I think in the end, those factors drive me away from trying to further my career in C++ and instead …

yeah im starting to get into the mindset of "fuck doing what you love, just get hobbies" Ultimately, working in these high paying jobs lets you have a lot of great hobbies and enjoy life. Get a job with a decent work-life balance, and use the rarity of your skillset to make the crazy cash, retire early, make your own game company if you want.

Google, Amazon, & Microsoft are nearly always hiring talented C++ engineers. So you're not limited to finance. Quite the opposite. I'd be surprised if the majority of C++ jobs had anything to do with finance.

How's your work-life balance? I worked in the games industry a couple times, at Activision in the 1990s and later at Rockstar, and like almost the entire industry, everybody was in crunch mode almost all the time. I remember when the list of holidays came around one year, Christmas was on a Saturday so they gave us Friday off. Someone asked if we were also going to have the Saturday, Christmas day, off. Programming is essentially solving puzzles, so you can find the work interesting even if the topic area isn't interesting. No seven year old says "when I grow up, I want to write a memory allocator!" but doing it well, with as few CPU cycles as possible, without fragmenting memory too much, is an interesting challenge. I wouldn't worry about what people have in their job descriptions. There's a quote from John Carmack about an ad for a Oculus dev that he technically wouldn't qualify for, …

FWIW most of the folks who work with C++ in the financial industry are not really "messing with people's money" except in the sense of trying to exploit market inefficiencies to take it. In a typical quant hedge fund no actual money changes hands; instead, the C++ parts are there to perform analytics extremely quickly, which then feeds into an execution engine (usually also in C++, or sometimes Rust or assembly) that's sending trades to the exchange. And they're usually trading their own capital or a small set of very wealthy limited partners. The retail financial industry, the folks like Fidelity and Vanguard that manage money for ordinary people or folks like Bloomberg that supply data for this, largely runs on Java. There are fewer foot-guns here, and you really don't want a security vulnerability that loses your customer's funds or creates an inaccurate statement.

Tip: Amazon Games pays above game industry standard, hires for Unreal skill, and has options for good work/life balance. (Like any large company, it can depend on the particular game team. Moving to other teams is generally supported, if the needs and skills match up.) And answering one of the other sibling replies: if you apply for one of the games reqs, you'll be interviewed by members of the game team that posted the req. If it's a C++ role, you'll be interviewed by someone who uses C++ on the job. You will benefit from doing your interview homework first. Make sure you know the Amazon Leadership Principles by heart, try to have 2-3 solid examples at the ready of how you exemplified each one (some matter more than others), and be comfortable solving little programming challenges (I'm sure it's happened but I've never seen some of these Google-esque obscure tree challenges get asked). …