I was a game programmer at EA for eight years. Six years here. This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of

I was a game programmer at EA for eight years. Six years here. This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me. I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices. I agree completely. I still remember the HR presentation where they talked about how long most of the developers at our studio had been with the company. I had only been there 6 years and I was somehow one of the 10% most senior people at the studio. At one point our studio (EA Burnaby) was run by a nice fellow named Jonathan Schappert who later went on to be CEO at Zynga. I'm told that his vision for the studio was for some small percentage (like around 5%) of the programmers to be senior engineers - SE3's or better - and for the rest of the programmers to be kids straight out of school. You can imagine how this 'pyramid of excellence' worked out in practice.