I started my career in a traditional tech role and quickly grew to hate it.
I used my savings to fund a 2-year sabbatical in which I wrote my own game engine using C++ and LUA (this was in the dark days of XNA, no Unity yet).
Towards the end of my sabbatical, I went to GDC and started getting involved in the scene and used my game engine to apply to AAA studios. I eventually landed a job in Vancouver BC and went to work at an amazing studio for the next 5 years, which gave me enough time to meet some co-conspirators and start my own studio.
After 5 years of hellish work, intense stress, and poverty wages, we created https://store.steampowered.com/app/656350/UnderMine/ which found enough success to make another game. It destroyed several relationships, burned me all the way out several times over, and caused me to tear my retina I was at the computer so much. It's hard to be honest with myself about what I would have done if the game had flopped.
So it's certainly possible to go from traditional tech into games. It can take a while. Everyone's path is different. Be prepared for some life-altering downsides to the games industry, especially on the indie side.
My gut reaction is that it listens to me, either directly or via some app, but I know Google has refuted this fact. I suppose this is testable too, so I tend to fall on the confirmation bias side of things.
I am confident it did not, that conversation was out of my mind as soon as it ended, which was why I was so surprised to see it dredged up again in my feed.
I had a 5 minute conversation with my niece at the park about rotary phones and now my feed is full of rotary phone-related articles. This happens more times than I can remember.
Really makes me wonder how guys like Abramovich get started. Did he used to work for the telecoms and knew how things worked? Or is he just one of those insanely motivated hacker types to just poke around the internet and find opportunity?