Red Interactive

I had a lot to think about over Thanksgiving weekend, as Red Interactive offered me a job for about 40% more than what I'm currently making at Disney.

It was the worst kind of thinking, too, because I didn't have all the other factors laid out. It's hard to think about something and consider two different routes to take when you don't have one of the options on the table and you have to just imagine your choices based on what your second option could be.

After all that thought, though, it wasn't too hard of a choice to make in the end. Disney said that they wouldn't counter anything. I'll be starting with Red as a software engineer on December 15th!

I was leaning towards Red anyway, even though it was a for-real full-time Engineer position, but I was curious to what Disney thought all my efforts were worth over the past 9 months. Apparently, not more than I was currently making. It was good to know. I really loved my time at Disney and I'm sad to go, but stuff like "no counteroffer" makes me think that I'm leaving at the right time. Disney has a reputation for stringing people along almost until they're not legally allowed to any more.

The thing that was driving the possibility of me staying at Disney was a producer title, and it looks like that was farther away for my career than I thought. Getting a producer title would have been nice, because it the only qualification for being a producer is "having been a producer", an irony that is not lost on me. But, if Disney isn't willing to offer me a producer title while I'm about to leave for another company, they're probably not going to offer me one later just for being a swell guy. I suspect that I was 2-3 years out on landing that title, and that's too long. I have stuff to get done.

I'm extremely excited to start with Red, for a lot of reasons. They run many, simultaneous projects that last around 6 months each, with 2-4 people per team based on the need. Smaller teams means that my creative contributions will be much more likely to help steer a project, and it will even be possible to be a developer that completely understands all aspects of the project I'm working on.

Even though I'm horrified that I'll be getting paid to do engineering, I'm excited to really give it the majority of my attention. In the past, I've tried to engage with engineering but have always found more important things to work on. Cyber Heist needed a designer, Disney needed a producer, and even though I've always loved engineering it's been more important to do other things instead. Everyone at Red assures me that there is way too much engineering to do compared to the rest of the responsibilities there, so I feel hopeful. It seems like the perfect step to take for my career.

Constructive Criticism

I got some constructive criticism at work today, and it was fantastic.

The feedback came when I talked to Bob Lowe--Lead Toybox Producer--that I wanted to schedule some time for him to see the levels that Chris and Shane had been working on, and he thought it was a great idea. Then, he told me that he had some feedback for me and that I should try to raise my awareness by looking for more feedback just like I was doing now. He said he felt blindsided by a couple of the bugs that were going on, and really wanted to know more about what I'm up to before it's too late.

I told him that I'd really take the feedback to heart, and I went upstairs to my office and wrote it on my whiteboard to really internalize it. Right before I headed off to the university for the undergraduate industry panel, I sent Bob a detailed email of all of the networking teams goals, the status of matchmaking, and the other plans I have to help push matchmaking forward. I also proposed a weekly meeting with myself and Bob to try to keep us on the same page. 

I learned a lot from the experience, and I'm really excited that Bob is interested in investing in me enough to consider my performance and give me feedback to perform better. 

The first thing I learned is related to the reason I went down to talk to Bob in the first place. My primary goal wasn't to give Bob feedback at all, but rather to go promote Chris and Shane and get them more exposure to Bob, who has sway in the positions that Disney hires for. Bob seemed to interpret this as an attempt to keep him in the loop, which prompted him to give me feedback. I've long had a policy of primarily looking out for other people, and this is a surprising example of it turning back in my favor immediately.

Second, I strongly suspect that I wouldn't've got this feedback had I not reached out and done something different. I haven't fully digested this idea yet, but I think that part of the lesson is to try things I wouldn't normally, and the other part is to identify feedback for others before they do something that reminds me to give them related feedback. Perhaps I might have got feedback from Bob in either case, but reaching out definitely helped.

Disney Interactive

I really hate blogs that apologize for the gap in updates, but eight months seems pretty extreme to me.

It's too bad, too, because I've really gone through a lot of growth since I accepted a position as an Associate Software Engineer at Disney Interactive in Salt Lake. I feel like there's quite a few life lessons that will never be properly expressed because I didn't write them down as I learned them.

However, since I've last wrote I've acquired a job, helped ship a AAA game, and even taken ownership of a feature in that game. My position primarily has to do with managing testers and equipment for Disney Infinity 3.0 in a multiplayer environment across 5 different consoles, but I've carved out a role in multiplayer feature development. I worked on the matchmaking feature and helped develop the flow and many of the levels for the release.

