I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have a bit of insight here. I've been happily employed in the games industry for the past 10 years and don't have a

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have a bit of insight here. I've been happily employed in the games industry for the past 10 years and don't have any plans to leave it, but while I have absolutely recommended programming/software dev as a career field to people before, I would hesitate to _suggest_ the games industry to someone who wasn't already excited about it. To your comment, making games is great and fun and I think it's great you want to do it. Working in the games industry is different from making your own games though. For one - you pretty much will never have creative input on the game you're making as a programmer (unless you're on a really small team). Probably the biggest reason to avoid the games industry is salary. Game developers make less than their peers in other areas of software development. Lots of people blame this on there being a huge supply of fresh grads to hire cheaply, but that explanation feels like a myopic/simplified view from people on the outside looking in to me. My opinions aside, the fact is that if I left my job today and got a job programming something that wasn't games, I'd almost certainly make more money. I'm paid well enough to live a very comfortable life, but if your goal is just to maximize how much money you make, game dev is a bad choice. Next thing to point to is crunch. Game development is notorious for "crunch" (aka - long periods of 70-80 hour weeks). Some studios do this more than others. It always sucks. It's also a fact of life in games. Even teams that "don't crunch" will usually wind up doing something like it at some point. I honestly have no idea if other programming fields do this too, it's just a common criticism that I've seen levelled at games industry jobs. Being a game developer also means that you're not working with the kinds of tech stacks that the larger software industry as a whole is using, which feels like it would make switching fields more difficult (not that I've tried). For example: I haven't had to build a real database since college, have written maybe two unit tests in my life and don't think I've ever worked anywhere that's used the C++ standard library, despite working in C++ for most of my career. It's also super unstable. It feels like most game studios will close (or transition to not making games) within ~10 years of starting up. Layoffs and studio closures are also a really common occurrence. Every time a meeting gets randomly added to my calendar at the last minute, my first thought is that a layoff is going to be announced (even though this has literally never happened at my current job). This is less of a concern at large studios (although definitely still a thing), it's a huge deal if your dream is to work at indie studios though. There are lots of great things about working in games, but the above wall of text are some of the reasons why I'd hesitate to encourage folks who aren't already interested in the field to choose game development as a career.