you would program a game just for the hell of it.

Nowadays, anyone can knock up a program in minutes but they don't know how/why it works, or how to make it better - it's all just libraries and "magic boxes". Take away their development environment and they wouldn't be able to write a batch file, let alone a program in C (and in fact most kids, even the computer-geeks, know bugger-all that isn't available in a GUI anymore, for instance. Tell them to write a progam and they go looking for the "Write a program" icon - DOS is a mystical thing to them that they won't bother to learn). These kids just don't care - they don't see how the games are written, they have no patience to write their own and they have no help.

Killing the command-line, BASIC and similar languag

Re:The problem

[QX-Mat]

My "Design & Technology" class was more about making sure I had 1cm borders on design documents than actually *doing* anything. I can't describe how true everything you've said is. I dare not even qualify that with an "almost" because it's all true.

Matt

Re:The problem

[hansamurai]

That was a long way to say "get off my lawn." But still interesting, don't get me wrong.

Re:The problem

[luther2.1k]

Whilst the simpler machines of yesteryear were easier to master, I don't think that it's the lack of resources that are holding kids back.
    I had the good fortune to grow up with like minded friends and we basically taught each other to code, write 3d engines and push the hardware. Also, we all went to a decent college and went the Basic->Pascal->C/C++ route.
    Most of my old school friends work at IBM now but I'm a coder in the games industry thanks to their help and encouragment (and that of the few good teachers I've encountered). The biggest assets we had were curiosity and the need to learn and improve.
    Any kid today with access to a PC and with the same will to learn can get the similar start that my friends and I enjoyed- you can get a whole slew of development tools for free. I use Visual Studio express at home and if you don't like that there's always GCC, Eclipse and plenty others.
    We weren't encouraged to program by anybody but ourselves and didn't have the internet, which would have made life a lot easier.
    I think it's just a case of numbers. We were absolutely in the minority of kids in 1990 and the population of Britain hasn't grown that much since then. Most kids our age back then, as now, were too busy getting pissed, stoned and pregnant to bother learning how to be good at anything, yet alone something as uncool as programming.
    The simple fact is that the industry has grown and demands more staff than the minority pool of self motivated kids can provide. Also, it doesn't pay us half what we're worth so graduates smart enough to do this work probably leave the country (I know I did but then I came back when the Japanese govornment decided my visa was out of date :) or work on something less exciting that pays better whilst staring at the window thinking of game designs.

   

Re:The problem

[TechnicalThug]

If I didn't have the worst karma on the planet, I'd mod you up *big-style*, Sir. You hit a lot of nails right on the head.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You wish has come true!

http://www.xgamestation.com/

80 Mips risc, expandable, full dev environment.

Their "Hydra" station uses a 8 core "Propellor" chip with 160 aggregate mips. Each 'core' can be used for a different task, such as sound, graphics ( full software ntsc generation! ), controllers, etc.

Both are under $200.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Anonymous Coward]

Not any more. Since the ageist laws were passed last year it's now illegal to require a certain period of experience as that would discriminate against a percentage of the population.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[qazsedcft]

You need to get up to date on your numbers. I live in Poland and make more than I would with a decent job in the US. Not Silicon Valley level yet, but better than most states. The US dollar is dirt cheap, remember?

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[vidarh]

I remember a few days back on Slashdot reading a story comparing Apple employees salaries to Google salaries in Silicon Valley. Well, believe me, all the salaries in that article are very high for UK programmers.

Not really. I've managed teams in the UK where everyone was at those kind of levels. Google and Apple are hardly comparable to the typical salaries in Silicon Valley, and your typical mom and pop shop in the UK is hardly comparable to large companies, even excluding the banks (where there are plenty of developer jobs at 100k GBP and above)

Especially when you consider the high level of tax we have to pay over here.

People always bring up the tax, but the difference is exaggerated.

If you make $100k in California, you pay 9.3% state income tax. On top of that, in 2006 (too lazy to look up current numbers) you paid 22.3% federal income tax, for a total of 31.6%

$100k is ca. 50,800 GBP. For last tax year that'd be taxed at 21.8%

On top of that you'd pay about 6.3% National Insurance (for non UK people, NI covers most of the socialized healthcare, state pensions, some dental services etc.), for a whopping total of about 28.1% tax, including far more services than included in the California number.

