Darkened Software

At Secret Level I used to do a lot of hiring and I would often see resumes where some programmer worked at 1 or 2 companies for the first 8 -10 years and then for the next 5 years or so they jumped jobs every 6 – 12 months.  My first thought was these guys had cracked under the pressure or had in some way become flawed.  Why would they not want to finish out these games and put some more completed titles on their resume.

Having just passed the 10 year mark in the industry myself I now realize I had drawn the wrong conclusion about these guys.  While your learning about the industry you care less about Quality vs Quantity.  But once you have a good handle on things you become very impatient with people and companies not going down the right path to AAA games.

A little quick math, if you finished out every game you start you have about ( 30 years left in career / 3 year dev cycles ) 10 chances to be involved in that hit game .   Since only about 10-15% of the games even make their money back and < 5% are run away hits you only have a 50% chance to ever work on a hit game.  That is not really great odds when you think about it.

But if you drop the requirement for finishing games and leave as soon as you determine the company is both not on the right path and will not listen to the voice of reason to correct itself ( 6 months – 1 year ) then you have at least 30 – 60 chances ( 150 -300% ) to be involved in a hit game.  That takes your career from 50% chance of being meaningless to almost guaranteed success at some point.

But there is a little game theory in it, how many times can you try out a few companies before your resume becomes a liability.  Given that leads have to worry about people leaving at critical times right before shipping and major milestones the number is pretty low.  If I saw a run of 3-4 companies and no explanation ( ie they all went under ) I would only hire them as last resorts.

So in reality the optimal strategy is ( 30 years / ( 7 ( 3 year + 4 * 1 year )  )  = 22 with a 110% chance of shipping a hit and your resume never becomes a complete liability.   This should be the path for the gamblers out there that want to help small companies succeed and risk it all for the chance at big buyout money or crazy royalties.

Point is these guys with somewhat jumpy histories are not necessarily flawed programmers, they are often the really good programmers that are tired of wasting their time at bad companies and are going to jump until they find the right chance for success.

I have gone to 100′s of pre-interview resume reviews with other programmers to discuss our thoughts on a candidate and determine what everyone will quiz them about.  I am always still amazed how everyone can read the same resume and have completely different take on what could possibly be good or bad about this candidate .  It is a different trigger for everyone, sometimes if anything is a little vague or over sounds overstated people get turned off and suddenly the interviewee  is fighting an up hill battle.

Be very careful with the resume wording because given the chance people will often interpret it completely wrong…

Even if you write the clearest resume possible it is not even close to 100% so you still have to then anticipate all the ways they could take everything on your resume wrong and and figure out how you are are going to convince them of the right story on the phone or during the live interview.  Is it a pain, yes.  Is it right, probably not.  But you literally have to be prepared to defend everything on your resume to make the interview go well.  Some people will always come to the interview assuming the worst about the candidate and you will have to change their mind about every point.

Lets hit the examples:

Worked for company X for a long time.

You might be thinking that it shows loyalty to the company, dedication to your job and that your not a quitter during tough times.  You might also be rightly thinking that is shows how valued of a employ you were, you survived 8 round of layoffs and your position was never in danger.

Others might see X years and think that means you have no ambition at all.   They instantly think you are one of those  people that found a place to hide and have just been collecting a paycheck for X years.

Defending working at a company for a long time, sounds silly right?  When they comment that you about working for a company for a long time.  Don’t just answer yes.  If you started during the beginning, talk about how you helped grow the company and it was pride thing. If you got shares then talk about the ownership responsibility.  If you did not have the above then talk about the great projects you got to work on or great friends you made or how much you learned there.  Make sure they believe you had reasons to stay and now have a even bigger reason to leave.

Have a bunch of grind tasks on your resume.

Say you have done UI, TCR’s and some of the other grind tasks that people do not generally like to do.  You might think this shows you are willing to take one for the team and do what is needed to get the game out.  You might even think is shows you are not a prima donna and will not be bitching all the time.

Others will see it and think that you must not have any real skills if you have been given grind tasks.  They will automatically rank you intern status because that is usually who they give those tasks too (yet they wonder why they often fail first submission).

Defending grind tasks.  If you were on a time line explain that the project could not afford to be kicked and had to get through first time, it was an insurance policy thing.  If you were doing other tasks as well explain that the grind tasks were in addition and you are really a super man in human cloths.  If you were really only doing UI / TCR’s then explain how you were building tools and infrastructure so it would be less work for those that followed you. Point is to make sure they do not believe that you were tasked with grind work against you will or that you were not happy with it.  Make it seem like it was a challenge or accomplishment.

There will be a second part to this topic as there are many more potential issues.  Big take away should be to read your resume over and try to predict how people could take it wrong and be prepared to talk them down from that position.  The thing is they will not ask you to defend your work experience, they will just drop an off hand comment on something and you need to detect it and then take over the conversation till you get your point across.  Missing these small hints in the conversation means people will be leaving the interview with bad thoughts still and you have lost.

Here is often what happens when you submit your resume online to a company.  It gets forwarded to all the hiring managers / leads and since it comes in off a specific email address it gets a rule applied and forwarded into a special folder as these guys can get 100′s of emails a day and do not want that in their inbox.

At this point it is up to the lead to go through all the emails and pick out which ones they are interested in contacting.  S0 now as a lead programmer I see a folder with 400 new resumes in it and this is what I see in the list of subject lines.

