I left 2K games for much the same reasons. Working on big budget games like Bioshock is safe and comfortable, but after nearly 10 years to going into the office at 9, having meeting after meeting, then going home at 6, I realized life was passing me by.
So I quit and started my own studio Iron Helmet Games. I'm taking risks again, I have some creative control, I'm even getting much more done! It feels so good to work really hard again. I like to work hard, but I need to know its useful and appreciated.
Our first game Neptune's Pride has only been in development since September 2009 and people are already playing and enjoying it.
Kyburz - isn't that a name from Bioshock? Didn't even realize that was a shoutout :)
Thanks for the firm kick in the ass - I've noticed that I've been getting to work at 9, leaving at 6-7pm for a while now with alarming regularity. For some time I wrote this off as part of the job (I get paid a pretty sum for it I suppose), but it bothers me more and more.
Do you have any advice (aside from "quit your job!" which I'm well aware of) for getting one's work/life balance back in order?
He's talking about http://np.ironhelmet.com/ - I'm currently bitter-sweetly loving it (huge overlap with a personal project that I keep ditching in deference to work).
There are two times when it's easy to chase dreams: when you're too young to have many responsibilities, and when you're too old to catch them. He jumped ship in the middle of the hard time. That takes enormous courage, and more power to him. --Lynne Flaherty on my FB
I'd hire him. It's easy to forget now how completely IE pwned Netscape in 1995-2002. They won by being better. I was a die-hard Netscape loyalist and Microsoft hater. I finally switched in 2000 because Microsoft's offering worked and Netscape's didn't, and I couldn't ignore that anymore.
The fact that Chrome and Firefox are simply better than IE now doesn't change that. People should be evaluated by how well they did with the technology and resources available at the time they did the work, and not by how badly their employer fucked things up after they left.
Dude. Microsoft lost an anti-trust trial, at least partially due to the Extreme Marketing of IE. We're allowed to read some ethically borderline behavior into that period's PM's resume.
I mean, I like Microsoft and Windows as much as the next guy, but geez, as soon as IE had 90%+ marketshare (due, lest we forget, in some measure to illegal behavior) Microsoft just let it stagnate. That alone should clue you in to how Microsoft feels about web browsers.
Again, don't project the sins of Ballmer onto the individual contributors and managers responsible for getting IE out the door. I really doubt that the IE team was responsible for the decision to disband the IE team, or that they made the decision to bundle it in with Windows. Those sort of strategic decisions usually get made by top-level executives.
I actually hate Microsoft. A lot. I work in web UIs, and the bulk of my frustrations come from having to work around IE's shortcomings. My personal computer has been Microsoft-free for the past 2-3 years, as well as a period in college, and in-between was only used as a Windows host for a Linux virtual machine. I try to avoid using Microsoft products whenever possible, I hate the company and would never think of working for them, and I would be rather glad to see them broken up.
But I try not to let my feelings about the company color the way I see the accomplishments of individual employees of the company. And whatever my personal feelings, the IE team accomplished a lot between 1995 and 2002. Netscape was as dominant in 1995 as IE was in 2002; in those 7 years, their positions reversed.
You can claim it was due to extreme marketing, but I was more than capable of downloading Netscape for myself, I was a die-hard Netscape fan up until 2000, and yet eventually I had to admit that they lost because they were stupid and the IE team was better. Netscape 4.7 was slow, it had poor standards compliance, it crashed a lot, and it refused to view a lot of really popular websites. Netscape 6.0 had an incredibly crummy interface that seemed like it was designed to take you to their portal page and trap you there. IE kept getting faster and more stable from IE3 to IE6, and it introduced innovations like XMLHttpRequest that later formed the cornerstone for GMail and Maps.
Yes. Thankyou.
We can look at IE now and criticize. But IE 5/Mac was awesome. IE 5.5/6 on Windows were so much better than netscape. MS might have done some dodgy stuff to get them there - but at the same time they delivered the goods technically.
I'm proud of the team I worked on, but have ambivalence for the company.
I was on IE 1.0 thru 5.0 (roughly '95-'99). It was a great team and in many, but not all ways, I think we made a great product. What happened on IE 6.0 was a tragedy. I wasn't there, but neither was most of the team that worked on IE5.
The only bright spot of that tragedy is it helped open the door for Firefox, which I love and have used for years.
IE development was effectively stopped at 2001. After IE6 shipped with XP, IE team was transformed into Avalon project (which, after years of struggle, became WPF). Only IE Sustained Engineering team continued to work on IE6. After some time it became apparent that security challenges are too hard for such a small team and larger effort is required to fix reemerging security issues, so new IE team was created to concentrate on security issues. Some old-timers were transferred from Avalon to found (refound?:) this team.
