Are degrees required for a job in Programming?

Hey guys, I'm almost finished with my holidays and I am completely bogged up with homework. I should never have been assigned that homework but that rant is not for here.
I am 16, and am aspiring to be a full-time Game Programmer. Honestly, this homework makes me want to give up and drop out and pursue my passion; game development. It would free up a lot of my time and just give me time to work on projects and learn more about programming and development. It stresses me out and I really hate it. When people say "Well if you can't handle homework how are you going to handle being in a business environment?", I have worked in small development groups and when I am given a task with a deadline it is not stressing for me whatsoever, even huge tasks because It is something I want to do and am willing to.
Down here in Aus or at least at my school we have no good teaching programs for IT and development, we have a 'Game programming class' which teaches Scratch and that is way too simple for me, I am also in a VCE (Enhanced) Computing class which is also too easy for me and there are no other IT based classes in my school, meaning the next 3 years is going to be redundant; sitting in class doing and homework when I could be at home developing and learning things that I would actually need in the future.
Furthermore, dropping out would result in me not being able to get a degree. From what I've heard a degree is a must in the game development community but I've never heard that from a proper developer. From you 'veterans' and people actually in the game industry, what is your experience with finding jobs without degree / hiring people without degrees. I was also thinking, instead of working in a studio, I could just work Free-lance the salary is much lower than what a studio programmer would get but to me, Salary isn't very important; as long as I am doing what i love.
Also, to you Aussies; What is your experience with programming jobs (specifically game programming) in Aus, I haven't heard of too many development studios in Australia and if there are, they are usually small groups.
There are many successful people who have dropped out and succeeded in life, I am not saying I will be one of them whatsoever but they are examples that school is not a requirement to succeed and I heard a lot of companies such as Google (Yes, not a game company but does have programming jobs) hire people based on skill and does not look at degrees.

 

You're having problems with a homework (in a highchool, I'm guessing (or first year of college, pretty much same thing)?... and you're thinking of dropping out because of it) and work ethic in general (you'll only work on things you want to work on), but you're trying to convince me you have the drive to learn to dev if left at home. You know why I'm calling bulls***, right?

Let's say this is your only working experience working so far. Tell us, did you seek out / make this group yourself or was it all organized by the school (i.e. shared assignment)?

Also what scope of development are we talking here?

 

I sought out the group, It was a small project.

And I didn't explicitly say that I would not work on projects I did not like, I am more than willing to work on a task i don't like, it's just that I have so many things to do it's overwhelming. I still do the tasks at hand. I am saying that i am still going to do the tasks but If i were to not have them hanging over my head, i would have more time to focus on tasks that would help me in the future.

 

Ultimately, to get a job, you are going to prove/demonstrate you have the skills required. These days it is a very competitive field and getting a degree is a good way to get and show you have those skills.

That said, it’s not a ‘requirement’. Myself and many of my friends and peers don’t, but we have decades of experience. And we come from a time when formal education in programming hadn’t caught up and was pretty scarce. And game programming wasn’t something that was taught anyway.

Today, younger, competent, self-taught engineers seem to be exceedingly rare. Almost always, applicants we’ve seen that are ‘self-taught’ seem to think engineering and “I watched some YouTube videos” are equivalent. These days I tend to recommend get a formal cs type degree, at the bare minimum, it will at least inform folks what is actually required to be known. Whether they are any good at is a separate issue.

 

@zombiegorilla great to know. Understandable how most people would look for more qualified people

 

The answer to your question is - "degree is not required", although Computer Science degree will be a big help.
To work without a degree as a programmer you need a portfolio and examples of past successful projects.

However, what you're planning to do:

Is royally bad idea.

Your homework almost certainly is a joke compared to programming problems. Because programming is ALL about finding solutions to problems you never knew existed until 5 mintues ago. So, if you're planning programming career, you should be able to deal with your homework.

Game development is not exactly a lucrative or a stable career, and majority of developers fail.

So... if you drop out to start "wonderful life of a gamedeveloper", you will fail. You'll waste few years of your life and achieve nothing. If you want to have a future in gamedev, you should be able to handle your homework.

