Business gets you Politics, Games get you fired.
As many of you know, I'm a game programming veteran. My wife is also a programmer, but she works on business software (Delphi, SQL, Java, database programming really). I could probably do that, if it didn't seem so soul-crushingly miserable.

Anyway, while I don't pry into her work, I've noticed that everywhere my wife works, there's been a complicated set of office politics. I mean, every place she has worked for has had backstabbers, schemers, and at times, real bastards (people who use such weapons as fake sexual harassment claims). In most of the places, she's had multiple bosses, and spends a lot of time soothing ruffled feathers from when they all disagree.

By comparison, I've seen almost no office politics at all. In the game industry, there is a clear-cut chain of command that goes something like this:

God
^
Director
^
Producer
^
Lead Peasant(Lead Programmer, Lead Artist, Lead Designer)
^
Peasant(Programmer, Artist, Designer)

So, as long as you know your place, there's no way to get multiple bosses, and very little backstabbing to climb the corporate ladder.

However, I can't help noticing that all the big companies I've worked for had a lot of office politics above my eschelon of understanding. Once you get up into the baliwick of Management, Marketing, and other such drek, office management rears its ugly head again. What does that mean to me? It means that the company has no clear vision, no direction, and it will probably fold in on itself.

So the choice is this: stay fast on your feet in a business job, or keep a nice safe job that will disappear when you get locked out of the office because your company hasn't paid rent in six months.

Tough choice.




- posted by BrandG @ 1:13 PM