Transitioning from living to work, to working to live

January sure did fly by quickly. I had been intending to write something for the last couple of weeks, but through a combination of a somewhat hectic work schedule and lack of inspiration in topics to write about, I didn’t make time for anything sadly. However, in reflecting and dealing with some recent work-related sources of stress, I realized that maybe it’s worth talking about my career and the transformations that I wish to enact.

As Maria von Trapp once said, let’s start from the very beginning – a very good place to start!

Relatively early on in my life, I always had a fascination with computers. In particular, video games were a great source of joy for me. While I should have been probably spending more hours dedicated to studying or music practice or other such things, a large amount of my time growing up was spent with a controller or keyboard and mouse in hands, poring over a screen, and absorbing whatever experience had come to grab my attention as of late.

Video games to me have always been a great source of escapism. There is nothing that I enjoy more than rich narratives with complex and deep characters, colorful settings, and events that spread across the entire emotional spectrum. Storytelling in general is something that I deeply respect and care for across the variety of media in which stories are told, but there is something special and meaningful about the interactive nature of video games which other forms cannot quite replicate in the same way.

As a result, it should be absolutely no surprise to anyone that I decided relatively early on that I wanted to make video games. I wanted to be involved in the creation of these amazing experiences, and help forge titles that in my wildest dreams I could only hope would live up to the caliber of some of my favorites.

At the ripe old age of 18 years old, after having finished high school, I packed up my things and I moved from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Derby, England, where I would begin my pursuit of a BsC in Computer Games Programming.

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I loved university. Despite the grueling amount of coursework that we had to undertake, I absolutely loved what I did. There were many late nights involved, as well as plenty of caffeine and coding mistakes that were made that I’m sure current me would chuckle at with my additional years of professional experience under my belt – but there was no replacement for the feeling of accomplishment when a big project finally came together, or when you finally solved a particularly complex problem, and could take a step back and look at your work with a sense of pride.

I didn’t particularly overthink just how much I was working during that time. My parents had always raised my brother and I to have a very strong work ethic, and encouraged us to work hard for our goals. As I was surrounded by friends who all lived and breathed the same existence as myself, who all shared that same love of what we did and actively encouraged and supported one another in our endeavors, I thrived off of that energy.

However, despite all of that, I was thirsty for more. What I did was educational and fine enough, but I wanted to build something meaningful. I wanted to be working on a real project, something that would contribute to the real world, not just academic assignments towards achieving my degree. Thankfully, my course was structured to support that. After the first couple of years, our third year was to be a year-long internship at a company which we would have to successfully secure for ourselves. It would give us the opportunity to be a member of the real world, so to speak, and experience first-hand what development would be like as an industry professional.

And so along came Microsoft.

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From 2011 to 2012, I lived in Reading, England and worked at Microsoft’s Thames Valley Park campus as an SDET intern on the Mediaroom team, where I helped work on test automation systems for streaming TV applications. Which, as I’m sure you’ve no doubt picked up on, is not the same as game development.

So why the shift? Well, there were numerous reasons, but the key ones were ultimately:

1. Having a company name like Microsoft on my resume was inevitably going to look good from an interview perspective.
2. Microsoft, as one of the leading software companies in the world, was surely a place that I would be able to learn a lot and improve my own skills.
3. I started having concerns about working in the video game industry due to constant reports of crunch hours and the toll that it ultimately took on individuals’ mental health.

That last one in particular was a big one for me. Around that time, as much as I enjoyed the projects I undertook at university, it was hard not to be aware of the ever-growing volume of stories and articles that you would hear through the grapevine of the terrible working conditions of the industry, or of people burning out because of the pressure and hours that they were obliged to work. In essence, a fear that by going down that path, I would become a slave to my own work, and beholden to the thing that I loved.

For better or worse, I decided that an opportunity at Microsoft was too good to pass up, and so I embraced it with open arms. In retrospect, I didn’t particularly enjoy my internship. It was a good learning experience, and I took away from it a number of things – for example, that testing is absolutely not my cup of tea – that have been beneficial. What I worked on, however, didn’t spark great joy in me.

