overqualified but underspecialized

Another job possibility turned me down today. Once again the gist of the message is "we think you're smart and talented, just not a perfect fit for the position we have open."

Unlike the previous time I heard this line, I actually believe it. Unfortunately, this came along with a sort of half-assed "we have this other position that I can't really describe adequately, on this super-secret project that I really can't talk about, but if you can make the claim that you've done this exact kind of work before, maybe we can hire you for that." So after ten minutes of me talking about things that were sort of tangentially related to what I imagined this guy might be talking about, he came to the conclusion that, no, I hadn't had this exact job before.

And this is the problem. I haven't had the same job for more than about six months running over the last twelve years, because, well, things need to get done, and I think I can do them. At the last permanent job I was on, I was more or less hired to do cross-platform network programming, and wound up getting drafted to debug PS2 rendering code and rewrite PS2 audio code. It's hard to get more disparate programming tasks than those three in today's game industry. Before getting the job, I'd never seen a PS2; just before I quit, the company was trying to bribe me cash money to work extra hours to get the doomed PS2 version out.

So I shift around a lot, and that means that, well, I'm not a sound guy — I did some sound programming back ten years ago, I understand the principles, I can get up to speed on new sound hardware pretty quick. I'm not a network guy — I've added network play to a crappy little puzzle game, and I've written a game-matching client-server networking system. I'm not a graphics guy — I've ported an OpenGL-based game to Direct3D and a Dreamcast/Kamui based rendering engine to GLIDE.

Now I'm to a point where I'm senior enough that I should be an expert at something, but I seem to know a little bit about a lot of subjects instead of a lot about one. Everybody wants to hire someone who's an expert at the task they need — they want, effectively, someone to write the same code at this job that they wrote at their last job. The perception, then, is that I'm "entry level" for any given specialization, but I need a lot more salary than an entry-level programmer does. Never mind that, when some unexpected disaster strikes, and the guy who understands the widget engine gets run over by a Twinkie™ truck, I could volunteer to become the new widget engine expert and wrap my head around it in a few days. You can't schedule that guy getting run over, so you can't schedule the need for his replacement.

The smart thing for me to do here would be to go buy a GeForce3 and spend a month becoming a DX8 and OpenGL vertex-and-pixel-shader GOD by, uh, copying the sample shaders off the nVidia developer support sites and tinkering with them, so I can go around saying I'm a graphics GOD. Unfortunately, I'm a lazy evaluator, or a just-in-time expert system perhaps, and I don't want to fucking bother to fill up my brain with that crap when my next job is just as likely to be network-related as graphics-related.

Yes, I'm a bit frustrated here at this point.

I'm ready to get out of the game industry. I'll have the same problems breaking into a new field, but at least when I get there I'll have some sort of tradition of QA on my side.

Bedtime.

Posted by russell at June 4, 2002 11:35 PM