What should I focus on learning to get a job doing high level programming instead of low level programming?

Question

I am in last year of college. I want to get a job in games industry as programmer but I don't want to do low-level programming. I want to do something AI and machine learning related. Am I in the wrong industry? Should I change focus to other jobs other than games industry?

By low level programming I mean, for example, connecting XNA and windows Forms or whatever. I mean I don't care about those kind of things, I want to work on higher level like doing fuzzy logic, how does the AI decide what to build in RTS and so on...

Answer 1

I am in last year of college. I want to get a job in games industry as programmer but I don't want to do low-level programming. ... By low level programming I mean, for example, connecting XNA and windows Forms or whatever. I mean I don't care about those kind of things, I want to work on higher level like doing fuzzy logic, how does the AI decide what to build in RTS and so on...

As an entry-level programmer, you're going to have very limited say in what you ultimately end up getting to do -- entry level programmers are often hired as generalists.

You will likely have to spend some time doing some level of grunt work (which is more akin to your apparent definition of "low level" than is traditional); it's the nature of the beast. You are only minimally competent, at best, after college anyhow.

You can help avoid this by paying careful attention in your job interviews to the kind of work other programmers describe doing. You want to find a place where tedious grunt work like connecting forms to the game engine for editors is handled via a resuable architecture platform, and doesn't involve much programmer intervention: where tedious grunt work has been engineered out as much as possible, because the programmers know that grunt work is not intellectually stimulating and they want their fellow programmers to be intellectually stimulated.

That is, assuming you even look for a job in games, because...

I want to do something AI and machine learning related. Am I in the wrong industry? Should I change focus to other jobs other than games industry?

...you may be barking up the wrong tree, unfortunately. The vast majority of "AI" in games is clever disguised scripting and simple, heuristics-based logic models. The games industry is most decades behind the state of the art for artificial intelligence and there is rarely any real opportunity to advance it: even the scripts are usually mostly in the hands of the designers, for maximum gameplay control.

Answer 2

Although you may be able to find a job that only requires High Level programming, it's always a plus in your resume to at least know and understand how low-level works.

Besides, even if you are applying programming on AI and high level concept, you might need from time to time to handle low level (for example optimise your AI computing with GPGPU).

Answer 3

This was going to be a comment, but it's really long enough to be an answer.

The answer is (unfortunately) you can't avoid or minimize low-level work. It's just impossible.

Why? Because high-level is built on low-level. There are layers of abstractions upon abstractions; but at some point, somewhere, abstractions leak or are imperfect, and you need to dig down. How far down depends on the problem. You may find CLR bugs through some third-party's application on top of another third-party's library.

Let me give you an example. You might have a web app which uses ActiveRecord, which in turn uses NHibernate, which in turn uses C#. It's possible to find issues that depend on the way the CLR was implemented on a particular architecture (eg. x64).

Plus, most likely as a developer, if there' s a low-level bug, you will need to trouble-shoot and fix it, because it will impede your high-level work. You can't just say "here, ask X to fix this" because you're a "high-level" developer. YOu have to get the job done, whether it's your code or some other layer of the cake that has the problem.

If I were you, I would pick a fairly high-level platform to specialize in (like XNA, or even XNA specific to X platform) and focus on improving your debugging skills. That will carry you very, very far.

Sorry if this is not the answer you want to hear! This is just the (sometimes sad) reality of code. It's layers, and imperfect abstractions.

Answer 4

As others have mentioned, your question isn't about low-level versus high-level. Let me paraphrase the question.

Can I get a job working on only the "fun" parts of developing a game?

The sobering answer is: probably not. 95% of the jobs on the market require doing the "un-fun" parts too.(Disclaimer: 95% of statistics are made up on the spot) And the 5% of the jobs that are only fun-related are often senior-level positions. They are senior-level positions often because in order to be good at them, you need a lot of industry experience in order to make good design decisions. Note that by "experience" I include "a thorough understanding of the low-level systems you develop on."

Here's the bright side though: you can find developers who have different opinions of "fun." For example, some people love writing game engines and frameworks, but not so much writing the scripts and interaction components that you'd want to work on. You can also find ways to minimize the low-level work by using pre-built frameworks such as Unity, doing mods on other games (like DOTA), or just making technological sacrafices (Solium Infernum comes to mind, the multiplayer is Play-by-Email, and the game is written in some kind of Flash compiler)

Answer 5

I want to do something AI and machine learning related. Am I in the wrong industry? Should I change focus to other jobs other than games industry?

I think so, yeah.

A typical games company has between 0 and 1 AI programmers. And if they do have a dedicated AI programmer, or someone who spends a lot of time on AI, there's hardly any chance that they're using machine learning - it's just not a branch of AI that is commonly used in games, due to being too unreliable compared to more explicit methods.

By low level programming I mean, for example, connecting XNA and windows Forms or whatever.

That's pretty high level by many standards in the games industry: they'd think of low level as writing shaders, optimising C code, writing directly to audio buffers, etc.

I don't think you'll find much work in the games industry that doesn't have you working with graphics and input/output stuff, at least to begin with.