...Said my grandfather. Great man, horrible cabinet maker! I was driving to fencing practice yesterday and I noticed my boss was calling. For the past two years I've always got the goose bumps when he calls for the project has not been progressing smoothly and he has been complaining about budget overruns. He said he had some bad news, I was never told what our budget actually was but now he said it had ran out, he had put in his personal money beyond what he had initially been willing to spend but now as he had been trying to recruit some help for me he hit a brick wall. So, almost exactly 4 years since I was hired to lead the production of a very, very challenging mobile sports game I am now fired from that position, having been for the most of the 4 years the sole team member alone responsible for the ambitious goals that went well beyond my capabilities. I has not been once or twice that I have personally reached out to him with the notion that I myself have a degree on economics and managing businesses, that I could be given more managerial freedom to steer the project to a better course or in general we could have finished one of several alternate projects with the funds that were available. It was not to be, my advise was not wanted and I too had certain restrictions placed upon my ability to complete my tasks yet I was required to work towards them regardless. This project was very taxing to me and I really did not enjoy the four years but the pay was good and it was a games jobs and not telemarketing or some kind of backend for a webstore - which I frankly know nothing about. I will pitch a game I've worked on for a long time and see if that amounts to anything but I feel at the same time that I will have to now accept a job outside of games but also this allows me for the first time in four years to really focus on my own things when the legal shackles that would have stolen all of my own works IP from me are lifted. Truly, while the pay goes down we've had it a lot worse over the years and we can probably stay at our current apartment. Emotionally, this does feel like a release above all. I no longer have to stress about when the plug gets pulled and I no longer have to bash my head against a brickwall for 8 hours a day and end the day feeling frustrated and failed. Instead I can now just have a job and also work on games that are genuinely interesting and good. So, all is well, really. Going to have to scale back on daily expenses and so but that's nothing. We don't live to eat things we could do without. We live to chase what we love. Now that the sword has fallen I no longer have to stress about when it happens. I see a world of opportunities open up ahead.
Today as we went to buy some groceries I felt a genuine lightness, a sense of freedom. Really, I was in so many levels tied up by legal obligations and also restricted by them that I could not do what I desired. Now I am free again and will not easily get suckered into another such situation where I am by all legal accounts de facto property of someone without even freedom on my own time to pursue my own things. Freedom!
About 5ish years ago I was released from the job I'd been working for 7 years for unfortunate circumstances. This led me to pick up a job working at Solar World which gave me some experience in the silicon industry. About 2 years ago Solar World went belly up (more or less) and laid me off, At which point I applied for my current job. Had I not been released from the old job I might still be there, working seasonally for barely enough to survive on. Now I'm making almost 3 times as much and it's a minimum 40 hours a week, and I should be able to push to get another several dollars an hour before I plateau. I've got a car, a house and a regular income. Who knows where I'd be if I hadn't gotten released 5 years ago but I can assure you I probably would be in a lot more desperate a situation, I just wouldn't really know it. Sometimes it really can be just a blessing in disguise and I hope yours works out much the same way. My current job is as a technical support engineer for Tokyo Electron. And yes, tech support but no, I'm not the kind answers the phone and tells you to turn it off and on again (most of the time) I do the work before anyone else has so I can write the procedure as to how to do the work XD
I've had similar experiences. After army I got a job at steel painting line, I got exposed to toxic fumes there and my arm broke from the hard work on my third week. I mean I went back with my arm on a stretcher to try if I could still do it with one and a half hands but I couldn't so I went to the bossman who then said "you sure you're cut out for this kind of job". After getting home and giving it a thought I resigned myself, finished gymnasium and got to a temp track at hospital district's economics/finance department. It was dull AF but it was a 'govt job' so low pay but once getting past the temp-chain and officialized you'd be in it till you retired. Luckily circumstances during my final weeks during the BBA degree had a teacher force me to call off an already arranged substitution the day it was going to begin - it was a major dick move from the teacher that put me in an impossible bind between potentially not graduating and waiting for a whole year without income for the graduation papers or failing my promise to show up for work as substitute. So the hospital's CFO got mighty pissed when I had to deliver the news and when I tried to call her 5 years later to apologize and explain what went down she still refused to answer! So yea, that career path was really closed. So I went ahead and started the game studio in 2012 which I quit in 2015, averaging like 600€ a month for income for 3 years. But I learned the trade, really did. It was less than two weeks that I got this current Lead Dev position, which now lasted 4 years almost to date. Now I'm excited to see what opportunities will open up next. I suppose that in 2019 and in 2020 there will still be at least some level of demand for folks with 10 years of experience from video games development, C#, animation, VR etc. I could learn new things. I'm also itching to try to run a new studio, even if on the side, maybe do some freelance work. Or maybe I could build a castle which could be my HEMA dojo
