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Hello, I was wondering if anyone has known someone or if you yourself have been employed without a Computer Science Degree?
I have 180+ credits a 3.25 gpa, and I can't help but think another summer and fall semester is a waste of time. I want to program video games! I would even be willing to leave today to fill a position. I know this is a jump in what most say, a bad direction, but if you have any advice or personal experience with this kind of thought process, let me know ?
The degree is not a waste of your oh so precious time. If you want to get a job in games, finish the degree. Moving this to the proper forum.
One year is not much time to "lose".
It will pass by in no time.
If you already invested three fourths of time in it, you MUST finish it.
One year is not as much as it seems.
Most of young people fail because they completely lack patience. It is something normal at young ages.
What's stopping you from making games right now? If you apply at a company for a development job, I would expect you'd want to have some kind of portfolio anyways.
Finish the degree. Make games in whatever spare time you have.
Well, to put this in a bit more perspective, I have had medical problems for the last ten years! This has made finishing school a terribly long ten year problem. And now that I am finishing next fall all I can think about is how those courses aren't game programming. You all are right though the Degree is very important. Its not that I value my time more than anyone else, its more that I have been through so much with this degree and invested so much, I just want to start tomorrow and not have any more classes like Philosophy Moral issues or political science 101 get in the way of what I really want. A lot of job requirements say BA in CS or equivalent, I guess most people graduate with 120-135 credits so maybe not graduating with 180+ credits would be equivalent. Thanks for listening/reading. ?
GaryLougheed said:
Well, to put this in a bit more perspective, I have had medical problems for the last ten years! This has made finishing school a terribly long ten year problem. And now that I am finishing next fall all I can think about is how those courses aren't game programming. You all are right though the Degree is very important. Its not that I value my time more than anyone else, its more that I have been through so much with this degree and invested so much, I just want to start tomorrow and not have any more classes like Philosophy Moral issues or political science 101 get in the way of what I really want. A lot of job requirements say BA in CS or equivalent, I guess most people graduate with 120-135 credits so maybe not graduating with 180+ credits would be equivalent. Thanks for listening/reading.
Finish. The. Degree.
Well gheez Tom, that wasn't empathetic, I mean I tell everyone I have 60+ more credits than the average undergrad in computer science and 3.25+ gpa. I tell everyone I have ten years of off and on medical problems that elongated my degree.
And all you say is ‘my precious time’ and then state finish my degree. If you aren't gonna be a person towards me then get off this topic. I am looking for real talk and real experiences where someone was hired with equivalent experience to a BA. I see that listed a lot when employers are looking for new employees.
GaryLougheed said:
Well gheez Tom, that wasn't empathetic, I mean I tell everyone I have 60+ more credits than the average undergrad in computer science and 3.25+ gpa. I tell everyone I have ten years of off and on medical problems that elongated my degree.
And all you say is ‘my precious time’ and then state finish my degree. If you aren't gonna be a person towards me then get off this topic. I am looking for real talk and real experiences where someone was hired with equivalent experience to a BA. I see that listed a lot when employers are looking for new employees.
It doesn't make sense to spend the money and time to get a degree and just bail out. Tom is 100% correct, finish the degree. I have no idea if you're in North America but you only need 120-132(honors) credits to graduate from what I know (correct me if I'm wrong) and you already have 180+ which tells me you're at the end of your studies. If you've been going back and forth for 10 years to finish why would you dump all that effort and time and just quit when you're this close to the finish line?
Take this from an employer's perspective… You didn't complete your degree which means you don't commit to finishing tasks. That's a red flag and will impact your ability to get a job as you have no working experience, and on top of that you dropped out of school.
Regardless of my opinion about degrees, you don't “need” one to get into the industry but it does help, and on-top of that a degree is still better than no degree with all else being equal just because of candidate screening. Also depending on where you want to go (executive positions - MBA) a degree can open more doors for you. There are many programmers working without degrees in North America but these individuals have portfolios and have been programming for years. You will only do yourself a disservice by not completing your degree at this stage.
I would also suggest you take feedback a bit more better because the game industry can be highly stressful and if you're not able to handle the heat you wont last too long. On that note, Tom has ‘real’ experience and I wouldn't take his advice lightly on this matter. http://www.sloperama.com/tsloper.htm
You know, I worked very hard in college. When I graduated, I graduated valedictorian with a 4.0 and I was very proud of it. After my first year in the industry, I applied for a couple of positions, and during the process of interviewing for those positions I realized that even just a single year out of college… nobody cared about my 4.0 anymore. The only thing anyone wanted to talk about was what I had been working on for the last year. The year I hadn't been in college. I felt a little betrayed at that point - like I wished someone would have told me how quickly my degree would become “useless”.
But here's the thing I didn't understand yet, and the thing you need to understand now. The video game industry is chaotic. Projects come and go… and with them, so do developers. It is very common for employees to be picked up on a contract basis for the sole purpose of getting a single project out the door. It is also not uncommon for a project to finish (either successfully or unsuccessfully) and large numbers of the people who built it to be laid off. The elite programmers in a studio are not frequently affected by this turnaround… but the weaker programmers in a studio definitely are.
Game development is hard. Many of the people you will run into are both incredibly talented and incredibly passionate (read: they put in a lot of hours on top of having a lot of natural talent). In the past, I have encouraged people to realize that a college degree doesn't make you an expert on anything. In comparison to the rest of the developers already working in the video game industry, it makes you an absolute beginner at everything. As a new developer (who hasn't even finished college yet), you will almost certainly either land at a studio that is not large enough to be relatively stable, or become one of the weaker programmers at any studio that is large enough to be relatively stable. I say this to drive home the point that unless you are a true wunderkind, you will spend a lot of time at the beginning of your career applying for jobs.
As a personal story, a friend of mine (who also did not have a degree) once applied for a job on my team at Electronic Arts, and several weeks later I finally directly reached out to our recruitment team asking why we had never seen his resume. Their response was, verbatim: “We haven't sent you his resume because this is not EA University.”
The combination of these realities is why you want the degree. Without any work history under your belt, your college experience is literally the only thing that recruiters and engineers on a team have to look at. Do you want that experience to read: “I couldn't be bothered to finish college”?
You should also consider worst-case scenarios. What happens if you discover that you can't get a job in the games industry right now, and have to take some other work for a while to make ends meet? That general CS degree gets really valuable in a hurry. Your college degree will not be very useful for very long. But during the phase where it does matter, it is the single most important thing on a very short list of things that matter.
You should listen to kseh and also make some games while you are finishing school. This will both scratch your itch, and it will also make your technical interviews fresh out of school go much more smoothly. Imagine what happens when you walk into an interview and the interviewer sees an actual finished game on your resume. Now he can ask you a bunch of direct, relevant questions about problems you've already solved! You don't have to figure much of anything out on the fly, and you nail every question he asks. Do that. It is the second most valuable thing you can do to break into the industry.
But it's still the second most valuable thing you can do to break into the industry. The most valuable thing you can do - to break into this specific industry or do anything else with computer science - is listen to Tom. Finish the degree.
@GaryLougheed There are just so many branches that come into view when you speak about making games … you have programmers, artists and more and then each category branches into multiple categories … in this modern day and age, most of the game engines do all the heavy work for you … so you'll be using scripting languages to tell it what to do with your art work. I say graphic design is a good field, you can make an entire game by just opening up a notebook and sketching some ideas, writing a story plot, visualize the game mechanics and other things and then look at the big picture and decided what is needed to bring it to reality.
