While it wasn’t for us, it was most certainly worth going for these few months.  We have no regrets.  Firstly, it was important to make some friends in the area, and we met a number of wonderful families through school that we’ll continue to meet up with.

Plus, we had to try the school education out to see just how wrong it was for us.  Four months ago, we didn’t even consider the idea of home schooling.  The idea that Lucy could teach a 5-year-old while looking after 2-year-old triplets would have seemed nuts.  It’s really taken us these four months to come around to the idea, trying everything we could to fix the problems at school.  We worked so hard on making school work out that we now feel sure we’ve made the right decision.

Anyhow, here are a few things that surprised me about our school experience.

Parent involvement

Americans love to get parents involved in school.  Looking back at our short time there, we did an almost ridiculous amount.  We did about half the baking for a fundraising bake sale.  We helped run the book fair.  We bought stuff for the classroom, from pencils and craft supplies to tissues and hand sanitiser.  We organised a basket of gifts for auction.  We organised a ‘book swap’ event where every child could swap out two books, including getting hold of several hundred books to seed the event initially.  We sent in the fruit for their Thanksgiving feast.  We photocopied, and emailed, and organised.  We went to meetings to vote on proposals for upgrading classrooms.

And when I say ‘we’, I mean Lucy!

We never even got around to volunteering in the classroom or driving kids on field trips (two other things we were down for) because the background check process still hadn’t completed when we left.

I love the principle, and I think it’s a deliberate culture.  From what I can gather (I haven’t seen this written down explicitly), the theory is that the more invested the parent, the more they care about their child’s education, and the more they do outside school to set up their child for success in school.  The child sees that they care, that school is important.

I hope it works.  I think the danger is that maybe the parents who need to care a little more about school, aren’t the ones running the bake sales.  But overall, I liked the attitude.

Fundraising

You’ll notice that a lot of what we did in my ‘parent involvement’ list was raising funds for the school.  And this is where I worry, because some of the parent involvement may be less about getting parents to care, and more about making up for a desperate lack of funding:  buying tissues and pencils for the classroom concerns me.  For a while I kept telling myself, it’s just a way of getting parents involved.  Then I learned they just cut teacher pay in our district this year - 5 schooldays cut in the first half of 2012.  So maybe not.

Many countries are struggling to make ends meet in their budgets just now, but no pencils in classrooms?

I also wonder about the effectiveness of some of the fundraising approaches.  None of the fundraising involved donating money directly to the school.  It’s all of the form where some parents provide some goods or services, other parents pay for these goods or services, and the payment goes to the school.  The problem is that the parents providing stuff are spending money and time which does not go to the school.  And the other parents are probably buying stuff they don’t really want!  So there’s an inefficiency there.

If I spend $50 on baking ingredients and sell $200 worth of cakes at the sale, then the school just raised $200, but parents collectively spent $250 and a load of time baking.  My question is, what if those parents had just donated $250 and volunteered that baking time directly to the school instead?

The book fair is arguably worse.  Parents simply spend money on books.  The school must get some kind of cut or perhaps some free books, but fundamentally it’s money going into Scholastic’s pockets (they did $2 billion in revenue in 2011).

It’s not a simple question to answer.  Perhaps the bake sale approach encourages people to give more than if they were just asked for money and time.  It helps foster the school community.  It provides a good way for lots of parents to give small donations.  The book fair encourages parents to provide books for their children.

But I found it frustrating that I saw very little analysis of the efficiency element in all this fundraising.  So much effort is being put in, and I wonder whether a little extra thought could help.

Pledging allegiance

Now this part is just plain weird.  Every schoolchild here, every single day, has to stand, place their hand on their heart, and say these words in unison:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

As an atheist, I was kind of irked by the God part (which isn’t even part of the original wording – it’s a 1950s amendment and the subject of various lawsuits), but mostly, I found this just a little bit creepy.  Suitable for special occasions with patriotic significance, sure … but every morning at school?  Sorry America, but it’s something a cult would do.

One speed fits all

The main, perhaps only reason, we ended up taking Lexie out of school, is the approach to dealing with different ability levels within the classroom.

I should start by saying that we thought Lexie’s teacher was pretty amazing in some ways.  Most of all, she took this class of 30 children, some of them rather unruly, and had them under an impressive level of control.  They lined up neatly, were quiet at the right times, tidied up their room, and approached their learning pretty seriously.  Not all of the classes in the school looked this way.

What they weren’t terribly interested in, sadly, were the children’s individual abilities.  I don’t want to turn this into a rant about how special our child is, but will stick to one very simple example: Lexie was prevented for a long time from writing her own name on her artwork.  Apparently that’s the teacher’s job, because if you’re writing, you’re too far ahead.  There were hundreds of things like this.  It felt as though her enthusiasm for learning was being crushed.  She began to be afraid to try hard or show what she could do, lest it was against the rules.

We asked again and again for some differentiation in the teaching, and while there was some token effort on the school’s part, the message came back consistently: just relax, she can wait for the other children to catch up.  With a bit of added disbelief that she was actually capable of doing things like reading.  CHILDREN OF THE SAME AGE ARE ALL THE SAME, DIDN’T YOU KNOW.

For some reason I thought modern education was all about being child-centered, recognising that different children are at different stages and have different learning styles.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m sure that’s the impression I got from my mother training to be a teacher recently.  I thought we were on a continuing process of evolution and improvement from the rote learning style of the 50s.

Is that a difference between the UK and US systems? (I didn’t think the UK system was anything to shout about!)  A difference between idealistic teacher training and the realities of one teacher looking after 30 children?  Is it impossible to pay attention to each child individually and also maintain class discipline?

Is school just babysitting?

I recently came across this post on public schools and home schooling, which just hit the nail on the head for me with this idea:

Because then I noticed how the US school system is really just the biggest babysitting institution in the world. My first clue, probably, was that I was dying to have my kids back in school so I could have my life back. What else can I do to get time alone? How else can I do some work? Work is very fun.

Whether or not it’s supposed to be … that’s exactly how it felt to us.  A babysitting service.

I disagree with that post though on the idea that it’s doomed to failure in the way that Social Security is.  Social Security is in trouble because of the basic age distribution of our population, and constantly increasing lifespans.  It may well be doomed.

