Darkened Software

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.

So all game companies put in game tips during the loading screen to pass the inactive screen time TCR’s.  But as always if you are going to do something then there is no excuse for not do it right.

Here is the problem I see a lot, if I am 8 hours into a game and I have died 5 times in a row and I am forced to watch the loading screen before my next chance to die.  Guess what I do not want to see in my time of frustration, informational tip “Press X to Jump”.  Its likely I got a handle on that tid bit already, how about something on how to dodge the attack that is killing me.

Darksiders, I am looking right at you as the most recent and frustrating offender with the same 5 useless tips for the entire game.

At the very min make sure you have unique loading screen tips for each level and only cycle through the ones for the level or at the very least weight them a lot stronger in the rotation.

Even better is if you can detect why they are reloading the level and provide hints that make sense for it.  Maybe put up hints on the latest move, weapon, spell or item they  acquired.

I am not recommending going to the extreme that was the loading system in Bayonetta which let you practice attack moves the loading screens.  Although it was interesting there should never be a reason for its existence.   They had to go there since they had > 2 min loading time, a crime that had not been seen since the mess that was Crash Bandicoot 2.  I am sure the gaming community would have rather seen the developers spend more time and making sure the load times were in line than putting in mini games for them to waste their down time on.