[imcrs]

He has a point though. The author chose lawyers as a comparison point. Why? Manual laborers work long hours. People with two or three part time retail jobs work long hours.

Lawyers have a different set of qualifications and requirements than game developers do.

[csydas]

I think that this is sort of missing part of the comparison in that it's meant to compare similar highly demanding jobs which require a specialized education. While labor is incredibly important and I respect the hard work, it's a different skillset entirely that doesn't have the same prequisetes. I would suggest the comparison is between professions with the same demanding hours and same demanding prequisetes, not just the hours. It's not to diminish other jobs with long hours, it's just they're not the focus of the comparison.

(To further elaborate, my very first job was picking flat stone at a quarry, since it was popular for home gardens at the time and machines couldn't get the stones easily without breaking them. Long hours of hard work in the dirt and mud plus many split knuckles and crushed fingers. Still, I was able to do it as a 15 year old unsupervised and with no training. It was useful and hard work, but not really the same as the IT I do now, the majority of which is watching progress bars.)

[dinkumthinkum]

I think your point is a little hard to discern. Who do you think educationally game programmers are more similar to: Manual laborers or Lawyers? Other than the regulation of the latter, I think it is clear they are more similar to lawyers. Serious game programming requires fairly extensive knowledge in multiple disciplines of computing particular graphics and rendering, AI, at least some basic algorithmic knowledge and competency with programming that is much more technical than "make yet another web app in a hipster JS framework," to just be honest it. There are many people in the game development industry with MS degrees and even some PhDs. This I think is more similar professional "status" than brick laying, I think.