Schools may be facing budget shortfalls, but it feels like they’ve also just made some bad decisions on how to approach teaching.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

In looking back, a couple of things stood out for me from our family’s life in 2011. Did that really happen in a year? It’s pretty inspirational when I think about the possibilities for next year.

I know Kung Fu!
The first example is watching my daughter learn to read. Roughly a year ago, we started getting her to read a story to us as part of the bed-time story routine. It was hard going to begin with; the stories were essentially along the lines of “This is Tom. Tom has a mop …. This is Pat … “ and even then, they were often a struggle.

A year on, and she’s reading me the “How to Train Your Dragon” series, a chapter a night. I guess they’re like novels aimed at 10-year-olds or so. She reads all these long words perfectly, even when she has no idea what they mean.

Ok, so that was cheating a bit … it helps to be five years old! Sometimes she reminds me of the training scenes from The Matrix, with the speed she can pick things up.

Follow this one simple rule
The second example is about losing weight, the classic new year’s resolution. I didn’t actually make a weight loss resolution last year, but I did lose nearly 60lbs (27kg for my euro-friends) over the year. It’s truly incredible, looking back. I’ve tried so hard and failed so many times before, and it didn’t even feel like I tried too hard this time.

Obviously, you can boil it down to eating better and exercising more, but specifically, a rather wonderful set of random factors combined to make this time work for me (and I have Dreamworks to thank for all of them!):

• Unlimited free food. No, really. Maybe my mother drummed into me not to leave food on my plate, or maybe I’m just inherently gluttonous, but I’ve never been able to turn away from free food … until Dreamworks. Here, they put an unlimited amount of delicious free food in front of you, at breakfast, all morning, at lunch, and all afternoon. And it turns out that this is exactly what I needed. Once my subconscious greed reflex grasped the fact that the pile of delicious breakfast pastries was going to be there again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, it began to become less important that I ate one RIGHT NOW.
• Seeing a nutritionist. I’ve found this really helpful in making a series of small changes to my eating habits. The way I eat now is very different than a year ago, but at no point have I had to go hungry or feel like it’s been a hardship. It’s just been a series of simple, incremental changes, for example not having dessert with lunch every day, but picking my favourite from the week’s menu and just having that. It’s amazing how these changes add up over time.  Also, having to talk through my food choices with someone put an immediate end to all the inner excuses I could come up with for eating crap.
• Lunchtime sports. I find it incredibly hard to exercise hard for the sake of exercising. I need a game to play, a ball to chase. With 4 young children, I also find it impossible to justify spending time on myself after work or at the weekend. Lunchtime sports are the solution to both these problems, and we have the most amazing facilities at work … full-court indoor basketball and a bunch of outdoor fields. Over the course of the year, I’ve honed my sports choices to get maximum benefit for losing weight. Firstly, I’ve minimised hard-surface sports like basketball as much as possible, because my knees started to get sore and became the limiting factor to how much I exercise. Instead, I try to play on grass every day if I can. Secondly, I’ve determined that ultimate frisbee contains more running than any other sport I can find. It’s unbelievably lung-bursting. Finally, I make choices within the game to maximise my exercise rather than to prioritise winning: run deep upfield routes whenever possible, try to guard the faster players on the other team, get back to the line fast after a score.

Little and often
The lesson for me in both of these is that the changes you can make to your life, your body or your mind in a single year are just incredible – almost certainly more than you can imagine right now. All you have to do is pick something and work on it.

Have a great 2012.

From pre-revenue startup to established company
Ok, so RTW wasn’t quite pre-revenue – I guess we brought some money in from Crackdown – but we were pre-revenue in our ultimate endeavour, to build an online self-publishing outfit with a lot of VC money.

Revenue obviously makes a huge difference to the way you can treat your staff.  RTW’s heart was in the right place, but ultimately early startups need to attract and retain employees by passion and opportunity alone, not a life of luxury.  So I feel very, very spoiled at Dreamworks!  Sure, they provide breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks, the best gym I’ve ever seen, and a train pass, all for free.

But the thing I like best is all the extra-curricular stuff they put on: lunchtime classes (figure drawing and screenwriting recently, improv just now), talks about film-making from internal and external speakers, and a movie screening every week.  I suspect you become somewhat used to food etc over time (when I met someone at breakfast early on they said “I wish I could taste the breakfast like it was my first day again”), and that the artistic development stuff holds the real long-term value. Learning is tremendously important to me.

From secrecy to openness
Coming straight from the world of RTW’s secretive and bumbling management, it’s refreshing to be part of somewhere far more open.  Part of that’s down to being publicly traded (quarterly earnings reports!), and part of it’s down to the public availability of box office receipts.  It’s more than that, though.  I particularly like Jeffrey Katzenberg’s ‘blog’.  Closer to a text message than a blog, with its hurried, highly abbreviated style, and the blurriest photo attachments I’ve ever seen, it tells everyone, pretty much every day, what he’s been up to – who he had ‘bkft’ with (seems like he can’t eat without working!), how our projects are going, deals and partnerships he’s working on, thoughts on the future, and general company news.  He is absolutely relentless and it’s wonderful to get some insight into what’s going on at the top level.  Along with the fact that he is very good at dishing out praise where it’s due, it’s one of the reasons I’ve noticed unusual fondness towards him here, compared to a lot of executives.

(there’s an example here – leaked by someone naughty!)

Rules and procedures
My biggest fear of going to a larger company was bureaucracy and an environment where people can’t use their initiative.  Dreamworks pretty much exacerbated those fears with the welcome pack they sent alongside their offer letter – including a fair amount of “corporate policy”, some of it on some pretty trivial topics, like taking “rest breaks” and filling out weekly timecards.

Thankfully, it seems to be an incredibly relaxed place to work in practice, and people apply common sense over policies – in fact, many people seem to be unaware some of the policies even exist.  I’m not sure why they’re there – was it just the done thing when they started the company, a legal necessity, or are they a result of having some unionised staff?  Whatever the reason, I’m glad to say I haven’t filled out a timecard yet, and in several ways, I’d say Dreamworks is actually more relaxed than RTW, where we continued to use a clock-in/clock-out system to the end.