**************************************************************************************************
Subject                                                                            *   Date *
**************************************************************************************************
Job
Job Listing
Job Posting
Resume
Resume & Cover
Employment Opportunities
Resume email
7 Years Senior Programmer
Senior AI Programmer Position
*************************************************************************************************

If I am looking for a mid level programmer which one am I going to look at first? Most likely the last two and if I find what I am looking for I might never go back and open all 400 others that only say job or resume.  Why would I spend several hours digging through all those other email / resumes only to find out that they producers / artist / designers and not what I am looking for?

Rule # 1 Put something useful in the title, either what you are or what your applying for, its best to put both!!!

ie.   Senior Programmer applying for AI programming position

Next do not make me go digging for all your information.

• Do not zip your web site up and make my unpack it and fight with broken links just to find your resume.
• Do not make me install anything of yours just to read your resume, last thing I want to be is responsible for putting viruses on the company network.
• Do not make me download special plugins for my browser just to view your work.
• Make sure your resume is not in the latest beta version of word that only you and 3 others can view.

Rule #2 The perfect programmer submission would be.

• Put basically a Mini summary of the attached cover letter in the body of email (  I believe I can help you guys, here is why you should read my cover letter and resume ).
• Attached YourName_CoverLetter.doc
• Attached YourName_Resume.doc
• Attached YourName_CodeSamples.zip if requested in the job rec
• Can put info about how they found out about the job, ie reference or listing.
• Link to web site or sources of more information about you.

This will allow a lead / hiring manager to quickly figure out if they should be talking to you.  You do not want to end up in the email grave yard of 1000′s of people that made it to difficult to find out if they were the right person and were passed over.

You have experience in Unreal Engine, effects programming or combat systems and would like to work on a AAA title with a great publisher, we would like to talk to you…

Posting…

Job Posting

Website…

Airtight Games

One of the big problems with working at a port houses is there is typically not just not enough extra funds in port projects to sustain the company in a dry spell.  So not only do they have to have signed  projects at all times they need a couple in the wings in case anything goes wrong.  That is a hard balance to keep right, you do not want to string to many companies along as you will eventually piss them off.  So typically you end up taking on to much and then ruin your reputation as you only half do all your projects.

So with our reputation being pretty good at the moment but at risk of being over stretched we started trying to get in with bigger publishers and longer projects.  We started an MMO with Lucas Arts but it got shut down when they realized that anything not in the Star Wars IP would never sell.  Then we got to do a our first non port project with Wizards of the coast that resulted in Magic the Gathering for xBox; got critical acclaim but did not sell well.  Then we got our biggest chance yet, EA partners needed someone to do a port of Odd World’s Stranger from the xBox to the PS2.

Microsoft had finally dropped them as their publisher and EA was interested in picking up the IP but needed PS2 numbers to make it work.  Getting in good with EA Partners would indeed lead to many other fat projects and untold wealth.  I think everyone had this on the mind to much as we went to check out the project and see if we could help.  Other companies had turned them down and said it could not be done.  Warning sign #1 we ignored.  It looked hard, there was no doubt about that.  But nothing is truly impossible so we decided to get involved and see were it lead.

This was the closest I came to quitting as things went from just plain bad to crazy in < 1 month.  EA needed to ship the two projects at the same time, they were going to hold the xBox version for the PS2 one, but they did not want to hold it for long.  So porting was going to start on a still rapidly evolving game and code base.  We did not know the Microsoft had been sending them engineers to help optimize their game for months as it had been unplayable slow.  It took two weeks just to get the code base to compile on the PS2.  I found a blog post from their lead programmer about how he hated designing for porting and actively worked against it.  EA would not accept any schedule and kept stopping us to consider ways to make it faster and kept trying to bring in even more companies to help. I had seen this play out before and I was pretty sure our reward for failing EA in any way would be the end of the company.  Most companies that got a EA injection imploded hard after they left.  It was during this crunch I totaled my first vehicle while driving my 2 hour commute home late one night.

As things looked more and more dire we finally had a meeting to voted on going forward with this project and all the programmers were thumbs down.  Amazingly Jeremy and Reeve took it ok, they were initially pretty sad but suddenly the sequel to Magic the gathering fell through and they moved on to sign us up to do and XBox and PS2 port of America’s Army with Ubi-Soft.  Ubi-Soft also another big publisher that we had supported before in the unreal days was a good opportunity.  Sadly this project was not and it came really close to killing the company.  Somehow it ran for till almost till Alpha without ever having a real schedule.

I was just finishing up another failed investigation; this time to do Robotica with Sony Studio’s.  Yet another really big publisher that it would have been nice to work with.  Interesting problem with big publishers we were finding is they have lots of money and time so they do not have to commit to anything in any hurry.  This can be hell on your budget and often you can not wait until they get their act together.

About this time Ubi-Soft looked in and realized how screwed up Army was, then sent three producers to live on site and verify every detail.   About this time the lead programmer decided to leave and I got pulled on to finish it up.  Well with producers on site and changing their mind in every meeting, things got even harder and only a ton of late nights and Crown Royal saved the xBox version of that project.  It was during this crunch I totaled my second vehicle while driving home late one night after several days of min sleep before Beta.    Sadly we still had a PS2 version to ship and people were all ready burnt out, we finally give them a PS2 first submission disk and that day they officially cancel the project.  Dam that was another 6 months of crunch for nothing…

That may have killed us right there but lucky just before this another company had been looking to acquire some US studio’s and our living paycheck to paycheck days were over.