Take the programing path in life?

[Davidobot]

As a suggestion, check out Meteor. It's a very new, absolutely awesome javascript based framework that combines front-end and back-end into a single application. It blew me away when I first saw it And because it's mostly javascript it should look pretty familiar; Javascript resembles Lua quite a bit.

Wow, thanks for introducing me to Meteor! It looks amazing, I'll be sure to check it out.

[Ekamu]

also indie games these days are really well received.

that being said you don't really "need" to find a job for games programming and the creative freedom you get as an indie make it all that more worth your time. You can make the games you want to make and this is a lot more fulfilling for someone who has it in their soul.

On the business side of things (no offence) games programmers have one of the worst jobs in the field of computer science...Low job security, competition is rough and cut-throat, the work hours are rigorous and most of all you cant just be creative and have fun anymore. Its just work and very hard work.
In today's video-game industry. Its big business which means no body is going to care about your cool new idea (because such risks would mean loss) unless you are working for a small indie team or you are solo either-way the big companies have a lot of pressure to make as much money as possible. It's not about making games, its just business. If you enjoy being under appreciated and over-worked then its the perfect job for you.

The only drawbacks of being independent (indie) is you might or wont make enough money to make a living and you wont have enough man-power to pull off some HD-massive content game with networking and lots of hype that you see in the mainstream industry. If you ask me, indie games keep getting better and better as the days go by and the mainstream games I see today are starting to look really hollow once you see past those amazing graphics and features. They lack in spirit.

For someone who has it in their soul, for someone who loves programming and video-games to the core. I say forget about the hype, just get a nice stable job that is related to web design or computer science (something that also gives you free time) and have fun making really unique and special games that mean something to you. If your very serious you can easily collaborate with a few people with that same spirit and form a small team. If you manage to keep that childhood innocence and fun spirit into making your games then I'm sure you will be able to make it a profession. Simply put everyone who truly loves games is craving for more heart felt games, because of that you will most probably make your impact on the gaming industry if you do it out of LOVE (no pun intended).

You set your own path. be free and creative and never give up your dreams! Whatever path you take, its always an uphill battle either-way.

[jjmafiae]

while we are at indie games let me introduce you all to this:
Click me

and this:

Click me

[Murii]

also indie games these days are really well received.

that being said you don't really "need" to find a job for games programming and the creative freedom you get as an indie make it all that more worth your time. You can make the games you want to make and this is a lot more fulfilling for someone who has it in their soul.

On the business side of things (no offence) games programmers have one of the worst jobs in the field of computer science...Low job security, competition is rough and cut-throat, the work hours are rigorous and most of all you cant just be creative and have fun anymore. Its just work and very hard work.
In today's video-game industry. Its big business which means no body is going to care about your cool new idea (because such risks would mean loss) unless you are working for a small indie team or you are solo either-way the big companies have a lot of pressure to make as much money as possible. It's not about making games, its just business. If you enjoy being under appreciated and over-worked then its the perfect job for you.

The only drawbacks of being independent (indie) is you might or wont make enough money to make a living and you wont have enough man-power to pull off some HD-massive content game with networking and lots of hype that you see in the mainstream industry. If you ask me, indie games keep getting better and better as the days go by and the mainstream games I see today are starting to look really hollow once you see past those amazing graphics and features. They lack in spirit.

For someone who has it in their soul, for someone who loves programming and video-games to the core. I say forget about the hype, just get a nice stable job that is related to web design or computer science (something that also gives you free time) and have fun making really unique and special games that mean something to you. If your very serious you can easily collaborate with a few people with that same spirit and form a small team. If you manage to keep that childhood innocence and fun spirit into making your games then I'm sure you will be able to make it a profession. Simply put everyone who truly loves games is craving for more heart felt games, because of that you will most probably make your impact on the gaming industry if you do it out of LOVE (no pun intended).

You set your own path. be free and creative and never give up your dreams! Whatever path you take, its always an uphill battle either-way.

Very nicely said!

[hiimjosh]

I wouldn't worry about making that choice yet. The best thing about college is that you can experiment. You can take CS classes while you do your Bio/Chem classes. In fact, that would give you a huge breadth of experience in the fundamentals of a number of fields and could open doors for you to combine the two.

That said, here's my take on life as a programmer:

PROS:
- Cool technology is always being released
- Easy to get a job
- Pays well
- Lots of options (web dev, game dev, embedded, startup, enterprise, contract, consulting, etc)
- Flexibility in your hours, work environment, and time management (it's pretty hard not to get distracted on a computer sometimes)
- You'll wonder how it's possible that people don't know how to make scripts for manual tasks
- Composing lots of different technologies and systems is really fun and rewarding

CONS:
- At a desk a lot of the time (not necessarily alone by yourself as many projects require many people to communicate, but you are inside at a desk)
- Strain on eyes/back
- Makes computers kind of boring sometimes
- Being trapped in legacy code and tools can be brutally painful
- Work can be slow, stressful, and repetitive at times

I've always liked math. Not number crunching; logic problems and the such. I'm not great at them, but I think they are interesting. I didn't really do any coding until my junior year of college where I pretty much fell in love solving little coding puzzles in C. I was able to get involved with web development in grad school and have been doing it ever since.

While math is fundamentally important to programming, you don't need to be able to solve complicated math problems. You don't really need to know any math, but it's very useful to be able to think logically if you start working on big or complex problems. It's important to be able to identify causes of inefficiency and to be able to apply techniques to solve those kinds of problems (I usually just open a text book or google to refresh my brain on things). Those types of issues are pretty rare though. Usually it's just good design skills that you need to understand (e.g. scope, coupling, modularity, message passing). In that sense, an education can be very useful. But it's by no means required, and there are plenty of jobs that don't run into these types of problems on a recurring basis (although, you can expect that kind of stuff if you're working on teams with multi-million line codebases).

So, my recommendation is that you leave your options open for as long as humanly possible