Development environment
The biggest downside I’ve seen of our size, so far, is when it comes to centralised software services (source control, bug database etc).  It seems like it’s hard to choose such software and configure it in a way that keeps everyone happy.  This was already a problem by the end at RTW and it’s an even greater magnitude here.  I do miss the days of 40ish people when a few of us could agree to switch source control and get it done fast.

I’m not a big fan of their choice of Accurev here, although the more I use it, the more it seems like the server is robust and fast, and it’s the client that’s awful (unfortunately that includes the command-line interface, not just the GUI).  Over time I seem to be collecting the necessary quirky recipes to get things done, and it’s becoming less of a problem.  If there were 30 of us I’d still want to change, but for a few thousand?  No chance!

When it comes to the local development environment, things are much better.  It’s been fun getting back into Linux development after years on Windows – simple pleasures like the shell   We’re free to choose whatever open-source tools we want here, and we have a couple of proprietary options on top; I’ve already seen at least 3 different choices for each of compiler, editor and debugger in common use.  I got frustrated with a couple of the default options and am now on the tried-and-trusted gcc+Emacs+gdb.

Most of the code here is either C++ or Python.  Sadly, the stuff I’m working on is in the former.  I was going to say I’d forgotten just how awful C++ is, but I think it would be more truthful to say I never knew this last time I used it – it’s taken using C# heavily for a few years to see the difference.  Waiting to build is horrible, even though we have pretty short build times by C++ standards.  Simple changes seem to take so much typing – change the header, change the source, change all the constructors, copy constructor, assignment, destructor … ugh.  Just to add a member!  The lack of breadth in the standard library and the lack of sugar (foreach!) and power (lambdas!) in the language adds verbosity everywhere.  Sure, 0x adds some of that stuff, but I dread to think when it will be widely usable, and I won’t be surprised if it brings all kinds of new ugliness too.

The *one* thing I like compared to C# is deterministic destruction.  Oh, I guess const can be useful sometimes, although you learn to live without that pretty fast.

Anyway, back to Dreamworks.

Cross-site development that works
I realise my past experience isn’t a lot of data, but VIS and RTW both struggled with the relationships between their various offices, with a similar pattern of tension and distrust across geographic lines.  With VIS it wasn’t too bad with just the occasional flare-up, but with RTW it was rife.

Dreamworks have managed to avoid that, and I’d love to understand better how.  One thing I’ve noticed that’s probably important is the way teams are organised: while VIS and RTW reinforced the site division by letting it affect the org chart (e.g. keeping teams entirely within one site), here it’s the opposite.  Many teams are simply spread across both sites (explaining why so many of their job openings are advertised at both locations).  They make so little of the division that I have a very poor awareness of who is at which site, at least for the people I deal with less frequently.

Asset management
Something that struck me early on here was the sophistication of their approach to managing assets.  They need to: the sheer number and size of assets made for a show makes even the biggest of games look tiny in comparison, and there’s a big focus on eliminating inefficiencies in the production pipeline.  Of course, they have the benefit of many years’ experience doing this, and a great deal of stability in their toolchain over that time compared to constantly-changing game technology.

The other thing that’s interesting is the Technical Director (TD) role.  They have programming skill, but are part of the content production team – so they can do technical things such as setting up character rigs, writing shaders or setting up simulations – but they’re also available to help organise assets, and do scripting, automation and tools to improve the pipeline.  As part of the content team, they understand what the artists are doing far better than central tech teams.  While I’ve met people with this skillset in games, not every team makes best use of them – I’ve seen them treated as interchangeable with core technology programmers – and I think game art teams are too often left to organise their own assets, or struggle with managing their budgets.  I have seen some game teams make good use of someone like this, but I don’t think it’s always recognised or hired for as a skill in its own right.  I’m certainly not one of the “games should imitate films” brigade that you sometimes come across, but this could be a useful idea for some teams.

Lots to be excited about
2010 was a tough year in many ways – severe sleep deprivation, losing a job and leaving our beloved home.  But I also see it as a wonderful one – bringing the triplets home from hospital in good health, starting at Dreamworks and moving to California.

With 2 to 3 films a year, and several years’ worth of original projects at various stages of development, there’s a lot going on here and quite a buzz around the place.  It’s opened up whole new areas to learn about and lots of amazingly talented people to meet.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my first few months, and I hope 2011 is just as good … perhaps with a bit less of the upheaval

This is very much a set of notes on what happened to me, rather than general advice of any kind.  Things may have changed, and everyone’s situation is slightly different.  I found the British expats forum to be an excellent place to get specific advice.

Immigration

I came in on an H1-B Visa.  I think that’s the most common for foreign software developers at the moment, but there are others (I love the sound of “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” – but you have to be as extraordinary as Alex Martelli!).  A few random notes on these:

• This year, there was an annual quota of 65000 H1-Bs.  The quota began on 1st April, and being on this year’s quota, I couldn’t start work until 1st October.  In past years, the quota was sometimes used up within days, which was pretty silly; the last couple of years, it has lasted way longer (there are still 15000 left right now, in early December).  I kept an eye on the number at uscis.gov while I was applying.  I think I was lucky with the timing of Realtime Worlds’ demise – still some visas left, but 1st October wasn’t too far away.
• The rest of my family are on H4 “dependent” visas, which in particular means my wife can’t work here.  As it happens, she has her hands pretty full right now, so that wasn’t an issue for us.
• Simply applying for the visa, never mind providing relocation support, has a cost to an employer, both $$ and the extra complication.  Some of the places I wanted to apply didn’t bother considering foreign applicants.
• Things that tripped me up and caused delays in the visa application process: needing to renew my passport so it was valid past the end of the visa period, needing to provide academic transcripts from my degree (CU usually take a leisurely 28 days to provide these!!), and needing to get visa photographs taken that were almost like passport photos, but subtly different.  There was also a fair bit of paperwork to do; some of it was O(N^2) in the size of the family, which hit me hard!!
• The first step of the application process was Dreamworks submitting a “petition” on my behalf.  Once that was granted we had to go the US embassy in London to actually apply for the visa.  The “appointment time” seemed to be less of an appointment, and more of a first-come, first-served queue, so I wish we’d arrived earlier.
• Overall timings went something like this: 2 weeks for LCA, 3 weeks for petition, 1 week to get appointment in London, 1 week to get visa, 1 week to book flights.  Plus a few extra weeks caused by me (sorting out passport, degree transcripts, and photos).  So it’s not exactly quick.