When you factor in VAT / sales tax, then yes, you likely pay somewhat more in the UK than you would in California. On the other hand, when you factor in the cost of equivalent health insurance, pension plans and dental in California, or alternatively take the NI out of the equation, things evens out significantly again.

Low US tax rates are largely a myth - to get rates that are significantly lower than most European countries you are significantly constrained in where you live, and usually to places with lower salaries than California.

Re:Creativity is just a tiny small part of program

[Moraelin]

Well, maybe. The only issue I do take issue with, is the misguided idea that it's some art form that can't be trained. As you yourself note, experience and knowledge _do_ play a major role.

You're right, if you take someone with absolutely no imagination, just teaching them algorithms won't suffice. But conversely, I've seen plenty of people who had just the imagination, and it didn't really compensate for lack of knowledge and experience. They did dumb and inefficient things anyway. Granted, some where _creatively_ dumb and inefficient, but still...

Game Art Degrees

[iregisteredjustforth]

Game art and game design degrees are in a similar state. Most are run by people that have never worked in the games industry which have no clue what companies want from graduates or even what it takes to make a game. I was lucky enough to attend one of the two or three decent game art courses in the UK. I got a job with a big publisher/developer after a few months messing about and working on my portfolio a bit.

Most of the game degrees out there are run by people that simple do not understand what it takes to make a game or work in the games industry. As a consequence most of the graduates come out with very little skills and are totally undesirable to employers.

Also doesn't help that most of the game degrees are at unis that are certainly not at the top of league tables so the graduates attending them are not the pick of the bunch.

US Perspective

[stewbacca]

I am an American, but I lived in England for three years until very recently. I have another hypothesis. British consumerism is a bit more sophisticated than US, thus their slightly more sophisticated games don't fly so well in the larger market of the US.

Re:It's not a university problem, it's people leav

[Anonymous Coward]

you took time out of your life to post that?

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[carou]

No, I think he meant "There is no skills shortage in the UK. There is a shortage of decent employers, so all the skills are fucking off to the US and Canada where they can support themselves in the game industry without being a bartender in their spare time."

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[stewbacca]

Actually that article about Apple and Google salaries is not very indicative of the entire nation, given the +2,000 per cent cost of living adjustment needed to live in the San Francisco/Bay Area. In other strong IT areas (Austin, TX, for example), the averages are more in the $60,000 range, which buys a hell of a lot more house than anything out West.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[elrous0]

Jesus, even with a weakened dollar, that's less the $40,000 a year for a PROGRAMMER?!?!? To put that in perspective, the median income for U.S. *high school teachers* is $51,000.

That's fucking insane.

oh well

[crodrigu1]

what is the problem, salaries are very low, long hours of work, no respect = NO BODY wants the darn jobs. Is simple: you need to attract the best of your population, and how you can do it by paying 45,000 at year?

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[mdwh2]

True, although the US doesn't have it all good - despite higher wages, they tend to have longer hours, hardly any holiday, and poorer employement laws (fire-at-will, we-own-everything-you-do-IP-contracts, no-compete clauses). Overall I'd prefer the UK, personally.

The problem in this case is specifically the games industry - where even in the same country, you have lower pay compared with equivalent jobs elsewhere in IT. And that's not offset by better working conditions - on the contrary, it tends to be longer hours and poorer conditions.

This is true in the US also, from the stories I've heard.

When I graduated, I had no desire to go to the US. But I turned down a job at a games company, deciding I'd rather take somewhere with better pay and conditions.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[jedidiah]

The cost of living is also dirt cheap in the US.

Get outside of the coastal cities competing with Tokyo, London
and Moscow for "worlds most expensive place to live" and the
sliding dollar doesn't matter so much.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[caluml]

even excluding the banks (where there are plenty of developer jobs at 100k GBP and above) I find your comments interesting, and would like to subscribe to your Utopia - it can happen to you too! newsletter.

Re:I'm a game programmer

[mdwh2]

British programmers are alcoholics who write poor hacky code, based on one anecdotal experience from an anonymous source?

