So what's been going on with me? Why this mysterious (and yet somehow not unusual) period of silence? And what can we all make of the random tidbits on Twitter and Facebook, if perhaps we are one of the few people who cares about my presence on said social media?
The Cliffs Notes
I have ended my nine year relationship with Egosoft as of a couple of months ago. My time working on space simulation games is up, and I'm moving on. More details on that below, should you be interested.
I have accepted an offer as Senior Server Programmer for ArenaNet. I can't talk about what I'm working on, partially due to NDAs, and partially because I don't actually know yet. I start officially on June 6th.
The combination of these two things has produced a rather crazy result: I moved from Atlanta, GA to Seattle, WA over the course of the last week. This involved five days of driving, one moving van, half a dozen apartment prospects, and no small amount of stress, panic, and exhaustion.
I am alive, well, and looking forward to starting my new job next week.
The Move
It took several all-day-long drives to haul across the country. For those not familiar with the US's geography, I covered just over 3000 miles during the move. Thankfully, I have a relocation management company handling the bulk of my belongings, so all I had to do was drive my car. Still, I spent over 45 hours driving, which is no small accomplishment. Needless to say, I am sick of the inside of my car.
I was formerly located just northwest of Atlanta proper; I'm now looking into the Bellevue area in Washington state, specifically on the south side of town, between Newcastle and Issaquah. Apartment applications are pending and I should know by mid-week where I'll end up living.
Egosoft
Nine years is a long time to work for the same company, especially in the games industry. It was no easy decision to leave Egosoft, and in many ways it feels like a part of me is gone now. Egosoft and the X games have been an integral part of my career, and I will remain grateful for the opportunity I had to work with the excellent team there and the role I was able to play in bringing some fantastic space games to market.
I won't say much about my departure, because to be honest things got a bit rocky, and I'm not interested in badmouthing anyone or developing a reputation as a troublemaker. Suffice it to say that after many years it became apparent that my fundamental philosophies of doing business differed from those of the company as a whole, and we simply weren't all that compatible. It may seem strange that it took so long for that to be obvious, but such is life; often it takes a hefty dose of hindsight to realize exactly what's been under our noses for ages.
Put another way, I had to have time to rise to a certain level of responsibility and seniority within the company itself to see just how things were expected to work. Once I got to that point, it was clear that we simply didn't mesh. We had different visions for how to carry forward the game IP and the company as a whole, and there was no sense in creating excess friction or drama over those differences.
So now I'm gone, and I wish the remaining team all the best in completing and shipping X: Rebirth, which was announced a few weeks ago. They certainly deserve the success.
ArenaNet
I quietly started my job search during GDC 2011, and spent a fair amount of time on the career expo floor handing out resumes and giving impromptu screening interviews to probably a couple of dozen different prospective employers. In the end, though, I ended up getting contacted by ArenaNet via NCSoft; it all runs together a bit but I think that, ironically, I found them online after GDC rather than making contact directly via the career expo. Either way, I had a quick phone chat with the technical director, and found myself shortly thereafter on a plane out to Seattle for a formal interview.
ArenaNet has an interesting (and, to my mind, superb) method of hiring. Rather than pigeonholing applicants based on their expected position, they interview for a range of positions, and then work out a solution of best fit with the applicant once the preliminaries are taken care of. As such, I went in having no idea what to expect or even what skills to try and highlight; I felt phenomenally unprepared, but as it turned out, things went pretty well.
The first chunk of time was spent on a technical test, which consumed pretty much the entire morning. I can't divulge the details, but it was a pretty good test that covered a variety of problem solving issues and skill sets, and provided a decent picture of the applicant's abilities to design, write, and debug code - under the kinds of interesting constraints and limitations often found in real world game development.
That was followed by lunch with several of the engineers from various departments, and then a review of the technical test. During the final meeting, one of the network engineers happened to be available, and almost as an afterthought we wound up talking network technologies. I happened to have some extensive low-level network experience from my first day job (which long-time readers might remember as The Job From Hell) so we actually had quite a bit of interesting stuff to discuss.
Apparently, someone was impressed; when my formal offer letter arrived a week later, I was offered the position of Senior Server Programmer.
Time to dust off the ol' TCP/IP, I guess!
Final Flippancy and Sarcasm
That pretty much brings us up to today. I'm still a little mindfucked by the three hour time change between here and Atlanta; I have to be really careful about when I make phone calls in the evenings. Hopefully the kinks will be worked out and I'll be sleeping on a sane schedule come time to start work next week.
At this point, there's not much I can do but wait out Memorial Day and sit around with my fingers crossed that I'll get accepted for the apartment. My Xbox is in a box somewhere between Georgia and here, so that leaves streaming movies via Netflix and endlessly pressing F5 on the GDNet forum listings.
So. Now you know what's up, and I'm still willing to bet a few bucks that you don't give a shit!
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