Salary negotiation and cost of living

I found the US employers I applied to far more direct about salary negotiation than I’ve been used to in the UK.  In some ways, it sounds a bit unfair that salary could be based on negotiation ability as much as, say, past experience or technical performance at interview.  But I didn’t find it too bad, even though the idea of a negotiation is slightly intimidating to me.  Overall, I prefer a conversation about salary to a take-it-or-leave-it offer.

As a quick aside, I highly recommend reading “Getting to YES”.  It’s a fascinating book in its own right with its tales of international diplomatic incidents.  But mostly, it’s highly practical and it’s reassuring to see that being a good negotiator isn’t just about extreme force of personality.  Wikipedia has a brief summary of the core material.

For example, there’s the idea of separating interest from position.  Your position is what you’re asking for.  Your interest is what you really want – the motivation behind your position.  There are plenty of cheesy examples to illustrate the idea, but the principle is important and can always be used, albeit more subtly much of the time.  Specifically, I made a point of mentally separating the salary I was asking for (the position) from what I really care about: the life my family and I are going to be able to lead on this salary.  So doing thorough research on the cost of living over here was really important.  If I hadn’t done this, I would have massively undersold myself and potentially ended up struggling to get by.  Going the other way, I’ve seen candidates in the past insisting on Bay-Area type salaries when applying to Realtime Worlds.  There really wasn’t any way we could proceed with the hiring process in these cases.

I also checked with some American friends what typical salaries would be for the area and my experience.  When that independently aligned with my cost of living calculations, I felt pretty confident with what I was asking for.  Armed with this information, I wouldn’t even call it a negotiation.  One company offered what I asked, and Dreamworks actually offered more.  But if there had been any negotiation, I was confident that I could justify $x.  There wouldn’t have been any arbitrary who-blinks-first haggling that is probably what I actually fear most when I hear the word “negotiation”.  Want to pay me much less than $x?  Ok, show me where my figures are wrong.  Did I completely over-estimate the average rent in your area?  Did I mis-understand the tax system?  And if we hadn’t reached agreement, I would have felt confident that walking away was actually the right thing to do.

Computing cost of living changes for a move within the UK is generally quite straightforward, as many of the costs stay the same or thereabouts.  I found looking at the US to require a substantial amount of effort, and I still find costs of things bizarre and surprising.  Petrol is cheap.  Our home electricity/gas bill seems to be about 1/4 of what it was back home.  But then mobile phones seem like a rip-off.  And food feels extortionate.

Moving household possessions

We sent a few things (essential baby equipment!) by air, and everything else by sea.  The sea freight still isn’t here after 9 weeks, although it’s very close now.  Given the cost of shipping it, we did a pretty thorough sort through our possessions, so packing up our stuff was the most time-consuming part of the entire move by far.

Shipping companies send someone round to your house, supposedly to estimate the volume of your possessions.  I was naively expecting them to bring a tape measure, come up with an accurate estimate and feed it into a published set of price-per-volume rates.  But they’re really a salesman.  They feed you a lot of BS, and while they do look at your stuff, I think they’re also there to size you up and figure out how much they can rip you off.  They do not have a published price list per volume.

So we a got a couple of them in and played them off against one another to get about 20% off what they first asked.  I would then say they did a great job at the collection end, but the delivery end has been poor.  I’ve detected an attitude of “well do you want your stuff back or not?”

Medical care

The US medical system was a huge concern for me when I started thinking about the move.  It’s still early days, but I feel a bit better about it now; at least, much of the fear of the unknown has gone.  There’s lots of new and confusing terminology to learn – we had to pick from a choice of 4 insurance plans, based on a big table of data full of words I’d never heard of … HMO, PPO, copay, deductible, out-of-pocket maximum … and various ominous-sounding phrases like “pays 70% of reasonable and customary expenses”, which leave you with absolutely no idea how much medical care is going to cost you.  Thankfully, the internet makes it possible to reach some kind of understanding.

On the good side, it seems as though there’s a much wider choice of levels of care, depending on how much you want to pay, and all the jobs I considered came with a decent level of care at a reasonable cost.  The service is generally considered more efficient and higher quality than public ones.  These are all the obvious benefits of a privatised system.

There still appear to be some major problems with the system.  The idea that some people can’t afford decent care is disgusting, as are the set of horror stories about people going to the nearest doctor in an emergency and being made to choose (if they can) between serious medical problems and financially crippling bills.  And there’s the whole pre-existing condition thing.  They have at least been working on these issues with recent legislation, I believe – but it feels as though the incentives can never be made to align perfectly with patient interest in a private system.

Anyway, I’ve wandered completely off topic.  In the end we went with a plan (one of the HMOs) that seemed simplest financially, and perhaps closest to what we’re used to back home.  It essentially boils down to a price list, so you can see exactly what each treatment costs (this is what they call ‘copay’) – none of that 70% stuff.  We’ll need longer to see how happy we are with it, but so far the results are encouraging: it seems lightning fast to get an appointment, no queuing when we go, more outside-work-hours options, and all the appointments have been cheap ($20) so far, including seeing some more specialised doctors.

Getting credit

One of the odd things about the USA is they have their own credit rating system and couldn’t give two monkeys about the rest of your life to date.  So we went from the maximum possible credit score to the minimum, overnight.  Supposedly, we have to work our way up from easier types of credit (store cards/car loans) to higher types (credit cards/mortgages), and people say this could take a few years.  In practice, it’s not been quite that simple:

• I was actually denied a store card – they only allowed a tax return as proof of income, and I haven’t filed one yet.  I’ve not bothered to apply for any others given that I was only applying for one in an attempt to get some credit history, and I found being denied a store card pretty insulting.
• We took out a small car loan, even though we could afford to purchase outright.  They didn’t seem to care much about our low credit score – it’s just a good excuse for them to slap on a punitive interest rate.  Given that we can simply pay the bulk of it off immediately, I’m not too bothered.
• A couple of companies (mobile phone, electricity) simply asked for a few hundred dollars deposit up front.  We’ll get these back in a year.  This seems fairer to me than being denied or charged a ridiculous interest rate.
• Getting a credit card, on decent terms albeit with a lowish limit, was straightforward.  I’m not sure if that’s normal – we got it through our bank, Wells Fargo, who, incidentally, deserve a mention for being outstanding.  They have an international application process so we were able to set up the account, wire money in and get our debit cards before we set foot in the US.  That process was pleasantly personal, with a single point of contact throughout who we could email as well as call.

