I am a small cog in the machine, but the code I wrote that is put in production is used by million or so users, but without the rest of the machine it would not be possible for me to reach million users.

I am not saying one thing is better than other, but in general you have to choose a mindset that is more in aligned to your life goals as well as stage in your life. Not every one can be entrepreneur, but the author of the post has right kind of experience as to succeed as one, even though he might have disliked parts of his job at Ubisoft, it is the experience he picked there and the skills he developed to survive the noise and collaborative grunt work would be more useful for his indie games enterprise.

I believe the author is female.

One more FYI: "he" is grammatically considered a neuter form unless otherwise informed, just like in Spanish and other romantic languages which don't bother making up "zhe" pronouns and the like. If the GP didn't know or care about exactly who Maxime is, "he" would be correct regardless of his actual gender.

Yes, wiki-link but with 3 immediate useful references in the first paragraph. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neu...

I very rarely see native English speakers use "he" as a gender neutral pronoun. It's usually plural they (when stating generalities) or singular they [0]. I find singular they much less ambiguous and sexist than "he" and you'll rarely find someone taking issue with its use, something that cannot be said about generic "he" as can be seen above.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

I typically only see they being used when it's not about a specific person. It's hard and strange to use 'they' when you know the name of the person you are talking about.

No. See Maxime with his partner http://gingearstudio.com/about

No.

http://gingearstudio.com/about

Just an FYI, Maxime is a boy's name. I'm guessing you saw the name at the top and assumed it was a girl.

I've never really understood that attitude of "if it's not all mine, my contribution doesn't matter."

Maybe it's just my own raging ego, but no matter how small my contribution is to the whole, I remain absurdly proud of whatever I did.

I certainly hope that the guys working on AAA games feel the same way to the point of annoying everyone they know: "You see that? You see the way the guard rubs his stubble in his idle animation? Look at how realistically his fingers make contact with his face! I did that, that was me! You're welcome!"

On some Pixar movie (Ratatouille, I think), one of the DVD extras was a set of deleted scenes that happened to be the entire work of individual animators - basically they spent 18 months of their life working on that stubble, and the whole guard was cut because that didn't work with the story.

That's an extreme, but something like that is possible for anyone working on a sufficiently large project. I get how people like that could really feel like their time was wasted - your assumption is that their contribution will be in the final project in a small but interesting way, and that's not an assumption that can always be made.

I used to be on the Space Shuttle Primary Flight Software team in Houston. Super motivating environment.

There was another independent team in Huntington Beach that wrote the Backup Flight Software. Never used it in 34 years of flights.

Poor bastards ...

I'm pretty sured it was indeed used, at least as part of emergency drills. I think that is pretty good, to know that your backup system works in case it is ever needed.

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

Same example can be applied to many folks working on startups that go nowhere. Especially the early days of pivots, a/b tests et al where many solutions get thrown out. Maybe a better way to handle this is focusing on growth achieved (startup or corporate) and less on the ego?

Your time is never wasted. You still get paid. That might just be my jaded way of looking at it though.

When your job becomes something useless you do because you want the money you get super unmotivated, to say the least.

An painter spends 18 months creating a great work of art, one of his best. After he is finished, a guy buys it for a large sum of money and promptly burns it. How does the artist feel? Is he going to be motivated to spend another 18 months on his next idea, even though his previous idea was a financial success?

That all depends on how you feel about ice sculptures. Maybe only a few people see it before it melts, but that doesn't matter. The skills gained in striving towards excellence are not ephemeral. Even if the product goes nowhere, no one can take away what was gained in the process.

And if the process is pure tedium and you learned nothing about yourself or the tools throughout it, you should try to create the tools that do inspire you to perform the tasks that don't. Manually creating a production build is boring and you rarely learn anything, but creating a good task runner can be incredibly satisfying.

I think the difference between the example and ice sculptures is that ice sculptures are enjoyed before they melt, but the example was produced for the sole purpose of being destroyed, rather than enjoyed for a short time.

Edit: Another example with something temporary would be spending time making food for someone who consumes it, versus spending time making food for someone who just throws it in the trash.

Good point about ice sculptures. However, the difference with ice sculptures is that you know it is going to melt before you start.

> An painter spends 18 months creating a great work of art, one of his best. After he is finished, a guy buys it for a large sum of money and promptly burns it

Out of topic, but in some countries, it's illegal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights)

>An painter spends 18 months creating a great work of art, one of his best. After he is finished, a guy buys it for a large sum of money and promptly burns it. How does the artist feel?

