mthg's comments

I know the author of the piece in question, Chris. He's a writer with no technical background whatsoever, and his job is to write whimsical jocular short pieces for Slate. This isn't a serious critique of any sort. There's nothing to see here.

Hey there, were you a coworker of Kyle's at EA? A fellow game graphics programmer from Rockstar Games here.

I remember Kyle mostly from his days as a comic artist at my alma mater, Univ. of Virginia. I was a comic artist and editor several years after Kyle graduated but I still remember his work from my freshman year. It was a comic called Drool and was a very morbid comic but hilarious if you're into that kind of thing. It was much better than most of what comes out of xkcd and other fluffy nerd comics. I believe it was canned after Kyle ran a Jesus joke that rubbed some people wrong. The artwork in World of Goo comes directly from his old work.

I would point you to a URL of his stuff if it weren't for the fact that our school newspaper's website hasn't been fully functional since my roommate who maintained it graduated :(

A lot of companies use in-house languages with similarities to popular outside languages. Unreal script for example would be accessible to anybody coming from a traditional java background but it is different in some ways, i.e. polymorphism based on 'game state' as a built-in construct. A lot of other in-house languages look like Python. Some companies script with LISP and LISP-derivatives. In my experience most game scripting has less to do with programming and more to do with game design. If you are interested in solving algorithmic and engineering problems, it's not the way to go. Game programming per se usually involves hacking almost exclusively in C, C++, assembly and shader languages.

No matter which direction you go, the best way in is to show them a body of work even if it's unpublished projects done in your spare time. If you only want to do scripting work and avoid systems-level programming, you can get into modding.

As for the 'breadth of what you need to know' you shouldn't be terribly intimidated if you're a junior person. Most generalist programmers at a game company are not much different from very good systems programmers at other companies. If you want to get into specialized fields like AI, physics, or graphics, you will need to demonstrate that specialized knowledge.

I agree with this sentiment entirely. I went to a public magnet high school with SAT scores averaging around 1480 and at least half our graduating class every year ends up in an ivy / mit / stanford. I'd say more than half of those who made it to the top tier got in from legacy / extracurriculars / obsessive dedication to good grades and making teachers happy as opposed to genuine intelligence and love of learning. Also curiously, like you said, everybody from my graduating class who went to caltech, although not necessarily teh uberg3nius math wiz, was at least minimally competent in some technical field.

Although one could make the case that a lot of those schools, especially the ivies, are picking people based on their ability to lead and 'make a difference' in some general sense rather than pure raw ability. Therefore they may intentionally focus on apparently manifested soft qualifications like achievement in extracurriculars, personal discipline as exhibited by a flawless GPA, or well-established personal connections.

This is all strictly re: undergrads of course. I've never seen a single retard get admitted to a top-tier PhD program in science or engineering.

SDL for boilerplate, ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) for the physics. My understanding is that ODE was started by a ex-Havok employee, and it is in fact an excellent oss physics engine.

Well, the article is talking about a USC grad program, not really comparable to one of those video game only niche 'colleges.' The way I see it, it's not unlike other interdisciplinary sort of grad programs (e.g. robotics). In the end though, you're right in saying that a traditional degree in CS, with the raw skills in specialties needed in games like graphics and AI, is all you really need. FYI I am a game graphics programmer, with no game degree, just a CS undergrad degree from a public university who took a lot of masters level graphics classes in school and read a lot of SIGGRAPH papers.

Hello to you there @ Bear Stearns. I'm a Bloomberg core infrastructure engineer, and I can second that. I can type in a symbol and type in a functional mnemonic, hit enter and see a news aggregate pertaining to a certain security, along with just about everything else you want to know about the security and/or the company underlying it. And of course Bloomberg messaging is a premier form of OTC trading. I understand this is most likely targeting the armchair investor (aka clueless speculator) although they should probably go to Vegas instead if they think they're going to make consistent returns picking stocks with their meager information.

I tend to agree with those who believe that your immediate community of associates to have a much larger effect on your personal outlook than the defining characteristic of the your city of residence as a whole (although certainly each major city has one).

For example, I went to college at the University of Virginia, where the career prospects of most graduates reside in DC. As a programmer destined for DC, the message was loud and clear: "Be a defense contractor." For my friends who were not in engineering, the message was equally clear to them: "Be a lawyer."

But personally I never really cared much for success as defined through local conventions, mostly because I got bored too easily, so I spent half my college years as a cartoonist. Around the drawing board, the message I got was : "Be funny." Granted, our school is mostly known for successful lawyers and politicians, but we do have Tina Fey as well.

When I did hang out with the CS kids, it was almost exclusively with the computer graphics guys, and from them the message was: "Make photorealistic real-time applications." (As opposed to "Be a defense contractor.")

After graduation I moved to New York as a software engineer at a very large financial firm, and again I mostly managed to avoid the "Get rich" attitude prevalent in NYC by working with a small group of engaged CS folks some of whom were also start-up founders.

In none of the above situations was my local sub-group larger than a dozen individuals tops. Majority ambition can rarely ever suffocate sub-communities. The real danger is that a small community is vulnerable from disintegrating at any time. For example, all the previously mentioned clusters eventually dispersed, from graduation and corporate turnover and they are never immediately replaceable. In a place like Cambridge or Palo Alto, I suspect this would not be such a major risk.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if your city's message as listed by pg is incompatible with what you want in life, don't freak out.