Easier than expected

That’s about all I can think of.  Through all the complexity, and the apparent magnitude of moving internationally with 4 young children, it’s actually not been that big a deal overall.  One of the wonderful things about modern life is that you can do all these incredible things – like fly around the globe in a metal tube – fly – while your possessions share the cost of an ocean voyage with goodness knows how many thousands of unrelated items, and you don’t need to know the first thing about any of this, because teams of specialists do it for you.

I just have to get used to the funny keyboard layout and spelling “colour” differently in my code

I then stumbled into Realtime Worlds because I wasn’t enjoying certain aspects of VIS, and I knew a few people who had gone up the road. It seemed the best option in Dundee, and we’d just bought a house so moving wasn’t that desirable.

I guess what I’ve described is a pretty common human problem-solving technique: go with a gut feeling, a local, adequate solution, and see how things go. Change your approach if it isn’t working.

But earlier this year, for the first time in my life, I decided to be a bit more deliberative about the search my next job.  I realised that it was time to move on, that I care passionately about what my workplace is like, and that I am not the kind of person who changes job too often.  I asked myself, “if I could work on any software project, anywhere in the world, where would I choose?”

I thought I’d share the process I went through for anyone who’s interested.

The company

I never seriously entertained the thought of leaving software development, but equally, I never wanted to restrict myself to games.  So I came up with three fairly general criteria that I could apply to any developer:

1. Must produce truly world-class product(s) – recognisable “brand names”.  I know this isn’t necessary for me to enjoy a job – because I know I’d love to work for the right early unheard-of startup – but with a young family, the time felt right for something more stable.  Once I started to look at established companies, I couldn’t face the thought of somewhere whose product was anything less than excellent.  Sub-standard things irritate me deeply and I want to be proud of what I do.
2. Must be known for being a good place to work – good culture, talented colleagues.  The people I work with, and the types of interactions I have with them, are what make me happy to get up in the morning and go to work.  And I need time with my family, so sweat shops are out, even though some of them do amazing things.
3. Must be innovative and ambitious, technically and/or creatively.  In other words, the work itself must be interesting.  Otherwise, you could name some rather mundane places that satisfy (1) and (2) – perhaps banks, although I’ve never worked at one, so that may be grossly unfair.  As a specific example, I worked my university summers at Data Connection (now Metaswitch), and they matched (1) and (2) without really inspiring me to go back.

I did not limit myself geographically.  I was most likely limited by my own awareness and knowledge of developers, and perhaps in a variety of subconscious biases, but I tried to search as widely as I could.  I decided to be really picky on all three criteria, and came up with a list of about 10-15 companies to start off with (4 of them were game developers).

The role

The next question was, what do I actually want to do?  After getting semi-accidentally sucked into management at Realtime, I felt that I needed to make a clear choice between going back to programming, or committing to the management path.  I honestly found this a tricky question.  My heart instantly said programming, because I love it unconditionally.  But my head couldn’t help wonder what the other path might hold.  Maybe the possibilities for career growth make management a better long-term option?  And there’s always the classic fear of being an old programmer, articulated here for example.

In the end, I decided on an experiment.  I would apply for management roles with some companies, and engineering roles with others.  I figured the interview process itself would help me to learn about myself and ultimately make a decision.  As a general rule of thumb, I tended to go “management” for the really giant companies, and “engineer” at the others.  I did this on the basis that I’ve already done the thrown-in-the-deep-end-with-no-help thing.  It would be good to experience somewhere that provided clear structure, expectations and guidance to younger managers, and an opportunity to be mentored well.  So I created two drastically different CVs for the 2 roles, and sent my applications off.  What happened next was wonderfully illuminating.

Option A

So the first reply I get is for a management role with a company that shall go unnamed, inviting me to their first-round phone screen.  The questions are slightly unsettling from the start:

“Tell me about a product that’s not electronic or electrical in any way that you absolutely love and consider to be well-designed”.

Ok, um, panic!! … looking around me … ah, my Moleskine notebook is sitting in front of me with a list of questions to ask at the end.  That’ll do.  I manage to give a semi-decent answer about why it’s a well-designed notebook.  Phew.

“Now, consider how you might make use of electronics to improve this product.  Describe your design to me”.

Oh, shit!

Just nothing.  Totally blank.  I half-heartedly stumble through some ideas and the interviewer, taking pity on me, takes one of them and turns it into some kind of portable pen that could scan pages for transfer to a computer.  I admonish them for what is, frankly, a stupid idea.  Ooops!  They point out that it’s just an interview question and leave awkward silence for me to give a better answer.  Eventually I blurt something out about how useful it would be to have a wireless device that could help you locate your notebook if you lost it, if such a technology were cheap enough.  A bit lame, and a bit sci-fi, but at least somewhat useful.

An hour later and I can finally hang up the phone, pouring with sweat and totally on edge.  Lucy asks me why I didn’t choose our cots (we have pretty nice cots).  Built-in baby monitors, toys that make lights and sounds, temperature monitoring … the possibilities for naff but plausible electronics would have been endless!  Damn!

A week later, for reasons I cannot fathom, they let me through to their next round of interviews.  I start sweating nervously on the spot.  Here we go again …

“Describe the design of an iPhone application you’d like to make”.  Great!  I’m in the middle of creating an iPhone game for a bit of fun.  Launching enthusiastically into my game design, they cut me short.  ”Could you choose something that’s not a game, please?”

[I can't face the embarrassment of describing what I came up with.  Let's just say I finished this interview even more of a wreck.]

Option B

The very next day, I have my first engineering interview.  At this point I’m pretty terrified of any kind of interview, so I start off more or less trembling.

