> It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.
I posted a bitchy comment using a throwaway account on Reddit about ten years ago.
It directly led to me moving across the country, getting hired at Google, and finding myself in my dream job doing programming language stuff full-time.
Life is weird, man.
Also, Vidalias (and, really, all of the alliums) are wonderful.
I was working at EA at the time. I got into the game industry because I loved making games. But I wasn't on a game team at work (which was good, because it meant I had a sane work schedule). And EA's employment contract basically forbids you from doing hobby game stuff in your free time since they would own the results.
So here I was "in the game industry" and spending zero time actually making games. I posted a rant complaining about that.
Some random redditor said, basically, "I work at Google. If you're a decent C++ programmer, I'll put in a referral for you."
Meanwhile, my wife and I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest and decided we wanted to move to that area. I started looking for jobs at other game companies in Seattle. I flew out there to interview at ArenaNet. Since I had a referral, a Google recruiter expedited an interview at the Seattle office while I was in town. I wasn't very seriously considering Google, but I wasn't about to say no.
I bombed the ArenaNet interview. (I think the main sticking point was a question around the time complexity of adding an element to a growable array. I said it was constant, but couldn't effectively explained amortized complexity to them and they didn't seem to understand that amortized complexity existed at all.)
Wonder of wonders, I just squeaked through the Google one.
I ended up on a random project doing front-end programming in JavaScript because I had UI experience. I didn't care for the product and programming UI in JS is, uh, not my idea of a good time, so it wasn't super fun.
However, I randomly took a one-day improve class that Google offerred. There, I met another Googler on another project and we started talking about language nerd stuff. He later ended up forming a team to work on Traceur, which was a project to prototype language changes to JS. They were ramping up, and he remembered I was into language things, so I asked me to join.
That project wound down later so I went looking for other projects to join. Dart was ramping up then and went there. It's been a blast.
But, literally, if I hadn't posted a comment on reddit and taken this improv class, my whole career might be different. I might have left Google to rejoin the game industry or something else entirely.
I posted a bitchy comment using a throwaway account on Reddit about ten years ago.
It directly led to me moving across the country, getting hired at Google, and finding myself in my dream job doing programming language stuff full-time.
Life is weird, man.
Also, Vidalias (and, really, all of the alliums) are wonderful.