Every time I read something like this I just think, "My highschool experience sucked."
I appreciate that the Raspberry Pi foundation was set up in an attempt to readdress this issue, but I for one consider myself very luck -perhaps more so than this generation of kids- to have grown up in an era where school kids had the same (dis)advantages as the games studios. And I think it was that which cemented my desire to work in IT at such an early age - as I felt part of the industry even though I was just throwing together silly BBC / Amstrad BASIC, and later DOS games in Pascal, for my own amusement.
You are absolutely right. I am currently in high school, and I enjoy doing lower-level stuff like game engines, compilers, OSes and hardware.
I am currently thinking of dropping out of school, but it will probably force me to do freelancing and web dev.
It's almost impossible to get a job in any of the areas I am interested without a University degree.
Back in the early days of PCs, I could easily make a hardware startup and earn a decent living, or maybe even get rich. But now it's virtually impossible to do so.
It costs billions of dollars to setup a semiconductor fab and the field is encumbered in patents and politics. Majority of games studios also have budgets with about the same number of digits.
Whatever is making school unbearable for you, fix that problem instead (or ask for help to fix it) of trying to get away from it.
I dropped out of high school at age 16 because it made me fucking miserable, and self-studied for two years to get myself into college. I had a GED, a 3 in AP Calc AB, and a 5 in AP Computer Science by the end.
They admitted me to the honors college at UMass Amherst. I did my undergrad there BSc Computer Science (with honors), specialized in the Programming Languages and Compilers Track.
Today I'm at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, doing a research-track MSc.
You want to do stuff like compilers, OSes and hardware? Screw high school, get yourself to university as fast as possible, and once you're there double down on all of it. For specialized areas like these, even at a good undergrad institution you're going to have to take grad-level courses to get to the Real Deal.
You can do this! So hurry up and get to work!
EDITED to elide bragging. Stupid me.
Joking, of course, this is cool. I wonder how they'll recruit, whether it'll be from pre-existing modding community (does that still exist, given how relatively creaky their games are now?) or completely fresh. I imagine that these days, due to mobile apps and independent engines like Unity, there are more good young devs outside gaming/modding than before.