“If I write an empty class in C++, how many functions does it already have?”

I can do this.

“If I add a pointer-to-integer member, and assign a new int to it in the constructor, what else should I do to the class?”

I can do this too.

“If I change this member to a pointer-to-array-of-integers, what changes should I make?”

I suddenly notice that I’m completely, blissfully, relaxed

“What happens to your code if the memory allocation fails during the assignment operator?”

Doh!  But easily fixed!

“Could you describe all of the casting operators in C++?”

In my sleep.

“What do I mean by shadow mapping?”

I love interviews again!  Ask me more!

And so on.

In short, after an hour of non-stop technical questions, I know I have to follow my heart.  The unnamed giant company call back and ask for another management interview, and I tell them to **** off (nicely), because I am, conclusively, an engineer again.

And the result …

The outcome of all this is that I’m now a software engineer at PDI/Dreamworks.  Working on film graphics seems like a good way to learn something new but also make use of what I already know.  And my 3 criteria are definitely met.

I’ve only been here 2 weeks, so for now it’s still pure excitement.  A considered opinion will have to wait.  But whatever happens, I feel good knowing that I explored my options as best I could.

“Never mind – we blew $100m, but we learned from it!” is scant consolation for our investors, our gamers and indeed ourselves, but for those of us who were on the rollercoaster, we shouldn’t let that take away from the fact that we did learn a lot.

We also shouldn’t let our failure take away pride from the things we did well.

Ambition

I was first sold on working for RTW when I saw the concept for MyWorld at interview.  They weren’t really sure what the project was yet, but it was clear that it was very, very different from the kinds of games I’d been working on at VIS.  These were games that aimed to change gaming, as opposed to games that aimed to keep the business afloat for another year or two.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about working for Dave Jones was that his past success freed him from any desire to do something ordinary just to tick along.  Everything he did had to be ambitious in some way.  Arguably, we were too ambitious, because we were trying new things from both a technical and product perspective.  If you hold one of those constant, you can deal with the other: you can iterate fast on unknown product concepts when you have a stable technical base, and you can throw engineers at really hard problems if they know exactly what problem they’re solving.  We had no idea what we were making, and we had no idea how to do it.  Crazy, but exhilarating.

I didn’t include this in my “what we did wrong” because I honestly think we kept pace with the challenge pre-investment and had the chance to execute better.  The fact that we came quite close in some ways, that we did some of the hard things really, really well, and failed in some deceptively simple ways, is deeply frustrating.  But there’s no question that we set ourselves lofty goals, and shouldn’t be too surprised that we failed.  It was always going to be a possibility.

For my future, I am determined to demand challenge and ambition in whatever I do, because I found it genuinely thrilling, and would find it hard to go back.  The only caveat is that at RTW, the joy of the technical challenge blinded me to weaknesses in our product and business thinking, and I need to avoid a repeat of that.

Crunch time

“Management” is a generalisation, a big topic.  While my post-mortem has been highly critical of some aspects of the company’s management, it would be wrong to say “management” was bad and “developers” were good.  Our development leads managed a lot of our work extremely well, and we generally hit development milestones confidently and smoothly on all our projects.  We cultivated an ethos of working very hard during the day, but going home on time.

Whatever the end results of our efforts, I have seen enough evidence to suggest you don’t need to force a team to work crazy hours to build a great game.  On the other hand, I’ve also seen that people working long hours truly voluntarily, for the love of what they’re doing, bodes extremely well, and that a complete lack of it is a major warning sign.

I leave with a strong belief that I can realistically combine creating great software with spending time with my children, something that many programmers must come to question at times.

Deja vu

It’s frustrating that the lessons of our failure read like so many other startup failures.  Many people have written to me recently to say just how eerily similar it sounds to a past experience of theirs.  It’s sad that we couldn’t learn from other people’s lessons before we walked into them.  It’s a painful illustration of how much more you learn from personal experience than from reading.

I hope we can all use our experience for good in the future.  Realtimers, I will miss you all, and expect great things from you!

It’s perhaps best summed up by our own words, the blurb from the graduate recruitment section of our website.  It’s still on our website as I write this, but I’m going to quote it in full as presumably it will disappear at some point soon!

If you’re looking for your first job in games, it’s worth thinking very carefully about your future employer. Do you want to work on jaded, derivative titles that receive scathing reviews and go straight to the bargain bin? Do you want to work large amounts of unpaid overtime because your project is underfunded and poorly managed? Do you want to work on codebases that are messy and poorly-designed because there’s never time to do things properly? Do you want to live in fear of your company’s financial security?

It’s sad that these and other games industry horror stories are more frequent than they should be, but it’s not like that here. We only work on original, ambitious projects: our first title, Crackdown, was a number-one hit, winning critical acclaim and multiple awards, and our best is yet to come, beginning with our first online game, APB. And while making games is great fun, we take our work seriously. We pride ourselves on our unusually sensible, sustainable and professional development practices, resulting in smoothly-run projects and far less overtime than is normal for many game developers. We’re passionate about engineering and crafting our games to the highest of standards. We cultivate an open working environment where ideas are valued on their own merits, no matter whose they are. The growth of our company and size of our projects allows us to provide a wide range of opportunities. And the investment we’ve raised puts us in a strong financial position with security and creative control over our projects.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.  I don’t know if a comic writer could have hand-crafted a more deliciously ironic piece for us.  And yes, complacency did stray into arrogance at times.

From the creator of Lemmings and GTA!

For a long time, Realtime Worlds cultivated an air of success about the office.  Raising $100m sounds pretty cool on paper, we all walked past the Crackdown awards cabinet each morning, the press were excited about APB and we had Dave who apparently could do no wrong.

But after the investment, we lost our scrappy startup mentality and used our money to build this highly “corporate” culture, mimicking an established, successful organisation.  We lost our hunger, our fear of failure, our focus on staying lean and making do, on building the simplest thing that could possibly work.  The external signs of success were everywhere but the driving force was gone.  We forgot to tell ourselves that the investment was just a small step towards success, not to be confused with success itself.

