Or How I Jettisoned At The Right Time

Well, this last week has been a very interesting one. A couple of weeks ago I was offered and accepted a job with ngmoco:). I informed my bosses at ImageMovers Digital and then started the two week count down to my exit. I was still working full steam on some stuff, handing off other things, and then jumping back on to stuff I had worked on previously to make sure loose ends were all tied up.

Two weeks pass. I have an awesome going-away lunch with my crew.

All seems right with the world, especially after three margaritas and a shot of tequila for my “birthday.”

After lunch I get back to the office and it’s almost time for my exit interview. It was all very professional and ended nicely. I then proceed home and plan on two days of rest¹

That Sinking Feeling

Friday I get a few text messages. It appears ImageMovers Digital is going to be closed down by Disney. I’m gobsmacked. There were no words that would make anything feel better. Former coworkers and good friends are now going to be out of a job. 

I still don’t know what to say. If anything I thought IMD would be around a little bit longer, possibly to finish up Yellow Submarine, possibly longer.

Marching On

I know that my friends will end up okay, I just worry that with 450 people entering the market it will be harder. I’ll write recommendation letters and provide references until the end of days for any of the people I worked with, they’re that great of a crew.

I am grateful for social networking in that it will keep us all in touch a bit better than just email. For anyone that is going to be around IMD as it winds down you have my greatest compassion. Blue Sky didn’t get shut down, but I was there to see it nearly dismantled and it’s not a fun place to be.

1. Those two days felt like Saturdays. I couldn’t have asked for more.↩

Jonathan Danylko lists the programming lessons he’s learned in 20 years:

5. You are not the best at programming. Live with it. – I always thought that I knew so much about programming, but there is always someone out there better than you. Always. Learn from them.
6. Learn to learn more – With number five explained, I’ve always had a magazine or book in my hand about computers or programming (ask my friends, they’ll confirm). True, there is a lot of technology out there and keeping up with it is a fulltime job, but if you have a smart way of receiving your news, you’ll learn about new technology every single day.

A good list of things, with these two jumping out at me. When you reach a point at a company where you aren’t learning that’s a sign it’s probably time to move on. Personally I don’t enjoy sitting around resting on my laurels, even though it doesn’t always look like that.

/via Jason Kottke

Alex Payne, in Don’t Be A Hero:

If someone is working at four in the morning, something is deeply wrong. Figure out what’s broken and delegate the work out evenly across your team such that it doesn’t happen again. Don’t pat your hero on the back for “pulling another late-nighter”.

This is one reason why, when looking for a job a few years ago, I didn’t consider working for any company whose job description implied (or stated) that I’d be expected to work extremely long hours regularly and not have a family life. Such companies are either run by “heroes” or expect to hire one. (Usually for the same salary as a nine-to-fiver and with a trivial equity stake.)

I resent the commonly held belief that this is an unavoidable part of “startup culture”. (It’s completely avoidable.) Such beliefs encourage workaholism, especially among young people, and cause poor-quality products, employee burnout, and high turnover.

I don’t want to be a part of any company that’s so poorly managed, or simply so cheap, that employees are expected to forego a healthy lifestyle. No job is worth that.

So true. My current job has the current record over my 13 years for hours worked in a week and days worked in a row. I’ll never do that kind of stretch again. Ever. Burnout is not just bad for you, it’s bad for your family and friends too.

/via Marco Arment

Over the course of the last few years I have been fortunate enough to make friends with folks outside my industry and sphere of friends. Many of them happen to be in the developer community for Apple’s Mac and iPhone platforms. One of the people that I’ve been fortunate enough to meet in person is Daniel Pasco, CEO of Black Pixel Luminance. Daniel is an amazingly smart guy¹ and I look up to him. If I had been living in Seattle when I switched jobs last year I would have held out to work with him and the guys at BPL.

Today Daniel posted an open letter about Black Pixel²:

We’ve developed almost twenty applications in the last nine months, including those we developed for our contract customers. We’ve spent much of our time working on iPhone, but at the same time, our work with iPhone and Apple has changed us, too. The expectations and demands we make upon ourselves as designers have increased dramatically.

Great design and interaction are a huge part of the user experience for iPhone applications, and the more we experienced and learned what is possible, the more we desired to refine our work and take full advantage of what the platform has to offer. Creating our first iPhone apps was a very fulfilling experience, but like an artist looking back at early sketches, we soon began to spot the flaws and see the shortcomings of our initial efforts.

We’ve made some great applications, but for a variety of reasons, our own applications have largely kept the same user interfaces that we introduced them with when the app store opened, and we feel that we can do better. The cognitive dissonance resulting from this situation started to become intolerable late last year.

By the time we went to Macworld we had already decided that we were going to focus on raising the level of polish and focus on our applications as much as possible. The addition of Chris Clark to our team raised the bar for us even higher.

Black Pixel means good design. To us, that means quality, innovation, beauty, and fun. We are pushing ourselves hard to develop applications that adhere to these principles. Effective immediately, we have decided to pull all of our applications from iPhone App Store until they are up to our own standards.

