I recently published this to LinkedIn (because where else do you put something like this for a semi-wide audience), but since Rule #4 is “Don’t waste your best stuff on the away games”. Here it is in its entirety. Just a few thoughts ten years removed on how my major career change has worked out.
Ten years ago this month (September), I turned in my last Microsoft contractor badge, snapped a final couple of selfies in the studio lobby, and walked away from the Redmond campus for the last time. A few days later, my trusty old Saturn and I would be eastbound on Interstate 90, heading for new opportunities and a career pivot in South Dakota.
I left behind a fourteen year career in game development, and thirty-five years of calling somewhere on the West Coast my home, in the hope that getting away from Washington and out of game development would allow me to find better job stability, improved career advancement, and a better quality of life for my family.
With a decade now spent in other industries, and with my oldest two children both graduated from high school, it’s worth a few minutes to ask, was it worth it? How did those goals match up against reality?
- Cost of Living/Quality of Life – This has been an absolute win. Cost of living on west coast states continues to skyrocket. Meanwhile, the worst commute I’ve ever had here in South Dakota has been fifteen minutes. I’ve been able to attend my kids’ sports events, AWANA graduations, VBS productions, and everything else, because I haven’t been spending hours in my car commuting from the place we could afford to live to a developer job in Redmond, Seattle, or Kirkland. Here’s something that nobody talks about either: in Washington and California, a “family subscription” or offer, or pack, means two adults and two children. If you have more than two kids, you pay extra. In the midwest, a “family subscription” means two adults and as many children as are in the family.
- Job Security – This is the biggest miss of the bunch. Looking at my history while in game development, I changed jobs every two years or so. One notably longer stint at Monolith/WB Games helps drag that average up, but other than that, it’s a bunch of eighteen month or less contracts and a full time endevour, the vast majority of which I left not by choice, but because of a studio layoff, closure, or contract hard end date.
Since leaving game dev, I’ve… changed jobs every two years on average, with one notable exception being my stint at MetaBank/Pathwards. Once again, all but one of those depatures were not by my own choice.
- Career Opportunities – Back on the plus side, this has been another win. I enjoyed my time in game dev doing QA, production, and audio roles, but my end goal was always to get onto the programming side of things. That opportunity never realized itself while in game dev, but when I finally got the chance after leaving, I jumped at it. Six years later, that’s a decision I don’t regret at all.
Two out of three isn’t bad, especially when the positives far outweigh the negatives. I don’t regret leaving game development. I definitely don’t regret leaving Washington. I don’t miss 80+ hour crunch weeks and eating three meals in the office every day. I do miss the camaraderie that came from those long crunch weeks, and being on a team all striving to get something built and released. These days I’ve had to seek out that kind of unity of purpose in volunteer organizations such as the Civil Air Patrol.
I suppose that if there are any takeaways from all of this, it’s that making a career pivot, whatever direction you go, is hard. Not everything is going to go how you think it will. But, if you’re doing it with a good plan, and for the right reasons, the positives will outweigh the negatives. (Picture at the top of this post is my youngest daughter and me, attending a playoff game for our local Independent league baseball team. A game that started at 6:30pm, which I never would have been able to take her to working the kinds of hours I did back in my “cool” game developer days.)