I don't work in games. I once saw a glimpse of my boss's notes on me on a screenshare during one of our 1on1s over Teams. The first two bullet points he has about me are something like:

* Generalist, has worked in many different areas on different types of software

* Thinks that's a bad thing

And I do think that's a bad thing, from a career-marketability standpoint anyway. Back in the 80s or 90s, you could get away with being a "guy who knows computers" and they would pretty much stick you anywhere they needed someone who knows computers. And you had to sort of muddle through, figure out what your colleagues needed to do and how to apply the technologies you had on hand to make it easier. Starting in about the 2000s, the enterprise world especially started demanding specialists. They had a J2EE application that needed maintenance and if you didn't know your J2EE backwards and forwards, I'm sorry, there's just no place for you, BOLIYFE[0].

I had spent four years in a robotics company, and then some time at a server appliance company, and the hot thing when I found myself in need of work after those stints was "cloud". If you weren't up on cloud, the industry just couldn't use you. Résumé driven development became a must if you wanted to make a living in the industry.

And now those chickens have come home to roost in the gaming industry. Because game development isn't six guys in a strip-mall office messing around, figuring out a way to create something that thrills them at least as much as Mario did. Not anymore. I'll come out and say it: in terms of complexity, budget, and team size, games are enterprise software. Each game is an enormous project, often a distributed system, involving the contributions of hundreds. Games have passed the complexity threshold beyond which no one person can hold even a decent approximation of bigger than a tiny sliver of the whole system in their heads. The dev team is likely to be divided into smaller squads, each of which specialize in a narrow area of the game -- because it has to be. Because each of those areas, alone, is going to be more complex than can be handled by a single person, let alone a small team. And in order to not lose productivity onboarding new people, those people have to have demonstrated expertise in the narrow subset of the whole game whose team they aspire to join, typically by being credited on at least one AAA game title in that area. And generalists, unless they are literally John Carmack or at his level, don't have the deep knowledge it takes to be useful on, say, a AAA game's sound team, or level design team, or gameplay mechanics team, or scenario team.

And so we have today the situation where a Hackernews tells a promising kid, put down that homebrew retro console you built out of a Raspberry Pi and learn Unity and Unreal, because that's where you can make a real contribution to the field[1]. And he's right. The industry has changed how it works since the 90s, so in order to stay relevant in the industry you have to change too. Change with the times, or get left behind. Adapt, or die. It was always ever thus.

[0] "Best Of Luck In Your Future Endeavors"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920