4 ms·

> Nowadays even for junior positions we wouldn't consider anyone without at least a bachelors degree in CS, so that's at least 3 years of university Why?

gambiting 3y ago
Because without this criteria our number of applicants for junior positions would be unfeasible to review and process. It already is, frankly, and I've heard talks about narrowing it down further to only people with masters degrees just to bring the number down to something that can actually be reviewed by a human. It's a tough line to walk - as a hiring manager I'd love to talk to every promising candidate no matter what education they have, but equally I also wouldn't want to do the job of recruitment where they take weeks just to sort through the absolute flood of applications that we get.
- dschuetz 3y ago
  I see a problem here. Hiring is work that needs to be done, because it is not going away if a company wants to find talent. It seems to me that instead of putting more effort into "sorting through the absolute flood of applications", or perhaps even finding a solution for that problem, HR just ramps the qualification bar even higher disregarding the possibility that higher education is not actually needed, and that talent is not necessarily reflected in any sort of degree. At the same time, it de-values higher education. You absolutely expect employees having the "best" education, giving 100% and going the extra mile without actually willing to put up the work on hiring talent based on reality. Ergo: AAA studios are setting up to fail finding talent themselves. Talent without university/college degrees rarely get a chance, so, with enough energy, they start doing stuff by themselves.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    I agree with you, the problem at a large corporation like ours is that the process ostensibly "works" - the candidates we are hiring are good and it's hard to argue that by expanding more effort(and more money) on widening our pool of candidates would result in even better candidates than the ones we have. The argument you'd need to fight against is basically "we already have a 1000 candidates, if you can't find someone suitable within a thousand people then maybe it's not the candidate pool that's the problem". The pool could be better and include people who are just as good(or better) but don't have a university degree - but again, that's money that would need to be spent and it's very hard to make such an argument in a corporate setting where people who make these decisions aren't the ones participating in the process.
    - dschuetz 3y ago
      > [...] that's money that would need to be spent and it's very hard to make such an argument in a corporate setting where people who make these decisions aren't the ones participating in the process. I understand that, from economic perspective at least. "Is it worth it?" is a phrase I hear (often also saying myself) a lot when talking about investing time=money in something. I am afraid talent is absolutely worth it, and it's up to the hiring company, not the applicants, to solve that problem. On the applicants side, especially those who are well aware of their talents, they also think "Is it worth it all? Getting a degree just to be able to apply for positions in big-time companies? I don't think so."
dagw 3y ago
At a guess because there is over all very little need for 'game developers' at AAA studios. Had a friend that worked a AAA studio and he spent most of his time just working on improving and fixing collision detection performance in their game engine. Had another friend who only worked on the asset management pipeline. Another wrote tools for mesh optimisation. Others I know just worked on various tasks related to writing high performance low latency server code. All of these are skill you're more likely to learn during a CS degree rather than as a self taught indie game developer. Nobody I know who has gone to a large AAA studio has actually worked on game mechanics or game play in any meaningful way. One poor sod I know, who loved computer games, got tasked with working on the framework for building in-game microtransaction stores into their games.

gambiting 3y ago

Because without this criteria our number of applicants for junior positions would be unfeasible to review and process. It already is, frankly, and I've heard talks about narrowing it down further to only people with masters degrees just to bring the number down to something that can actually be reviewed by a human. It's a tough line to walk - as a hiring manager I'd love to talk to every promising candidate no matter what education they have, but equally I also wouldn't want to do the job of recruitment where they take weeks just to sort through the absolute flood of applications that we get.

dschuetz 3y ago
I see a problem here. Hiring is work that needs to be done, because it is not going away if a company wants to find talent. It seems to me that instead of putting more effort into "sorting through the absolute flood of applications", or perhaps even finding a solution for that problem, HR just ramps the qualification bar even higher disregarding the possibility that higher education is not actually needed, and that talent is not necessarily reflected in any sort of degree. At the same time, it de-values higher education. You absolutely expect employees having the "best" education, giving 100% and going the extra mile without actually willing to put up the work on hiring talent based on reality. Ergo: AAA studios are setting up to fail finding talent themselves. Talent without university/college degrees rarely get a chance, so, with enough energy, they start doing stuff by themselves.
- gambiting 3y ago
  I agree with you, the problem at a large corporation like ours is that the process ostensibly "works" - the candidates we are hiring are good and it's hard to argue that by expanding more effort(and more money) on widening our pool of candidates would result in even better candidates than the ones we have. The argument you'd need to fight against is basically "we already have a 1000 candidates, if you can't find someone suitable within a thousand people then maybe it's not the candidate pool that's the problem". The pool could be better and include people who are just as good(or better) but don't have a university degree - but again, that's money that would need to be spent and it's very hard to make such an argument in a corporate setting where people who make these decisions aren't the ones participating in the process.
  - dschuetz 3y ago
    > [...] that's money that would need to be spent and it's very hard to make such an argument in a corporate setting where people who make these decisions aren't the ones participating in the process. I understand that, from economic perspective at least. "Is it worth it?" is a phrase I hear (often also saying myself) a lot when talking about investing time=money in something. I am afraid talent is absolutely worth it, and it's up to the hiring company, not the applicants, to solve that problem. On the applicants side, especially those who are well aware of their talents, they also think "Is it worth it all? Getting a degree just to be able to apply for positions in big-time companies? I don't think so."

dagw 3y ago

At a guess because there is over all very little need for 'game developers' at AAA studios. Had a friend that worked a AAA studio and he spent most of his time just working on improving and fixing collision detection performance in their game engine. Had another friend who only worked on the asset management pipeline. Another wrote tools for mesh optimisation. Others I know just worked on various tasks related to writing high performance low latency server code. All of these are skill you're more likely to learn during a CS degree rather than as a self taught indie game developer. Nobody I know who has gone to a large AAA studio has actually worked on game mechanics or game play in any meaningful way. One poor sod I know, who loved computer games, got tasked with working on the framework for building in-game microtransaction stores into their games.