Thank you for pointing that out. Just because two jobs both generally have the same long-hours in their workweek does not imply that they share the same reason for those long hours.

Mortgage loans take forever to close because of a TON of beurocratic red tape, and a TON of departments and hoops that you have to jump through, which is an externally imposed hinderence to getting the job done. And there are internal pressures too; the loan originators only get a percentage of the loans that actually CLOSE. This leads to the necessity of building up a large pipeline of loans in order to actually have some that close, because not all will, and also have enough to pay your bills. The urgency of this is exacerbated by the fact that the overall company also relies on profits from closing loans, so the loan officers are usually "encouraged" to do even more. In some ways, it's not all that different from telemarketing.

Also, I've never met ANYONE in th mortgage or real estate business that wasn't really sharply dressed, and those duds don't come cheap, which perpetuates the false need for more money even further. At least programmers don't have that against them! ;)

A video game development cycle is more like building a big complicated airplane or car, and less like telemarketing.

When building a big product, there are far more opportunities to plan and streamline the processes so that you don't burn out your employees. This has actually been one of the biggest and longest ongoing refinements in the aerospace industry for some time now. Boeing calls it "Lean Engineering". Basically, it's the idea that we want to do our tasks in the most resource-efficient manner possible. That might not always mean "fastest time", at least not on its own. It might actually be more cost effective to let one guy work a problem, instead of assigning a team to it, depending on the circumstances.

The point is, those are logistical challenges that airplane and video game companies can solve with better planning and learning from experience, and they can do better the next time. There are very few, if any, logistic-type problems that mortgage companies can solve that will improve how long it takes to close a loan, simply because they're also at the mercy of banks and government beurocracies.