The 25th was my 34th birthday. The day after I went for yet another interview. The third one with a famous Japanese developer for a position in the research department.
I was asked to bring copies of some documents regarding my current salary.
This time around the interview was a bit more serious. There was money to talk about and I’m not particularly good at it. I surrended pretty quickly for entering doing more or less what I’m already doing, and wait a few months for a review.
I couldn’t tell if my current earnings are somewhat higher than expected, but I don’t think so, as I’ve previously gave a rough figure of my salary to other interviewers. I also previously explained that I had to take a decision by the end of this month. There are only two days left and so I got in touch with this company today again.
The answer was that the process of issuing an offer, if any, will most likely take more than two days.
I realize that certain things require time, but I’m also in a difficult situation. I could try to be sneaky and accept the offer I have to possibly leave shortly after, in case of a better offer. But that would suck.. it would be a lot of hassle to eventually change jobs right away, both for me and the company involved.

I’m currently hoping that I will get any new offers by tomorrow, or else I will have to decide wether to accept the current offer and ignore any new ones that would arrive shortly after, or ask for a delay to the offering companies, so that I have enough time to see what’s available.

Ummmmmmmmm !!!!

I’ve also been doing some work on DSharingu. A new version should come soon. Finally a decent version which has an usable compression with progressive refinement and some added usability: less buttons and standard Windows menus.

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 4:30 AM EDT

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Yesterday I went for a last round of interviews. The second round for a very popoular developer, and the first (and only ?) with a larger company which perhaps used to be more famous in the past.
They both were group interviews. I had the first one with the popoular developer at noon, with my prospect coworkers. I think it was mostly to see if we’d make a connection, and I think it went fairly well. We all had fun but we also spoke of our past experiences and the things we like to do. I had a chance to briefly speak about image compression, but also a chance to mention that I go clubbing from time to time 8)
It was bright outside and I really felt at ease.. but I should not be too relaxed until I hear the result !

The second interview was with the larger business located not exactly very near Tokyo, but sporting its own set of cool looking buildings, although the interior was definitely more on the functional side…

Because my reading abilities are very limited, I was given one extra hour to do the multi-choice tests, plus the possibility to use whatever electronic dictionary (specifically the Nintendo DS to rapidly consult kanji).

The skills tests varied greatly. I started with a warm-up section that was a concentrated litteracy-level test for native Japanese readers. I could only see kanji I coudln’t recognize and I had 4 minutes.. I stared at the paper until the alarm rang and the lady in charge came into the room to see how I “did” 8)
Other tests were simpler, involved understanding little or no Japanese. Doing equations, making sense of numerical series, associating figures, basically a simple IQ test.
I regret that I was not able to solve a simple equation with two unknowns. I was definitely not well organized, I tried to skip steps and I found myself possibly making mistakes and possibly misunderstanding the equations which were to be derived from a plain language explanation.

The attitude test had about 120 questions to which one had to answer either with 5, 4 or 3 possible answers, depending on the type. I did as far as I could, starting at about 14:50, and then came the interview at 17:00.
This was again a group interview. Everybody was pretty kind, although not necessarily upbeat. I was told that I could resort to English if I had problems, but I did not, aside from introducing 2-3 words to make sure I was understood. The word 残業 ([zangyo] = overwork) this time came from one of the interviewers. I was basically told that the norm is to work about 11 hours and sometimes on weekends.
Overall it seemed to me like a very Japanese (so to speak) work environment. Making no excuses for working late everyday but also being honest about it.
The icing came when, after the interview, I was kindly given unlimited time to complete the attitude test. That was a bit harsh. I went on and used another hour and a half to complete the test, but this time I didn’t really try to understand well every question, as it would have taken me at least 3-4 more hours.
I understand the company policy, but if that piece of paper really matters, then I don’t think it’s a good idea to make it fill it up to someone that has obviously problems understanding the questions. However I didn’t complain and I took that as a good exercise 8)

As I’m standing, I’m one more company should supposedly contact me to set an interview. The contact at this company answer with an average 10 days delay (!). I was also told by a friend that sook some business with them in the past, that they are basically snob asses.. so I’m not holding my breath !
Another company has yet to give any answer (did they get the resume ?). And another big foreign one, which recently had no more need for a position for which I was introduced by some contacts (in English), finally apparently answered to my original (mandatory) online inquiry for another position (in Japanese).
They now ask me to send my resume, over one month later, while it should have taken 1-2 weeks. Honestly, I have 8 days to go before I’m jobless, I need to start doing paperworks for the apartment, and I have a sure offer from a good company that was kind enough to promptly show its interest.

