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This conversation around QA seems a good time to mention something I saw when I was at Yorkshire Games Festival this year. I was helping out at a drop in career advice service for students wanting to get into games. A lot of students asked if they should get in through QA.
When I answered you should get into the discipline you want to do, that QA was a career in its own right not a doorway, I got more than a few confused looks.
Their lecturers at uni had been telling them all they could not enter the games industry without 'doing their time' in QA
Their lecturers at uni had been telling them all they could not enter the games industry without 'doing their time' in QA
This is a HUGE problem! Not only are they devaluing QA but they're teaching these kids programming, design and art and then saying they can't get jobs doing it.
So what the fuck are you teaching?
So what the fuck are you teaching?
I told each and every one of them that their tutors are just flat out wrong, that I joined from uni as a Junior Programmer and they can do that too (or designer or artist) and that if they go into QA don't think of it as a rung on the ladder. It's a career. I do worry though..
About the quality of games courses if this is the nonsense getting peddled on them. People who are massively out of touch with the industry giving advice to people who look up to and trust them.. not a good mix.
