Plaidophile

The interview at Yorba went well. They're in much better financial shape than they were two years ago and are working on some pretty interesting things, including a thing to make it easier for software projects to get funded (Kickstarter works okay for some things but it falls short in a big way for most F/OSS stuff and even non-game commercial software). There was also a lot of mutual interest between us. They're also aware of the fact that I'm interviewing at other places and aren't doing a hard-bargain thing or anything, and so they're still on my list of possibilities.

Still, my top choice would involve anything that gets me back in Seattle, although I might be chasing rainbows too much to appreciate all the excellent stuff I have around me. At this point my list of preferences regarding places I'm actually considering working is something like:

• Valve (who still haven't gotten back to me)
• Amazon (only because they're in Seattle - if they were in San Francisco I wouldn't be nearly so eager)
• Yorba (because they're doing stuff I appreciate and at least the commute is nice and they're in a nice part of the Mission)
• TinyCo (in reality this is the best shot I have for working on my music thing but I'm not interested in the rest of them, so)

(not shown: all the other places trying to recruit me but which I have absolutely no interest in)

First, at Sony, there's a whole bunch of open positions, including various software engineering positions (client, server, hardware platform, and web), but also things like marketing, content development, and even English-Japanese translation, at various places in California (San Francisco, San Jose, Foster City, San Diego, and Los Angeles).

Next, a friend of mine at a local cloud computing startup is looking for engineers able to work in San Francisco (or are willing to relocate here), ideally ones experienced in Java and Hadoop but really just being able to learn technology as necessary.

If any of these appeal to you, email me at fluffy[at]beesbuzz[dot]biz and I'll get you in touch with the right people.

Today I had my regular 1:1 with Steve. After talking about the usual miasma of why I'm unhappy now, he asked what I expected to be doing here in 6 months. I didn't say, "Not being here."

Suddenly I seem to have a lot of people interested in me, and they are jobs that I would also be interested in doing. Huh.

Tomorrow I have two (!) phonecalls with potential employers, one at a small gaming company in San Francisco (which apparently has a lot of former Sony people, and I know better than to give a crap about who's on a board of directors but it does include Marc Andreessen for whatever that's worth), and one with some fly-by-night ecommerce outfit (yeah, yeah, I know, but it's a group that is apparently non-sucky to work at and the job description is really appealing anyway). Next Monday I have lunch with Adam at Yorba. I'm also already turning down a lot of interviews from places that I might be interested in if I were desperate for ways out, but I'm not.

I still wish I'd hear back from Valve, but it's not seeming so important now. Also, I know from experience that Amazon's relocation package is phenomenal (as is their IP agreement), and location-wise they're actually a bit nicer to work at than Valve (if only because being in various downtown-ish Seattle places makes for a much easier commute from more parts of Seattle; Valve is in a nice part of Bellevue, but it's still Bellevue). Amazon is also doing a lot more interesting stuff in more areas, and it feels like I'd be able to move around a lot more there, assuming I even feel like moving around, and already being in Seattle would mean it would be even easier to try to go with Valve.

I've also been thinking a lot about just putting my condo on the market (or maybe turning it over to a management company, although the HOA will make that difficult), moving up to Seattle on my own, and just chilling out for a while. I'm starting to work out the involved financial scenarios that would involve, and honestly they seem pretty darn good.

This morning I had a major panic attack just before the daily scrum. I managed to hold it together more or less (despite every little thing conspiring to keep lengthening it), and then I went to the relaxation room to try to breathe my way through it. 15 minutes later I felt like I really needed to just get the hell out of the office and I was feeling sick and my stomach hurt and I just needed to leave, so I told my managers I was feeling sick and took the rest of the day off (and also emailed Adam at Yorba to cancel lunch today).

I took a cab home, had the usual large/painful/unpleasant output that comes after a panic attack, and then laid down for a while. I'm feeling better now but still not great.

This panic attack felt like it was centering around the need to juggle work, my actual interview at a place that suddenly seems really unappealing to me (after finding the position at Valve that I really want), and the thoughts around just moving to Seattle outright and trying to geta job there, and worries over the logistics involved there, especially regarding my cat. (My cat seems to always be involved in these things.)

Sometimes I feel like I'm just unable to function at all anymore, and like whatever choice I make it's going to be the wrong one.

Meanwhile, last night I finally made most of a Keynote presentation as a framework for describing this collaborative music game/Internet studio/etc. idea that's been the target of my "I WANT TO MAKE THIS" obsession, mostly with the hope that Valve does give me the time of day and that they really do let employees decide what they're going to work on. Or, even if not, it is something I can use for other investors or game studios or whatever. It doesn't hurt to have, especially since it helps me organize my thoughts. It actually felt good to work on it, in a way I haven't felt good in a long time, and that says so much to me.