Those poor nuclear physicists and rocket engineers -- thousands of them -- in the US and the Soviet Union whose ICBMs and nuclear warheads were never used!

While they may not be in the job for the money, there is still a split between those who are in the job for the recognition and those who are in the job for the learning experience. Most of my work is hidden to everyone except those on my immediate team of 2-3, but I learn an incredible amount.

> You still get paid.

In the case of the game industry, you still got paid, but markedly less than a comparable software engineering job outside the game industry and with poor working conditions in general. This is tolerated because you're invested in the work; when that work just gets thrown away, you might as well have been working on the next Facebook for Cats and making the correspondingly at-market/inflated salary.

It might be that the attitude comes, not from actually thinking "my stuff doesn't matter at all", but more from thinking "if I leave, almost anybody else could do my job".

Not sure if this was the case, but I believe a lot of our developer egos would like us to think that I and ONLY I would be able to do this particular thing (even if you know you'll actually never be THE ONLY one at anything) it definitely feels like you might be one of the very few.

And then when you realize that no, you are not a special snowflake, you kind of feel "my contribution doesn't matter", not in that it doesn't actually matter at all, but in that someone else could've done it as well.

I worked at a company where I built the first version of the product, then, because I was remote I was removed from the main user-facing product and was sent to the virtual basement where I built and maintained internal tools. I was not happy, but, hey! at least I was getting a very nice deposit every month.

Four years later I was laid off and realised that I had absolutely nothing to show for my years there. No portfolio. Nothing on a public url that I could share.

Landing the next job was extremely difficult.

My resolution was that the next company I worked for should be one that allowed me to point at cool stuff and said, proudly, see that? I built it.

Ownership is very important for your career.

It's easier to be a cog in the wheel when you really support the mission of the organization (company, non-profit, etc).

It's harder somewhere like a telecom. That said, your priorities will change as you get older. When I was younger, all I cared about was getting to work on things that I found interesting, starting a company, and big company work would start to bore me.

Now I have 2 kids and my priority has almost entirely shifted to taking care of them. Stability, benefits, college funds, family activities and events have totally replaced the outside of work time that was formerly preoccupied with obsessing about entrepreneurial ventures.

I still think about them. When you've got the bug it's not something that turns off, but it's nowhere near the same level of priority that it used to be.

I'm on the same boat: perspective changes as one age and as the circumstances change.

I still do stuff on the side but only when kids are asleep. When they're awake: 100% kids activity only.

I hope this doesn't come across as negative, it's not meant that way...

Do you think your priorities will shift again as your kids grow up (and move out)? I've not been a parent before, but I have parents, and it's kind of hard to encourage someone to follow their own interests again when they've been so focused on others for so long. I'm grateful for everything my parents gave me, but if I had a time machine I'd try to encourage my parents to keep up their own interests too. Honestly, I don't think I would have minded in the slightest. Besides, even if that led to my own boredom, I think that just encourages more self-reliance in finding your own entertainment, and self-reliance is one of the best gifts you can give a kid IMO.

Anyway, that's just my outside perspective, it probably feels different when you're a parent.

Yeah for sure. Nothing is constant/static.

As they grow up, they will want to do things their way, explore things on their own. It'll be tough since I care of them so much but it's part of life: it's natural that your kids will leave you eventually (especially boys).

My interest in the field (hi-tech) is still sky-high. I'm blogging when my kids are asleep. I dislike NodeJS/JavaScript but I still learn it on the side (yeah, it's a weird relationship...). But when kids are awake, hi-tech is far from my mind.

There was an article about valuing Time because you can't purchase Time. When I'm old, I probably won't remember anything about Java or Rails or Tomcat v5.0 or Linux Mandrake but I'm pretty sure I will remember the time I spent with my kids when they were toddlers. I probably won't spend much time with them as soon as they have their own partners/family.

So I suppose I've come to realize that my time with my kids are even more limited up until they're 12-15 years old, become sparse up until they hit college, and becomes very limited once they have their own family.

PS: my kids are almost 4 y.o. and 16 mo's. They're constantly asking for attention and all I can give them right now is just that: attention. They're not asking for toys or gadgets (yet...).

> There was an article about valuing Time because you can't purchase Time. When I'm old, I probably won't remember anything about Java or Rails or Tomcat v5.0 or Linux Mandrake but I'm pretty sure I will remember the time I spent with my kids when they were toddlers. I probably won't spend much time with them as soon as they have their own partners/family.

Thanks for the reminder - its sometimes hard to remember things like that on 4 hours sleep, but it is super important.

Now, time to put down my phone and pay some attention to my little boy!