Wow, I feel even less shitty about this whole farce ending now that I am looking at it today. I sent the boss a message asking on details such as "where and when" should I drop the equipment that belongs to the company. Then I remembered something I had forgotten during all of this hurdle with preparing to set up a new studio. The fact that he never responds to anything! I do painstaking work to figure out what is going wrong in the project, then I spend a lot of time - including my own time - to find out how it could be fixed and send a report to boss where I explain the issue in detail and also how to fix it and ask for a permission to pursue that path and for the funds as the measures were often contrary to standing orders and exceeding what I had to do, like recruiting help. Can't recruit a specialist without legal mandate to do so and definitely can't pay him yourself because they often cost more than I did. The point being made that doing these things would have cost a small amount of money then and there but it would have saved a ton more with the project coming to a satisfactory completion. And then - nothing. Can't reach the guy, can't get no comment and sometimes it took a whole month or more before I'd find out that he essentially didn't read it or just didn't care and then told me to "get back to it and fix it yourself" after I pointed out that certain skills that were needed were far beyond the scope of the project for me to learn. I mean, I can't just sit there for 7 years learning something like art when my speciality is games design and programming and I suck at art. I mean, come on! Really, none of the losses incurred by this project will be on my conscience. I certainly did more than my part in trying to steer it to success but ultimately the decision didn't rest on me. Now I figure I'll just have to look up their address from the salary receipts, show up and ring the doorbell until someone shows up and dump all of the gear to whomever opens the door from them. Because that's how professionals handle games development! I'm so ready to have a go for the first time in my life of running my own studio and answering to no one. 10 years! Not a single game published. It's about time now. If I've learned something then my lesson has been that other people will just screw up everything. I mean, I made many errors during the first few years too but I've learned a thing or two since then. Now, partnering up with someone who has not learned those lessons doesn't seem like a very attractive idea.
I found out that I have the right to apply for bridge studies to utilize my 10 years as a programmer into robotics. They're currently taking in applications for 'robotics in industrial manufacturing' course and I'm applying for it. While I love making games, I also love robotics and automation. There are no games jobs in my area and I need to feed the family and this whole province is defined by industry and agriculture, both of which heavily utilize robotics. So, if the games stuff won't work out I'll at least have the skills to seek employment in robotics. Robotics. I can't say the word robotics often enough, robotics. Having spent last four years heavily involved with animation systems, it seems to fit like a glove. Anyone have any info or experience of robotics as a job?
Well if you code you'd probably pick up ladder logic fairly easily. Electricians who were good at logic were always busy at the GM plant I worked at. Programming, setting them up and altering the logic as needed when things change or break. Good paying jobs and almost future proof.
Because climb is not a generally used expression unlike .Pick(), so if I take Ladder_Logic.Pick() I can get a copy of the Ladder_Logic for myself with specified keys. Da! Thank you! Yea, logic is easy since it's been what I've been doing for the past 10 years for living. I suppose I'll just need to get familiar with the syntax and conventions and learn some physical engineering - electrical, pneumatics, hydraulics, motors, sensors etc. Then again I love studying that sort of stuff anyway. I was mindblown when I found out that I could take these bridge studies for it while also receiving unemployment benefits that were based on my previous salary. I mean, it's still a 45% drop and all but it sure seems worth it. I almost went for robotics and automation before I started making games and frankly, this whole making games thing has not been a smooth ride to say the least! Some really bad years to be honest, at one point almost cost me my marriage. It's ironic that trying to make stuff that makes other people happy can be such soul sucking torment. As of now I'm every moment looking more and more forward to getting started with robotics. I'm gonna eat up all of that theory. And making games will return to being a hobby that I enjoy instead of a work that I resent. Man, I have a feeling I'm on a verge of a whole new chapter in my life. Warm and fuzzy! <- where'd that come from? Slippery and tentacly? Well, sure, I'd rather slippery tentacles than sand paper tentacles
wouldn't a pick be more useful for data mining than trying to remove the ladder from logic? Get your boolean out of my priority queue!
Holy crap, mindblown. I can now literally design my own drones, program them, equip them with desired sensors and even swarming if I want to. Next I'm looking up at how to read EEG and to control drones and robots with it, how to use EEG readings for more dynamic software etc. Mindblown.