Why is this racist nonsense getting modded up?

Sorta

[Moraelin]

Well, the short answer is: sorta.

It's true that there is a degree of cluelessness in recruiting across the whole software development and IT industries, and not just in the UK. The difference for the game industry is that, basically, they usually can get away with worse stuff than everyone else.

It's just a nasty product of supply and demand, so to speak. There's a steady supply of idealistic young nerds coming out of college, or sometimes straight out of high school, with an idea that they _must_ work in the games industry. Because games are cool, challenging stuff done by really smart people, and they're not gonna end up wearing suits and writing database programs in VB like _those_ boring guys. There's simply more of them than there are jobs in the games industry. Orders of magnitude more.

And as is the case when supply vastly outstrips demand, you'll find someone who'll sell it to you for a ridiculously low price. Just because he found no other buyers anyway.

So the industry actually gets a steady stream of people who'll actually take a 15k job, and be perfectly content to be treated like dirt and asked to do 80+ hour weeks too.

Unfortunately, that brings us to their skills shortage:

1. Those tend to be rather inexperienced. There's virtually nobody who made their experience as a high-paid enterprise archited or senior developper, and then suddenly decides to become a game designer for a quarter of the pay and twice the work hours. Everyone who gets in the game industry does it from the bottom, with very little experience where it matters.

2. And by the time they did get their experience in the games industry, they're burned out and bitter, and lost most of that juvenile idealism. So they move on to better paying and lower stress jobs. The games industry is actively bleeding that experience out, as fast as it gets it.

Incidentally, that's also a somewhat different skills shortage than you describe. In the games industry it's not that some PHB wants you to have 5+ years experience with the exact version of IDE they have there. They'd be happy to get you with 5+ years experience, period. Provided that you still work for as little money as a complete newbie, and have just as little self-respect as their usual employees, of course. And that's where they start having a problem. By the time they've got 5 years experience at all, half of those people have left the industry for good. And it only goes downhill from there.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[jedidiah]

> Low US tax rates are largely a myth - to get rates that are significantly lower
> than most European countries you are significantly constrained in where you live,
> and usually to places with lower salaries than California.

No, the low tax thing isn't a myth. You're just insisting on fixating on the
Peoples Republic of California. The salary gap between California and the rest
of the country is more than made up for by the lower cost of living and the fact
that taxation is "progressive". That "progressive" taxation means that people
who live in inherently more expensive places get hammered on their taxes.

Although I can (and do) make as much somewhere else without the absurd real
estate prices or the state income tax.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Anonymous Coward]

Because anyone who WOULD start such a business DOES start it, and runs it as a mom-and-pop shop, with a low number of employees, low overhead, and nice margins. The media doesn't care about small businesses, only corporations. So you never hear about it.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Rogerborg]

The traditional view is that the company is doing you a favour by paying you to do your hobby. Until you've got your name on a published title, you're a nobody.

If the teach anything but Java today...

[Assmasher]

...I'd be surprised. I mean, they certainly offer courses in university related to systems capable languages but they seem to focus very VERY (especially in graduate school) heavily on Java for algorithms, structures, discrete math work, et cetera. The software engineering courses tend to be in Java, et cetera, ad nauseum. Heck, we had a guy who received a PhD in Computer Vision who'd never coded in anything EXCEPT Java LOL!

In any case, having received my CSCI degree in the 1996 I had a strong *nix and VMS background which meant a fair bit of C with some C++ thrown in. When I graduated I went to work for a virtual reality company, and later worked on 3D game engines for game companies themselves. Nothing in university prepared me for that experience at all. I don't think you can blame schools for not producing coders who can work in the unique environment that is a game company. Heck, most of the issues with games today are resource (art) related anyhow. It's not hard finding five good coders if you've got a decent budget, but it IS hard to find the 50 quality artists who will produce the kinds of content and shaders necessary to please gamers today. Games are simply astounding amounts of work today.

Fast, cheap, good - pick any two.

Yes, they're called agencies

[threaded]

There are many IT agencies that are only too happy to supply top notch talent. The talent being known as contractors.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[robthebloke]

As someone who's had a teaching job in the UK (lecturing graphics programming at the NCCA), i can say with some certainty that it's not a bad graduate job. But...