When I came back to Sony it was mostly because it was an easy-to-handle known quantity, and I didn't feel like I was quite done with the project I'd left. But now that project has stagnated and been trapped in a vicious cycle, and I feel done with it. Plus, I keep getting assigned tasks that I'm completely uninterested in, based on other peoples' incompetence (as in, management assigns me to these things because they know I'll do a good job of it, whereas the other available resources aren't so trustworthy).

I've experienced burnout before but never this bad. There's a bunch of factors involved but they're not worth discussing. What it really comes down to is I need to find a new career and lifestyle.

I've gotten some pretty good advice from someone about how to break into the interactive music industry, and I'll probably be following through on that, and meanwhile there's a non-profit free software organization in my neighborhood which is looking promising again so I've applied for a job there again (I'd talked with them two years ago but didn't follow through because the salary wasn't high enough to meet my basic living expenses, but ever since I refinanced my mortgage I can get away with much less, especially if I have the freedom to do other works on the side).

I've looked at other software companies around here but I'm completely uninterested in anything that any of them are making and I just feel like there's a big emptiness where my passion used to be, so maybe I need to go and do some good for a change.

That's also why I haven't posted any comics in a while. I'm just not feeling it.

As usual, my mom is being supportive but then keeps on calling me every few hours with another "brilliant idea" about what I should do based on her Fourier transform on her understanding of my interests and motivations and reality so that kind of wears me out too. Somehow she thinks that because I've been baking bread recently it means that I should go to a culinary academy and become a professional baker. But that's the way my mom's mind works.

If you're in or near San Francisco and interested in working on some pretty awesome next-generation platform code for embedded devices (game consoles, set-top boxes, etc.), and have experience with this sort of thing, drop me a line! C/C++ is required, and having experience in one or more of OpenGL (especially ES 2 and GLSL), embedded scripting (Lua, JavaScriptCore/V8, libTcl, etc.), Android, network stacks, and embedded/small Linux devices are huge pluses.

It's a great job with some great people, and the fact that I quit this job for greener pastures only to very quickly come back says a lot.

This is to develop an established media application platform that has already been used in quite a few consumer-facing applications, and gaining more all the time.

Drop me a line at [my pseudonym]@[this domain] if you're at all interested.

So, it's looking like my ongoing health problems have really been a stress disorder. Considering that I've been under one form of extreme stress or another since the time that this crap started, that makes a lot of sense; I think the aspect that made both me and my doctor consider this as the most likely possibility is that I'd actually been doing pretty okay for the last month (after returning to work and no longer being stressed about health issues per se), until early this week when work suddenly got VERY stressful VERY fast, and the problems all came back in spades.

So, for now, he's putting me on a low dose of Prozac to take the edge off while I try to figure out how to reduce my stress levels. I did have a good long talk with one of my coworkers who had gone through something similar a while back and he said he learned to just let other people make decisions and to just go with the flow and do what he's asked (and nothing more). I'm not sure I can make myself not care enough about what I'm working on to do that. But we'll see.

The year began just hours after my grandmother died.

The startup continues to be ridiculous, even after I'm gone.

I'm not fired, but I will be "parting on amicable terms" which appears to be the HR guy's favorite euphemism for "asked to quit."

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

I don't know why I thought the sixth startup I worked for would work out any better than the first five, but there you go. Looks like I'm going back to a corporate job where I belong.

Meh.

it is a lot easier t o keep inmiscible identities separate on the Internet if you keep thm completely separate from real life as well. I am apparently bad at both, judging by how many of my former coworkers have recently added "fluffy critter" to their circles on Google+. I mean, it was okay when it was the people who I'd let know about it to begin with (and I mean if ucblockhead hadn't known me online I'd have never had the job to begin with), but I'm not quite sure how I feel about apparently everyone else in the office knowing now too. Sigh.

Oh well. I've long felt that it's not so bad having people who actually know me actually know ME - it's the other direction I've always felt important to avoid (people trying to link my online self to my offline self in a way that makes it easy for people to know my real name which is not actually my real self). I hate people judging me by my resume and my picture and my legal name as if those are any more valid than the self I have discovered within.

I guess either direction is potentially problematic because I hate the idea that people would judge me unfairly based on stereotypes from one set of interest, and I'm still paranoid with the whole "You'll never get a job if people know about you!" thing that people have been parroting for years, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Basically I'm complicated.

