After college I took my first real job as a programmer at BlueLincs HMO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma. I had been working there as a part time night computer operator for a year, and then, for a few months, as a full time day computer operator before I was hired as a programmer.

 

I had to talk the MIS manager into hiring me to fill the open programmer position. He knew I had programming skills, and a newly minted Computer Science degree, but he was reluctant to hire me. Because I had told him that what I really wanted to do was … be a game programmer.

 

Too bad Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1991 had about … oh … ZILCH … opportunities in that regard. I mailed off a few résumés, but never heard back from anyone. So I “settled” for a local programming gig working for a company I knew  I liked. I never regretted that decision. I hope my manager never regretted his.

 

I loved that job. My manager (who I still look up to as an example of how to manage IT professionals) rotated all of us programmers through the various departments: accounting, claims, provider relations, member services. So in just over 3 years I had worked in every department (this was a small subsidiary; only about 90 employees). I learned how to talk to accountants, what’s really important to data entry specialists (short answer: TAB field movement and lots of hot-keys), and how the different software in the different departments all fed into each other to run the business.

 

BlueLincs is where I learned I love interacting with users, solving their problems, and watching them use the software I made for them. I also learned I was good at “stretching the rubberbands” of existing (read that: eff-ing old) software to slip in new functionality.

 

Finally, BlueLincs is where I learned to love the 8-5 job that doesn’t come home with you. Dennis, my manager, liked to point out that “nobody dies” if we weren’t done with a particular task by 5pm. So we should go home, and leave work at the office. I didn’t realize at the time what a gem of a manager he was (and still is, I’m sure).

 

Because I could leave at 5 and be home before 5:30 … I noticed I had a lot of free time. And since I really wanted to be a game programmer … I started working on little projects. I read books. I bought new, faster PC’s and graphics cards. I tinkered with multitasking DOS and twiddled with Windows programming.

 

Somewhere in there I got married (and will clock 15 years on that this week).

 

Mostly, though, I accomplished damn little except keeping busy at both work and at home. I did finish an MSDOS file manager using Turbo C++ (ViewDo2, a re-designed sequel to ViewDo, which my younger brother had written with Turbo Pascal in 1990). It was damn handy, but I never made money from it. Windows 3.1 had come out and was already choking the life out of the MSDOS utility market. None of my game projects, though, moved past technology testing or proofs of concept.

 

When I took a job in Nashville, Tennessee–another health insurance programming job taken strictly for money and the “excitement” of moving to a new city–I got even less done than before. The commute (45 minutes to work in the morning, 45 minutes home in the evening) took a big chunk out of my available time. Windows 95 came out that year, though, and I dabbled in Win32 programming.

 

After 15 months in Nashville, my wife and I were quite tired of the place and I took a non-health insurance job back in Tulsa.

 

That move back to Tulsa in early 1996 coincided with the explosion of the internet and the World Wide Web. And the release of Delphi 2 (with full support for the Win32 API). And with my younger brother needing a graphical front end for the VT100/telnet MUD-like paintball game he had built over his last Xmas holidays as a single man.

 

1996 was a busy, busy year for me. And that continued into 1997 and 1998. I worked 8-9 hours at my job, and then went home and worked another 5-7 hours on The Journal, or Paintball Net, or Artifact–or sometimes all three on a given day.

 

I learned how to build Web pages. How to communicate over TCP/IP. How to use the rich text edit Windows Common Control. How to use WinG and DirectSound. How to manage an online community. How to accept credit card orders. How to handle customer support. How to track the business income and expenses separate from the family finances.

 

I even learned stuff at my new job. Mostly how to use Sql Server and much fun a T1 internet connection and a Universal MSDN license could be. I used PowerBuilder (does that even exist any more?), but otherwise my job was much the same as it had been even at BlueLincs: talk to the users, and find ways to make their lives easier/better. In my last few months there, though, my job became more isolated from the users and more keyed towards developing software that no one needed yet (and, it turned out, never needed at all).

 

It was definitely my 8-5 jobs that made my indie shift possible. That’s a large part of why I call them “corporate welfare”. I didn’t have to worry about how my bills were going to be paid. My health insurance and retirement benefits were generally good during those years (my first child cost me a total of $150 out of pocket; my 2nd, with no health insurance, cost me just over $6,000 out of pocket; you do the math). I was able to take the money from The Journal and my part of Paintball Net and re-invest it into my new, growing business. In 1998 I bought my first computer that I paid cash for (it’s still running, BTW, turns 10 years old in July; my daughter plays Web games on it), and I could legitimately call it a business expense.

