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Anecdotal, but everyone that I can recall from my uni's CS cohort who used video games as motivation to learn CS were ultimately bad or middling programmers, wh
by googlryas 4y ago
Anecdotal, but everyone that I can recall from my uni's CS cohort who used video games as motivation to learn CS were ultimately bad or middling programmers, who were basically only employable by these game companies that pay crummy wages with bad work culture.
It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.
- kaladin-jasnah 4y agoThe impression I get from video game hackers (eg. finding glitches for speedrunning) are that they are quite talented, and console hackers as well (finding that PS5 jailbreak definitely requires skill) so I'm not sure if it's the best generalization.
- dankboys 4y agoconsole hackers and game programmers have little overlap, though. If you've spent the time to understand VR/ED you probably want to do that, in which case you're not programming.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoHacking savefiles and similar stuff (yourself, not just copying things on the web) help teach the key work habits of day to day programming. Problem solving, sticking to a problem, visualizing, decoding, basic computer architecture, tech docs, self starting, debugging, etc. Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
- friedman23 4y agoI think that would be a bad generalization. Maybe people obsessed enough with video games that you find out that's why they are learning CS are bad coders?
- urthor 4y agoMy experience is the opposite. I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.
- kjeetgill 4y agoHuh, I guess I always found the exact opposite to be true. But I finished university in 2012, prior to the gold rush. CS department cohort stereotypes have probably drifted somewhat.
- googlryas 4y agoClass of 2006 here :)
- jltsiren 4y agoAlso anecdotal, but the best self-taught programmers I know (or knew, at this point) came from the demoscene and often made their careers in game development. The people you mention made a common mistake. They went to a university to study X, and not because they were interested in X but because they wanted to do Y and believed that X would be useful in it. That's a mistake, because academic education does not work like that. Mastering the curriculum does not make you an expert in the field. The curriculum is only a scaffold. You are always expected to learn more, both because you should find the topic interesting and because learning more makes sense.
- Thaxll 4y agoYour average AAA dev is usually better than other fields because they use C++ and so they need to understand a lot of complicated topics.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoIt's not quite like the old days, but games and game engines frequently require far more math and algorithms than the usual programmer just moving bits between database and screens. I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys. They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.
- andkenneth 4y agoI absolutely noticed the gamer attrition between first and second year compsci at uni.