I know of a few specific job openings right now for anyone who is interested.

First, the new startup is looking for a senior QA engineer and an iOS developer, ideally one with heavy UI experience. They're based in the Presidio (pretty much right by the Golden Gate Bridge), and are working on some great stuff and have amazing benefits and great pay and all the other reasons why I'm looking forward to starting there.

The startup is also interested in good talent in general, especially folks who have done mobile dev work (especially in graphics and networking) and realtime server backend stuff and whatever. They don't have any specific headcount to fill, but instead just want to attract top talent who are interested in what they're doing (and what they're doing involves distributed media stuff around low-latency audio and video streaming and creative collaboration tools and so on).

Next, Sony is looking for, well, someone who can replace me. C++, Java (especially on Android), and graphics programming (espeecially OpenGL ES) are desired there. My group was based in SoMA, although there's also a splinter faction in San Jose where a bunch of stuff happens too (especially on third-party library integration and so on). If you're interested you should probably chat with Neillparatzo (who you can PM via my forum or whatever), as he could certainly benefit from the referral bonus.

So now that the announcement has been made at work, I guess it's okay for me to talk about it here too: next Wednesday (the 29th) will be my last day at Sony. I've gotten a pretty interesting job at a tiny stealth-phase startup, where I'll be their Android platform and graphics specialist, and possibly doing stuff on iOS and a few other things too. The startup is pretty stealth and really doesn't want to be talked about (so I won't mention them by name here) but they're doing very interesting stuff in the world of mobile media collaboration and the like (real-time low-latency audio/video stuff). It's a very scary move for me, but it's one of those rare opportunities that I'd absolutely regret not taking.

I won't be starting at the startup until July 18, so in the meantime I am free for socializing, and also I have a couple of toy Android apps I've been meaning to write in the meantime. Hopefully I'll have a chance to actually see the parts of San Francisco I've been meaning to see for the last four years.

For all the issues inherent to working in a small group in a large international megacorporation, the last four years at Sony have actually been a great experience with some amazing coworkers, and I hope to see the products I've been working on actually make it to market (which they should be fairly soon).

For the last several days I've been back in NYC for the first time in six years, for Song Fight Live. The show went pretty well; there were some logistical problems and some equipment issues and of course things didn't go as amazingly as most people ever expect them to, but there isn't really anything new there. It was fun and a good time, when maintaining an appropriate perspective on what it was we were actually doing (PROTIP: we are not actually rock stars).

The main thing I was worried about is that much of our time would be spent treading old ground that represents about a year's worth of really bad memories for me, and I did everything I could to ignore the fact that I was physically in a place where mentally I was very bad off. Trying to ignore the familiar sight of the L train and Union Square and the like, in particular, made me feel twinges of ickiness (even obsessively pre-planning transit before flying here made me feel twinges of deep pit-of-the-stomach sickness), and I very purposefully let Mike (a fellow songfighter from Seattle with whom I was sharing a room and most of my time) lead the way everywhere, and basically played willfully ignorant about how to get around.

Last night, though, I ended up getting, shall we say, sufficiently intoxicated, and ended up getting separated from Mike, having gone with a different group that was going to do some further bar-hopping, but certain members of that group had much better judgement than myself and said I should probably head back to the hotel rather than drink more. (I fortunately had enough sense to realize that I was probably on the verge of feeling like I was going to die if I didn't get some water and lie down very soon. Even if it meant less time hanging out with certain friends who will remain nameless.)

So, of course, the way back to the hotel was very familiar: the L to Union Square, then the 6 up to my hotel in Midtown. It had aspects of trips I'd done many times before, and normally the majority of that would have been in order to go to work (L to 5th Ave, F/V to 25th St - or just walk, if no train was there). I also used to take a bit of extra time to myself to just walk to Union Square after work to clear my head further, so that particular station is also quite familiar to me.

But it might have just been the alcohol but I just plain didn't care. The whole journey was simple and easy and came completely naturally, and it was actually comforting in a way to be alone in the middle of a crowd of strangers. I got to thinking about my relationship with NYC and so on. I came to the realization that I'd gone to NYC to begin with because I needed to launch my career and I was just so desperate that I was willing to take anything, and the reason I put up with the hell I was in was simply because I had no self-worth to speak of. But now I know better, and while I still wouldn't want to live in NYC, I no longer hate it, because it's where I finally started to learn to appreciate myself.

So I've had a formal offer from the startup since Thursday. I'm definitely going to take it, but I need to figure out the best way to manage the message to my higher-ups at Sony.

I am almost certainly leaving Sony soon.