Yup, that’s pretty much what it’s like…

Image via Wikipedia

I worked in the gaming industry for a decade before moving on … this is precisely WHY I moved on.

Now, I didn’t work on any game teams.  I started out in Network Operations – babysitting EverQuest servers all night long and running patches whenever they were necessary.  From there, I moved into the development side, but I chose to work in Internationalization rather than on a game team.  The code that I wrote did fascinating things like conjugate Russian verbs, and that meant the amount of time we were in crunch mode was dramatically reduced from what a majority of the people working on game teams experienced.

At the beginning, I had a lot of fun … but towards the end, I hated every. day. I. went. to. work.  Our manager would frequently tell us to code things one way, then abruptly change his mind in the middle of development, not tell a soul, then yell at us all when we came back with what he originally asked for.  It was like working for a Magic 8 Ball that would randomly blow up on you for absolutely no reason.  At the end, I was getting migraines on a nearly daily basis and having some serious health problems.