[martincmartin]

How's your work-life balance? I worked in the games industry a couple times, at Activision in the 1990s and later at Rockstar, and like almost the entire industry, everybody was in crunch mode almost all the time. I remember when the list of holidays came around one year, Christmas was on a Saturday so they gave us Friday off. Someone asked if we were also going to have the Saturday, Christmas day, off.

Programming is essentially solving puzzles, so you can find the work interesting even if the topic area isn't interesting. No seven year old says "when I grow up, I want to write a memory allocator!" but doing it well, with as few CPU cycles as possible, without fragmenting memory too much, is an interesting challenge.

I wouldn't worry about what people have in their job descriptions. There's a quote from John Carmack about an ad for a Oculus dev that he technically wouldn't qualify for, and DHH who invented Ruby on Rails, was called by a recruiter asking whether he had 10 years of Rails experience when Rails was only 9 years old. A "Senior C++" engineer might just mean more than 2 years of experience with C++, who knows.