[Jon Stratis]

Just to throw in my two cents on the matter... For programmers, there are jobs in almost every industry out there - everyone uses computers, and almost everything is controlled in some way. In industries where people's lives are at risk, testing is the most important part of development. Think about your robot and it's code - how much testing have you done?

I work in the medical device industry, and can tell you... our products are tested almost beyond reason. 100% unit test coverage (not just lines, but path coverage) is just for starters. We have whole teams dedicated to functional testing - black box, white box, system, subsystem to name a few. Any industry where lives depend on your product (like aerospace) has testing this strict. A 0.1% defect rate kills people.

To give you an idea of how the testing goes, one of the projects i worked on last year i wrote 841 lines of code. I then wrote 2,893 lines of unit test code. That's 3 times as much testing as development. We also had one of our system testers working on developing tests for this same code for 4 months.

All that said... game development isn't nearly as test intensive. Yes, you have to do some testing to ensure it works right - but a lot of that is actually playing the game! I can tell you working on a system that has this much testing is extremely frustrating at times. But it's also extremely rewarding when you get to talk to patients who are alive today because of the work you did. A job in game design may be more fun, but it won't be as rewarding.