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.