Returning to university for my final year in 2012 was particularly difficult. The one thing that I had taken from my internship was the feeling of working in a team environment, and contributing to meaningful products that would live and breath beyond the scope of a simple academic assignment that was destined to gather dust once the goal of the module had been accomplished. Going back to an academic environment after having that initial taste of what real life would entail – of a career – meant it was hard not to always be looking ahead to the future, instead of focusing on finishing my final year and my dissertation at the time.

What made it even more difficult was that, before I had even finished my first semester of my final year, I had successfully secured a job not only at Microsoft, but at their main headquarters in Redmond, WA on the Xbox team. Not only did it feel like a step towards my goals that had shifted to be close to the area that I loved but not necessarily embroiled with the same chronic culture that seemed to permeate in other areas of the games industry, but it also was a move to a country that I had long dreamed of moving to in pursuit of career goals.

It felt like everything had fallen into place.

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I could ramble on about the various experiences that I’ve accrued over my career thus far, but I’m more interested in the general outcome of where I am today. I am sure that there are plenty of interesting stories that I could tell, but I’ll save those for another day.

For now, what matters is that I’ve obviously moved to the Seattle area and continue to work at Microsoft. In my 6.5 years there, I’ve worked across two teams on a variety of different products – from Xbox to Windows and now Azure – and have moved up the ladder from a junior engineer to a senior software engineering lead, with seven people reporting to me that I’m responsible for, as well as managing a scrum team of four engineers and myself. To cap it off, I’d like to believe that I’m firmly on my way to reaching principal software engineer in the next year or two.

I have achieved a lot in my time, and there is a lot to be proud of. However, now that I’ve almost reached that main goal of an arbitrary career level that I’ve held for the last few years, I’m realizing more and more that I need goals that are not just driven by a title or an increase in salary. I need to feel enthused about what I work on. Although I can enjoy elements of what I do on a day-to-day basis or find happiness in individual tasks or working with some pretty great people, I do not feel passionate about what I do. I’ve lost that feeling that I had growing up, and frankly I don’t know how to reclaim it.

Reaching this goal has not been without sacrifice either. Despite fooling myself that this path would be a safer route to avoid crunch and associated stresses, it hasn’t. I constantly deal with the ebb and flow of a work schedule whose ever increasing demands on my time and sanity gradually take their toll. I find myself unable to switch off from work or stop thinking about complex problems that I have to solve, and end up sacrificing the limited time I do have to it more often than not. I find myself often wasting the free time that I do have due to feeling exhausted and the constant need to recharge my mental batteries.

As I sat down with my counselor the other day, we talked a lot about work and the demands that it has on me. As I continue to evaluate my life and seek to make positive life changes to start putting my life back on track and filling it with the experiences and people that matter the most to me, I have come to the realization that there is no happiness to be found in a passionless career which overwhelms me without much in return. I feel so bound to my salary in order to be able to continue to afford living in Seattle, as well as maintain the lifestyle that I enjoy. There is an inherent fear to change those things.

However, I think I may have finally reached my tipping point. At what point does this all become worth it? At what point do I think that the long hours and mental pressure start providing benefit? Do I think that if I work hard enough that I will magically fall in love again with what I do and reclaim that spark that I once had?

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As things stand right now, I’m a little bit lost on that front. I feel that the right way forward is to try and rediscover my passions, and find out what makes me happy. I can only hope that by doing so, I may be able to find some idea of career opportunities that would lend themselves to reignite my creative spark, and ideally allow me to feel more centered and less overwhelmed.

My raw thought is that I would like to see if I can find something to do with interactive storytelling. I don’t really know how one forms a career out of that, or if indeed that is something that can be maintained without some serious lifestyle changes at the prospect of taking a serious hit to my finances. That said, I know in myself that I need to figure out this for myself.

After all, all work and no play makes Peter a dull boy.