While I don’t like the idea of having to reject any offer, I hope I will soon have a chance to choose and finally relax.

We’ll see !!!

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary, Japan at 11:24 AM EDT

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Last Thursday I went for an interview at a pretty famous Japanese game company. As expected I had to undergo a standard test before the actual interview.
The test consisted in having to answer 270 dual choice questions in about 40 minutes. I could only manage to answer to 40-50 because they were all written in Japanese ! The Japanese<->English dictionary on the Nintendo DS helped a bit to find out kanji readings.. but that’s definitely a rather lengthy process.

The interview was for a position in the research department. I was asked straight away to give a simple explanation of what Spherical Harmonics are all about in 3D graphics.
I tried to speak Japanese as much as I could, but I gladly resorted to English when it was time to talk technically. The technical interviewer could speak English and it felt great to talk about 3D graphics without getting stuck every other word. I was actually excited… you don’t get a chance to talk about that stuff with other people very often !!

The interview apparently went well and now I’m scheduled for a second one. The second interview should be with more people and I fear that I will be crushed under the pressure of my poor Japanese.
For this reason I decided to intensely study Japanese.. but I haven’t really studied that much ! Instead I’ve been working on DSharingu.. lots of work on the interface. Which made me realize how sometimes programming is so needlessly time-consuming. Doing GUI programming is pretty sucky but it’s also the bulk of application programming !
So, now I spent few days coding at home after a stupid interface, but the screen compression system is the same weak thing. bha !

Recently my home server’s FTP went crazy. I changed some settings and now I can’t make it work again. I was running a free, but really not so good, Windows server.
So, I decided to try use Linux. I installed Ubuntu Server on a VMWare virtual machine and I’m currently experimenting with that.
Apache was no problem but doing FTP is quite a different matter. Linux Linux Linux.. it’s crap !
Unix is very powerful, but you need to know a lot of things. I searched around and found out documentation telling me how to install ProFTPD.. only to find out that on this release I have I’m supposed to go uncomment some lines in some config file so that I can force the system to go look for the package to update. Otherwise it tells me it can’t find it.. what the hell ?! It’s the second most famous FTP server !
They tell you: “use vsftpd !”. OK.. and just to get it running the way you want (easily done with any Windows FTP server), you need to learn how to configure dozens of options in some obscure text files… from various sources that are often not up to date with the current changes of the software.

I realize that my frustrations aren’t too different from those of those people that sit in front of a Windows PC for the first time and can’t get things working. I often feel like blaming Windows newbies, and I can see like a Linux person could blame me for not being able to install and configure an FTP server.

In the end it shouldn’t be the user’s fault. It’s the fault of who designs those interfaces.

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 11:39 PM EDT

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I’m all geared towards my first day at my new job. I want to go and kick some ass ! ..Sorry for the dudeish expression, but that’s more or less the feeling. I want to go and code new stuff, get tasks, etc etc.
Chances are that my first tasks will be somewhat boring, although I really hope they won’t be ! There is also a fear that I may end up in some place where there is a weird coding standard.
My current employer required (but I never complied (^^;)) that one had to put an underscore before any local variable (WTF ?!), an ‘m’ before every method, and some funky names for looping variables.

for (int i=0; i < 10; ++i)

…becomes…

for (ulong32 _Lp=0; _Lp < 10; ++_Lp)

..give me a break !

My current rules for writing C++ code are the following:

//===============================================================
/// @file class_name.h
//===============================================================
class ClassName
{
    int     _class_item;

public:
    ClassName();
    ~ClassName();

    void    PublicMethod();

private:
    void    privateMethod();
};

..I hope that I can keep that to some extent. Or at least that I won’t be forced to use some very weird and/or paranoid coding style.

Changing topic. I recently received some positive and some negative feedback regarding my search for employment.
The large foreign company that I was aiming for apparently isn’t doing great business in Japan and it’s not looking anymore for new people for the position I applied for. It could be an excuse, but on the other hand I didn’t really have a chance to go for an actual interview after the initial phone chat (which it seemed like it went well).

