Darkened Software

My first day at Microsoft they recommended reading this book as they explained you will eventually become overwhelmed with more possible work than anyone could complete and you need to be very good at scheduling what your going to take on and what your going to punt.  Odd I thought they would then recommend a book about how to stop Procrastinating but I picked the book up and read it anyway.  Turned out it was a great little book that covers both topics.

First section of the book is all about learning to ignore the myth that everything is important and needs to be done.  In reality only about 20% of the work you do is game changing work and the other 80% can at the very least be put off if not punted all together.  Tricky part is really identifying or get your boss to commit to which 20% is the critical at the time and there are some good recommendations on how to do so.  In the game industry we call this the “bits on the disk test”, if it does not help us put better bits on the disk we ignore it.

Second section is about doing enough is needed to prevent procrastination and other time wasting behaviors.

Procrastination = The fear you are going to fail

You mind decides to then save you from failing by looking for other stuff to do or wasting time, eventually you run out of time and your mind can write it off “I did not fail, I ran out of time”.  In reality 95% of the time the reason you’re mind fears it is going to fail is it does not fully understand the problem and what it takes to fix it.  Experienced programmer break problems down into little parts so that their mind never goes down this path.  The book gives some good examples on breaking this pattern and deconstructing problems.

Last section of the book is about scheduling your time and building out large blocks of time to work on your tasks.  This is one part of the book that everyone misreads and takes way to far.  True it is very important to have blocks of time so you can get into deep tasks that take a lot of concentration and have big ramp up and ramp down times.  But this does not mean going to insane extremes like only answering your email once every 24 hours or scheduling days with no meetings.  If you think answering my email is distracting you should try not answering it and having me in your office.  Similarly if you have a daily meeting that can not happen on one day so it is a meeting free day then it most likely should not have been a daily meeting in the first place.

There is no reason people can not check and respond to their emails before the day starts, after lunch before returning to serious work and before they leave for the night.  Given that many in the game industry start around 10 am it is better to get all meetings out of the way in the morning because you are interrupting a short block of work anyway and leave the 6 hour block open for a serious stretch of coding.

Good little book and worth the 10$ price tag.

This book should be within the top top 3 in your list of books to read this year.  Andy Hunt managed to follow up his amazing first book ” The Pragmatic Programmer” with sequel that might even be more profound.

It starts off with a basic breakdown of how the different parts of the brain work and the interactions between them.  Nothing revolutionary and all things you could find in other books like “How the mind works”.  But then he starts to tie it back to our daily programming tasks and show how each of our different skill sets taxes the different parts and some common things we do that make it harder on ourselves.  A great example was music, most programmer listen to something while coding and debugging.  But voice process is handled by the left side of the brain which needs to be thinking about the code your writing.  Music without words is fine as only the right side of the brain is needed to process it.

He found some research that goes against the theory that your born with the max # of brains cells and you just slowly loose them over time.  For years they thought his because mice in labs never seem to gain new ones.  But then someone finally wondered if environment played a factor and put the mice in a more natural and interesting environment instead of just a cage.  They started growing new brain cells right away and rewiring how their mind worked.  Something to think about at your current job, are you stuck in a cubical cage running the same maze every night and not growing your brain?

He also shows how programmers really need to not neglect the right side of their brain as it is instrumental for tasks like debugging which we think are left brain but really not.  We have all had that moment were on the drive home we think of the solution to a problem that we could not get all day.  Its not that we did not know the solution all along it’s just the right side of our brain was blocked by the left all day and could not give us the answer.   Learning how to get answers from the right side quickly instead of at the pace of 1 per night is very important and he does a great job of explaining how to help this process.

That is just the tip of the iceberg of all the info in “Programmatic thinking and learning”, I could go on for pages about all the things I learned.  Its a great book that ever programmer should read twice.

I now believe there is 2 fundamental problems with people that one would get through a recruiter.

1. Who would leave their career path in the hands of a someone else that based on the economics of the situation can not have your best interest in mind.  They get more money for placing in the harder to fill spots, so their job is to try and convince you to take a terrible or risky job.  They spend a lot of time trying to spin it but if it was a good job at a good company it would have been filled by one ad placed on gamasutra for a fraction of the price.
2. Who can not take the time to search gamasutra, linked in, and jobs pages of their favorite companies.  Searching for a job takes about 1/2 hour a day at the most, maybe more if you find something you like and need to write a cover letter.

Neither of these traits sounds like something I in general want in a programmer.

Then there is the problem of dealing with recruiters in general.

1. Shelling out and additional 20% of employee’s wages in recruiter fees.
2. They will be calling him/her to move again as soon as he passes the 2-3 month contracted must stay period.
3. 90% of the people the bring you are remote and there is an additional 20k in moving needed if not visa issues.
4. If they have dealt with your company for awhile they coach the candidates and your interview process becomes less effective.

