Eating Bees

“We’re community - we SURF the catastrophe curve.”

There’s a lot I can’t say about Mythic right now. But there are three points I can make, in direct defiance of silly children on message boards:

One, the people who lost their jobs today were not just a few extra QA folks, or a couple world devs hired on for the big push to completion. The pile included some very senior people, people who expected to stay at Mythic until they retired.

Two, many of them were good people who deserved the loyalty they’d been told so much about. If anyone reading this happens to be hiring (people still do that, right?), please give me a buzz.

Three, um, and I say this with love, but the mouth breathing troglodytes who post on boards in between bouts of masturbation and nosepicking should probably shut the hell up about how this was EA’s evildoing at work. I don’t know firsthand what EA was like before they bought out Mythic, but if “acting like adults” and “allowing the studio to set their own expectations” and “paying a decent wage by the standards of the game industry” are bad things, I don’t want to work for a good company again.

One of the reddest flags in the game industry is hearing that an experienced professional didn’t get a gig because he didn’t demonstrate any “passion” during the interview. There’s only two situations in which this is okay. Don’t worry, I’ll get to them. Eventually.

Here’s the deal for everyone who was born yesterday: “Passion” in a job description is almost always code for “the hours are long and we’re not planning to pay you enough to live on, so if you’re not starry eyed with the wonder of finally making it into the industry, you’ll burn out in two months.”

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[19:02] friend: http://change.gov/page/s/ofthepeople
[19:02] friend: (6:08:01 PM) friendoffriend: 6:07 PM
i see obama agrees with Sanya and has a feedback form, not forums.

BOOYAH.

I followed the instructions on my jurisdiction’s postcard, all but begging those of us who work at home/don’t work/have retired to pleeeeease vote off peak between 10 and 3. My better half (whose company gives a half day, paid, for voting) and I walked the mile from our house to the elementary school cafeteria where we vote, figuring the parking lot would be overwhelmed and for heaven’s sake it’s just a mile, we used to do five mile hikes for fun when we were dating and before we turned into elderly sloths.

We passed a guy just standing there with his McCain sign, eyes shifting around nervously, because he knew damn well he was supposed to be twenty feet further away where all the other signs were. We ran a gauntlet of signs instructing us to turn off our cameras, cell phones, recording devices, neural implants, and satellite connections to the mothership. Look, it was a very long list and my attention span for such things is very short.

The newspaper this morning was filled with “OMG Four HOUR LINEZ, RUN!!11!!” So imagine our surprise when we turned the corner and found… no line. We were the entire line at 10:30 AM, in a Baltimore suburb.

Admittedly, when we left, there was a line. Five people is a line! Sort of!

Anyway, if you’re thinking, hell, my vote doesn’t count so much that I want to wait four hours, go now! I’m thinking a lot of people are writing this one off, thinking their state is a shoo in for this guy or that guy. Yeah, and Dewey won the race, too. Go vote!

Dear Creep:

You are one of the top five people at your studio. Your stay at home wife has a nanny come in twice a week so she (your wife) can do the shopping without schlepping your children. You yourself leave early at least twice a week so you can see your kids play soccer or dance, and sometimes you leave early just so you can pick them up from school as a surprise.

That’s lovely.

And if you ever again say your studio is a family friendly place to work, I am going to get in my car, drive through wind and rain and toll highways, and punch you right in the junk. I’m serious. You have employees who have quit because they didn’t make enough to pay for day care. You have other employees driving two hours, one way, so they can afford day care and a place to live. You offer no paternity leave, no flex time, and while you have telecommuting, anyone who takes you up on it winds up with nothing but scut work.

You haven’t granted vacation days in months. Anyone who isn’t a lead gets spoken to by their lead for their lack of dedication if they leave on time to fetch their kid from day care, let alone early for a special event. Your leads never have to be spoken to, because they don’t GET to be leads if they ever left early for a special event.

Hiring a clown for the company picnic is a wasted gesture. There’s already a clown sitting at your desk.

*

If you work for a family friendly company, post here with the things that make it friendly. But please note, if the benefits aren’t available for the rank and file, it doesn’t count.

So, the deal is, I’m not looking for work at this exact moment (well, unless you count short term consulting, I’m always open to that). However, anyone who has been either in the gaming industry more than, oh, five minutes, knows that you should always hear recruiters out. The minute you think your current job is forever, the people who pay you will go out of business/go insane/lay you off.

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