Our CEO was a fucking asshole but due to his cult of personality, it took David and I (and others) to see him for who he really was a fat, arrogant, lying fuck.
Cool, I'm pleased that you see the picture clearer now. David probably should have been more specific but what's done is done.
Shit, if we had $10 mill in seed money I'd still have a job!
To a large extent you are correct. I was at the company David wrote about in his article and usually didn't work more than 50-55hrs/week. Why? Because I drew my boundaries early.
The CEO and other founders knew that and eventually came to respect it. Unfortunately, it took me 5 years in new media to learn how to define my boundaries with regards to hours and such...
However, it's unfair to David to say it was strictly a boundary issue. David and I had different jobs. His was very broad and mine was very focused. I was usually able to complete my tasks and then go home while David's often shifted and changed and dragged on.
So yes, it was a matter of personal choice but only to an extent.
Dan Frumin and Jeff Simon were 2 of the 3 ZapSpot founders and the primary developers for the company.
As a startup (and mentioned in David's article) our salaries were anywhere from 15-20% below market rates in NYC a year ago when the company got off the ground.
As you may know, hiring programming talent in a tight technical market is expensive. It gets even more expensive when you factor in the fact that most of the so-called programmers ZapSpot interviewed failed the various programming tests. In other words, they didn't make the grade. I mean shit, writing some code to pull data from a db isn't rocket science. Even I can do that and I dropped out of my college's comp sci program after 2 semesters and barely learning anything.
For what ZapSpot was doing, we needed *good* programmers and the sad truth was that there were very, very few. Those that were potentially available were way beyond the company's price range. Understand also that we never got VC financing so we were essentially on a shoe-string budget and couldn't afford to pay for the few who were able to pass our tests.
Remember, we were creating games old-skool style. This means efficient code and routines that could generate 50,000 unique and solvable levels as well as plot shit on the screen.
As David mentioned, our dev cycle was quick. Everything had to be specc'd, designed, coded, and QA's within 2 weeks before it was sent to 350,000+ users.
As for the founder's vacation - I shit you not. Both Jeff and Dan went away that week. Both had weddings or some affairs to take care of. They left David hanging in the breeze and despite having a ton of bricks dropped on him in terms of working with a new and strange API and a short time-line, he did a great job.
See for yourself on www.download.com. Search for ZapSpot and for the game called BullyFrog. I know this because I did the artwork for the game and sat in the cube across from Dave.
I had the pleasure of working with the author of this article and can say without a doubt that he can code.
Writing games is a real test of a programmer and writing complete games from scratch in 5 days (which David did) is a testament to his programming prowess.
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Our CEO was a fucking asshole but due to his cult of personality, it took David and I (and others) to see him for who he really was a fat, arrogant, lying fuck.
Cool, I'm pleased that you see the picture clearer now. David probably should have been more specific but what's done is done. Shit, if we had $10 mill in seed money I'd still have a job!
The CEO and other founders knew that and eventually came to respect it. Unfortunately, it took me 5 years in new media to learn how to define my boundaries with regards to hours and such...
However, it's unfair to David to say it was strictly a boundary issue. David and I had different jobs. His was very broad and mine was very focused. I was usually able to complete my tasks and then go home while David's often shifted and changed and dragged on.
So yes, it was a matter of personal choice but only to an extent.
Try Netslaves.com. A good site and required reading for anyone in new media.
As a startup (and mentioned in David's article) our salaries were anywhere from 15-20% below market rates in NYC a year ago when the company got off the ground.
As you may know, hiring programming talent in a tight technical market is expensive. It gets even more expensive when you factor in the fact that most of the so-called programmers ZapSpot interviewed failed the various programming tests. In other words, they didn't make the grade. I mean shit, writing some code to pull data from a db isn't rocket science. Even I can do that and I dropped out of my college's comp sci program after 2 semesters and barely learning anything.
For what ZapSpot was doing, we needed *good* programmers and the sad truth was that there were very, very few. Those that were potentially available were way beyond the company's price range. Understand also that we never got VC financing so we were essentially on a shoe-string budget and couldn't afford to pay for the few who were able to pass our tests.
Remember, we were creating games old-skool style. This means efficient code and routines that could generate 50,000 unique and solvable levels as well as plot shit on the screen.
As David mentioned, our dev cycle was quick. Everything had to be specc'd, designed, coded, and QA's within 2 weeks before it was sent to 350,000+ users.
As for the founder's vacation - I shit you not. Both Jeff and Dan went away that week. Both had weddings or some affairs to take care of. They left David hanging in the breeze and despite having a ton of bricks dropped on him in terms of working with a new and strange API and a short time-line, he did a great job.
See for yourself on www.download.com. Search for ZapSpot and for the game called BullyFrog. I know this because I did the artwork for the game and sat in the cube across from Dave.
I had the pleasure of working with the author of this article and can say without a doubt that he can code. Writing games is a real test of a programmer and writing complete games from scratch in 5 days (which David did) is a testament to his programming prowess.