So recruiters get paid a lot of money to bring you temp false hope in the form of coached candidates.

What is the little company that does not have a big reputation yet suppose to do?  They do not have people hitting their website every day hoping there is jobs opening up.  These companies put job posts up and only get 1000′s requests for internship from the local universities.

First line of their job post should be:

Company ownership after 1 year.

This will ensure they stay 4 times longer than the average recruiter candidate will stay for.  This will attract the risk takers you want and will ensure they will be bought into the entire project.

Sadly most small companies will not consider this.  They will offer royalties or something like that but everyone knows that it is < 5% to ever even pay out.  Yet companies still stay afloat and manage to make money.  Why are companies not sharing that with their employees that are also sharing the risk.  Small company owners can be 33% owners of nothing because they only have temp’s and interns or 20% owners something great if they just got the right employee’s.

10 years ago I was just was just finishing up a project with the 3DO company, not wanting to go through another dev cycle with I got an interview with Microsoft for the Direct X team.  At the time I was very big into openGL, but saw the potential in DirectX and wanted to be on the new leading edge of graphics.  They flew me out for the big interview but when I got there I found out that an internal transfer had already taken the position I was interviewing for.  At MS it is common they interview you for multiple positions and they still wanted to interview me for some Direct X Development Test spots.

Although not what I wanted after a full day of interviewing I had convinced them that I would be a great Development tester.  Slightly upset that the position I wanted was not available I stopped on the way back to the airport and got my hair dyed blue.  At the time I did not understand the rest of the benefit’s of working at Microsoft so I did not consider the offer letter enough to move out of CA and start doing testing again.

If I had known then what I know now I would have dropped everything and gone to work with them in an instant.  This company literally has everything a computer geek could want.

1. You have access to more information than you could ever hope to learn.
   • ms library has access to every ebook and most tech and marketing books ever published.  You can check them out for 3 weeks and have 50 checked out at a time.
   • You have access to almost every consumer report and any marketing research ever done.
   • You have access to IEEE, AMC, and every knowledge database ever collected.
   • You have access to the people that originally wrote a lot of the the software you use.
   • They have more email lists, blogs, docs, meetings, round tables, video’s, industry committees and learning groups on any topic you could imagine.
2. You have access to 30,000 very smart engineers that are willing to help you learn anything you wish, it is like the biggest college on earth.
3. You have free or almost free access to all the software and hardware Microsoft produces.
4. You have one of the best medical plans ever heard of.
5. You have access to one of best fitness club in the world.
6. You have access to the best legal team that you can also use for personal counsel.
7. You have access to a billions of lines of source code from every project Microsoft has ever done.
8. The amount of resources you have for a project is unreal.  If it gets backing it is almost unstoppable force.

So one of the great thing about going through a full interview is then you are in the system and the recruiters never loose contact with you. Anytime a position comes up that fits your resume they contact you right away.  Finally they called me up with a job I could not refuse.

In 2 weeks I have had more hardware resources dropped on me than I have in my entire career.  Been exposed to 2 different engines and more source code than I have seen in my entire life ( which is hard given how much time I spend on source forge ).  Checked out 2 dozen books from the library, downloaded Rosetta Stone for Japanese and finally had access to all game sales numbers imaginable for the first time.

I have gone from spending most of my time to trying to get resources to now trying to prioritize what tech / resources I want to learn / utilize next.  From trying to figure out what the publisher really wants to picking projects and features our team will help out with next.  From trying to just get access to information to trying and scope what information is most important to me so I do not get overwhelmed.

During orientation they discussed how the industry average for getting ramped up to full productivity was 3-4 months and at Microsoft people said it was much closer to 9 months.  Originally I laughed, but now I understood why.  You will reach your standard productive rate within your normal time line but here that is just the beginning as the bar is much higher.

Was recently talking to a college grad working there and it became clear he was squandering the mass opportunities he had lucked into.  Not sure you can ever fully appreciate it with having suffered in the under funded and disorganized world of normal software development.  Only then can one understand what it means to have everything you need and you are the only limit in what you get done.

Sorry if anyone between 6:13pm and now got re-directed to an attack site, the hosting companies server was hacked and they at a min dropped new .haccess files in every folder.

Hosting company has been informed.  Tonight I get to write parsing code to look for re-directs.  Learn a new skill every day.

If you did get re-directed earlier run windows defender “full scan” on your machine right away as you likely have some Trojan Downloaders in your browser cache.

eg.

C:\Users\”your-name”\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\f_000111->(SCRIPT0005)