I have a 4.0 in a Computer Science (Games) Programs type degree. now I seem to be stuck in limbo at getting a job. IT companies think im a risky candidate because I have a 'games' degree and that is clearly where I want to go so I will leave their company at a drop of a game job hat
This is my biggest reason I recommend against it.
Getting a trade degree can hurt your prospects. It can often harm the ability to work outside the industry. It can often harm the ability to get a masters degree or other higher education. It can often harm your salary negotiations, even inside the industry. While some schools may have a quick path through topics they feel are games specific, my personal view is that it isn't worth it.
One of my local schools offers a games focus as part of their undergrad CS curriculum, but still rejects graduates of other game schools from their graduate programs because they don't trust them to know enough CS topics. The school still has the same base CS requirements but augments it with additional optional courses for those wanting the additional certificate. IIRC it adds a half year of study beyond the raw CS degree if you don't take any other optional courses.
About 2 years ago I had a co-worker who graduated from FullSail. He applied to that university's graduate CS program. They tested him, they also contacted the faculty at FullSail and asked for specifics. Even though he had been working at a game studio for several years, ultimately the university did not accept him from the program since they believed the game school degree lacked the necessary CS background and because the student struggled at certain CS topics. They gave him an option of enrolling in some courses as an adult 'continuing education' program until he mastered the required undergrad level topics, then he could re-apply to the CS masters program if he wanted. He turned that option down.
After writing about that, one of the FullSail professors contacted me and wanted to know if he could contact the school on the student's behalf. The guy turned him down, explained that he had already been in touch with both schools and how specific remedial courses would be required because of his test results, and there wasn't much point in trying to get FullSail to try to explain 'we teach Computer Science' when his actual test results showed he had no clue about a number of theory topics or mathematics topics. We ended up talking for a while. He had a class on optimization but clearly didn't understand parts of computer architecture or compiler theory. We talked about math and while he did understand a bit of liner algebra as it applied to 3D games, the details were still magic. We talked about algorithm theory and he struggled with basic problems, understanding vaguely what big-O notation meant but not deeply understanding concepts like reducability and algorithmic classes, nor could he explain why it would matter if an algorithm is similar to the well-referenced bin packing problem or the traveling salesman problem. He agreed that he probably didn't get the CS side when he attended the game school.
When I attended graduate school my first semester teachers had an interesting way of weeding out people taking the classes. In a digital signal processing class, the teacher derived the Fast Fourier Transform the first day. He asked if there were any students who didn't understand every step of the math. A few raised their hands. He asked for how many students the FFT was just a review, and several raised their hands. He then said that all students who couldn't follow a simple FFT on the first day would probably fail a digital signal processing class and should transfer to a math class instead. The math in the class just got even more difficult over time. Another teacher for AI and machine learning opened the class by asking by show of hands how many students could explain what a sigmoid function was. Then he asked by show of hands how many could explain the difference between a Gaussian distribution and a Poisson distribution. Then he asked a few questions about L'Hopital's Therom and the possible situations that happens with the math operation of 0/0. Then he asked who did not raise their hand at any of those questions, and urged those students to go back and get the necessary math to be able to understand graduate-level machine learning algorithms.
Computer science as a topic is mostly an applied mathematics field. It is about algorithms and transformations and problem spaces. It is about manipulating numbers and symbols and turning them into useful information. It is not so much about programming languages and container classes.
In the real world, the job of "computer programmer" and the study of "computer science" have varying levels of overlap. Many computer programmers spend their days encoding rules written by others and never do any of the computer science work. Other computer programmers spend a lot of time doing analysis or writing tools and blocks of code that rely heavily on more technical computer science work. Industry needs both types.
If you get a more traditional CS degree the schools will generally cover enough content that you can do both types. If you get a trade degree or specialized 'game programmer' bachelors trade degree, in my experience most of game-specific graduates only can fit one role and struggle in anything outside that limited scope.