Also... if you really wanna make games, just start making games as a hobby. Do not expect to make a career out of it, and proceed with your education as usual. This is more realistic scenario.

 

I'm old school, self taught too and with hindsight I think I'd have worked for a formal maths degree. With the increase in telemetrics and ai/statistical analysis in programming, demand for degree level math skills is growing, and it's not as easy to self learn maths as it is programming, graphic design or pretty much any other game dev skills. Developments in things like shaders and physics come from implementing new maths ideas so it seems an obvious choice for working at the cutting edge of game development (especially if cs track seems too easy).

Are maths degrees viewed as favourably for studio jobs as I'm imagining?

 

I do not have a degree, but I am a professional software developer with a proven track record. I also make games, build furniture and I am an excellent chef.

When I was in school, All I wanted to be was a mechanic, I hated computers, and was prone to horrendous accidents when using the most basic of tools.

Moral of this story? What you want to do in school is not always going to be what you end up loving. Dont make the mistake of passing up on a well rounded education which will help you in all aspects of life, Including the career you ultimately end up in.

Enjoy game development as a hobby, and see where it goes. If you end up as the founder of the next Bungie, then good on you, and if you end up as a farmer, then good on you as well

 

I dont know what the Australian education system is like but an option I would recommend to people who have lost motivation/got sick of academia is not to be afraid to take a year out of that system. Just try and 'pause' your studies in the right way so that its not too hard to resume them after a year if your experiences in the non-academic world dont work out.

Academia is not for everyone and if you are already demotivated by it at 16 then thats not a great indicator that you'll make it all the way through till the end of a degree. But there is a lot going on at that age and you might feel different later on, so whatever you do its worth the effort to at least complete whatever stage of education you are at now, and try to leave neatly rather than dropping out randomly.

 

And when it comes to taking the non-academic route, keep in mind that its not just about your skills and motivation. Other factors make a large difference, including luck, where you live, who you know, your ability to talk yourself into jobs/opportunities and work well with others.

Here in the UK I have seen articles about trends towards more businesses not really trusting certain degrees in terms of the quality and skills of everyone who gets these degrees, and this very much includes game-related degrees. But I would be wary of using this sort of thing to convince myself to simply give up on the academic route, especially at 16. Alternatives are possible but there isnt so much of a map for them and failure is just as likely.

 

I honestly don't know these days. In my day nothing was required but also, things were less specialised back then. A programmer was a programmer. These days you have programmers that have fields of expertise.

What specifically would your field of expertise be within programming? It assumes you know at least two languages well enough to talk about them without looking stuff up. That would help substantially.

How are your math skills? It's less an issue for a typical solo dev but a big issue for an employee getting into programming. Only very large studios have dedicated mathematicians.

@zombiegorilla is right (actually I'm not sure when he isn't) and its hyper competitive now. A lot of the competition is actually noise but that only means you have to try harder.

If programming really is your cup of tea, test it by doing a small Unity game. Can you manage that? if so it might be an option. If you can't manage it at all, perhaps other careers will welcome you. This is because programming is less about knowing the syntax and more about being able to solve puzzles. I'd never hire someone who memorised the syntax but couldn't solve a quirky logic puzzle.

Programming isn't for everyone and it does come with health risks (learn to be very active whenever you aren't at the keyboard!)

 

I completely agree with @neginfinity. It's not required, but it's definitely a huge benefit. I started off as a designer who liked tinkering in the engine, and now I'm mostly in programming. There's a lot that I've had to learn on my own that would've been a lot quicker with a CS Degree.

When I'm looking for someone to hire, I look at past projects. Even if they're new to the industry, I want to see that they've completed projects in the past, whether in a degree program, their free time, or at another job in the industry (or any other industry for that matter). All a degree shows me is that you've successfully completed several projects with goals and deadlines over the course of that degree.

