The Difference Between Pros and Amateurs

I always thought I was a good programmer because, you know, Dunning-Kruger. When I got my first programming job we were using a language of which I only had academic knowledge, and I knew I was out of my depth. I spent many weekends reading and studying and trying stuff out on my own in order to get up to speed and learn everything I could about this "Object Oriented" stuff.

A few years later, I got into the games industry. At the time, I had been following John Carmack's .plan updates, reading books and forums, and trying out computer graphics stuff at home. I had demos and knowledge, but even then, I knew that I was "the new kid" in a company filled with industry amateurs. Whatever I already knew about C++ and assembly and computer graphics, I was working with people that had already been in the games industry for years.

Same thing when I got into C# and Web Services, and then with ASP.NET, etc etc.

The difference between pros and amateurs is that pros do it 40 hours a week.

When I was in the games industry proper, I was typically involved in the interviewing process. Many of the candidates that I spoke to had no prior industry experience, but had taken some classes at school, or done some stuff on the side.

The difference between a year working for a game company and a year taking a class is astronomical. A class is three hours a week of instruction, and maybe that again on a project or homework -- and that's just to learn the basics. And you get the summer off, and a few weeks for Winter break, and so on. A year working for a game company is 60 hours a week working on games -- whether that's art or code or design. Plus whatever books you read on the side (for me, easily more than I ever spent reading textbooks in school). Plus the side projects you work on when you're home. Plus meals and recreation time with other industry insiders.

If you want to get into the games industry, don't read blogs for hours every night and think you're learning. The agile manifesto applies here as well: you learn more by doing than by thinking. Thinking through stuff is great, researching is fine, but there's no substitute for getting your hands dirty.

I remember Dave Sim (of Cerebus fame) saying something along the lines of "every artist has 3000 bad pages in him before he'll draw any good pages." Pretty much everything is like that. Sure, you play Guitar Hero on the weekends, but are you a guitarist? Hah, no-one really thinks that. It takes a couple years of practice before anyone would be willing to pay to hear you play. Art is the same way -- remember those art geeks back in high school? Some of them were pretty good. Not, like, professional good, but pretty damn good for high school students. It takes a lot of effort to get good at something. Games are, of course, the same as everything else!

I'm working on a few WinForms apps on the side, and building them has taught me far better than books. Books are great; they're a leg up. They point you in the right direction. But when you need to do something, having experience under your belt is a much better resource than a book. Some books are better than others in this regard. The Wrox ASP.NET 2.0 Problem - Design - Solution book is great, because you do something useful by following the examples. Reading it is ok, but actually building the samples yourself is much better.

And again, compare that you building your own app. Consider what the professional developer is doing -- he has to get something working. He's on a deadline. He's got a boss looking over his shoulder. He's got a client to impress. He's spending forty hours a week getting his hands dirty.

Are you?

If you want to get into the games industry, then take it seriously. Make it your hobby. Build games, code tools, craft models, paint textures, construct levels. And not just on the weekends, and not after spending the day surfing the web, doing "research."