Positive feedback comes instead from two big Japanese game companies. They both want me to allocate at least 3 hours to undertake an interview and a test.. rigorously in Japanese.
One company says that I will receive help in reading and that I can bring my brand new CASIO XD-ST7400 8)
The other company contacted me directly with an appointed day and hour. So, I will have to ask about the test. If good reading comprehension is required, then I may as well avoid wasting everyone’s time. I don’t like to take tests where there is a good chance that I’ll fail !

I’ve recently worked on DSharingu. A new release fixes a crash problem. But it really needs just a lot of work. I need to improve compression, especially for complicated wallpapers.. but I also need to improve the interface.
Currently the settings allow to specify one party to connect. If one wants to change he/she has to change the IP manually but also change the passwords relative to that destination.
I’m now working on an interface that keeps a list of destinations (or “remotes”), each with a name and a password.

ole’

Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, Diary at 10:54 AM EDT

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At the news that I resigned from my job without first having found a new one, everyone was more or less worried (me included !). That ranged from “it’s usually advisable to..” to “are you nutsss ?!!!”.
I can’t help but thinking that those that were worried the most are also those that underestimate me the most. I’ve been told that I had balls/guts.. so I receive appreciation for being adventurous. That’s certainly a compliment, but it also sounds as if I’m not that good of a programmer, and that I could end up jobless.
That was never an issue, also because I have experience doing web development and everyone needs a web developer 8)

In any case, today I received an offer, I think.
I’m flattered and I really appreciate no-nonsense companies that get to the point. No need to keep one hanging for weeks.
There was some money talk and then an offer and it was all in Japanese. When it comes to talk about money I can’t find my way around in Italian.. much less so in Japanese.
I’m waiting for the details to be put in writing. But in general the feeling I got is that I won’t become rich as a game programmer anytime soon. This can be also related to the fact that for the past 5 years I couldn’t release any major product. Nothing that would resound on my resume, nothing that showcased any particular technology.

Basically, I’m good but not excellent..

And if I were considered excellent ? I’d get paid like anyone with a good experience programming Visual Basic, Excel and Oracle.

Polyphony Digital, the creator of Gran Turismo on the PlayStation, was offering (until the end of August) a maximum of 1 million yen/month. Being a hot programmer on the best selling racing game will give you more or less what any programmer will get in the finance business.
Stock traders instead make a lot more money. I hear that to become a trader one has to have balls, build experience in some place and and suck it up to his boss until he’s given the chance to become a trader.

I feel a bit cheated. I’m told that the gaming business is worth more than the movie business. As a programmer I’m supposedly at the heart of this business, and yet, if I want to be able to step up the social ladder, if I want to be able to enjoy more refined things in life.. I need to become somewhat of a merchant.

Anyhow, I’m fairly happy 8)
One of the very few companies I was really aiming for wants to give me a chance. It’s about developing rather popoular games, flexible work schedule with supposedly not so much overwork. I think that the company is cool, and it offers free (”call now the operators are standing by !!!”) Japanese courses on site, which is also convenient.

I’ll give it some time to see what others have to offer and then I’ll make a decision.

cool cool !

Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Diary at 4:38 AM EDT

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Yesterday (Monday) I started my round of job interviews.
On the same day I had a phone interview and a physical one. The phone interview was for a big foreign company, the other one was for a relatively small but rather active Japanese developer.
There are a lot of game developers in Tokyo, but I actually aimed first at those two companies. There are probably a lot of nice opportunities out there, but given what I know (I’m not really well informed nor connected), my gut feeling is with those two companies for now.

I was a bit scared of the first interview cause I was worried that I’d receive the personality profile sort treatment. Big companies are famous for employing dedicated personnel for screening potential employees with trick questions.
As it turned out, it was a rather short layd back chat with an actual potential boss. Big relief !

I went into the second interview prepared to have to do it in Japanese but the person interviewing actually made me choose between Japanese and English. I bravely picked Japanese knowing that I could easily throw an English word here and there.
The second interview was not so long but definitely a lot more indepth. I was told that, as is often the case with not very large dev studios, I would have to assume more than one role, not just 3D. I was also told that R&D was mostly about development and not so much about research (fair enough).
When it came to questions, I asked about work time and specifically on the more or less expected (unpaid) overwork. The answer (if I understood correctly) was that the company isn’t a sweatshop, but of course one has to be ready to work late hours around milestones (fair enough, again).
I asked about Internet security. Apparently security is pretty strict. I asked if I could chat with my mother on lunch break (!) and the answer was “yes, if it’s lunch break…”. Well frankly was a somewhat dumb question to ask to your potential CEO ! But I wanted to raise those issues.

