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What Game Developers Look for in a New Graduate

What Game Developers Look for in a New Graduate. Interviews and Surveys at One Game Company. Michael Hewner hewner@gatech.edu Mark Guzdial guzdial@cc.gatech.edu. “I want to be a game programmer.”. The Game Company I Worked With. Develops 1st person shooters for mainstream game consoles

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What Game Developers Look for in a New Graduate

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  1. What Game Developers Look for in a New Graduate Interviews and Surveys at One Game Company Michael Hewner hewner@gatech.edu Mark Guzdial guzdial@cc.gatech.edu

  2. “I want to be a game programmer.”

  3. The Game Company I Worked With • Develops 1stperson shooters for mainstream game consoles • Has 100+ employees • Does pretty much everything in-house – programming, art, testing

  4. What do game companies look for in a new graduate?

  5. Related Work • International Game Developers Association Curriculum framework • McGill. “Weighted game developer qualifications for consideration in curriculum development.” SIGCSE 2009 • Trauth, Farwell, Lee. “The IS expectation gap.” MIS Quarterly 1993.

  6. Step 1: Interviews to Define Qualifications • Focused on what qualifications they looked for in an incoming college graduate • Interviewed nine participants: developers, managers and artists • In the second rounds of interviews, participants could see the qualification list we had created and use that to revise our wording or generate new ideas

  7. Step 2: Online Survey • Emailed to whole company • 32 people responded • 5 level Likert-type scale http://bit.ly/sigcse2010

  8. The Scale Not Useful Sometimes useful but not required or evaluated in interviews Important, has an impact on the hiring decision Very Important, has a large impact on a hiring decision Essential, would not hire without good skills in this area

  9. Programming

  10. Optimization

  11. Design

  12. Specializations

  13. People Skills

  14. Other Stuff

  15. Things to Remember • This is the opinion of one game company • Social skills are critical • Fundamentals of algorithms, design, and C++ programming rated more important than specialized game-specific topics

  16. Summary and slides for this talk at http://bit.ly/sigcse2010 Questions? Michael Hewner hewner@gatech.edu Mark Guzdial guzdial@cc.gatech.edu Special thanks to all the game developers who participated in our interviews and surveys. Thanks to the CSL Lab for their feedback on the paper and this talk.

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