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Fun story: when I was applying for game jobs in 1994 I sent a 3.5” demo disk with my CV. It had a few little ModeX asm demos, but the piece de resistance was a sort of in-between-Wolfenstein-and-Doom engine. I was quite pleased with it even though it wasn’t half as good as iD’s stuff (who was, except Ken Silverman?)

Anyway I’d made a bunch of disks and sent them off with my CV. A week or so after lots of rejections I discovered a mistake which, when fixed, roughly doubled the frame rate.

@sinbad I don't even know how you'd go about learning enough ASM to do a raycaster today, let alone in the pre-Internet days. How did that not get you in?

@dev_ric I’m not even sure they looked at it. A recruiter told me that because I hadn’t gone to university my CV probably went straight to the bottom of the pile (I got a degree later via Open Uni)

@sinbad urgh that sucks, but also isn't surprising. I have a general dislike for how university is a mandatory for jobs that really don't warrant conventional learning methods, but it seems especially ridiculous in industries like this.

Going to uni to better yourself, because that's an environment that works for you? Great!

Want to architect a building where safety and such is paramount? Yep, you're gonna need to cert up!

Been drawing stuff and want to do it for me? Cool - show and tell!

@dev_ric things changed massively in the decade after I left school. No-one I knew had been to uni and all jobs came with training, usually apprenticeship or day-release, even structural engineering (a friend went down that route & qualified). Companies used to just pay to train their staff over multiple years. The self-funded uni for all approach is extremely capitalist not educational (the giveaway is that it started in the US). I learned very little new from my degree later

@sinbad yeah apprenticeships aren't really much of a thing any more it seems. Neither is just walking into places like grocery stores and pubs to ask for an application form - they don't hire like that at all these days.

Our youngest is 20 and she tried the uni thing but it wasn't really for her, so she came back home about a year ago and had basically been trying to get a decent job ever since, until finally landing one a couple of months ago. Watching the struggle has been eye opening!

@sinbad she wasn't even applying for anything you'd need experience for, let alone a degree. Grocery stores, pubs, that kind of a thing. I don't know when things changed but even for these super low level, bottom of the ladder positions, you now have to go through questionnaires just to get an automated mechanic to decide if you can have an application form, and honestly the kinds of questions these things ask, even I didn't know how to answer - and I've had those jobs! Recruitment is awful now.