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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."
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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?
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.
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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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
Ehm, GTA IV from Rockstar North based in Edinburgh? Scotland is still part of the UK at present afaik
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.
Um, you do know GTAIV was made by a British studio, don't you?
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
...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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
* 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.
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.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
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
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.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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...).
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).
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?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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...
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?
At my last job I had to make my own uniform and the kids threw stones at me. It really sucked.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
...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.
No sig today...
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
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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
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?
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."