I've heard that the salary for game programmers is pretty low compared to other fields. Is this also true for graphics programmers in general? E.g. jobs in AR/VR.
I am a former game dev who worked for one of the top AAA game studios in the world in a lead programmer role. At my first FAANG job, my compensation was like 2x higher than game dev. Now it’s many times higher still but admittedly I have been out of gaming for 15 years and have a senior leadership role. I generally do think that for a given talent/experience level the rest of the industry pays much more with way better work-life balance, it’s a combination of supply/demand and business model (at least for AAA) vs SaaS. You can strike it big in games if you are lucky (e.g. create Minecraft) but it’s much easier to do that at a startup or big tech.
The reason salaries for game programmers are so low is that there is an effectively endless supply of new crops of graduates who have told themselves since they were 12 that they want to make video games for a living. Classic supply and demand dictates that, with such a high supply, big studios can get away with paying very little (and can extract additional "benefits" as well, such as demanding insane hours and so on).