So, dang. My current job is easily the hardest job I’ve had yet. Why? The personal stakes are somewhat less than some of the previous jobs I’ve had. Working for my father, there’s obviously the stress of working for a relative, and there was a lot of money moving around on the decisions I made, at times. Working at Sega, I was basically one of three people that was responsible for the localization of Seaman, and since it was my first foray into the gaming industry, I really wanted to make a good impression. That, and I was working two other jobs at the time.

But working at Maxis is a combination of neverending deadlines, and sheer chaos. I think part of the issue is that I’ve never worked with so *many* people, and so much management. The management structure is really impressive, to be perfectly honest, and in a situation like this, entirely required to even marginally manage the number of things we have to do. But as a result of that, there’s something between eighty and a hundred and fifty or so people churning along at full speed all the time, and communications between the bunch leads to a *LOT* of action items. There are times where I think if I had three straight hours, of no meetings, and nobody coming by my cube and asking me to do something, I could easily complete everything that they *might* ask me to do. But everyone has to make time for the communication, as well, and that takes up a remarkable amount of time.

It’s not that I have too *much* work to do – to get right down to it, the problem is that I have too *many* things. I’m just not used to working in an environment where I’ll literally have twenty things queued up at a single time to do, and have people coming to me sporadically throughout the day with *more* stuff to finish. Even with a layer of production between me and the schedule, the assignments, and prioritizing/scheduling those for my own personal task list is more than I’ve ever had to deal with before. Definitely learning a lot, and keeping a LOT of balls in the air, which is good, but man, it can get *tiring*. By Friday, I’m usually dead tired, regardless of sleep, and … whew. It’s rough. But fulfilling, at the same time. Pretty neat to see something you basically coded from scratch doing something in-game. Be interesting to see how friends react to the game when it comes out. Yeah.