I'm 8 years past that, even having come back to the industry after time elsewhere.

A little off topic but, how was it getting back into video games. I never intended on leaving myself but 2008 and redundancy caused that and then my salary massively jumped several times since leaving. I'd need to take a big pay cut to get back in but, I could move to a cheaper part of the country like Manchester.

There's not really much to say... a good position was available, I applied, so I took it. Salaries can be higher elsewhere but it depends on what you're good at. I could probably get a 50% pay rise if I went back into an AI-related startup in London but that comes with its own downsides.

Yeah, this kind of makes sense. But still.. that guy sounds really convincing. "Sometime around your 30th birthday you'll leave the industry in disgust and start over elsewhere, with nothing to show for the last decade of your life except unhealthy weight gain, a crippling pile of debt, and your name in the credits of a bunch of 6-out-of-10 video games. The industry will not miss you. Every year, thousands more kids march out the front doors of that same game college where you went, like a never-ending parade of clone troopers. The big publishers will be happy to hire them and let you wander off to figure out what to do with the rest of your life." Josh, are you making 6/10 games?

I'm 34. I did leave the industry once, a year after my first job out of college (which did not produce a 6/10 game), but I came back after two years doing contracting for the Navy and DoD. I haven't gained a significant amount of weight since school; I am about 5' 5" and weigh about 130lbs. My wife and I were completely debt-free for years until six months ago (when we took out a small mortgage to buy a house, which actually let us reduce our monthly expenses over rent by nearly 50%). Only one of the games I have worked on has a score near 6/10. The rest are all 8/10 or better, when they've shipped, although to be clear I don't think the review scores of a game contribute in any material fashion to how much satisfaction and pride I derive from my job.

I generally consider myself successful, but it wasn't an easy road. It required and continues to require a lot of work. I do feel that the industry tends to attract a lot of folks who believe that a love of playing games will translate to a love of making them, and a decent enough portion of those folks do end up having a sufficient amount of basic skill to find themselves a job in the industry, but eventually discover it's not as magical or romantic as one might think from the outside, and thus leave. Often with chips on their shoulder about it. It requires more than just the ability to write code, make art, or design mechanics to really succeed in this job (or any job). It requires, for example, the ability to say no to working obscene hours, to effectively negotiate for the pay you believe you need, and to work closely with a wide variety of people of different backgrounds and thought-processes.

Interestingly you can pick up several of those skills, or least some basics thereof, by staying in school and devoting the time it deserves to that pursuit.

Experience trumps qualifications. Every single time. Once you're working a few years, no-one (apart from a select few companies like Google) cares about your degree.

Starting out? Don't have experience? Employers have no reason to hire you over the other 50 guys who have no experience but do have degrees.

More importantly, however, the second part about "starting out" applies. No experience, and you are not going to be hired. Not getting hired means you have no way of getting experience, the classic catch-22 situation. The only thing that will get you hired is qualification. No degree, no luck.

I've never written more than a single application for a job (not just any job, but precisely the one I wanted) even when I was a bloody beginner. I know people who, 20 years later, still write 25-30 applications for a job (including jobs which are not their immediate preference) and deem themselves lucky if they are hired, which is often not the case. They're not bad people, they're not even stupid people, they just don't have a degree, and they don't have a compellingly awesome job history.

So... no headhunters calling you for a more lucrative job, no Sir. If your application doesn't go into the round "archiving cabinet" under the desk right away, it will be towards the bottom of the stack of applications, the people with degrees and job history on top, followed by applications by people with a degree only.

I cannot stress it enough: No degree, no luck. Yes, there is this urban myth about quitting school and becoming a billionaire within half a year because you're just so awesome and your idea about a nose hair trimming app makes you rich over night. But realistically, this is not going to happen with any likelihood.

Never been to UK or even went through education there, but here's a grain of salt when it comes to education.

In every subject that you will learn in life, whether that's computer science, programming, art, basketball, hockey, swimming, etc, I find that it's always a good idea to learn it both formally (someone with expertise teaching you) and also your own experience. Don't just rely on your own experience, because many times you don't know what you don't know. Let others who actually have the curriculum (based on their own and others experience) show you what else out there that you can learn. Although their methods of teaching can be a different story.

My first and second year in college also bored me. Challenge didn't start until 3rd, and 4th year was when it became fun.

And I don't agree with you, because I learned a lot of fundamental stuff from here. When I ask for feedback, everyone is giving me high quality feedback and I don't get that in uni.

As amazing as it may sound to you, a lot of that quality stuff is coming from university education, and practical experience.

I think you expect to learn the wrong things in University.

A University teaches you foremost how to make sense out of chaos and invent new things. You get these huge unstructured seemingly impossible problems. (Extreme example: Invent the next generation X thingie, must be twice as fast, and 3 times lighter, preferably done in a year please.) It's up to you to unravel the problem into a nice structure, so you can reason about it, and find a novel solution (current X thingie has already taken all technology to the edge, so twice as fast and three times lighter is not a simple extrapolation of existing technology). Unlike the normal solutions, novel solutions don't exist at the Internet. They also cannot be asked about at a forum, since they are completely new, nobody has ever tried anything like it. Most people don't even understand your problem.

To do that you need a deep understanding of all the subjects and all theory, at the level where you can mix and match various pieces of theory, and do the impossible.

Note that the real interesting stuff is not at the global overview level. The real good stuff is in the deep details. Those details make that the solution is a solution. You need those details to understand how to solve your future impossible problems.

When reading a solution to a problem it often looks extremely trivial often, I agree. This is also the experience of a researcher, in fact, it's often a sign that the solution is a really good one. The point is however, you have to find such a solution in your chaos problem without knowing where to look or which direction to go for an answer, in fact, you don't even know if the problem is solvable at all.

What a university doesn't do is learn you practical things. You won't learn real-world programming, using a version control system, or how to install a computer, or whatever.

If you're bored, why not make it interesting for yourself?

I spent a lot of time digging around in a Linux machine, figuring out how it worked in detail, what all the system calls do, how to use a tape drive, etc.

EDIT: I also spend years inventing little interesting problems, and try to solve them with a computer. If it failed, I needed more thinking, if it worked, I was sure I could find a better solution than I had. Both were true.

Also, any university has a huuuuge library with more books than you can read (for a long time, I read every book I could lay my hands on). It also has access to many research papers published in journals. It covers all topics you can imagine, and more.

In all, it doesn't matter much what you do, but spend your time learning, now is your chance.

One option you could do, is learning what the courses aim to do, but at a deeper level.