[Boldened15]

Since speedrunners who find glitches are obviously very technical, do they usually already have some sort of day job in tech? I imagine it might be easier and just as lucrative to work on some CRUD app 9-5 and devote the rest of their time to research/streaming, and may be preferable to overloading their brain with even more of the same kind of research.

[effortfeedslazy]

I know a speedrunner who turned down a promotion beyond their data job because they were in a role that they already had automated a large chunk of, and wanted to stay in it so they could keep pretending to be busy at work while instead practicing speedruns.

[MrCheeze]

As an n=1 data point, that was my exact situation for a while. Also a lot of the people who put out high effort stuff are college students, which works for the same reason.

More interestingly and more surprisingly, some of the people who work on exploiting games _don't_ do any sort of tech work and have no background in compsci - they're purely self educated just for the sole purpose of breaking the one game they're interested in. This was the case for some of the biggest contributors to ACE in Zelda Ocarina of Time.