Boldly Striding
On the 19th, I quit a job that I’ve held for the last three and a half years. I did this because I got a new opportunity, a new job, working for a different company. The hope here is ultimately that I’m able to turn this opportunity into one that allows me to be a producer for games at a later date. While we are boldly striding, I suppose the steps are baby steps.
I’ve been working towards an opportunity like this for a few years now. I realized at my old job that, much like the vast majority of my peers, I was growing to hate the work. The rote, repetitive, annoying day to day tasks that I had to accomplish every day too more and more of my time and inflicted more and more stress. I don’t do well with routine because my mind tends to wander when bored. When I first started at my old role, it was the wild west; everything was new, nothing was decided. We were pioneering how to do what we were doing, documenting those processes, figuring out everything for ourselves. But eventually, we figured all of that out and started following those documents and then routine slowly began to thread its way in and choked out things like innovation.
So let me tell you a story about what I did. It took a while for me to pinpoint what exactly I liked so much about the work that I didn’t have access to anymore. I had a team, yes, and once I started to hate the work I still had a team, so I knew that wasn’t it. My closest peer group had improved as well, so there wasn’t that vague sense of ‘head of the class loneliness’ I’ve heard about either; we were all doing our work and all doing it well. Even my superiors had improved; during my first 1.5 years in the job, I had 12 bosses but during the last year I had only two, allowing my relationship with those superiors to stabilize. The problem, I realized, was that I hated what I was doing because I was doing it so often. Familiarity had bred contempt.
This in mind, I looked back to when I had enjoyed the job and realized it was when everything was still chaotic, when we were planning and creating everything from scratch. I spoke this over with a few friends who were in the same boat, with a few mentors I was lucky enough to have, and after a bit of searching I headed to Bellevue College, learning more about project management.
And look, project management is weird. I don’t know why I like it. One of my teachers there described it as ‘having influence without authority’ and as ‘being a consultant towards a company’s success without being responsible for it’ and that sounds simultaneously dodgy and right on the money. But I liked what I was learning, and I blasted through the program in nine months. Afterwards, I followed it up with some additional classes and certifications for Scrum, a methodology that I’m told is both ‘revolutionary’ and ‘absolute bullshit,’ often by the same people and within the same conversation. I guess we’ll see.
I’m actually going to get to use what I learned in those classes in that new opportunity starting on Tuesday, when I move into a new position at a new company working on a large new project as a — wait for it — project manager. I’m excited. I’ve worked towards this for just over two years, so I’m happy to see it finally starting. Off we go!