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People want to work in the video game industry so they are willing to take less pay in order to work in it.

Too true. The "teenager who likes to play a lot of video games and therefore enrolls in a compsci undergrad program" is an extremely common pipeline.

Not too many teens choose a career in programming because they want to build a robust framework that allows construction of large-scale analytical queries on unstructured data.

Yeah, writing boring HR software pays a whole lot better than game programming because one brings you joy and the other makes you a nihilist.

Based on what I've read about working in the games industry, joy is fleeting between ridiculous crunches, which seem to be nearly ubiquitous.

IMHO, neither is the most interesting work. There are some really interesting jobs writing software for machines with life-and-death consequences. Imagine knowing that your software is implanted in a human, or that we rely on it to prevent a huge pipeline from exploding.

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