I saw this happening (and was told about it by my professors who still worked in the industry) 14 years ago in college and decided that I’d rather work at the fish market I worked at as a summer job throughout high school rather than go through a 4 year degree program just to make the same amount of money I was already making.
The brain drain is real, and the companies don’t care because there’s always fresh college kids right out of Digipen, Full Sail, or wherever else, ready to work for peanuts because they’re passionate about making games.
We see this a lot in engineering as well. The flashy and defense companies have undergrads lined up and frothing at the mouth to try and work for them.
Then the utility companies pay better, better benefits, and at 4pm you are done. Meanwhile the high profile companies have new hires doing bitch work and working 60 hours a week.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve heard that companies like Raytheon have direct connections to some of the big colleges so that kids basically already have a job working for them by the time they graduate. The games industry occasionally has something similar. Portal, for example, was originally the senior project of a couple of kids from Digipen, and Valve hired them right out of college to turn it into a AAA game.
I saw this happening (and was told about it by my professors who still worked in the industry) 14 years ago in college and decided that I’d rather work at the fish market I worked at as a summer job throughout high school rather than go through a 4 year degree program just to make the same amount of money I was already making.
The brain drain is real, and the companies don’t care because there’s always fresh college kids right out of Digipen, Full Sail, or wherever else, ready to work for peanuts because they’re passionate about making games.
We see this a lot in engineering as well. The flashy and defense companies have undergrads lined up and frothing at the mouth to try and work for them.
Then the utility companies pay better, better benefits, and at 4pm you are done. Meanwhile the high profile companies have new hires doing bitch work and working 60 hours a week.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve heard that companies like Raytheon have direct connections to some of the big colleges so that kids basically already have a job working for them by the time they graduate. The games industry occasionally has something similar. Portal, for example, was originally the senior project of a couple of kids from Digipen, and Valve hired them right out of college to turn it into a AAA game.