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.
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.