This last Tuesday was a retro blog day here at Neuron. We always try to take a look back at the company’s past and capitalize on our successes while learning from our mistakes. This last Tuesday however, was a particularly special day for me. It has been 9 years of freedom from the man! On this day in 2001, I left my last corporate 9-5 grind job making software that mostly never got to see the light of day to work on Neuron Games full time.
The bad – Working full time on your own stuff has some draw backs. Mainly it is money. You don’t get to see any money up front on any of your development. Nobody fronted me cash, and I didn’t receive a penny of investor funding. So the bad thing is that by doing this, money gets tight from time to time, but weigh that with the stress of working for the man in a cubicle filled with crap fluorescent lighting and recycled air …..well I won’t go on. Some of you only have to look up from this blog to see what I mean. I hope your day will come.
In a Box (no this isn't me)
The Good – Money is not everything, it helps quite a bit, but isn’t everything. One of the best things about these last nine years is that I haven’t had to set my alarm but a handful of times for appointments. There is not dollar figure a person can put on the ability to go to sleep when they are tired, and get up when they aren’t tired anymore. Eat when you want and take as long as you want to eat it. I sat and thought about my time away from the man a little yesterday. If you take a normal job with 2 weeks of vacation a year for 60 years you get 120 weeks of vacation. Most of those vacations have two parts. The first week you try to acclimate to the idea that you don’t have to work and you can relax. The second week you think about how you have to get back to work in x days. So even the vacations aren’t that stress free. Anyhow, I went on a tangent, I have had the equivalent of 9 x 52 = 5148 weeks of vacation. Sure I work on video game software, but that is what I have wanted to do since I was like 7 so it isn’t really work to me. :-) Anyhow, I need to go so I can drink some beer and reflect on my nine years. Oh, and write some code for the new level editor! Yeah! I love my job!!! Wait, is it even classified as a job if you have this much fun. Yeah! I love my life! How’s that?
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