That's a fair point and I can totally relate to it. There's a toxic relationship of startups always trying to one up each other to attract more attention as a great place to work and in general tech stack is just another tool on this fight. As a consequence workers are pushed to the same mindset, where fixing a problem with 10 microservices and a dozen AWS services is the expected and if you prove you can solve the same problem with a single machine running a cronjob with no external dependencies you're the weird one.

That's a really common pattern in gamedev too. Median career is something like ~3 years so those that stick around are okay with the crunch and other shitty parts of the industry.

Combine that with gatekeeping/I did my time you have to do yours and not much has changed there over the years.

What’s the pay like for senior games engineers?

levels.fyi

You don't even have to go that drastic. I was also tired of the "new technology treadmill" in software development, so I just changed roles in the same industry. Did a little product management for a while then settled on project management--for those same software companies. The pay is much worse but at least I'm not spending my time re-writing working software into "non-working software, but hey, it's in Scala."

yup I started my career and felt this way pretty quickly, I'm now trying to get a PhD instead, I love solving problems, so this seems like a good idea.

I'm sure there are some great companies out there, but they seem to be rare. I just see don't see work in this industry to be sustainable and I cant see myself working as a Software Engineer when I'm 30+ or with a family.

One of the most relatable posts I've ever seen on HN. Same reason I'm working towards getting out.

It´s kind of sad. I am the same. I want to do something different but I don´t know much else and the pay is reasonable (reasonable, not great, I am in Spain).