alt Hacker NewsThough it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."
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sbarre • today at 5:47 PM
I think you can say that for any nascent / figuring-it-out industry.
The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing.
We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did.
But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most.
The inmates ran the asylum, as they say..
Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work.
Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.