Working for The Man

Here's another one Juleigh sent out, this time featuring advice about how to restructure instead of downsize, should you be a video game company executive feeling the pinch of the current financial climate.

While I'm not a video game executive, nor do I plan to be one anytime soon, I really enjoyed the article. Thinking back to my time in financial software (hello Ontario Systems), the advice here really makes sense. I don't think I was ever there during painful layoff sessions, but I do pay attention, read pretty widely, and hear stories from people who've worked at various companies; also, Ontario was unusually open about the financial status of the company, at least internally, so I got me some finance and accounting education whether I needed it or not.

I can picture how the suggestions that Mr. Mencher gives might work better than the standard "We're trimming 7% of our workforce in order to meet (or approach) our yearly earnings projection." And given the state of the world economy, who couldn't use advice about better ways to keep a business viable? Really, I think it boils down to: if you let your numbers men or women run the show, you're going to piss off your employees, or at least frighten them into polishing their resume when they should be working harder to fill in for all those people you just fired. Wouldn't it be better to take a look around and find some ways to tighten the collective belt before you resort to decreasing your labor force? Perhaps you don't need that corporate jet after all, or your financial planners and industry forecasters should give up their yearly bonuses for dropping the ball on this one.

Good links for job hunters

The ever-fantastic Ms. Juleigh DeCarlo just sent these out to us, and I want to dig into them (and possibly post about the first one) when I get a bit of breathing room. The sprint to Quarter Presentations is on and things are a bit hectic around the offices. Cool that we have "offices;" a suite of rooms is just what one needs when one is doing serious development.

Six Words that Make Your Resume Suck

The AWN Career Connections

The Five Worst Mistakes You Can Make on a Resume

Evidently, AWN.com is a good resource for entertainment technologists. Who knew?

Beginning again

New year, new semester, new chance to have a fulfilling and useful semester at the ETC. And so far, everything is fab-o, a-ok, could not be better if I had custom ordered it. I mean, having my old housemates back would be perfection, but since they've all abandoned me for the West Coast (except for Zikun! who is in Pittsburgh somewhere), I'll take what I can get.

My main semester project: Crayon 3D which you can investigate here and here. Someday we will have a shinier website. With possible mailing list! Our dreams and future feature lists are bigger than one semester can contain.