This kind of discussion is always challenging because it's hard not to come off as a prick. I'm really trying to not be boastful.
Quote: "When Jeku can enplane himself that he has created something usfual in programing or what have you, then he would be someone to listen to and no im not trying to be rude im sure you could see that in my posts."
Do you have to invent brand new concepts, like bump-mapping, in order to be "useful"? I can only give you examples you can't prove because the games are closed source.
One of the large franchises I was part of had a specific module of the game programmed in an internal language that NOBODY outside of the company had ever seen. It was slow, cumbersome, buggy, and prone to crashing at least 5 times a day. When I joined the company I made it my mission to become a guru of the language, and to help improve it and make it easier for new engineers to ramp up and learn.
By the time I finished with that franchise, nearly two years later, I had become the lead engineer on that language. I wrote over 150 pages of technical pages and tutorials on it, and I gave training sessions for new programmers. We took that language and did more things with it than even the original creators in Florida had envisioned. My team used their creativity to create shortcuts and external tools to speed up the process, and in the end we became a little bit like "superstars" in our domain. The other engineers on the other franchises wouldn't touch this language with a 10-foot pole.
None of that particular language was learned from my 4-year degree. The engineers I worked with had never seen or heard of this language before they arrived at the company. But we all adapted and fit into it with no other choice but to learn to love it. The thing is, if I hadn't had that degree in my arsenal, my boss wouldn't have taken a risk to hire me. In fact, my resume would have probably been binned when they first started sorting the stack of resumes they receive every day. That would go for most game companies.
I'm sure that MANY of us here have enough talent to take on a brand new language and master it. But for a company who hires hundreds of employees a year, they need a way to filter future prospects, and people without degrees are not worth taking a chance on (in their eyes).
At this same game company, back in 2003, I was a quality assurance tester on a sports game, before I had my degree. When the manager heard that I had some programming experience, he put me on to help the engineers during crunch time because they needed all the help they could get. By the end of the project, I was even credited as an additional programmer, and I thought "Woo-hoo! My foot is in the door! Easy street now!" However, they told me they were NOT going to take me on as a programmer until I finished my degree. That's proof in of itself that
even with experience of having helped ship a freaking real commercial game, they STILL wouldn't hire me as a programmer unless I had the piece of paper.
@Slayer - I wish you all the best with your career, but if I were you I'd at least take some courses with an online university or do it part time and finish it in 6 years or something. Unless you're a genius or you have made the next big indie darling game, you will have a huge mountain to climb to get that job.
Sure, you can climb Mount Everest without the proper tools, but why would you?
Senior Web Developer - Nokia
