My 1000′s Publish blog Post!

This is my 1000′s Publish Blog post at ogrebear.com. Since November of 2006 (almost 5 years ago) i have posted 1000 blog post (or 1 blog post every 1.826 days).

I want to thank SOE for not giving me an internship!

5, 4 even 3 years ago, i really really really wanted to work at SoE. I wanted to work on Everquest or everquest2 (or EQ next). That was my goal. So i create this blog to talk about my thought on MMO’s. I developed 3rd party tools for the game (like http://ogrebear.com/map/) my Google Everquest 2 map. I helped debug some of the item parsers that were being developed. So i applied to SoE for an internship 4 years ago (as they had publicly announced they were looking for interns), i also applied to EA, and a few other local studios. I heard back from most, but never heard back from SOE. I was childish to think SoE would see my resume and be (OMG it ogrebear we must hire him).

I want to thank SoE for not hiring me for a few reason.

1. Made me realize i shouldn’t apply to 1 or 2 place and hope the one i really want will hire me. So next year i applied to every little computer engineer internship i thought i could do, i spent hours a week doing interviews, (Microsoft, Netapp, EA, Google). And at the end of the day i got to pick the internship i wanted the paid what i wanted to get paid.
2. I probably would of been laid off if i worked at SOE… Theres been what 3 layoff in the last 5 years?
3. SoE (most game companies) pay sucks http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Sony-Online-Entertainment-Salaries-E21279.htm?sort.sortType=BP&sort.ascending=true it looks like if i had a full time job there i would be making about 50-60K a year. But CS engineers in California typical make 70-80k out of college. And i’m happy to say i do, plus i got the great bottom of the recession (were now 600% higher).
4. I ment my true love.. Python!
5. SoE wouldn’t have given me a challenge. I work on the Dev Tools team at a company with 2000+ engineers (near mountain view lets say). I run the static analysis, code review, file ownership (and metics), a internal stack overflow site, and soon Eclipse IDE working Enviorment for the main codeline.  Each one of these thing is it own beast
   1. Static Analysis is writing tools warn developers of potential issues in their code before they even check it in.
   2. Code Review Tools. Giving developers a easy colorful graphical way to see the code that has changed.
   3. File Ownership and metrics. I wrote this my self in python (with django). It make sure that every single file has an owner. We also track metrics in these files (code complexity, number of defects and so on).
   4. An internal Stack overflow. As an engineering i find stack overflow to be very useful, and we have our own internal version that i helped set up.
   5. Eclipse IDE (my new adventure).

So SOE, Thank you for killing my hopes and dreams of being a Game Developer. Because of you, i’m happier, working on thing i enjoy, making a ton of money, and not burn out of Video game.