This whole “working for a living”
Posted by | Posted in Game Development, GLSLPlanet, Life, Pioneer | Posted on 28-10-2012
We as a species have fucked up, I can prove it too, just listen… or read; We have to work to live, this is clearly a cock up since as anyone can tell you our working lives are a clusterfuck. No-one really manages anything, your boss gets paid more than you for seemingly doing a lot less which works right from the bottom up meaning that the person at the top is essentially paid to play golf… badly and what you’re actually doing is, for most of us, a worthless crock of pointless shit that if anything actually detracts from the sum total worth of our species.
On an unrelated note I’ve just finished my 2nd week at my new job. Too pessimistic?
Try again: It’s not actually too bad, the people are nice… hmm, no that’s a bad start, I mean the people are always nice. Andys top tip is; if you ever start a job where the people aren’t nice, explain to the not nice persons boss that they’re reason you’re not taking the job and then walk out, possibly whilst also flipping the not-nice-person the bird. Starving to death on the streets is ok kids…
Ok take 3; The new job is ok, it has exactly the problems I expected, MFC, no real direction at the moment, MFC, the settling in, MFC, being told that “It’s not like those little projects you’ve worked on” … like 2 MMOs, numerous console titles etc. Piddly little things. Had to smile nicely, nod to that and just… ignore it, MFC, and of course I’ve already been asked to things that would be a piece of cake… if we weren’t using MFC. I think the worst things are that it looks like I’m going to be focused on one specific area for quite a while and that the office politics permeates everything. There’s a certain amateurish approach that makes things harder, ironically some individuals think it’s actually very professional, that leaves gaps in the development process wide enough to drive a lorry through. No-one seems in charge of the tech’ so there’s no direction that it’s heading in. I can’t see it as a long term career place at the moment but we’ll see how I settle down in the coming weeks. There’s a trip to Frankfurt to meet the team over there coming up too so I’m hoping that something about all this reaches out and grabs my attention. At the moment and mere 2 weeks in, nothing has really done that.
In more awesome news though, which isn’t job related, someone else has started hacking away at the Faction stuff I added to Pioneer in Alpha 27 :)
I haven’t had time in the last month to do much so seeing someone else come in and extend it is very good news! I think Pioneer is where I’m going to continue to find the reward side of programming and work is just going to be 9-to-5 from now on. Although I have done some more on the slightly separate GLSLPlanet code that I extracted and am working on – it now renders a limited set of terrain tiles at once, I need to do some work on that really and I think I need to prevent the root node from having any tiles of it’s own which would make the sub-tile grouping for processing a lot cleaner.
One thing that I am happy about with the new job is that I’m allowed to work on all of this and possibly on my own company, although there are several clauses covering IP and any title I’d release of my own. I have assured them that I won’t be releasing any multi-million pound First Person Shooters whilst I work for them…
Not much more to tell, so far have avoided doing anything for Halloween. I’ve tried to join in before but I just don’t feel anything for it, the dressing up has never amused me that much and I just generally don’t get it so, meh.
Adios!