Not terribly often. It does happen on occasion when someone has a lot of transferable experience from a parallel field (e.g. a server programmer), but in those cases the candidate has the years of experience in a similar industry. If you’re talking about the wunderkind type who is just naturally gifted and makes all the right calls, it’s actually pretty rare. Game dev is a skill without a lot of academic establishment. There aren’t a lot of ways to earn that experience outside of directly doing the work. The closest you’d be able to find would be the gifted devs who obtain battlefield promotions by showing skills to their leads during development.

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