Generally speaking, yes. Although what type of programming are you talking? Entire games? Tools to help the developers? AI?.

As far as programming games I've found, if you want to get in to the games industry and work for a company it is quite hard with no prior experience, unless you know people already in the industry. They all seem to be looking for 3+ years experience with multiple shipped titles. Alot of people i know have worked their way up starting with Quality Assurance and taking jobs that are offered internally. Even then its hard to land a QA job without knowing people or being lucky, due to the amount of people that apply for them.