Games up reports to the BBC how game developers in Britain are facing serious shortage on UBER game programming skills. Universities are being blamed for not giving the proper courses or having gone 'light'. The article also mentions what I think is an interesting point on how the level of asbtraction programmers use now, is not proper at all.
Basically what they're saying is either universities aren't cutting it, or people are just total numbnuts and are wasting their time playing games, or are total nubs.
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NOTE:printer unrelated
Being a programmer myself and only one semester away from graduating, I clearly remember the introductory course and the career director asking "How many here want to be game programmers ?" and like 60% of all the generation(maybe like 70 people) raising their hands including me. "Well, best case scenario only 2% of you will ever get their" I remember being totally shocked!
He was telling me that my main goal was hard as fuck to obtain and as the years went by, I came to really understand why this is so. You see my university focused mainly on java programming because according to them "it's what the big companies are telling us they need" and they were right. Universities are focusing more on a different industry which is
CLEARLY not the gaming kind.
They are still giving hardcore java, but now they are also letting you decide between C# or java when you develop your school projects, which seem to once and for all kill the C++ development @ the university. For the less tech savvy this might sound like "bla bla bla I'm a noob bla bla bla" but explaining virtual machines and language interpretation would mean me overkilling your puny brains, so I'll try and keep it simple. The newer the programming language we use is, the more resources it needs (memory, CPU, bawlz) this causes data overhead and you can't really make games run as smooth (30 fps, or 60 for the zealots).
Are we gonna have to see radical changes in the gaming industry ? Are more and more companies start to develop
mediocre games ? here's to wish for the best.
Relevant reads:
The need for more programmers - from embedded.com
Java game develpoment myths - directly from sun(maker of java, hello?) so read with caution.
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I learned C++ in college; everything was in C++. Of course, now I have a job doing desktop support, so all of that is moot.
Although the problem is always convincing people that you are good enough in the language to be hired. While I was still in college I had interviewers actually ask me how many years of C++ experience I had.
Anyway, C++ isn't the end-all of game programming that it was five years ago. Now there's flash, there's web games, and at least one real actual game (EVE Online) is written in Python.
As for working in game development ... meh. The work is probably not going to be steady and it will probably be grueling. Chances are you'll make more money and work fewer hours if you just take an ordinary job.
The funny part in all of this is how while the demand for programmers rises, the people studying programming is declining. WTF? doesn't anyone else think programming is sexy ?