 

My split-time corporate-indie life was possible for a couple of reasons. First, what I did on my own was totally different from what I was doing at work. Not just different industries but also using totally different development tools. Those differences helped keep me from burning myself out creatively or professionally. Second, and most importantly, my wife made it possible. She encouraged me–and watched our first child almost 24×7 from 1993 to 1998 (I did my share; but it was a small share).

 

I used to think it was impatience (to be my own boss) and overconfidence (that I would be making a lot more money soon) that made me leave my last job in 1999. And, yeah, there was quite a bit of both in the mix. But it was also because I had been moved away from “my” users and made part of a back office development team. I could no longer talk to the people who used (or would use) the software I was building–because they didn’t exist. Plus, I thought that last project I worked on was Totally Stupid™.

 

So I “quit and went home”, as a friend of mine put it later.

 

The journey since then has had its ups and downs, as I’ve talked about in other posts, and I’ve learned still more. I’m still learning.

 

I think these are the Big Lessons™ I’ve learned over the years and through my various jobs:

 

I could probably go on, but they’ll likely get redundant. So I’ll stop.

 

If you’ve stuck with me this far, thanks for reading.

 

Have fun!

 

-David

by Sande Chen

 

Hello, it’s David Michael’s conference-hopping co-author, Sande Chen.

 

Recently, I was at SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive Festival in Austin, TX, where I attended a session on Manga called, “How Manga Explains the World.” The presenter was Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future.

 

I didn’t know anything about manga going in so all of this was quite new to me. I was struck by some parallels to indie game development.

 

Manga is really popular in Japan. Tons of fans crowd into marketplaces to get the latest comics. However, what they buy is not the official manga put out by the publishers, but the amateur manga, put out by indie creators known as “dojinshi.” The dojinshi use established characters but create different, and sometimes questionable stories, with those characters.

 

Pink commented that in the U.S., intellectual property (IP) lawyers would have a very profitable field day if someone did this with a Disney film. But in Japan, the publishers and the dojinshi creators have a tacit agreement known as “anmoku no ryokai” (literally: “agreement or understanding”). The official manga industry has been in decline so the publishers look the other way. The publishers figure the amateur manga will keep fans interested in the official manga. In exchange, the dojinshi don’t flood the market and create limited copies of their work.

 

In fact, this interest in amateur manga helps the publishers. They use the dojinshi markets as a way to sign up new talent (and offer them a chance to create a new, original manga). The publishers also learn about market trends by observing what fans are buying. Some of these dojinshi become as well-known as the original creators. They sometimes even branch out and do original stories without publisher backing.

 

It seems to me that the mod community is a similar model. Successful mod teams do become successful companies with publisher backing.

 

Is the “official” game industry watching the indies? Just by looking at casual games, it appears they do. Do they look to indies as the barometer of what’s to come? What do you think?

 

I attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from the fall of 1987 through the spring of 1991.

 

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “4 years?” You gotta remember, though, that was the tradition at the time. The dot com boom hadn’t come along yet to show that completing a Computer Science degree was a waste of two (maybe even three) years. Imagine my embarrassment in 1998 when people were dropping out of college and into jobs paying just as much (or better) as my corporate welfare.

 

So I did those young punks one better: I quit my corporate welfare gig to make (for a couple years) even less than they were after their dot com companies went bust.

 

Anyway, I loved college. I still miss … well, I miss the co-eds.

 

After I quit McDonald’s (for the second time) in December 1987, I didn’t do a whole helluvalot of paid work in college. I was (mostly) supported by academic- and need-based scholarships, with just a touch of low-interest student loans (remember those?), so I wasn’t required to work. (My sophomore year I actually tried to get a work-study job in the academic computer lab (geek cred!), but the university told me that if I took the job I’d have to give up a grant. Work or free money? Tough choice, eh? I took the free money.)

 

Between my freshman and sophomore years, in the summer of 1988, having already sworn off fast food and seeing no other prospects for underpaid employment, I found I had a lot of free time. So I wrote a screen-based text editor for the Tandy Color Computer using the floppy-disk-based OS-9 operating system. In assembler. Because OS-9 didn’t have a good one. (Imagine my shock–and surprise–when I went back to school in the fall to find out that more than one of the seniors in the CS department were building … wait for it … text editors … for their senior project. I was so annoyed–and in the mood to show off–that over spring break 1989, just to prove a point, I wrote another text editor, this one for MSDOS, using Turbo Pascal [much easier than assembler, I can tell you; let's hear a cheer for third-generation programming languages].)

 

In late 1988, freshly cashed-up from my various sources of state and federal funding, I bought my first PC compatible, a Tandy 1000 SX. It had a modem. 1200 baud. Oh, yeah. So over Christmas break, my brother, Dug, and I created our first shareware games. Yup. Shareware. That word has been around a long time.