Couple years later it became clear that Firefox is becoming superior browser and Microsoft needs get back into the game. IE7 was announced and current IE team was expanded to meet the challenge. More old-timers left Avalon to join IE7. Then this team shipped IE7, IE8 and (as you would expect) is working on IE9 now.
I'm about 6 months into my Seattle stint (not at Microsoft), and I'm already loathing this city. It's sleepy, but not in the charming beach-side small town kind of way, in the lazy "I'm too arsed to go out, ever" way. There's no energy anywhere around here, which is a far cry from any other city I've had the pleasure of living in.
Was the environment - Seattle/Kirkland/Redmond/Bellevue a major factor in choosing to leave?
In fact, I met a lot of people here who came from the midwest and all of them either hate it or have already left (I'm from the midwest too).
Seattle is a gorgeous city, when I first came here it blew me away how beautiful it is. But there's just something about this area that really didn't jive with me. I agree "sleepy but not in a good way" is one good way to describe this area.
I think that makes it all the more interesting because you can see that the move worked out for him:
Scott is an independent author and public speaker for hire. His work as a writer and public speaker has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Wired magazine, and on National Public Radio. He has taught at the University of Washington, blogs for Harvard Business, and has appeared as an innovation expert on CNBC and MSNBC.
Traditionally, program managers say "What" and "Why," project managers say "When," and development managers say "How" (which encompasses "Who"). I guess facility managers used to say "Where," but that's stretching things...
While recently interviewing for a similar position (Program Manager) at Microsoft, I told the interviewer that it's also important to get a feel of your competition 1 month/1year from the present by following the angel and VC investments. He got so turned off that I felt I just bombed the entire interview.
I always get lost on the difference between "program manager" and "product manager".
Is there a standard breakdown between these two?
For some reason I have the feeling that Microsoft popularized the usage of these titles - does anyone know firsthand if this trend started at Microsoft?
"program manager" title has a long of history, it existed way before Microsoft was around. In the 1st half of 20th century, the common use of the word "program" was to describe an allocation of resources like manpower, production capacity, equipment, typically in the military setting. For example, the term "linear programming" as a mathematical optimization technique is based on using "programming" in the sense of allocating resources.
So historically, program managers handled decisions about how to allocate resources to accomplish a mission. These days, program managers usually allocate resources over a portfolio of projects and decide whether projects are helping to achieve the program's mission.
Product manager has a responsibility for one or more products and associated strategic and executive decisions , around business plan, marketing, sales, research and development.
Well, no. If you're a developer or development manager working 70-90 hours a week developing and/or managing other developers, when do you have time to evaluate the market, keep track of every single competitor and potential competitor?
Do you run a spreadsheet loaded up with market data and demographics evaluating the potential revenue impact for all of the features you're thinking of including in the next release?
And so on and so forth. Product management is a full-time job on a substantial product. It may be that in small start-ups people wear many hats and you don't need it as a separate function. But if your team ever gets to the point that you can justify a full-time development manager, your team probably needs someone else with nearly full-time product management responsibility.
In addition to that, there are sometimes some benefits to separating product management from development management. Sometimes. Being a little divorced from the product's inner workings can provide a certain useful perspective. Hopefully, the product manager isn't wedded to the feature that a developer just spent three weeks building and can jettison it to ship on time :-)
Product management (at least where I am) also does a fair bit of marketing work. They tend to shape the overall product, but all technical decisions are made by engineering, not marketing.
Sure. I don't have some belief that all developers are incapable of product management. The very best, IMO, have strength in understanding what and why as well as how. But I do have a belief that in some cases, there is value for everyone in having a team with specialized roles. For all products there is a need for product management. And for some product teams, there should be a specialized product manager leading product management.
Interestingly, the push to smaller start-ups and smaller teams does create more opportunities for developers to wear multiple hats. That's a good thing too.
Actually, I was at Microsoft between '94 and '05 and that's close to what happened in many cases, but not because of a single program manager. (At least not in cases that I saw directly.) Rather, as the company grew, and more program managers and project managers were assigned to things, a lot of developers felt less in control of their work due to the collective influence of a non-programmer organization.
That kind of growth probably has to happen. To be fair, most all the program managers had engineering degrees, and some had been successful developers. The project managers came from a different track entirely, and I think that was a more challenging relationship for a lot of developers.
If they had a problem with that sort of thing, then they shouldn't have taken a job at Microsoft, or even a corporation of modest size. Division of labor, and all that.
Besides, for a great many developers, dealing with a PM is better than dealing directly with people in finance and marketing, or customers themselves.
I didn't RTA, but traditionally? Work with marketing, infrastructure, release, and project managers to create the program and ensure it stays on-track.
If the only reason people pay attention to you is that you have the ability to fire them, you aren't much of a manager. I worked for years as a team lead. I had no authority to fire anyone, or dock their pay, the most I could do was to say nasty things about them like "They have their own independent ideas about how to get things done instead of genuflecting to me."