In any case it seems that network security has been tightened more and more recently. I have a friend working in a large company that can’t chat anymore, can’t use GMail, and to move files on a company laptop needs go through some hops on some encryption server.
I understand that one is paid to work, but it’s also nice to stay in the office if one can use a distraction from time to time. It’s a bit as if with the advent of the Internet we’ve all given a cubicle next to a window, and now we are being forced to close the blinds. You can take a peek perhaps but you definitely aren’t supposed to enjoy the view.

The position at the large company is about helping other local developers, rather than doing direct development of a title. This could be potentially quite interesting, perhaps a chance to break the long term project work and to face a variety of problems, plus of course the recognition that comes from working for a large company.

ummmmmmmmmmmmm

Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Diary at 4:16 PM EDT

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Last saturday I went with some friends to see a Brazilian Samba parade here in Tokyo in the Asakusa area !
Here are the pictures. I made a public album with faces of shy friends removed. To do that I “copied” (it’s shortcut kind of feature) pictures from the private album into the public one. However PicasaWeb seems to lose the order of pictures when doing that, and so they are not in the proper chronological order. Not a big deal I guess !

By the end of September my duties at my current company will be over. I don’t have a next job yet, but there seem to be interest from the companies I was interested to. So far, so good !

I fear interviews as I will have to pull out my best Japanese.. of which I’m not particularly proud. Many times people ask “do you speak Japanese ?”. That’s such a broad question to someone that is struggling to do it. There are many levels and contexts that one has con consider to answer to that question.

On the coding side, I decided to give a try to Google’s project hosting. I’ve started gathering and fixing code that I’ve had laying around, to put it out as open source. That includes DSharingu and the related Pascalibs, a quick name I gave to my libraries for the occasion. I’ve grouped the whole OS coding thing under a new blog which I’m doing with Blogger beta.. just to make sure that I go the whole Google solution 8)
I don’t foresee much activity on this, but it’s nice to have something out there. Nowadays, personal code is hardly much of a trade secret. I’m more afraid to lose it on a system crash than risking to have someone rip off some pieces of my code… but who really wants to spend countless hours to understand somebody else’s code ?!

As far as “love life” goes.. well I remember now what relationships are all about. I remember as a kid I was somewhat forced by circumstances to watch those black and white love movies where the two protagonist are all happy and eventually break up out of some stupid situation and then get together again for good. Boring, but that’s one recurrent pattern. Relationships are a continuum of repeating patterns, an endless script.

My current state of things involves at least one quarrel per week. Spend one day fighting, a couple of days getting back on good terms and the rest is just waiting until the next fight. Most of the times it’s just a word a joke, a thing said with a different tone of voice. Sometimes I make some stupid mistakes.. but I hardly ever get any mercy. I basically have to admit being sole responsible of something and ask forgiveness as I whip my back in pain.

I think that I’m a very honest person but that’s not enough. Actually it’s not a good thing. To have a good relationship, I’m told, one is supposed to tell lies !
Language barrier is also a terrible thing. No matter how good of a thought you have, you are only as good as you can express yourself. But then again, even when language isn’t a barrier, there are so many issues with pride and different points of view.

ehhhhhh

Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, Diary at 2:08 AM EDT

9 Comments »

Today (Sunday) I finally sent out a few copies of my resume. It took me a long time to get the whole thing right.
Most people kept telling me I was taking too long to write a resume. One problem obviously is that a resume is a rather formal paper and my knowledge of Japanese is very limited.
I had to do a lot of research to find out how technical terms are written in Japanese. Literal translation is generally both wrong and funny. The average native Japanese speaker also will find himself/herself at loss when trying to come up with translations of technical terms or even to describe an technical task. Nevertheless I had native speakers helping me with the process !
I also sometimes tend to get stuck with details, but I think that potential Japanese employers will appreciate that. Form shows dedication. Japanese are sensitive to that and so am I.
With the resume also comes a CD with a couple of demos. Nothing too big, just old stuff that I picked left and right (including JavaKazRace !).. because bringing demos tends to make quite a difference.

I am concerned however… I see that all the job descriptions for R&D programmer in the game business in Japan require the candidate to be not older than 35. I’m 34 and I’m supposed to feel like I’m at the end of my career as a programmer ?!
What is going to happen if, two years from now, I want to go code for another company ? Am I too old for coding ?
It sounds very much like getting in the military. It’s easy to convince an 18 years old to go risk his/her life just to get some action and a decent pay. But later in life, when one has a family to think about, keeping alive and healthy becomes more important.

