I got into programming for games back when I was ~10, started making little things then and then working on MUDs and text games through my teens and then ended up in government and business software development for ~15 years.

This is pretty much me, except after 15 years, I've decided that I'm not really that interested in the kind of horrific hours and crap pay that most game programmers put up with and I'd much rather spend my free time doing things that don't involve programming anymore.

I still think game development is fascinating, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the rest of my life for it. If I could get a job in the games industry which paid well and didn't require tonnes of crunch time, I'd probably be motivated to do as Sean did and try to break into the industry, but I think it's probably too late for me.

Pretty much on the same boat. I started programming because of games. After guerilling long hours, I concluded that any front-end development, including games, is just bad career choice for programmers. You are practically not in control of your own code. Product managers/producers/sales/random executive directors become your 'bosses'. They command you the direction of your app/games, e.g. how fast your fade-in animation should be.

Tired of zero leadership by people who don't actually care about games, or have any clue at all about software craftmanship but pretend they are the next Steve Jobs (god, there are so many of those people nowadays in the tech startups), I move to backend/server-side engineering. Nobody can tell me whether doing X or Y is better, except folks who are also engineers themselves, which I am happy to have discussion/arguments with.

I got into programming for games back when I was ~10, started making little things then and then working on MUDs and text games through my teens and then ended up in government and business software development for ~15 years.

This is pretty much me, except after 15 years, I've decided that I'm not really that interested in the kind of horrific hours and crap pay that most game programmers put up with and I'd much rather spend my free time doing things that don't involve programming anymore.

I still think game development is fascinating, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the rest of my life for it. If I could get a job in the games industry which paid well and didn't require tonnes of crunch time, I'd probably be motivated to do as Sean did and try to break into the industry, but I think it's probably too late for me.

Pretty much on the same boat. I started programming because of games. After guerilling long hours, I concluded that any front-end development, including games, is just bad career choice for programmers. You are practically not in control of your own code. Product managers/producers/sales/random executive directors become your 'bosses'. They command you the direction of your app/games, e.g. how fast your fade-in animation should be.

Tired of zero leadership by people who don't actually care about games, or have any clue at all about software craftmanship but pretend they are the next Steve Jobs (god, there are so many of those people nowadays in the tech startups), I move to backend/server-side engineering. Nobody can tell me whether doing X or Y is better, except folks who are also engineers themselves, which I am happy to have discussion/arguments with.

This is not unique to games - software development in general (and I imagine most industries as well) is plagued by people who try to do too much "hands on" in areas they are not qualified to have an opinion because they have a higher pay grade, or wear a suit, or whatever.

That being said, I've been lucky enough to not have to work under people who don't like games. There are some cases of people trying to dictate things that shouldn't be dictated, but that usually shakes out in the end when the result doesn't work or is sub-optimal and has to be changed.

And then there's the stuff that's been in the code base for 10 years that you can't change because that's how its always worked and no, you can't take the game down for everyone for a week to make it "better".

But again, that's not unique to games.

More on-topic, I started out young with just programming in general. Getting my parent's Mac to do interesting stuff with Basic, Pascal, and finally C before moving to a PC and C++. At the time I also really enjoyed computer games, so the two just kind of fit together really well (aside from my inability to do any kind of art for the stuff I made).

Pretty much on the same boat. I started programming because of games. After guerilling long hours, I concluded that any front-end development, including games, is just bad career choice for programmers. You are practically not in control of your own code. Product managers/producers/sales/random executive directors become your 'bosses'. They command you the direction of your app/games, e.g. how fast your fade-in animation should be.

Tired of zero leadership by people who don't actually care about games, or have any clue at all about software craftmanship but pretend they are the next Steve Jobs (god, there are so many of those people nowadays in the tech startups), I move to backend/server-side engineering. Nobody can tell me whether doing X or Y is better, except folks who are also engineers themselves, which I am happy to have discussion/arguments with.

Realistically that is what happens when somebody is paying you six figures a year to program for them. If you want "full control" make your own games. This is also why I never went for the AAA sphere and stayed with the funded indie companies. Everybody who works there generally likes making games since there really isn't room for ladder climbers.

Games got me interested in programming but I really wanted to do systems programming back when I was learning. I always thought it was neat to try and make device drivers and work with embedded systems. I kind of fell in to making games as I was just applying everywhere after school and a startup making a PC game gave me a chance. I've just stayed with it ever since. Now that I'm not 20 anymore making games is slowly destroying my desire to play games so I'm starting to look for an exit in to enterprise development. That kind of seems to be the way with game development though.