The complacency showed through in so many ways.  We were complacent about game design, papering over APB’s obvious shortcomings and telling ourselves it would somehow come together at the last minute before release (an argument that was strengthened by the experience of seeing Crackdown do just that).  We were complacent about business planning, deciding to spend all our investment getting APB to launch, assuming that we would sell zillions of copies and over-spending on server hardware.  When we were told we were being made redundant, we were told something along the lines of “the market is just so bad right now … we could never have predicted this … even our worst sales projections were so much higher than this”.  I think that was supposed to be consolation but it was just complacent, and dumb.

It’s a gross generalisation to say the whole company was complacent.  It’s deeply unfair to a few pockets of incredibly passionate, hungry developers that worked their socks off and created some amazing stuff – like APB’s character customisation system, and its super-reliable back-end software, to name just a couple (apologies to all the other good examples of work I missed).  Sadly, it was not enough to overcome the problems.

The investment and Crackdown’s success were obviously contributors to complacency.  Another reason is that we forgot to wear tin foil hats … because

Dave has his own reality distortion field

I was reading “The Pixar Touch” recently, when I came across these passages about Steve Jobs:

We’d have to deprogram our troops after he had made a visit, because he has this charisma.  When he starts talking, he just takes people’s minds.  He would start talking to the Pixar people and I would just see their judgmental faculties go away.  They would just sit there and look at this guy with what I would describe as love in their eyes.

- Alvy Ray Smith

And yet when we would go down to a meeting with Steve, he would be so convinced that this [3D rendering] had Everyman potential that he would talk tough to you.  He would say how this was really like PostScript and that we can have it in every printer, we can follow the Adobe model.  So while you are in the room with him, you’re thinking, Well, yeah, that’s true … But when you get back to the real world, you realise, I know that wasn’t going to work.

- Pam Kerwin

There was something quite eerie about reading this, because this is exactly what Dave Jones does to people.  I hadn’t heard about it before, but it turns out Steve Jobs’ “Reality Distortion Field” is famous.

Dave’s version was also famous, amongst people who’d worked with him before.  There was a running joke from the old DMA days, that everyone should don their tin foil hats when Dave entered the room, to block his mind-control rays.  There’s an old picture from the DMA office of them all sitting with tin foil hats on, although I couldn’t find it.  If anyone has it, send me the link and I’ll do an update and stick it here because I seem to remember it being pretty funny.

Unfortunately, Reality Distortion Fields do not provide total mind control.  They can convince people to believe anything, but they cannot direct people’s efforts.  Once we became over-sized, I think Dave really struggled to direct our projects as he’d have liked.  Our best efforts were in our early days when we were small – Crackdown, the early builds of APB including the core of the customisation system, and the prototype of MyWorld that essentially won the initial investment.  That last prototype was built by Mike Dailly all on his own, and represented perhaps the best outcome-to-effort ratio of anything we ever did.  The contrast with our 20-person committee meetings to review APB builds could not have been more stark.  I genuinely felt sorry for Dave in some of those.

The Reality Distortion Field was a double-edged sword for us.  I’m pretty sure it was a big part of us raising $100m.  It also obviously contributed to our complacency.  If anything ever reached crisis point, Dave was always, always able to convince people that everything would be ok.  I think at times this prevented us from actually taking problems as seriously as we should have.

I don’t blame Dave for that though; it’s a brilliant skill to have and I don’t think he ever wielded it maliciously.  We were the fools for not staying hungry.

Finishing up

I’m going to put together one more post.  As I mentioned at the start of this one, part of the reason we put up with the bad stuff is that we loved what we did.  For all the frustration that I’ve poured out over the last three posts, I had an amazing time over my 6 years at RTW.  While I regret not doing more to help fix our problems, and am deeply disappointed by our failure, I don’t regret taking part in the adventure.  I learned a huge amount, met some incredible people, and fully intend to leave my retrospective on a high note

From the moment we took the investment, our organisational structure developed in a number of unhealthy ways.  These problems detracted from the quality of product and experience we were able to deliver, destroyed internal motivation and passion, and also caused us to burn through our cash much faster than necessary – all significant factors in our ultimate failure.

Spend it all!

Let’s start with our attitude to the investment we raised.  We fell foul of some kind of modern version of Parkinson’s Law:

A Realtime Worlds project will spend the funding available to it.

When we received the initial $30m to develop MyWorld, management literally reverse-engineered a “hiring curve” (a graph of team size against time) from 3 parameters: the budget available, the desired launch date (set by the investors), and our internal figure for the maximum rate we were able to hire people at (this was the only good part of the plan – Dundee put the brakes on for us!). There are obviously far better ways to plan a project, and I could spend a whole post discussing just that, but for now I just want to focus in on the unquestioned assumption that we should set out to spend all the money.

This attitude infected our company culture at many levels. Almost everything we did, we sought to throw people at, and our hiring created inefficiencies all over the place.

More people in one team created knock-on effects elsewhere: more programmers needed to support more artists, more IT, QA and admin staff needed to support everyone else, more project managers needed to manage everything, and more recruiters to hire all these staff.  We hired a whole “business development” group that did, well, nobody else in the company got told what they did, except they hassled development constantly for “executive” progress reports (of course, making reports takes time, so this probably contributed to further hiring).  Then we hired a director of development, who while certainly helping us focus on on-time delivery, was sadly forced to spend much of his time fending this senior management layer off our backs.  Then we added a “program manager”, reporting to business development, to fulfil a nebulous floating cross-company communication role.  Someone above us came up with a “patent strategy” initiative; the engineers dragged along to the meetings managed to fend that off long enough for management to get distracted and forget the whole thing.  We hired a “live production” team, whose entire job seemed to be to pass messages between operations (the folks who run the servers) and engineering, on the basis that these two groups were struggling to communicate.  Unfortunately, they struggled to communicate with either group, and spent a lot of time creating Processes for how to pass these messages around.

All these layers, of course, generated extra meeting upon meeting.  When I worked on APB, my Outlook calendar looked like a game of Tetris, the day stacked full of meetings, usually with a triple-booking somewhere and several double bookings.  Hardly any of them held sufficient value for the time spent.

