flipCode - School: To Quit Or Not To Quit

flipCode - School: To Quit Or Not To Quit [an error occurred while processing this directive]

By Jaap Suter
December 1999

Introduction

Many of the flipCode readers are wanna-be game programmers (or should I say aspiring?), currently studying Computer Science. At the time of this writing I'm (Jaap Suter) in the position of being a second year Computer Science student in Holland. I have a part-time (20 hours a week) job at a local game development company called Davilex and for the last few months I struggled with the idea of quiting school and going full-time. The struggle is over and I decided to finish school. This article is meant to be of help for any other people who are in doubt at the moment.

What made me decide to finish school? I guess the main reason is society. Current society demands that you have a degree for everything. Even if you already know some game programming and you aren't learning that much at the University, you've still got to have the paper. Not only for game programming but for every job it's the same.

One day I got home from school and I was so incredibly sick of it that I decided to poll the game industry to see what they think on this matter. I gathered lots and lots of email adresses from professional game companies and wrote them an email with the following questions:

What value does a computer science degree have these days? I mean, isn't a cool demo worth much more?
I don't have the idea that Computer science university is teaching me anything useful (besides very little math). Do you think I should finish school, or get in the industry?
How often do you recruit programmers who don't have a C.S. degree?

At first I wasn't expecting very many replies, because these companies must be getting hundreds of emails an hour and they can't begin answering them all. But after a week I got replies from the following companies:

www.rareware.com - Rare, Brilliant creators of Goldeneye, Diddy kong Racing, Banjo Kazooie, etc. All for Nintendo64.
www.3drealms.com - 3D Realms, Creators of DukeNukem3d and many other cool games.
www.scee.sony.co.uk - SCEE, Doing playstation game development.
www.konami.com - Konami, Doing arcade game development.
www.epicgames.com - Epic Megagames, Didn't they do Unreal?
www.sierra.com - Sierra, Lots and lots of pc adventures, and publisher of Halflife.
www.davilex.com - Davilex, makers of A2 Racer Europe, hehe :)

I also got replies from different people that run or write for all sorts of game development sites. And last but not least I asked Jacco Bikker what he thought about it. This is simply because I discuss my ideas a lot with him and his opinion means a lot to me. When you look at all the replies I got you can spot two types. The ones that said: "You got a cool enough demo, then quit school" and the ones that said: "Finish it, damn you". Let us first take a look at the first question I asked and then take a look at some of the replies I got.

Professional Opinions

Question 1. What value does a computer science degree have these days? I mean, isn't a cool demo worth much more?

Scott Miller from 3D Realms says the following:

"We do not place much emphasis on college degrees. I, myself, didn't finish college because doing so would have forced me to miss my prime opportunity window to start Apogee. Bill Gates didn't finish college. If you're smart, motivated and willing to self-educate yourself on the topics that matter (for me that was marketing and business management) then college is not critical. Self-motivation and perseverce are far, far more important."

Sort of opposed to what Konami Entertainment had to say:

"You are either woefully uninformed, misguided, or Einsteinian in natural talent to think that a CS degree is less important than a cool demo. Cool demo's may come and go. In 5 years it is outdated and practically functionless. When you have no schooling or training how will you compete with the hotshots coming out of colleges with the new technology in tow? Get the degree. You may even wind up hating the game industry. If so, how will you compete for the good jobs then? What would you have to offer?"

SCEE made the following interesting note:

"A cool demo helps as well ... but demonstrates mainly technical competence, and doesn't rull out plagarism (which we've seen ... and you have to keep a wide eye on the demo scene to know all the demos out there)."

Which is a point I haven't thought about before. Maybe because I consider plagarism something that's simply plain stupid. Suppose you can get a job out of plagarism. Then you will never be able to live up to the expectations and be fired in a matter of days. Well, at least that's the way I think.

Jacco Bikker gave the following detailed answer:

"A demo is worth a lot. However, school teaches you a few things that you need. I believe the most important things are:

The ability to find information, even information that you where not neccessarily interested in. This helps when exploring new territory during projects, and prevents that you specialize too much because everything else is 'just not your business'.
The ability to finish a project on schedule, even when the project (partly) consists of things that you do not find interesting. Call it 'discipline'. You need that.
Strong logical skills.
Social skills - Again, not just with people you like, but also with 'less attractive people' that you maybe even depend upon. For school, that would be teachers, for a job, especially a fresh one, that would be a bad manager.

Besides this, school provides you with a good excuse to have enough spare time to learn the things that you consider 'important'. It prevents that you get too much one-sided. And basically he sums it all up pretty cool. School keeps your mind and view broad. I don't consider learning things like the Z notation is going to help me much in the future but what the heck. The worst thing it can do is being a waste of time."

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