Job related churn

Becoming a new parent isn't the only thing that has been distracting me from project work. Around March I really started to become restless with my RL job. We went through yet another re-org which moved my team further from working on games and closer to developing a straight up SDK. While this is cool in some ways it's not really what I was looking for.

Another recent work happening is that I celebrated my 10 year anniversary working at the company. Now before people jump to the conclusion that I'm in my late 40's please keep in mind that I joined the company straight out of school so I'm not a dinosaur yet. :) But it does mean that my whole career is defined by this one company.

With both of these things in mind I started looking at my career change options. What I found out was that yes, you can be at a company too long. While my resume showed a broad range of skills and loyalty, it also was a point of question for some people. Could I adapt to work in a different environment? Was I a corporate cookie cutter employee now? Needless to say I found those kind of concerns very annoying but I got through them and had a couple of different job offers to choose from.

My last day of work at my current job is this Friday and I couldn't be more excited and nervous. The company that I'm leaving is huge (70,000+ employees that work on everything from games to office applications and operating systems, can you guess which company in the Seattle area it might be?) and I'm going to a web startup where I'll be employee #12. It's a total 180 but it really needs to be done. I'm looking forward to a fresh start where I have more say in what goes on and more input into the final product.

The sad part of this change is that I will be getting out of the games industry. This is part of the reason for my return to GDNet land. I need to stay active in the game development community for my own personal reasons and this is a great place to do it. I hope to come back to the industry in some form in the future so keeping up on things is a must.

So while I'm back in journal land I apologise in advance if I'm a little sparse in the next couple of weeks as I make the new job transition. Wish me luck! :)