Golden Handcuffs

The classic trajectory of selling your soul for a decent salary. You start with dreams of building the next indie hit, spend years learning game development, then reality hits and you need to eat. So you pivot to web dev because, well, those FAANG salaries don't grow on trees. Fast forward a few years and boom—you're now a senior architect making bank, attending meetings about meetings, reviewing PRs, and writing documentation. The only code you touch is approving merge conflicts. The golden handcuffs have locked: you're too well-compensated to leave, but you haven't opened your IDE in months. Your game dev dreams? They're now a dusty Unity project folder labeled "someday.zip".