Disney is an incredible company to work for, and the studio culture here at Avalanche in Salt Lake is some of the best I've heard of in the industry. My boss, Matt Dawson, is incredibly supportive of my aspirations to become a producer not just in workload but also in title, and regularly talks me up to the other directors as well as allows me the freedom to do whatever I see necessary to make the multiplayer in Infinity 3.0 great.

I feel like I'm using my full talent of applying myself where work seems to be needed, and it's come up "multiplayer production". I'm extremely happy and consider myself pretty well qualified--my graduate thesis was a multiplayer-only game, anyway. There seems to be a lack of attention to multiplayer in the studio, which is where I hope to come in and create a new position for myself that will be obvious once it grabs the attention of studio higher-ups.

Movin Along

I still haven't heard back from any companies about job offers, but I've tried to stay positive. I recently read the first two books of the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, and it was quite inspiring. As frustrating as it is that I'm getting close to a full year without any luck in employment, reading such fantastic fantasy work reminded me that I really got into video games to create awesome stuff. If Brandon Sanderson can do it just through words, what's to stop me?

So, even though it might be a while before anything gets realized, I've been spending the past few weeks writing up design documents for games that I'd really like to play but don't exist. Janice's job has continued to treat us very well, and for the first time I find myself without anything that I want to buy. It's kind of a bittersweet feeling, but really it leaves me feeling more bored than anything else. The design documents help, but I'm really looking forward to getting a job with a capacity to create that I can't match as a single person.

As for Cyber Heist, things are going relatively well, and I've done my best to respond to incoming PR things as they come in. Last month I got an interview with SLUG magazine, who focused on the story of Cyber Heist in the article. It didn't do much for our numbers on Steam, but it was still a blast to do. Last week I did a tele-conference thing for a middle school with AJ where we answered middle-schooler's questions on how to become game devs, and the week before I visited a tech school to talk about the process of game creation to a technology-focused high school. Both experiences were quite fun, and it's little events like that that give me stuff to look forward to between filling out applications and taking care of Harrison. 

What happened, 2014?

It's sometimes hard not to be a little bitter at 2014.

I worked really, *really* hard to get a job and little to nothing came out of it. My reasoning was that to be an attractive candidate, I couldn't rely on things like an art portfolio or an impressively engineered code base. As a designer/producer, the best evidence I had to showcase my abilities was a well-made, successful game. I reasoned that because it's difficult to spot good project managers based on their resume alone, I would pour everything I had into Cyber Heist, and point to the quality of the game when people asked what I contribute to a development team. I could point to Cyber Heist and say proudly, "I project managed/designed/produced THAT."

And in one sense, it paid off. Cyber Heist has been nominated for awards in 6 different video game competitions, won over $40,000 worth of prizes, and been featured in something like 20 news articles. I've personally interviewed for at least 8 of those that I can think of off the top of my head, and two of those times were articles entirely dedicated to an interview with me. My goal was to make Cyber Heist as impressive a project as possible, And I can safely call that mission accomplished.

As impressive as Cyber Heist is, however, it still has yet to land me a job offer, and for the life of me I can't figure out why. Maybe it's because when people hear "student project" they assume that it was all just homework. Maybe it's because people don't believe that my experience on a dev team was authentic, and I still don't know what it's like to work in a highly collaborative environment. Maybe it's because people assume that I've never really been under pressure to deliver a quality product with "real world" deadlines.

Whatever the reason, nobody seems to believe I have the skills and experience that I do, or I'd have been hired a long time ago.

I've been trying to fight that through most of 2014, and I'm happy to announce that my biggest attempt to strike against that misperception just launched last month: my website. My hope is that my website will help to explain what my role is on a team, what I've done with that role in the past, and why I actually have the skills I claim to have.

In truth, any kind of project management is a weird thing to get a degree in. Companies always seem to want people who have been trained in project management, yet (in my experience) rarely seem to go for the person actually trained and instead favor of the person only touting experience. Somehow, having simply been a PM in the past wins out over specifically being trained to be a PM, and my actual experience with being a PM in graduate school doesn't seem to count because I did it during my training. It's pretty exasperating, and it's why I dedicate a lot of my website to explaining what the EAE program does and why people should consider it good, solid experience.

So here's hoping that 2015 brings better fortune for my career than 2014 did.