When the 3k top up fees were being introduced, all courses were dropped by a funding band. This lead to large redundencies across the board. Not fun.

Whilst teaching is rewarding, it's incredably draining. It was uncommon for me to spend all of my weekends and evenings preparing lectures and other resource material (I now work back in the games industry, and there are far fewer hours!).

Teaching jobs don't pay that much in the UK. It's certainly quite comparible when you are of graduate age (i.e. 25k in education, vs 20k in industry). The pay rises are however small, so within a couple of years you are 5k worse off than someone in industry.

Lecturers don't get the cushy holidays that people imagine they do - Masters students will typically still be studying over the summer months.

The worst part of lecturing however, is the behind the scenes bickering that goes on. You could be Jon Carmack, but your suggestions will always be over-ruled unless you have a Phd. You also have the constant fights with those 'other' university staff - the people who control the cash flow (who are never academics).

The long and short of it is, if you go to work in a UK university, it can often feel like you've walked into a battleground.

I've since realised I have more power over what the courses teach having left academia - with all those buzzwords like knowledge transfer and outreach programs - it's pretty straightforward to approach a university course and say "I'm from industry, can you please teach X and I'm happy to help you to do it".

99.99% of the time, they will say yes. Movements such as "Games Up?" will therefore be heard by academia - it's just whether the members of that group are willing to put forward their time and resources to actually make it a reality.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[networkconsultant]

Cost of Living too high? Come to Canada :D We have the same labor shortage and lots of Oil & better wages.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[networkconsultant]

Oh and hot French women.

Re:It's not a university problem, it's people leav

[Opportunist]

And churning out graduates won't solve the problem at all. How long do you think they will stay?

The only thing that keeps graduates from leaving immediately after college is that most studios want you to show "at least $number published titles". As soon as they can claim those titles under their belt, they're gone.

PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think that a PS3 is exactly that.
This is the modern Atari St, with an acceptable price tag.
A lot of internal knowledge is required to toy with it.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Marcus Green]

I have seen job requirements where you were expected to have more years experience than the product had existed. Welcome to HR hell. The odd thing is that it is very common that the work you do is unrelated to the direct skills you were recruited for, so its overall aptitude and ability to learn that matters, not x years with version 2.13 of product Y.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to visit Montreal soon. Truly the greatest women in North America, and possibly the entire Western world.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[omz13]

Its not also the bosses that are at fault, just look at any of the recruitment agencies and you get the same lack of knowledge and the quest to get somebody who can tick all the requirement boxes (especially if the requirements are *impossible* to get, like the infamous 5 or 10 years experience with X where X has only been out 1 or 2 years).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Maths at School is the Real Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem is the crap maths education at school.

I'm talking about the successful ones

[Joce640k]

Of course there's mediocre games programmers - just like in everything else in life.

80's games programmers were some of the worst offenders because nobody knew any theory - if you could write a scrolling C64 demo with ripped-off Rob Hubbard music you got the job.

OTOH there's the people who wrote Elite, etc.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[qazsedcft]

Well, the cost of living in Warsaw is definitely lower than in Moscow or those other places.

Just compare for yourself:

• Average grocery basket for a family of four: 500 PLN (~150 USD)
• Average home price in a quiet neighborhood not far from downtown: 8000 PLN/sq m (~230 USD/sq ft)
• Meal at KFC: 30 PLN (~10 USD)
• Meal at a good restaurant: 100 PLN (~30 USD)
• Comprehensive health insurance: 100 PLN/month (~30 USD/month)
• Cable + high speed internet: 120 PLN/month (~38 USD/month)
• Gasoline: 5 PLN/liter (~6 USD/gallon)

I don't know about the US, but this is still cheaper than most Western European capitals.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[DeadDecoy]

My favorite is when they ask for years of experience greater than the years a technology has been out.
Job only requires 50 years C# experience, 20 unicorns .... *and in very tiny print* every waking hour of your life.
For 20k peanuts!

