Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men

Six years here.

This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me. I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.

I agree completely. I still remember the HR presentation where they talked about how long most of the developers at our studio had been with the company. I had only been there 6 years and I was somehow one of the 10% most senior people at the studio.

At one point our studio (EA Burnaby) was run by a nice fellow named Jonathan Schappert who later went on to be CEO at Zynga. I'm told that his vision for the studio was for some small percentage (like around 5%) of the programmers to be senior engineers - SE3's or better - and for the rest of the programmers to be kids straight out of school. You can imagine how this 'pyramid of excellence' worked out in practice.

lol 'yea you can dress however you want'. Yea, they bloody well should let you when you're in the office 80+ hours a week.

I'll never go back to games - in the 6 years I've been in the games industry, I've worked with some really smart and fun people, but management (and on the whole, a lot of 'game designers') generally suck and have no idea what they're talking about. That includes a lot of the veterans - they got famous on a single game idea, way way way back and are carried by that.

- You're expected to always be on the absolute cutting edge in an extremely fast moving area, computer graphics.

- The ultimate goal of the projects is to make images that are so appealing, people will pay money to see them projected on a screen. This is fun.

- It requires extremely high levels of creative and technical proficiency, and to do really well ideally you'll have components of both.

- You work with people who are extremely passionate about what they do, and not what it might pay them. This does actually make a difference.

Now there are definitely significant down sides, but it's not that people are brainwashed into thinking they enjoy their work.

I've seen high-employee turnover before, and it's generally down to the company demanding too much overtime or being disgustingly underpaid. There's plenty of companies about now that understand overtime doesn't = productivity.

>Your average industry professional is a 31 year old white man with one to three years of experience

I've got no idea how true this is, but in my experience it's around 3-6 years average, though I've never worked for an indie or mega-studio, and I'm based in the UK.

The truth is, if you don't like C++, you won't like working on an industry that relies heavily on it (however, not every game is done in C++, and certainly few games use it exclusively), so in that case it may be a good idea to go for another industry where you feel more comfortable. If you like C++, of course, keep using it, and don't worry about finding a C++ job, they're still very common.

The best advice, and the one you'll read around here most often, is: don't learn a single language. It's OK that you specialize in C++ (so do I), but never put all your eggs on a single basket. From C++ you can very easily go to C, Java and C#, which also provide a lot of jobs, and outside of the C family there is a whole universe of languages you should always be aware of.