 

Over the next couple years, we made a few hundred dollars off of our door games. Those would be the first true “indie” dollars I made. I liked ‘em.

 

My favorite job during my college years, though, had nothing to do with programming or games. It was in the summer of 1989. I decided I wanted to work outside. Get a tan. So I worked as a campus gardener from May through August, Monday through Friday, 7:00am to 3:30pm, with 15 minute breaks in the morning and afternoon. I definitely worked outside (except when it rained), and my tan from all that weeding and trimming and chopping would be a credit to my Native American ancestors.

 

I wish I could say I learned a lot from my three months as a blue collar worker. I may have, but all I remember today is how to identify crepe myrtles, how to tell begonias from periwinkles, and whether or not those clouds up there really mean rain or if they’re just fucking with us.

 

The next summer, heading into my senior year, I landed a night time computer operator gig at the health insurance company which would, in just over year, become my employer for my first real job. It was a cushy gig being the night computer operator. All I did was babysit minicomputers while their backup processes ran to completion, and delivered printouts.

 

Anyway, college was fun, even if I did come out with a few student loans and some bad spending habits. More importantly, though, college is where I first learned how to make money that wasn’t timed by a clock (and wasn’t calculated in acres of grass mowed).

 

It wasn’t a lot of money. It was just a taste. Little more than a nibble. But I never forgot that taste, even after nearly half a decade had passed.

 

-David

 

…was a Monday. My first Monday as a self-employed indie game/software developer.

 

This past year as an indie didn’t go exactly as planned. Some of the “not as planned” was great, some … less great.

 

The Great:

 

The Less Great:

 

On balance, it seems to have been a pretty good year. =)

 

-David

 

PS This little indie-versary of mine is why I started the “Making of an Indie” articles. I expect I have another 2-3 of those coming.

 

My fast food experience:

 

Overall, I enjoyed working for McDonald’s. I learned to cook (seriously; the significant automation of the grill stations happened after I left), I learned to keep busy (or, as I liked say, because it irritated the managers, how to “look busy”),  I learned to have fun while working, and I grew up. A lot. My McD’s money bought my first car, my first computer (with a floppy drive!), and kept me in spending change.

 

I didn’t learn much from either LJS or Whataburger. Those were jobs I took because they were easy to get (warm body with prior fast food experience). After the hustle-and-bustle of constant activity at McD’s, LJS was damn boring (which is why I left after a month) and Whataburger wasn’t much better. But their paychecks cleared.

 

I worked in the grill. I worked the front cash registers. I worked drive through. I worked closing. I cleaned everything there was to be cleaned (except the roof). The only shifts I never worked were opening and breakfast.

 

I took my job seriously. Here’s how seriously: People would come up to the counter after eating to tell the manager how much they enjoyed the burgers I had made. I got compliments on McDonald’s burgers.

 

Early signs of near-obsessive-compulsive customer service, maybe. [*]

 

My senior year of high school, my typical schedule looked like this:

 

I learned to sleep anywhere. And did. I graduated 3rd in my class (of 60-ish; whee).

 

The most valuable lesson I learned in my fast food years was:

 

 

Like I said: I was having fun, mostly. I enjoyed my work. It took being passed over for a crew trainer position (and the raise that came with it), and the disappointment that brought, to make me remember that this was just a job. One of the only jobs I could get as a teenager. It wasn’t intended to be a career.

 

Starting college in the fall of 1987 helped. In high school I had no social life (see schedule above), which was not the case in college. Plus, I was on scholarship at college, so I didn’t need the extra money (as much). Also, starting my computer science degree I began to think of myself as “a programmer”. All of that affected significant changes in how I perceived my job behind the counter with the funny hat on.

 

Working for minimum wage, I realized, sucked. Even if I liked the job (which, when working on the grill, I did). So I set my sights on salaried positions.

 

But, before I got there, I had to finish college.

 

-David

 

[*] Here was my secret: I followed the instructions in the operating manual for “how to cook a McDonald’s hamburger”. Seriously. Evidently, an ability to follow instructions, with an eye towards quality control, is hard to find in teenage fry cooks. Then and now.

 

I received my first official paycheck when I was 12 (maybe 13).

 

Of course, I had been mowing lawns for cash for a year or two before that. (There’s nothing like being one of the few settled families in an oil-boom-fed-high-turnover working class neighborhood. Most of our new neighbors were in and out within a year, and almost none of them had lawnmowers. It was easy work for decent pay. And not even a lot of walking.)

