Great stuff. I find it really funny that a big feature of modern API's is that applications place barriers instead of being handled by the driver, and we all tried it for a while and then threw up our hands and decided to write graph systems to automatically place them because it was too hard.

I like to not think of anything as "absolute" or "dealbreaker" (within reason. If there's a culture of harassment I'm gone, for example). But spend intentional time throughout your career reflecting on what matters to you in terms of team culture, code culture, career growth opportunities, compensation, etc. There are a lot of factors to being happy in your work, and a lot of ways to get there. Be intentional about it, and try to always move toward it. It matters a lot more than whatever software you're writing.

Man it sounds like you've had a rough go. I'm sorry that's been your experience.

Graphics Programmer here.

More likely you would just write data to a buffer (basically an array of whatever element type you want) rather than a render target and then read it back to the cpu. Dx, vulkan, etc. all have APIs to upload / download to / from the GPU quite easily, and CUDA makes it even easier, so a simple compute shader or CUDA kernel that writes to a buffer would make the most sense for general purpose computation like an advent of code problem.

As a graphics programmer in the games industry, it's always exciting to me when people discover how much fun all this stuff is

This.

I ask my boss about project-wide stuff that might impact me and my team, discuss strategy / priorities / roadmaps, ask them to weigh in on anything where I need project leadership to help resolve an issue, and any perfunctory "goals" stuff (I hate it so much haha)

Also if you branch on a GPU, the compiler has to reserve enough registers to walk through both branches (handwavey), which means lower occupancy.

Often you have no choice, or removing the branch leaves you with just as much code so it's irrelevant. But sometimes it matters. If you know that a particular draw call will always use one side of the branch but not the other, a typical optimization is to compile a separate version of the shader that removes the unused branch and saves on registers

Pointers also allow you to do fun and dangerous things like casting between types!

For example, if you're implementing your own memory allocator, at the base level your allocator only really cares about how many bytes are being requested (along with alignment, offset, other things) so you'd probably just implement it to return a char*, u8*, or void* pointing to the blob of memory you allocated with new, malloc, or whatever scheme you've cooked up. The calling code or higher level allocator code could then cast it to the actual type