Running into a self-taught person at all was rare, but when I did their story rarely involved not transferring from another career and leveraging some SME knowledge to get started. They already had training or a degree just not in this.
I'm not sure screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore.
There are definitely places that won’t talk to you without a degree, but many, many places will take a degree or equivalent.
> screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore
I don’t think “screwing around” will land you a job whether it’s at home or at college/uni. But a degree tells me that you can stick by something for longer than a few months even when you don’t always feel like it by our own volition.
Someone who has spent a year on and off learning to code hasn’t shown they can code or that they have any sort of consistency- both of which are (equally) as important as each other in a workplace. Someone with a degree in marine biology and a handful of GitHub projects and can pass a programming test? They’re probably my first choice. Someone with 3 years experience of writing code on their own? Absolutely. Show me those candidates and I’ll interview every one of them for a junior role.
Not speaking for where you work but they might not even pass the automated resume filters anymore unfortunately.
I go back to school for the remaining 2 years, and when I graduated I had 5 competing offers with salaries starting at double what I would have accepted when I had not finished school. This huge reversal in outcomes was purely the college degree as far as I can tell- I had less time to send out applications, no internships, and no new personal projects of any substance.
My experience is that there are too many college grads and boot campers with github profiles to get into the industry off of some basic home tinkering.
If you're going to do it, I imagine you've got to go one step up and stand out.
Like Minecraft? Factorio? Modern tools allow for very small team to quickly generate very AAA games. Eye candy is still an issue, but AI is quickly creeping into that space. I would not be surprised if within the next decade we have the tools for a single person to generate what we would today call a AAA game.
Minecraft and Factorio are both simpler productions in terms of visual fidelity and lean on gameplay that is captivating. AAA is not a label for the quality of game, more of a style/level of execution.
Both Minecraft and Factorio started indie to my knowledge which is a separate path and approach from AAA games. Unrelated to good/bad.
Also, Factorio was crowdfunded via a kickstarter-like platform.
Also both are around 15 years old. They are both closer in age to 1995 than today.
So by definition, they did not use modern tools.
To be clear, there are plenty of games that do that, I just think those 2 are terrible examples.
AAA requires not just using but creating the latest visual and audio innovations, creating a huge surface area prone to bugs which all need to be polished out and creating tools to manage your version of that complexity, optimize everything so it runs smoothly and doesn't take an unreasonable amount of disk space.
Even with AI, anything an individual could do, hundreds to thousands of people are also doing at AAA studios. An individual might innovate in a few aspect, but never clear the AAA bar as AAA is a constantly moving goalpost, and most tools the individual can use are likely contributed back by AAA studios to popular AAA game engines like Unreal.
It's like racing in a hamster wheel against the person making the wheels...