The industry is to blame.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work in the UK games biz, the problem has nothing to do with the quality of the coders available, it's simply down to the games industry itself. As a coder (or artist) you can earn far more money and work more friendly hours outside of the studios. It's no longer the fun, laid back, working environ it once was. It's not even particularly creative, or challenging anymore. Making yet another generic FPS, with some licensed engine, does get rather boring year in, year out.

Having left the industry, not only do I make more money, but I also have a lot more time to pursue personal projects (including a couple of indie games). I can't say I miss crunch. An awful lot of industry veterans I know have walked, the new guys I wouldn't say are any weaker - they simply don't have the same level of experience yet. By the time they do gain their stripes chances are, if things don't change, they will also end up walking.

At the studio I worked, the higher ups were more interested in buying super yachts than running a good studio. The coders and artists were all expendable in their eyes. Complain about the stupid hours and before you know it they've found some eager graduate, who still believes the hype, and is prepared to work for next to nothing.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[KagakuNinja]

I live in Silicon Valley, and I would say that the home, internet and insurance prices you list are cheap, food and gas more expensive....

We are freaking out, because gas is now $4.50 per gallon...

Too sad

[32771]

we will never see Elite 4 come out now.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[HungWeiLo]

Wow. Warsaw has definitely changed since I visited over 10 years ago. Costs in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. (Seattle / Portland) in comparison:

• Average grocery basket for a family of four: 500 PLN (~150 USD) - for my family of 4, I pay about $100USD, but I bet your food tastes better.
• Average home price in a quiet neighborhood not far from downtown: 8000 PLN/sq m (~230 USD/sq ft) - Comparable to Portland & Seattle, except we'll have to travel probably at least 20 minutes to downtown.
• Meal at KFC: 30 PLN (~10 USD) - I've eaten there for about $6.
• Meal at a good restaurant: 100 PLN (~30 USD) - Comparable to Portland & Seattle.
• Comprehensive health insurance: 100 PLN/month (~30 USD/month) - For one person, comprehensive would cost $800-$1000 / month if your employer doesn't subsidize it. And I'm a healthy young man with no health issues.
• Cable + high speed internet: 120 PLN/month (~38 USD/month) - I pay about $56USD/month.
• Gasoline: 5 PLN/liter (~6 USD/gallon) - I paid $4.35/gallon this morning. Of course, there are hidden political and military costs which are not taken into account.

Re:It's not a university problem, it's people leav

[p0tat03]

The problem is also that... in other programming fields, the type of stress game devs face would be worth large bonuses, high salaries, and time off/overtime pay. The fact that the industry refuses to do this is the main reason why they fail.

money money money

[bootchka]

the skills are there! just with teaching them you dont get as much money as actually using them in an industry job so nobody will get the best skills. they need to pay teachers more to get the best people who will teach better skills. All the best progrgammers get snapped up by companies outside the UK.Plus kids in the UK just aint as geeky anymore...they're mostly thuggish chavs drinking white lightning outside the spar and giving people a beating

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[CAIMLAS]

Probably because the start-up capital needed for a software company is pretty high. Your employees are going to need to be fairly highly paid compared to something like manual labor if you want half-decent ones. And with the increase in cost comes a higher need for the projects to succeed.

And even then, it's got to be planned perfectly so that the first product is successful, or your boat will be sunk.

So why risk hiring people for more, when you can get away with hiring them for less?

Re:Monkey programers

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know you guys/girls, although R* (Rockstar) is indeed founded in Edinburgh, I remember seeing in the GTA IV ending credits that the development was done by the NYC studio. Also this would seem more logical since city in the game is a lot like New York.

But anyway, it's clearly not a problem in the UK but one that's worldwide, the problem is the architectures a lot more closed these days. On which current gaming console can hobbyists develop games without paying a lot of money? I guess the industry is more interested in shielding their DRM and just stifling innovation altogether. That's the problem it seems.

Yes but...

[pandrijeczko]

...so many studients here in the UK are doing "Media Studies" that if you need anyone to interview a games programmer, then definitely give us a call.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Inoen]

My former employer advertised in 1998 for programmers with "extensive experience with Y2K problems". How is that for unreasonable requests?

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, even with a weakened dollar, that's less the $40,000 a year for a PROGRAMMER?!?!? To put that in perspective, the median income for U.S. *high school teachers* is $51,000.

