I got into game engine development knowing full well that it’s “applied linear algebra” and not at all like playing a game… except when you need to test something a hundred times in a row.

Lots of my colleagues dropped out of the industry in their first year because they didn’t like maths at all.

What really drove the point home for me though was that a decade later I got more satisfaction out of developing ETL pipelines for multidimensional analytics.

Think about how “nuts” that is! Everyone likes playing games but nobody installs SQL Server Analysis Services on their home PC for “fun”! Yet… it is, for a certain very select subset of the population…