If you are over qualified, like having published several games on your own, it's not like they don't think you can do they job, they might think you will get bored and miserable.
Interviewer: "Why do you want to work for us?"
Me: "Honestly, I don't want to work for anybody because I have too much other stuff I'd much rather be doing with my time. But I need an income to sustain myself so, if I'm going to work, I want to work here because I think it'll be easy, provide decent benefits, and it's a 20 minute bike ride from my house."
Albert Einstein for example worked for several years as a patent examiner while developing special relativity. Sure his contemporary physicists mostly worked in academia, but teaching is as unrelated to research as everything else yet they still did it.
And yes, my blade is quite dull at this point!
And I said to the director of engineering who recruited me, more or less this:
"I can do all those and be rather good at them, too. But right now I want to focus on my physical and mental health so I want to work as a senior programmer with minimum supervision who takes ownership of big features or refactorings, and to be knee-deep in the code. All other soft skills that I have I only want to utilize to become the best colleague that you have."
My honesty was highly appreciated and I got an immediate job offer. I like the job. It's relatively chill, the colleagues are nice, the challenges are doable, and there's almost no pressure. I am mostly okay working for the company.
So long story short, I completely agree with you: sometimes you need a chill job so you can focus more on your life.
The thorniest situation is the overqualified, currently unemployed candidate. That person is often not trying to make a lifestyle change, but instead looking to pick up a paycheck for a few months until something better comes along (for good reason!).
So now I do enterprise development for my day job and work on games on nights and weekends. And enterprise development isn't inherently boring either.
Programming is still programming, in both games and enterprise software there are times where you just need to power through easy boilerplate with some music or a podcast on, and other times where it's an intricate puzzle you have to mull over in silence, do some research or experimenting on, ask your colleagues for their opinions or insight, etc.
Many great coders suck at communication or are just not nice to be around.
I've seen amazing "coders" not being hired because they can't have a good conversation during the interview. I'm sure they're the same ones that complain about interviews being too hard.
It was a fine and relevant comment until that part ._.