Remember dreams?

The past two years of my life have been an exercise in trying to escape the game industry.

There's nothing "exciting" about having to work in an absolutely twisted codebase written by junior devs and interns as a prototype and then just pushed into production by managers who don't understand that just because it looks like it works doesn't mean it actually works.

The Git commit history is a maze of branches and merges with no rhyme or reason, and all the commit comments are "fixed bugs and added new features".

When you read the code, you realise that everything is ad-hoc. Bug fixes are mostly just "detect when bad thing happens and make it not bad". Every single module in the project can (and does) manipulate the internal state of all the others. The documentation is a PDF file left by a developer who left the company four years ago. Most of it isn't applicable any more, except for the login credentials to the production server, of course, how else would the intern deploy critical updates on a Saturday morning?

You were hired as a senior developer "to help us fix this mess", but they don't listen to any of your recommendations because "we don't have time to do that now, just push out the Halloween update first". You look at the roadmap to see "Christmas Update", "Lunar New Year Update", "Easter Update", "Summer Update", and your email about when to schedule a code audit has gone unanswered for three weeks.

When you complain about this to your friends and family, they look at you funny. "Yeah, but you get to work on video games! That's your dream right?"

Remember dreams? It's been a while since you last had a nice one...