Game business also requires one to work his ass off, all in the name of fame… because certainly if you want to make money programming you are better off doing Visual Basic and Oracle.
So, I suppose most people by the age of 35, either become managers (difficult decisions but simple work) or they get into other businesses where they trade the fame of doing “cool games” with more money and a more humane schedule.

I just can’t believe that 2 years from now, people will look at my resume and trash it on the basis that I’ll be 36 !!

zzzzzzz melatonin is starting to make effect.. zzzzzzzz

Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, Society, Diary at 1:58 AM EDT

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Last Thursday I resigned from my current job. I worked there exactly 5 years this month. Not much boding ever went on the premises, but I do have a couple of friends and acquaintances that I’ll be missing !

I’ve been planning to leave for a while now, but I suddenly decided to resign as the start of a new project was approaching. It wouldn’t have been nice to leave in the middle of a project and, frankly, I was disappointed by the unrealistic time line (3 months to develop a game that is not yet well defined).
I was also disappointed by the fact that my skills have perhaps been misunderstood. I was going to be given a fairly difficult task, but definitely not one where I could have given my best. I think that things could have been better if the process of accepting projects and defining tasks were a bit more democratic.

So, I left in a heartbeat. The night before the day or resignation, I spent a few hours looking for a resignation letter template.
While it’s nice to write the whole letter by hand, that would have been a daunting task.

I took a quick 30 minutes course from a “native writer” to properly (form is important !) write just the 3 kanji for the envelope’s title..

I had quite a few days of vacation accumulated, that will give me time to breath and, most importantly, to find a new job and a new apartment. The current one is rented by the company and I will have to leave it !

I have already selected a few game companies which I think would be good for me. But, obviously my main problem is still the language. There are just too many words I don’t know and my grammar is just too poor. I doubt I can sustain a meaningful job interview in Japanese without any help. I’ll definitely need the interviewers to be patient.
The prospect to have to sustain tests also scares me a bit. I’ve never been very good at tests. I’m not a very sociable animal, I tend to be pretty nervous when meeting new people. I’m hoping that the resume and a couple of demos will speak for me. Because I don’t think I will excel at any tests or that I’ll sound too knowledgeable in Japanese.

I’m going to be 34 soon and I noticed that there is a recurrent 35 years old limit for being a programmer !! I guess that at my age one is generally some sort of manager&family-man and less of a programmer/researcher.

I may have to select companies which make some room for English or possibly even not in the game business. I have to admit that I somewhat envy those that work less and make more money. I like to work on the latest technology, do research, etc. But work is work, and more often than not, the most interesting research I do is on the subjects I pick, the stuff I make on my free time.. so I learned to value more free time.

Now I’m a bit worried. I think that generally my problem is that I like to be extra safe. I had to throw myself in a this situation, but by my nature I like to have all angles covered before making any step. That’s obviously not possible now, and it’s perhaps good: one also needs to learn to grab opportunities, to stretch beyond the safe limit to risk something in order to get more.

Fear is what locks almost everyone in place. Fear helps to stay afloat but isn’t going to propel any career.

wooo !!!

Addition: here is a song that sums up how’ve been feeling at work.. nobody should ever have to feel like that.

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 11:56 AM EDT

12 Comments »

Everyone likes to waste time in a way or another. Ever since GMail, Google has come up with a wealth of stuff to test and play around with.
I use Google Desktop daily. It comes with a sidebar and the SDK to add gadgets to the sidebar.. but honestly I can’t bear losing the space that the sidebar takes. It only comes as a distraction and I feel that I’d be wasting too much time programming something that I wouldn’t use myself.

One thing I was curious to find out about is AdSense. I get around 230 page views per day and most of them are Japanese users that come to download the GPU plug-in for PSX emulators !
With those numbers, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t become rich anytime soon. And so I effectively subscribed to AdSense just to find out how it works.
One month into it and I’ve earned $2. One has to make at least $100 before being able to get any money. That means that, at this rate, it will take me 4 years before I see any money 8)
..I wonder how much of Google’s business is based on people like me that do AdSense just to try it, or on people that hopelessly try to make a living with it (Americans are very adventurous when it comes to business 8).

Well, my lunch break is over.. back to the boredom of another useless day in the office.. no wonder I grab every opportunity I get, to mess with Google’s stuff.

woo !!!

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 12:58 PM EDT

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