Well I just completed my first week of work at my new job. It was a good week and I have a lot of positive things to say about it. The commute was not as bad as a I thought it would be, but it was worse in other ways too. Yes, it takes me an hour each way, and yes I get bunched up in traffic. However, the actual driving part just didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I have yet to get blocked by an accident, though I'm sure it will happen soon enough. I'm not looking forard to it, but what can you do?
The hard part has been simply the time. I am working from about 8:30am till 7:00pm. These are hardly insane hours, and no more than I worked at the Sony office in non-crunch times. However, when you tack and extra hour on each side of that for the commute, it's not very pretty. I get up at 6:30am, leave at 7:15am, and get home at 8:00pm. So I only have a few waking hours at home in the evening each day. Oh well, I can't complain too much, that's the life millions of Americans lead every day, and I'm no different now. Needless to say, I am missing the 3 minute commute to work I had before.
The work environment is different too. Not only do we not have offices, we don't even have cubicles. It's just a big wide open space. People sit at their computers and the place is deathly quiet. I am still getting used to the processes the company uses. They generate many documents, and then have many meetings performing multiple rounds of document review. This is much different than the way we did things at Sony, where we spent very little timein meetings and we each just went off and did our own thing in our private offices.
On Monday I felt completely overwhelmed. I have a great deal of expertise specifically in the game industry, but how my skill set translates to this environment was still a big question in my mind. Additionally, I was not even familiar with the technical side of what this company does. I didn't understand the terminology and I had no clue what they were even talking about. I spent the week taking a crash course on their technology and, by the end of the week, came to realize I knew a lot more than I thought I did, I just didn't know the terminology. It turns out that in my work on games over the years I have been involved in many aspects of the technology they are working on.
By now you have noticed that i haven't even mentioned what the heck my company does. Funny thing that. I can't. I feel like I just went to work for the CIA. The level of secrecy is very high. This is completely warranted given the competitive nature of the industry and the value of intellectual property. At some point our technology will be made public and I can discuss it a little more at that time.
Some of the things I really like about the new job is that the team is so small. At my last job the team had become so huge that it felt out of control. This is not a criticism of the team, it's just that once a single software project gets to a certain size it becomes this monsterous thing. It had reached the point at my old job that if I changed just *one* line of code my iteration cycle to compile, link, and launch, was several minutes. Blech. At my new job, even though there are a number of developers, each is working on his own section of the project. It's very liberating to be able to work with a small team and my own software sandbox with fast iteration cycles.
Later on, once our product is announced, I might get to do a little bit of travelling and that would be a lot of fun. Going to other game companies and helping them integrate our product into their game. I would really enjoy that.
Now that the weekend is here, I am looking forward to some football. Last evening my neighbor called me up and asked if I wanted to go to the Rams playoff game today! So, in just a minute, I'm heading out the door for that. I have never been to a football playoff game before. I'm really looking forward to it!
Next Saturday the Saturday Night Screening room is going to show a Paul Neuman movie, Hud. I'm really looking forward to that. In March I am going to be showing my copy of "Empire of the Sun" to the group.
Wow, I'm finishing up this blog entry on Sunday morning. I went to the Rams playoff game yesterday and it was an amazing experience. It didn't look that way for almost the entire game in regulation. In fact, I was beginning to get pissed off that I had paid a lot of money to see a very boring game with a lackluster loss by the home team. In the last two minutes of the game, the only way the Rams could stay alive would be to score a touchdown, make a two point conversion, recover an onside kick, and then kick a field goal. Then..they went out and did exactly that!!! People had already left the game, since the chance of this happening was so remote. After coming back to tie the game went into sudden death overtime. Unfortunately the Panthers won the coin toss and got the ball first. They marched down the field and set up for the winning field goal. Then, somehow, incredibly, they missed the field goal! The Rams got the ball, they marched down the field, and then they set up for the winning field goal. Which *missed*! The Panthers got the ball back, the Rams defense nearly stopped them, and on third and sixteen, they hit a long bomb pass and won the game. The game went into double overtime, so I attended one of the few games to ever go six quarters. The game lasted over four hours, and was an incredible experience. Yeah, it sucks they lost, but it was one hell of an exciting game. At least I feel like I got my money's worth.
Now that the Rams are out, I can root for the Packers wholeheartedly to go all of the way. How can you not root for the Packers this year?