If he was a good program manager, people would have respected what he did, which was to understand the market for the product so well that he could inspire and lead the team to build the right thing at the right time.
Depends on the company. Since a Program Manager sits above multiple projects, some companies think of them as just a coordination role -- a little more than a PM but not yet a director. But other companies think of them more like super-PMs, parachuting into their poorer-performing projects and taking over until the PM and the team can get their act together. In these tougher Program Manager roles, they're responsible for the day-to-day life-or-death of the project.
Sadly, more companies are leaning to the idea that the Program Manager is more like a fancy clerk. They end up pretty stressed out and under-appreciated.
This gets to the central question: How do you create, run, and release a huge effort that might take hundreds of man-years, like Office 2012? Something like that covers a lot more ground than simply kicking out some code. There are all sorts of things that need to be coordinated.
Companies are still sorting through how to set up and run programs, in my opinion. There is a LOT of room for screwing things up between 5 guys and 150 guys. There are a lot of tricks to use, but many times people want simple answers and the simple answers are not forthcoming.
A lot of time employees just go to their PM and then go around the Program Manager directly to the higher-ups in the organization. Makes the whole thing quickly devolve into a Charlie Foxtrot.
(Disclaimer: I've done quite a bit of setting up programs and helping companies manage them)
EDIT: I've describe a Program Manager as being "over" the entire effort. Some companies just kick them out to the side of the whole thing. This is an even worse setup, because the business drivers aren't directly connected to the work.
"How do you create, run, and release a huge effort that might take hundreds of man-years, like Office 2012?"
I think that more and more, companies are realizing that the answer to this is "You don't."
Google Chrome is a good example. Instead of trying to figure out exactly what needed to be in the product, they built a kick-ass updater (which is now open-source). One that let them transparently and efficiently download and install updates whenever necessary, so they could treat desktop software like a webapp.
And then instead of having to coordinate hundreds of man-years of work, they can have small independent teams that crank out a feature, release it, see if the feature works well, and back it out if necessary.
The best way to deal with an O(N!) problem is to keep N small.
Their worlds apart though, enterprise would be bringing in a lot of the money on Office, they'd want something they can roll out and only periodically patch, they want something they can rely upon from day one.
Chrome is a free product that already achieves it's main aims, if chrome was a $200 browser or something I'd imagine it would have to conform to the big release idea to.
Chrome got out of beta before GMail because Chrome has a bunch of OEM deals. I don't know the terms of those deals, but I imagine there's money changing hands, and that they are of strategic importance both for the OEMs and for Google:
There's some resistance to using auto-updating software in enterprises simply because it's not the way things have traditionally been done, but IT departments are warming up to it. The huge pain of doing a major upgrade and the constant security fiascos that come from using software that's 5 years out of date are a major incentive for departments to switch to a model where individual changes can be canaried and tested in isolation before bringing down the whole enterprise. Google Docs is certainly having some measure of success in the enterprise arena, despite being a webapp with this development model. And outside of Google, Salesforce.com has revolutionized their market with a webservice-based enterprise app.
The resistance to auto updating software is the amount of risk involved.
If say Chrome was your sole web browser and an update broke compatibility with a business process, who is responsible?
It's a constant struggle to balance the business needs of predictable use and the need to stay competitive with up to date products. Mainframes and WinXP's default browser will continue to stay until the benefits can be clearly shown to out weigh the risks.
"... After a year at Microsoft, around 1995, I became a program manager on the Internet Explorer web browser project. I was paid well to lead smart people in the making of software used by millions of people. ..."
The history and lineage of IE goes something like this:
"... why is this being down voted w/out any counter argument? ..."
The point of the timeline was to try and highlight developers who worked on browser projects during this time and highlight the differences in both company and individual responses. IE might have been an OK browser, MS made large sums of money but compare the difference Andreessen and jzw from Netscape have made to users by releasing the source code for Mozilla in the long run.
I suspect because I'm perceived in attacking the author by proxy criticising MS and IE. The thing I don't understand is why Scott needs affirmation? Just getting into MS at this time and working on the core product marks him as an above average developer. But lets not mince words. MS and the IE team did harm the Web and their customers needlessly during the periods of '95 to 2000. And being on this team with influence doesn't negate some responsibility. It would be good to get some sort of view of this from the author.
"... i'm not surprised that IE was managed by a rejected undergrad/frustrated closet writer? jk :) ..."
As for being a "rejected undergrad", credentials matter less in tech companies than ability ~ http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html that's why Scott was hired. The description of "frustrated closet writer" doesn't do Scott's contributions at justice.
So I quit and started my own studio Iron Helmet Games. I'm taking risks again, I have some creative control, I'm even getting much more done! It feels so good to work really hard again. I like to work hard, but I need to know its useful and appreciated.
Our first game Neptune's Pride has only been in development since September 2009 and people are already playing and enjoying it.