If you want to be a game developer its more than a fact that you must have a B.S. in either Computer Science or Engineering. I can't possibly imagine anyone without a strong college education matching up a graduate from a high-ranking university. In respect to the guy you mentioned everything depends on the sort of education he obtained. Is he a graduate from a shi*ty community college or one of those technical institutes? If so I wouldn't be expecting much from him either.
I am currently pursuing a B.S. in Mathematics (Computer Science concentration) in an Ivy-League College and it is obvious that I haven't been trained in respect to game programming. If I want to be a game developer I obviously have to learn technologies that go beyond the standards of academic education. Like OpenGL, Direct X, the win32 API, and perhaps modeller tools like Maya/3DStudioMax, along with scripting languages that are not part of the college curriculum like LUA, Python, PHP, Perl or the like.
This is what most people tend to confuse and wrongfully think a college education is worthless to be a game programmer, and they couldn't be farther from the truth. Back when I was in high school I learned a little C++ and thought I was good enough to do about anything, then I tried learning win32 and Direct X and it seemed like an effort in impossibility, I was able to perform certain hacks and draw some basic stuff but technically I didn't know sh*t and couldn't possibly aspire to make a complex project like a game. Now I am an expert C/C++ and Assembly programmer thanks to the education I received (Procedural, OOP, Data Structures, Systems Programming, Architecture Design, Software Engineering, and O/S programming, plus the mathematics: Calculus 1/2/3, Diff Equations, Numerical Analysis, etc. which considerably helped to logic and rational design of programs) and I learned the win32 API in a couple of days and currently am learning DirectX 8/9. The difference is that now I have the knowledge to make a 3D engine thanks to my college education, if I had stayed at home reading books on my own by this point the best I could aspire for would be to remake Tetris on SDL. And probably a buggy version with 10% of the GBA's version functionality.