I don’t mean any of that to be a criticism of the specific people in those roles.  Many of these folks were wonderful, talented people, and many of them realised the problems they were part of and fought hard against them.  I was as much to blame as anyone.  I built a technology team that was too big for its goals.  I also spent a year in a nebulous “technical manager” role on APB, and didn’t do enough to fight the cultural problems, including the question of why I was there at all (and why I had so many meetings).

Good vs Evil

The layers and walls between groups all came from a smallish group of powerful people (who we’ll label ‘Red’ for the sake of argument), that wanted Realtime Worlds to become more “corporate”, lazily imitating big companies in a superficial way, at the expense of critical thinking and focussing on our true goals.  Here’s a typical Red quote (I may not have the precise wording down but you get the idea – and I’m omitting the name of his previous employer because my point here is not personal):

Producers are how you drive accountability and make sure things get done.  <Company X> [who they worked for previously] understood this.  If we were adding a feature to the game, the first question would be “who’s producing this?”  If the floor needed cleaning, the first question was “who’s producing that?”

Opposed to Red was a group that for the sake of argument we’ll call Blue, with diametrically opposed views.  Quietly and subtly, perhaps without many in the organisation noticing, these two groups fought for the company’s culture.  Ultimately the Blues were destroyed.  While probably numerically greater, they held less org-chart power and were forced to work hard for even small concessions.  And while the Red relished the meetings and political fighting, the Blue were passionate about getting on with real work, about making our product better, and for the most part gave up the fight to focus on that.  The Red weren’t averse to dirty tricks either, such as paying a key Blue to leave (that’s org-chart power for you).

So a key piece of advice to any company receiving a large investment would be this: be very, very careful about who you hire to manage your fast growth.  You need someone who “gets” lean startup culture and is not trying to turn you into an identikit corporation where everyone talks bullshit management-ese just for the sake of it.  If you become big and successful, you might turn into that anyway, but if you try to be that way first, you won’t become big or successful.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against big corporate culture per se.  It has its proper place, as the natural result of refining a successful business to reproduce and continue that success as efficiently as possible.  But copying it cannot possibly be a driving force towards success in the first place.

Chalk and cheese

One of the most harmful organisational walls we built was between “business” and “development”.  Once we took that investment, responsibility for anything with a £ sign in front fell to a small group of “business” people, most of them in our US office.  We’d ask these people how much gameplay bandwidth cost us on APB, in case we needed to optimise our usage to make the game profitable.  We’d ask how much patch bandwidth on our CDN cost, in case it was worth adding bittorrent support to our patching system.  We’d ask how much running a server cost, in case it made business sense to spend more time on server code optimisation and reduce the number of servers we needed.

Every time, we’d be met with a condescending pat on the shoulders.  “Don’t you worry about that, son, you just get on with making the game.  Let us take care of the money.”  We asked, and we asked, and we asked, and were eventually point-blank refused, and later just ignored, on these and other important questions.

It wasn’t just about the questions we were asking.  The questions we didn’t ask were just as harmful and more.  How much are we actually spending on this game per month?  If we launch on this date, how much cash will be left in the bank?  We got so fed up of the small battles that we gave up and stopped asking important questions.  We wouldn’t question the financial prudence of an additional hire because we were tired of being shut out of that conversation.  We just asked upwards for permission and washed our hands of financial responsibility.  Of course, the people we were asking didn’t understand the importance of the hire, so we had to justify it to them.  But we did so without any context of how important it might be to save money.  It turns out, if your goal is simply to justify a hire to someone who doesn’t understand its importance, you easily find reasons to convince them.

We built a culture of treating development as completely divorced from the business we were running.  It doesn’t help that game developers are not used to thinking about the money.  Traditional publisher-developer relationships mean that the publisher worries about the money, and all a developer has to do is hire the number of people the publisher says they’ll pay for.  Everything else is taken care of.  We let ourselves sleepwalk into this attitude when we were spending our own money.

When we were asked to talk about money, the conversations were ridiculous.  Our finance guys thought we should cut the free fruit.  I had to wait 2 months for a pinboard because everything went for approval to the very top level for a while, apparently to help get a grip on our spending.  We cut all conference visits for my last 18 months there – a paltry amount next to our salary bill.  I spent 3 months arguing to upgrade some of the APB developers’ PCs in the name of working more efficiently; our wonderful build engineer, Phil, even put some hooks into the build system to automatically track how much time each developer spent compiling code in a day and collect all the data centrally.  We could prove that the whole thing saved us money in a couple of months, but nobody was interested.  They wanted to stick to a supposedly pre-agreed budget, which it then turned out they could change at will to suit their position.  I wasted weeks arguing about this.

With hindsight, I guess we were about to run out of cash and any expenditure was a problem.  But if this was the case, why on earth weren’t we trimming down our massive salary base at that point, or earlier?  Why did we waste time debating pointlessly small amounts of money?  Why did we force our talented development leads to spend their time on silly internal arguments instead of focussing on the product?

Developers might not be experts on money, but they’re incredibly smart people, and the parallel between spending in an organisation and optimising code is obvious.  Measure where your resources are going and focus on the areas where you can achieve the most benefits.  You don’t talk about cutting fruit bowls when you have 300 staff and are still hiring more.  I also don’t see how you can spend intelligently unless you hold plenty of open, intelligent conversation between the two groups – or have someone who understands both development and finance run the show.

If wonder if the finance guys were equally hamstrung.  Maybe they wanted to cut the staff size but were told to stay clear of that.  I can’t think why else they appeared to be so interested in the petty savings (the only other logical explanation is personally unpleasant towards them, and I’m trying to stay clear of that, especially for people I hardly know).

I wonder what would have happened if we’d had a different relationship with finance.  Or if we’d been given financial responsibility ourselves.  I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have come up with a plan that involved letting our cash reach almost zero at the point of APB’s release, with ongoing costs of 300ish salaries.  I’m also pretty sure we would have trimmed our feature set differently, and structured our teams to be leaner.

What I’ve said so far sounds so unbelievably incompetent that you’d think we were all just a bunch of idiots.  But I still contend that Realtime Worlds had an unbelievably smart, talented staff.  I can’t prove that with words, but even if you accept it only hypothetically for a moment, it raises this question: why would a bunch of smart people put up with this crap?

Next time, I’ll try to answer just that.

(Part 3 now up).