Self taught myself, only starting now after decades in the software industry (from dev to management) studying Math and CS on a bachelor degree out of curiosity and to gain more knowledge.
Early games needed visuals and that was something results were important, which demo guys delivered on machines with still very limited resources. Formal education for games was lacking behind during the 90th. After all, games as a broad industry was a new concept. (EA once produced games for the C64.)
This has changed. With more and more abstractions and more processing power it is more and more important to work on algorithms not hacks.
Most self taughts lack broader concepts, abstractions and especially algorithms. I had to learn everything besides hacking my way into Frontend development.
Would I look out for folks with no degree? Yes and no. I depends on the use case.
On the other side: the world is filled up with mediocre code from people with degrees. There is no guarantee. Only constant learning - and this is a supoerpower at least some self-taughts have.
> Most self taughts lack broader concepts, abstractions and especially algorithms.
As a self-taught who later went to university for pure mathematics (which I got interested in through game programming), that was not my experience with the late 90s, early 2000s generation of self-taught game programmers. I think you have to go back 5 to 10 years earlier for that stereotype to have merit; the transition from 2D to 3D filtered out some people.
In the post-Quake generation, the sexy thing for budding game programmers was 3D graphics programming. For the most part you had no choice [1] but to read, understand and implement SIGRAPH papers and doctoral dissertations to learn the ropes, which in turn forced us to learn a lot of the formal prerequisites albeit unevenly. And there were a lot of advanced data structures involved with visibility determination (and later level of detail), which was the focal point of graphics in the Quake 1 and 2 era before it fell to the wayside once the dominance of GPUs made more brute-force approaches the right choice. So whether you liked it or not, you had to master a decent swath of university-level CS and math.
The main thing self-taughts generally lacked when joining the industry were the same thing all new employees lacked: they don't yet know how to work in teams, they don't know how to manage time, scope and complexity (though it helps if you've worked on larger personal projects of your own), they cannot make long-term engineering trade-offs (reliability, cost of making changes early vs late, flexibility vs performance, etc) because they haven't gone through full project cycles, and so on.
[1] There were a few useful resources like Abrash's Dr. Dobbs articles on Quake which were partially pre-digested for easier consumption by programmers, but it was still daunting if you didn't understand the math. And the rate of progress was so high in this period that the few reliable sources of how-to information were so quickly out of date that you _had_ to keep up with the academic research and experiment by implementing and improving it yourself.
Early games needed visuals and that was something results were important, which demo guys delivered on machines with still very limited resources. Formal education for games was lacking behind during the 90th. After all, games as a broad industry was a new concept. (EA once produced games for the C64.)
This has changed. With more and more abstractions and more processing power it is more and more important to work on algorithms not hacks.
Most self taughts lack broader concepts, abstractions and especially algorithms. I had to learn everything besides hacking my way into Frontend development.
Would I look out for folks with no degree? Yes and no. I depends on the use case.
On the other side: the world is filled up with mediocre code from people with degrees. There is no guarantee. Only constant learning - and this is a supoerpower at least some self-taughts have.