Daniel Pasco, CEO
Black Pixel Luminance
March 18, 2009

I’m excited to see what BPL comes out with. Daniel has always been concerned about the company and the employees. The addition of Chris Clark is huge. I’m looking forward to all the guys up there driving to better things and beautiful software.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is the right thing to do. In this case it’s hard to pull already released apps from being sold. That’s income and a public face for the company. I know that with a little bit of time the BPL team will come back stronger and better and more satisfied with their work than ever before.

Good luck guys. I’ll be here waiting to see what happens.

1. I mean, the dude has his work on another planet. So full of awesome.↩
2. The letter is quoted here in its entirety for posterity’s sake↩

Today, 3 February 2009, marks my twelfth year of gainful employment after graduating from university. I’ve been fortunate to have stumbled into a remarkable industry that has afforded me the ability to develop my mental skills and branch out to areas that were once unfamiliar to me.

In my studies for forestryforestry the professors not only taught what we needed to know about forests, but they also prepared us for life in the business world. We were prepped on how to interview and that we should always wear a suit to an interview to show respect, unless informed otherwise.

It was with that preparation, and a bit of dumb luck, that I ended up in Harrison, New York to interview with Blue Sky Studios. While studying for forestry I worked in the GIS lab assisting with classes, managing the workstations, and programming. As I was getting ready to graduate I contacted a friend from high school that was working at Blue Sky. She got my resume in front of the right person and before I knew it I was being flown to New York for an interview. Predictably I wore a suit and tie to the interview. That certainly made an impression, but when I accepted the job my soon-to-be boss told me that if I wore a tie again he’d make sure he cut it off. To this day I’ve only worn ties to formal or celebratory company events. That was in January of 1997. I had interviewed a few other places and I kept pushing them off waiting to hear back from Blue Sky. Once I got the offer from Blue Sky I accepted, packed up, and moved to New York. I really had no idea what was in store for me, but I jumped in feet first and started working.

I couldn’t imagine a better course of my life. I worked at Blue Sky for six and a half years with a small three month stint at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). I worked on many projects between those two places: Bunny, Ice Age, Fight Club, and Alien: Ressurection to name a few.¹ After those formative and fortunate years at Blue Sky learning more than I ever had in university I decided it was time for me to head west to California. I think I had always wanted to live in California, I certainly did like visiting there. As with Blue Sky and ILM I got my next job at Wild Brain through people I knew and had worked with before. The idea was that Wild Brain would be starting up on producing an animated feature and they needed people to help develop a pipeline. That was a fun three years with a very tight-knit group of people. In the end the movie never materialized and I decided it was time for me to move on.

Proving once again connections are key, I finally got my foot in the door at Pixar Animation Studios. I was in the Production Engineering group at Pixar. The group that supports the software tools used to (thus far) make every film there. I worked through the release of two films there, Ratatouille and Wall•E.² That was a great time and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but it lead me to my latest adventure.

Taking an opportunity to transfer within the Walt Disney Company I decided to embark on a new adventure at ImageMovers Digital (IMD). Getting to stay in a large and stable company like Disney was important, but at IMD we’re working to build the studio from the ground up while working on our first feature. Moving here also gave me the title of Senior Production Engineer. It’s something I was ready for and brings much more responsibility and learning with it. I’m getting to direct software projects and I’m finding out what people relying on you means with some long, but fulfilling, hours.

I don’t know what the future will hold. I’ll be at IMD for a while because it’s so challenging here I want to keep doing it. I often find myself drifting towards the possibility of indie work, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to strike out on my own just yet. Whatever may come in the next dozen years I hope it will be as awesome as the last twelve.

1. You can see my full credit list at IMDB.↩
2. With the long production times and overlapping production schedules at Pixar I actually did work for Up and Toy Story 3 as well.↩

Warren Ellis writes:

“The more creators who only took on housepainting as a part-time gig, the healthier this medium would be.”

Oh man, so true. This is why staring my own work up is very appealing.

I am very thankful I’ve worked someplace other than Pixar. It really makes me appreciate how good our working conditions are. Take today for example. Today this fine espresso machine was installed in our building.

I will use it I’m sure to brew up some fine liquid concoctions. Also today O was thrown for a bit of a loop when I opened up the fridge to grab a soda¹ and what should be there. Nectar of the divine rendered human.

That’s probably just someone trying to get rid of it. They normally only have beer at work on Friday at Beer Bash in the evening.

1. Yes, I am bad and drinking sodas right now.↩

From Upcoming Pixar comes the news that Disney has released the WALL-E teaser Poster:

© Copyright 2007 Disney-Pixar

I can’t wait to see more stuff come out.

(Via Upcoming Pixar.)

via May on Twitter: “at the megadeth show for work. we met with dave mustaine and he was super nice”

Today marks my first year anniversary of working at Pixar.  I’ve seen Ratatouille finished up and released.  I’m getting to work on cool projects with insanely talented people and I’m really happy and challenged at work.  Let’s see what the next year will bring, it should be fun, challenging, and sometimes stressful I’m sure.