Being Nice is a Waste of Time
How corporate burnout launched my creative career
“Being nice is a waste of time.”
That’s the last thing my CEO said to me. The context is unimportant. There’s no good context for that phrase. And I know it was just another MBA Business School Alpha Bro take that I’ve come to expect from MBA Business School Alpha Bros, but that little quip set off an avalanche that had been building up inside me for almost 20 years.
On Quitting
Let me back up. See, I was vice president of a tech company. I spent nearly 20 years working in tech from spy agencies to small business to the military to FAANG.
I always knew corporate tech was toxic for me. But how many people actually like their jobs, right? I was paid well, and even if the system sucked at least I was one of the good guys in it. I played the political games and tried to shield my people from crap rolling downhill. I took pride in being a pain in the ass to leadership on things like compensation, benefits, work-life balance. And sometimes I even won.
But then one day, the final turd atop a mountain of corporate bullshit, I can’t even be nice?
You know, part of me wishes it had been something more dramatic that set me off. Something outrageous. Something worth writing a book over. But in a way, “being nice is a waste of time” was a great summary of everything I despised about corporate tech. The greed, the hierarchy, the “developers are a dime a dozen” attitude where the people who did the real work were disposable commodities. People were fungible.
That weekend, I decided I was done. On Monday I quit my job without notice or explanation. To whom it may concern, this is to inform you that I am resigning effective immediately.
I cannot tell you how much restraint it took not to tell them all the reasons I was rage quitting, all the things I really thought about some of the people at the top. I swear, Corpo-rats get under my skin like nobody else can.
But you know the phrase. If you can’t say anything nice… so when my phone lit up with messages from the CEO, I blocked him. Because being nice is a waste of time, right?
The Pivot
There was a period of detox and floundering. I was so burned out after years of circling back and synergy and all the phony professional politeness. I had toyed with the idea of a startup for a while, but my heart just wasn’t in it.
I never even wanted to go into tech in the first place. The grown ups in my life had convinced college-bound me that my dream of writing books and making video games was a naive life plan. So I’d taken the safe path and hated every minute of it.
So what if I… circled back? When I was 12 I had big plans to start a video game company. I was gonna call it Pharfalagumb Entertainment, because 12 year old me thought that was funny. I was going to make amazing epic RPGs modeled after my favorite game at the time, Final Fantasy 6.
Fast forward to my 40s, and I actually had skills. And savings. I knew a good deal about software development. I could code. I had been writing novels, so I could write a story. I could manage teams. I was even a mediocre artist and musician.
Maybe the path should have been obvious. Because over the past few years, I’d already dipped my toes into game development.
CODE-A-THONs
See, every year, my company had a 48 hour Code-A-Thon. Everybody form teams, work on whatever you want, we’ll order pizza, and at the end we’ll crowd into a big room and show off what we built and make a competition out of it. Techies love to show off.
The board hated this tradition. Because it meant paying the employees a whole 2 days to do unprofitable work. So the compromise was that our “do whatever you want” projects needed to be “go whatever you want so long as its something we could potentially turn into a profit.”
So obviously, a lot of these projects were horrifically dull. I mean like making plugins for our timesheet system level of boring.
For me and a group of weirdos in my division, we went off script. We found excuses to turn these into game jams.
At first it was using a video game engine to do interactive 3D data visualization. Another year we demonstrated the potential of machine learning (this was back before ChatGPT and all that) and trained an AI to play a video game. Which, of course, meant an excuse to build a simple video game. I learned to make shitty pixel art and music. Our sound effects were just a guy named Zac saying stuff and making noises.
Another year, we made a 3D platformer, something akin to Portal meets Minecraft’s redstone. It was a ton of fun, but honestly I can’t even remember what kind of business value it was supposed to represent. That was the last Code-A-Thon before I quit. And then, a few months later, that guy named Zac quit, too. Zac and I met up and got to talking over some tacos one day, and he’d had video games on the brain, too. Before long, Goo Monster Studio was born.
Oh, and now our old company has banned people from doing video games at their CODE-A-THONs.
Goopy is Born
Quitting my job like this was absolutely not part of my life plan. And yet, walking away from my career is one of the single best decisions I’ve ever made.
I’ve published a novel, with another coming this summer. Zac and I founded Goo Monster Studio. So my day job is making video games, I'm writing novels in my spare time, so I’m basically doing exactly what my 12 year old self said he wanted to do.
Will it work out for us? Well, we’ll see when our first game launches in the coming months. As Zac keeps telling me, we still have to stick the landing. It’s a very real possibility we land face first and break something. But I think I’d rather dig ditches than go back to corporate tech. The world needs ditches. I’m not so convinced we need more tech.