Partially, yes.

Also, don't get me wrong here we still do things that we like but hobbies are VERY different than side businesses. Side businesses have customers and commitments and demands on your time. Hobbies and interests can be worked around just about anything. I still have hobbies and interests of my own, just not time for an entire venture outside of my full time job and my interest in quitting a job to take a risk on pursuing something else is virtually non-existent because of the strain it would put on my entire family. If it was just me and my wife, we could take the risk and accept the consequences easily enough.

Something that gave me some perspective recently was my grandfather passing away at 92 years old. He retired, after spending most of his life working for the railroad, when I was about 3-4 and it struck me that I always basically knew him as a near professional level fisherman until he hit about 85 and couldn't do it anymore. Reading his obituary I found out he didn't even start fishing until post-retirement.

I realize it's not running a business, but I just found it interesting that he spent almost a full third of his life doing something different than the prior 60 years and that was the main thing that his grandchildren knew of him (in addition to his involvement with his church).

Just a perspective changer to make you realize that life is actually longer than we give it credit for despite all of the "life is short" proclamations.

That said, when my kids are both off to college I'll be 48 and will definitely be filling my time with something but at that point there's no telling where my priorities will be. It's entirely possible that I'll get more enjoyment out of community involvement than pursuit of a business venture.

Might get involved with Boy Scouts by that point. Might get involved with politics. Might get into farming or fishing. Who knows?

What I do know is that by the time I'm 48 there's a decent chance I'll have spent a little over 30 years of my life in front of a computer screen in some form or another and I'm probably not going to want to spend the next 40-50 doing the same thing (based on my family history, that's likely).

Being a small drop in a big glass of water comes with its own, albeit different, motivation. Small projects that one person, or a small group of people, can fully own are necessarily limited in scope.

Personally, I don't dream of having full ownership of my own successful little project nearly so much as I dream of playing a relatively small, but necessary, role in a big ambitious project. For me, this[0] is the dream. Look at all those elated drops of water! I think the Fleet Foxes put this pretty well in "Helplessness Blues": "after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me".

Having said all that, my point isn't that all big projects are better; obviously not every project is literal rocket science, and all else equal I find ownership more motivating as well, it just isn't the only thing that can be motivating.

[0]: https://youtu.be/ANv5UfZsvZQ?t=127

Damnit, Jim. That's my dream too.

All my entire career I've only worked for small biz companies. I've never cared to become a droplet until SpaceX rolled around. I went through the entire interview process, but didn't get an offer. The tour itself was worth it. :)

I think this sentiment rears its head a little more in the videogame industry than in others, because such a huge number of people have the experience of getting extremely familiar with a piece of software as a user that they automatically start saying things like "if I built this, I'd change X." People start thinking like this about games when they have no development experience whatsoever. When they're kids. When they decide games are cool and they'd really love to get paid to make them. It's pretty common to hear a kid say they want to make video games when they grow up, but it's pretty rare to hear one say they want to make customer engagement analytics dashboards.

So I think the pool of people for whom this is a "dream job" and who get slapped with the realities of development on a big team is much larger for games than for other types of software. I'm sure there are some kids looking at GMail and daydreaming about how much better it would be if they were in charge, but it's a heck of a lot fewer than those who are daydreaming about building the next Call of Duty or whatever.

But you're right, this sentiment isn't unique to the game industry; I think we just hear it more from there.

I also work at ubi as a programmer, at a project with 600 people and I don't feel that way at all. My contributions are meaningful and will certainly be visible in the final game when it's released. Obviously it's different depending on the type of programming you are doing, but as an engine programmer there definitely is a strong sense of ownership.

When you get a chance, can you find the people who work on the DRM steam clone and give them a good smack?

I have worked as a Tiny Cog before, but I still felt I was making several Users lives better by really thinking about there problems and then solving them. Yes, overall it's a tiny piece, but as soon as you start talking about solving minor problems for thousands of people that becomes significant in aggregate.

What did you work on?

Lot's of things for the DoD, FAA, etc. Which is a great way to feel like a tiny little cog in a great big machine.

I've worked on a largeish (10 to 15 devs, 2 PMs) opensource project before. I was paid to do so.

Quit after about 9 months because I felt I had no impact on the overall thing and little say in what gets built. Every suggestion was a struggle of design by committee and every PR got scrutinized for even the most trivial thing.

It was frustrating and it wasn't even that big a team/project.

Open source project with 2 PMs? That sounds very weird to me. In my mind that open source projects should be driven by community.

Hence the euphemism Community Manager.