While I absolutely disagree with the above comment that "bog standard" backend devs have less skills than game devs [0], the call to "passion" does tend to defl

While I absolutely disagree with the above comment that "bog standard" backend devs have less skills than game devs [0], the call to "passion" does tend to deflate salaries and inflate working hours (at very real costs of work/life balance and burnout/early "retirement") in games. (It's among many reasons game developers pretty much need to unionize to avoid mistreatment from management, because "passion" is always going to be a weakness in negotiation.) [0] The call to "passion" tends to work the other direction too in that game developers are overwhelmingly young, fresh out of school, and the turnover ratio in the industry implies a huge turnover of skills and experience over time as well as consequent losses to institutional memory. There aren't a lot of safe spaces in games to build skills and game companies have fewer incentives to retain skilled workers than a lot of the, for instance, "dark matter" enterprise uses of backend developers where the backend developer becomes an institutional knowledge bottleneck.