It's a tough 2026 out there, bad events are rolling across the world in waves, and that's reflected in our beloved IT too: mass layoffs, sweeping budget cuts, company shutdowns and bankruptcies. Against the backdrop of these sad events, many people (even experienced and worthy ones) are now losing their jobs in IT, which stirs up an unhealthy enthusiasm and even gloating in those who remain.
Well, @alex0x08 came up with a great dramatic intro — except, where would we be now without those other "random" people. Off the top of my head: the man who invented the genre that now rakes in half the box office of the entire game industry was an insurance agent. The genre is called RPG, the man was named Gary Gygax, and all he did was invent Dungeons & Dragons.
And this is not an isolated case, and for some reason it's customary to bashfully forget about it every time someone in yet another article writes "without a relevant degree, don't even bother". I can tell you that the history of the game industry is a history of lawyers, homemakers, pilots, ushers, canned-bean exporters, and dropout architects who came out of nowhere and built everything you've played for the last forty years.
So the next time you open an article with a headline along the lines of "can you get into IT without experience/a degree/after thirty/from a completely different profession", just scroll through this list one more time. Are you still against random people in IT?
Don Daglow studied to be a playwright and taught himself to program on a PDP-10 — a playwright, I remind you. In 1971 he wrote the first baseball game, and in 1975 another one, Dungeon, and created one of the first computer RPGs in history. Nobody issued him a license to invent a genre, and he didn't have much of an education either.
The Oregon Trail, which a couple of generations of American schoolchildren would later play through, was put together in 1971 by three education students (Don Rawitsch — history, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger — math) who knew a bit of code. Three future teachers accidentally made one of the most-referenced games in history, because they needed something to occupy a class. Not programmers, I remind you.
Richard Garriott was just a teenager behind the counter of a ComputerLand store, and turned his hobby into Akalabeth (1979) and then the Ultima series, which would define what role-playing games are supposed to look like in general. And note: none of them had "relevant experience" — in fact relevant experience didn't even exist yet; these were the very people creating it.
Shigeru Miyamoto came to Nintendo to draw, not to code, because he was an artist and an industrial designer by education. Donkey Kong (1981) was made by a man hired for his ability to draw apes, not for his knowledge of assembly.
Toru Iwatani was a pure self-taught guy with no education in either programming or graphic design, came to Namco at 22, and made Pac-Man by analogy with a pizza with a slice taken out. So the historians say. He unwittingly designed the game to appeal to women, because arcades back then were the territory of male company. That is, a man with no relevant degree got the marketing positioning right decades ahead of time too.
Roberta Williams was, mind you, a homemaker with no technical education whatsoever, but she got hooked on text adventures and made Mystery House (1980), and then King's Quest.
Will Wright, a dropout architect, and his self-described "lack of focus" poured straight into the sandbox genre, starting with SimCity (1989). What hiring calls the red flag of "didn't finish his studies, can't focus on anything" turned out to be exactly the quality you need to come up with a game that has no goals and no win conditions.
Jordan Mechner was obsessed with cinema, not programming, and made the animation for Prince of Persia with rotoscoping, from video of his brother running and jumping, then traced the movements frame by frame.
Hideo Kojima is an economist by education and actually dreamed of becoming a film director; he joined Konami against his family's wishes and made Metal Gear (1987). And he still makes films — it's just that his films are interactive and feature Kiefer Sutherland.
And the best story from the '80s is pure trash and chaos. This character founded a company called Taurus that exported canned beans to the Middle East. Beans, damn it. In cans. Commodore mistook Taurus for the software firm Torus and offered free Amiga machines, and instead of politely explaining that he traded in legumes, he took the hardware and made Populous (1989), giving birth to the god-game genre. Did you recognize Peter Molyneux here? You have a whole branch of the industry existing because of a typo in the name of a company that sells beans.
You can also recall Bill Stealey, a former pilot who together with Sid Meier founded MicroProse (1982) and made flight simulators. The man actually flew, and in his case the "irrelevant experience" was about the most relevant you could imagine.
American McGee dropped out of school and worked as an auto mechanic, and got into id Software because he happened to be John Carmack's neighbor — that is, a career at one of the most important studios in history was decided by a lucky housing rental. Then came Doom II, Quake, and his own Alice.
Or another French self-taught guy, an artist and musician, who made Another World (1991) practically single-handedly, drawing, programming, and scoring almost all of it himself. His name is Éric Chahi.
Hidetaka Miyazaki worked as an account manager at Oracle and didn't play games. At 29 he got into FromSoftware; other studios refused to hire him. Then came Demon's Souls (2009) and a whole genre that's now named after him in every other sentence. The industry nearly filtered out the man who redefined difficulty in games on a formal "no experience, wrong age".
Markus Persson, a self-taught programmer with no relevant higher education at all, single-handedly built Minecraft (2009), the best-selling game in history. Tarn Adams in 2006, holding a PhD in math (okay, maybe that one's close), made Dwarf Fortress — that is, here a man actually left academia for gamedev, which, by the standards of expectations of some commenters from previous articles, is roughly the same as quitting programming for beans.
Eric Barone worked as an usher at a movie theater — i.e. he tore tickets and seated people. For five years he single-handedly made Stardew Valley, drawing all the art, writing all the code, and composing all the music himself, largely to learn the very things he was being turned down for at interviews.
Greg Kasavin spent over ten years as an editor and editor-in-chief of the game site GameSpot — that is, the very journalist who writes about games rather than making them — and then moved to Supergiant and became the writer of Bastion and Hades.
Davey Wreden studied film criticism, and started The Stanley Parable in 2011 as a mod for Half-Life 2, learning development on the fly. So: journalists, ushers, film scholars, and risk analysts — and not a single one a programmer by education. If you wrote their past job titles in a column and showed them to any HR person, not one of these people would pass even a first junior screening. And I've surely forgotten many, many more.
And none of them had relevant experience at the point of entry, or it didn't overlap at all with what they ended up making — and each of them, on entry, was exactly that "person from the wrong field" whom it's customary today to turn away at the very first interview.
So the next time you open yet another article with a headline along the lines of "can you get into IT without experience/a degree/after thirty/from a completely different profession", scroll through this list one more time.
Are you still against random people in IT?
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