There's another aspect to getting a degree that no-one's mentioned yet, though. Unless you're one of the lucky few that can score a job working from home, you'll likely have to move around a lot throughout your career. I lived in Perth, Australia for five years and I know how scarce the gamedev jobs are. Having a degree makes it a lot easier to get a visa for another country. It's hard for a company to argue that you're a skilled migrant if you're a highschool dropout.

My advice: Stick it out for high school. You've got a lot more time than you think to work on projects. If you can get a few small, polished projects done by the time you finish, you'll be in a good position to start looking for work. After that, you've got two choices. Either pursue a degree, or take a part time job but continue to work on games projects whenever you can. Either way, the net result will be a few years and a handful or projects to show off to potential employers.

 

Oi. Not this question. -.-

 

I started as a game designer over 20 years ago, and am now an indie developer and part-time university lecturer (in Games Computing), so have seen multiple sides of this.

When I started, few had degrees, largely because of the lack of suitable courses, and the rapid changes in the early home computers, academia had trouble staying up to date. But that has changed over the years, with relevant courses and recognised value. Now few get in without a degree.

A degree is actually cheaper than the money and time you can waste trying to go self-taught. A degree course will massively accelerate your progression if you research the universities for the right course, but only if you go to university to learn, not if you go just to get the piece of paper at the end.

 

If "Aus" is "Australia", that's where I am too and I've been programming professionally for quite some time and do not have a degree. I'm pretty up front about that when opportunities come along, and I don't recall a single time where it's been an issue.

That said... I do have plenty of experience I can put on show and am well known in the local community.

I haven't read all of the above, but my advice is to get some formal education, mostly for this reason:

If you want to be a good software developer you absolutely need to be self-taught to some level, and able to learn new things on the job constantly. However, if you can afford to do it and get good teachers, you'll build your initial foundation of knowledge and experience much more quickly with a formal education, and you won't have any gaps that will trip you up later.

Such gaps do happen, and the lame thing about them is that you don't even recognise when they're tripping you up. One classic example is someone who hang out in a community I frequented and, after some years, made a big deal of the fact that you can add variables to the line where you declare a function to copy data in. They're called "parameters", and are covered in the early stages of most programming courses, but they hadn't taught themselves that because they didn't know what they didn't know.

 

This is a really, really important point.

You can go to school to learn to be a ‘programmer’. But ‘programming’ itself is a life long learning process. Of the last four titles I have launched, they were built in 3 different languages. Learning is the key skill of a good engineer. Virtually none of the tools or languages I used when I started professionally are in use today.

 

I would have posted a hefty reply but the guys here have pretty much covered it all.

It's good to see a thread like this which oozes quality helpful, information, for a young person getting ready to fly.

Good luck to you and take head of what people have said to you here. None of it is bad.

 

I'll echo what some others have said and just put an extra emphasis on it. You need to be a good developer. As in developer first, games second.

This industry has a huge share of amateur developers. People like yourself that just want to make games. Most of those people even after several years experience are not hirable. They lack grounding in fundamentals, any kind of breadth, and usually lack experience working in teams.

If you want to eventually get to work on interesting things in games, you will have to spend several years at least doing something less interesting. That's just how it works. College, then several years working on the least interesting things you can do as a junior developer.

The smart thing IMO is to just start on a course like that now instead of trying to find shortcuts. And then be looking for opportunities along the way.

There are people that for one reason or another bypass the normal routes. But those are almost always exceptional circumstances. My philosophy is always be looking for those but don't count on them.

 

I'm going to approach this from a different angle. What happens when you fail at being a game developer? Or find out that its not as lucrative or interesting as you thought?

Education gives you options. Sure, there are plenty of jobs you can do without a degree. But there are no jobs you can do without a degree that you can't still do with a degree. On the other hand there are plenty of roles where you won't get a look in without a degree.

In Australia, at the vary least you should complete the highschool qualification for your state. There are alternative pathways in to Uni, but they are a pain, and will add on an extra year or two to your studies. After you've finished high school I would recommend jumping straight into games for a year. If that doesn't work, then you can jump straight back into getting a degree.

 

This kind of outcome is very likely to trigger depression, IMO.