Today, I'll probably watch a little more football and try to get some exercise. Then it's back to the grind next week. I'll try to post again if something of interest happens to me.
The hard part has been simply the time. I am working from about 8:30am till 7:00pm. These are hardly insane hours, and no more than I worked at the Sony office in non-crunch times. However, when you tack and extra hour on each side of that for the commute, it's not very pretty. I get up at 6:30am, leave at 7:15am, and get home at 8:00pm. So I only have a few waking hours at home in the evening each day. Oh well, I can't complain too much, that's the life millions of Americans lead every day, and I'm no different now. Needless to say, I am missing the 3 minute commute to work I had before.
The work environment is different too. Not only do we not have offices, we don't even have cubicles. It's just a big wide open space. People sit at their computers and the place is deathly quiet. I am still getting used to the processes the company uses. They generate many documents, and then have many meetings performing multiple rounds of document review. This is much different than the way we did things at Sony, where we spent very little timein meetings and we each just went off and did our own thing in our private offices.
On Monday I felt completely overwhelmed. I have a great deal of expertise specifically in the game industry, but how my skill set translates to this environment was still a big question in my mind. Additionally, I was not even familiar with the technical side of what this company does. I didn't understand the terminology and I had no clue what they were even talking about. I spent the week taking a crash course on their technology and, by the end of the week, came to realize I knew a lot more than I thought I did, I just didn't know the terminology. It turns out that in my work on games over the years I have been involved in many aspects of the technology they are working on.
By now you have noticed that i haven't even mentioned what the heck my company does. Funny thing that. I can't. I feel like I just went to work for the CIA. The level of secrecy is very high. This is completely warranted given the competitive nature of the industry and the value of intellectual property. At some point our technology will be made public and I can discuss it a little more at that time.
Some of the things I really like about the new job is that the team is so small. At my last job the team had become so huge that it felt out of control. This is not a criticism of the team, it's just that once a single software project gets to a certain size it becomes this monsterous thing. It had reached the point at my old job that if I changed just *one* line of code my iteration cycle to compile, link, and launch, was several minutes. Blech. At my new job, even though there are a number of developers, each is working on his own section of the project. It's very liberating to be able to work with a small team and my own software sandbox with fast iteration cycles.
Later on, once our product is announced, I might get to do a little bit of travelling and that would be a lot of fun. Going to other game companies and helping them integrate our product into their game. I would really enjoy that.
Now that the weekend is here, I am looking forward to some football. Last evening my neighbor called me up and asked if I wanted to go to the Rams playoff game today! So, in just a minute, I'm heading out the door for that. I have never been to a football playoff game before. I'm really looking forward to it!
Next Saturday the Saturday Night Screening room is going to show a Paul Neuman movie, Hud. I'm really looking forward to that. In March I am going to be showing my copy of "Empire of the Sun" to the group.
Wow, I'm finishing up this blog entry on Sunday morning. I went to the Rams playoff game yesterday and it was an amazing experience. It didn't look that way for almost the entire game in regulation. In fact, I was beginning to get pissed off that I had paid a lot of money to see a very boring game with a lackluster loss by the home team. In the last two minutes of the game, the only way the Rams could stay alive would be to score a touchdown, make a two point conversion, recover an onside kick, and then kick a field goal. Then..they went out and did exactly that!!! People had already left the game, since the chance of this happening was so remote. After coming back to tie the game went into sudden death overtime. Unfortunately the Panthers won the coin toss and got the ball first. They marched down the field and set up for the winning field goal. Then, somehow, incredibly, they missed the field goal! The Rams got the ball, they marched down the field, and then they set up for the winning field goal. Which *missed*! The Panthers got the ball back, the Rams defense nearly stopped them, and on third and sixteen, they hit a long bomb pass and won the game. The game went into double overtime, so I attended one of the few games to ever go six quarters. The game lasted over four hours, and was an incredible experience. Yeah, it sucks they lost, but it was one hell of an exciting game. At least I feel like I got my money's worth.
Now that the Rams are out, I can root for the Packers wholeheartedly to go all of the way. How can you not root for the Packers this year?
Today, I'll probably watch a little more football and try to get some exercise. Then it's back to the grind next week. I'll try to post again if something of interest happens to me.
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