 

But this was a job. Every weekday afternoon I would spend an hour or so vacuuming the rooms of one of the local elementary school. I got paid minimum wage (which rather sucked in 1980; kinda like today, I guess, but with a much smaller, pre-double-digit-inflation hourly rate), and took home my paycheck on the first of each month.

 

I have no idea how I got that job. I suspect a combination of small town nepotism and charity. The principal of the school was the father of one of my classmates, and I had spent the night at their house once or twice. So he knew me. And since there had been as many of four of us in the school system in the previous couple years, he knew my family. Which is where the charity part kicks in.

 

Regardless, I was proud of that job, and I did the work very conscientiously. The janitor who was usually there for the first 10-15 minutes of my “shift” taught me how to listen to the vacuum and know when it “grabs” the carpet versus when its just sucking air. Sometimes he let me grab free cans of pop from the vending machine. I learned what bits of debris a vacuum can handle–and which it can’t. I learned what burning rubber smells like. And how to replace a broken belt and unjam an electric motor.

 

Good times. Sorta.

 

The school shut down for the night almost as soon as I arrived, students and teachers streaming out. The janitor was gone soon after. I had the entire building to myself for nearly an hour before my parents came to pick me up.

 

Sadly, the entire building was eff-ing boring. A bunch of kindergarten through fourth grade classrooms didn’t hold a lot of entertainment for a teenage male, and the gym was locked up. After the first week or so, the teachers learned to lock their candy jars into their desks. Once, thirsty, I “borrowed” a can of Tab from the fridge in the teacher’s lounge. Damn was that nasty stuff. I threw it away after one sip. Kinda felt bad about that.

 

Anyway, all of that was long, long ago, but I can still whip a vacuum cleaner around, cleaning both well and fast (though I have a 14-year old son now, so I get to delegate).

 

I’m not sure I learned anything that was relevant to my future in computer science college courses or to being an indie. Except maybe how to work–and do a good job–without direct supervision.

 

But that was my first job. And as I learned a few years later, vacuuming classrooms in a middle class school district beats working in fast food.

 

-David

 

Piracy isn’t the biggest problem facing software developers today. It isn’t even one of the biggest problems.

 

I’ll say it again.

 

Piracy isn’t why software developers go out of business.

 

Piracy isn’t why video game developers fold up like lawn chairs after an outdoor jazz concert.

 

What does cause these catastrophes? Poor management. Boneheaded financial moves. Retarded marketing choices. Sometimes even bad luck.

 

This is an emotional issue for a lot people. I’m not even sure why it’s such an emotional issue. Many of the people who  scream the loudest aren’t even affected by the problem.

 

I’m affected.

 

Here’s what I do about it:

 

 

None of that is rocket science. None of that is expensive. Most of it manages to work without making my customers feel like I don’t trust them.

 

What do I count as dollars lost to piracy?

 

$0

 

Money I never had is money I never lost.

 

-David

 

PS Prompted by this post.

 

Over on the Quarter to Three forums, Michael Fitch takes a moment away from his grief about the closing of Iron Lore Entertainment to vent his frustrations with PC game-dev (link found via Shamus Young).

 

Mssr. Fitch’s frustrations are the standard laundry list of PC peccadillos:

 

Wow.

 

You can draw your own conclusions. I just wanted to say these three things:

 

 

Sheesh.

 

 

This problem has been solved as much as it’s going to be solved.

 

 

Just checking.

 

Anyway, we seem to be in another cycle of “The PC is dead”, which happens about twice every decade. Usually that means something significant is about to shift, like when laptops passed desktops. Or when LCD monitors (and powerful CPU’s and RAM) dropped in price. Or when OpenGL became viable as a video game platform. Or when hard drives became huge.

 

Always the PC is dying.

 

And yet, here it is. Neither dying nor dead.

 

-David

 

In The Millionaire Next Door Thomas Stanley and William Danko pointed out how most Americans have no idea how much money their neighbors really have or make. People read too much into the public face of those around them, assuming both low and high net worths for all the wrong reasons.

 

The goal of “stealth wealth” is to actively pursue this obfuscation, to keep your financial situation (good or bad) “under the radar”.

 

The idea is that you provide as little information on the topic as you can. You buy the house (or car or TV or cellphone) that fits your needs and lifestyle, not the one that trumpets your success to the world. In fact, you avoid any purchase that involves “trumpeting”. You’re not trying to hide your net worth from curious friends and family (unless you want to, of course). But you’re not advertising.

 

Thus, “stealth wealth” is the opposite of “conspicuous consumption”. Instead of trying to impress everyone with what you can afford, you focus more on what you need.

 

-David

 

PS (SPOILER ALERT) The secret of The Millionaire Next Door is (wait for it) “spend less than you earn”. Revolutionary, ain’t it?