Right, but now you have to deduct a hefty chunk of cash from the US income to compensate for the fact that UK residents don't have to pay for healthcare and education directly, etc.

As one of those ST games programmers...

[clint999]

Thanks for the link. That honestly looks like a neat little toy and for under a hundred dollars it's something that I could legitimately try out :).

Re:It's not a university problem, it's people leav

[bitserf]

I have a mate who used to work for EA in the UK. He is one of the smartest programmers I know, self-taught, solid in math and physics, hard worker who churns out tight code.

Three years of his life wasted at that company for a pittance.

Needless to say, he saw the light and is now making serious bank doing "boring" development like the rest of us.

Sometimes you get more than you pay for, and if you don't realize it, your loss, since they will, eventually.

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[flickwipe]

get some ridiculously specialised science morlock job in a neutrino detector or particle accelerator or the like.

Let us know how that works out for you Mr. Freeman

Re:Monkey programers

[Simon Brooke]

I'd like to see them write Grand Theft Auto 4 with VB ;-)

Yes, GTA4 is a British production.

You misspelled Scottish.

Re:Creativity is just a tiny small part of program

[Simon Brooke]

Programming *is* mostly creative.

Well said, that man!

Re:Monkey programers

[Peter Cooper]

Nah, I was using the rare variant of "English" that we down here use when Scotland has something we want to usurp!

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Weezul]

Buzz! Wrong!

1) Any real job in the U.S. has health care provided by the employer.

2) American's do not need to pay for education directly; however, British actually must pay for high (prep) school directly because (a) the government ones are soo f*ck'n dangerous and (b) you've no shot at Oxford or Cambridge otherwise.

Btw, American's "pay" for education by county property taxes. So you must live near where house prices are high relative to the number of people. You need not actually pay those high house prices yourself, but you must usually make some sacrifices. Or maybe there is some bussing program your child can use if they are gifted or the right race.

What you mean is Americans must pay $30,000 per year for their university. What your missing here is that the drop after Oxbridge is quite rapid in Britain. More good universities means less need for prep school. Btw University is free in some U.S. states, like Georgia.

In fact, the real extra cost in the U.S. are (1) no universal health care hurts small business owners who must choose to provide it, and (2) retirement costs are high. Neither applies if your a European working in the U.S. So just come over, make way more money, send your kids to a better university if you have the money or live in the right place, or send them back home to Europe if you don't, and move back to Europe for a better retirement.

ALso

[Shorty1911]

Blame everything .. because we can . lol Skills drop due to people not focused on the classes, LOL what classes we had no classes .. *** DONT NEED NO STINKIN CLASSES My view as of the WHY: ( not shared by all but hey who knew ) Piracy or sharing of the software was the key .. now you get introuble for sharing software .. well i know if microsoft was not shared it be where it is today, lol , software they would not have been able to learn in the first place, see microsoft was not global but with the scene they where and this would hit the selected few that have the so called skills, that create that next level of programming and so on was. But today no one can share without some sort of price. which kills the industry. Seems a bit out there but hey .. i see it this way because i am damn old now. Some of the best cracks and patches came from afar games so on, but not thru the so called legal channels like today. sad huh. Your world now we just live in it. Connected 9600bps .... Welcome to the ...... Click ... disconnected ...

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[jrumney]

I have to concur. I'm now on the job market for the first time since 2000, and the situation now compared with then is dire. I'm seeing a lot of jobs advertised in London (with one of the highest costs of living in the world) looking for people with 5+ years development experience and willing to pay £25,000 - £30,000. I can't feed my family on that, and having looked into the benefits I could get, I'd be better off on the dole. Meanwhile, people with an MCSE can get a job as an "Enterprise Architect" recommending how many Microsoft servers to deploy, and get paid 80k+ for the privilege. It is really messed up when the people most valued are in a job position that has been invented by the monopoly vendor to sell more of their software into businesses, and the least valued are the people who create value in the business.

Re:Creativity is just a tiny small part of program

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to painting or carving, that just don't need any training... - Oh, wait!

Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo

[Anonymous Coward]

that's ridiculous, but funny. I was planning to go to UK for a tech job, maybe I should think again.