A couple good comments here, but I'll add my $0.02. Video game programmers often need to be very deep generalists. It's a combination of 1) the reality of smal

A couple good comments here, but I'll add my $0.02. Video game programmers often need to be very deep generalists. It's a combination of 1) the reality of small teams working on ambitious games, 2) increased expectations for what a videogame can do by default ("what do you mean I can't join a party with my friends?!"), and 3) video games are deeply, deeply bespoke software, and to implement one feature means you need to know the limitations of many subsystems. A good friend of mine works on the World of Warcraft gameplay development team. They have ~50 engineers, and they're almost all full-stack to some degree. He said that when he was an intern on the team, to build a feature he needed working knowledge of: 1. Blizzard's battle.net network layer 2. The way textures were rendered onto character models, pixel-by-pixel 3. The intricacies of their in-house Lua engine and parser 4. The way that NPC AI was written None of these requirements, by themselves, are too crazy; but he was using all of these, every day, as a junior in college! And that was for a three-sprint project! As an intern!