A Retrospective on My Diverse Work and Study Experience
[Personal Devlog: August 30, 2023]
This insight will be a very long retrospective on my work experience in various workplaces. So a short version first in case your time is precious. Thank you for reading, hope it will provide insights on how to navigate different workplaces.
TL;DR:
- Working for a Chinese out-sourcing company, don’t expect anything at all, you are but a mere tool ready to be exploited and disposed.
- Working for a Chinese company owned by the government, be an obedient worker that never complains, never asks for anything, solves problems by yourself and strokes your supervisor’s ego at every opportunity.
- Working for a Canadian company where most colleagues are also immigrants, our common struggles are understood without saying, much easier to communicate without misinterpretation.
- Working for an American company that mostly composed of white people, get rid of the “be nice, prove yourself first and beg for what you deserve later” mentality, get rid of low self-esteem psyche, be your authentic self. Want a workplace that accepts you as an equal, ask explicitly upfront. Want to be friends with fellow teammates, ask explicitly upfront. Want a mentor to learn from, ask explicitly upfront. Want constructive feedbacks, ask explicitly upfront.
The Long Version
Here goes the long version of my work experience. It is just my own authentic memories. If you, my dear reader here have questions about things that are unclear in my writing, please leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer.
Being a working force in China without personal connections to people in authority is tedious. Your role in a company mostly depends on “who your dad is”, which means your career trajectory mostly ties to your social status rather than your skillsets and potentials.
There is common hidden law within the system, you have mere to no chance to question and give suggestion to people in power. It is to be severely punished if you do so. It’s an ego-inflating game that I never wanted to be part of.
My First Internship
During my last semester of undergrad, I looked for internships for a long time. An outsourcing company in Beijing accepted my application. The monthly wage was around 150 dollars. Yes, you read it right, it’s that “much”. Twelve years ago remote work was not an option, I had to take 20 hours of train traveling from Dalian to Beijing. The rentals in Beijing was already skyrocketing, the monthly wage could not cover basic living place. The only option I had was to accept the company’s accommodation — a shanty town that requires 3 hours of commute to my workplace, 6 hours in total for a round trip.
The photos are NOT exactly where my accommodation was, but a very close resemblance to my living conditions back then. Inside a 4m x 4m living room there was only eight beds for eight girls, nothing else except electricity. No washroom, no kitchen, no table, no closet, no chairs, no internet connection. Only one public washroom outside for the entire floor, the tab water there was not drinkable. The most interesting part was I should be thankful for the company that provided accommodation at all.
My day job was to write unit tests for Microsoft CRM and Microsoft 365 Products. Overwork was a norm, plus 6 hours of total commute time already occupied most of my day. The only sanctuary that I had, was an Xbox 360 I brought with me. At least it could be played offline. There were colorful virtual worlds within, where characters were inspiring and very human. A “balance” to my daily routine working like a robot in Auschwitz Camp.
My First Game Made
By April 2012, I had to resign from the internship to get back to university again, finishing my degree project. Funny enough, the project was exactly a little 2.5D Role-Playing Game written in XNA Framework. I wanted to make games back then, but it would be impossible as a career to sustain myself.
My First Full-time Job
After years of exhausting studying and working, I was still expected to get a job, carry on with my life. Dragging my entire burnt out being back to my hometown, where a software engineer role opened in a government owned steel production plant. It was rare to have this kind of opportunity at all in my hometown. I was considered “lucky” to be able to have it, since the company rarely hired women. The monthly wage was around 450 dollars, enough to get me by. And I was hoping for a breathing room to re-collect myself.
I was dead wrong.
Our supervisor in the company never had any computer science or programming background, how he got to the position was largely a mystery. But once in that position he knew he had the ultimate power to demand anything from his subsidiaries, and they will be very “happy” to oblige every unrealistic goals he set.
Thus my first project to be part of right after company orientation and “training” (by training it had nothing to do with anything technical, just meaningless political propagandas) was to re-innovate the financial system using an internal framework developed by a tech outsourcing company in Shanghai.
The project was estimated to be completed in three years. Our supervisor had way more exaggerating goal in his mind — The entire system MUST be completed under eight months. Thus no objections, no reality check, we had to carry on with the plan with no rest at all. There were also constant requirement changes from the financial department. Back then the development cycle was very a typical waterfall model, no version control system was introduced. Once it was done, maintaining and making change on it was quite a hassle.
Any sensible human could imagine, the end product of crunching was barely functioning.
The cycle began again — I was working like a zombie on repetitive tasks of developing and maintaining using very primitive coding practices. Overwork was still a norm, as far as I could remember I never had complete weekends. In the meantime, I kept finding inspirations and kept my mind open in the gaming worlds. Posted game playthroughs, learnt spoken English from games, understood game design by observing game mechanics, deducted game development by looking at the inconsistencies in storytelling and reading dev stories.
Of course there were trade-offs, I never had any personal life. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Bidding my time, keeping as low daily expenditure as possible. When the time came, I would jump on every opportunity to get out of the hell hole, to find a place where I can be accepted as equal and work on a job that I would be passionate about.
The First Job that I Was Passionate About
During my experience as a part-time game journalist, it was job that I loved doing. Working on game related job itself was an absolute joy despite the occasional hostility and sexism from some of the male editors. I only cared about games, the others didn’t quite matter to me.
It was also a reason I was a lonesome gamer for all those years, because I didn’t want to deal with the sexism plagued the gaming community.
The daily routine was to do my maintenance work as “bug fixing” engineer while replacing my gaming time with game content writing.
Ready To Get Out
After the interview with Larian Studios CEO. The last question I asked was his suggestions for Chinese game developers. “Never give up.” he said, stirred something in me. I spent quite a lot of time investigating the backstories of Larian Studios, about their ups and downs before the interview. The phrase carried a lot of weight in terms of what they have been through.
It was also the time when I finished playing Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition. I realized that I would not have endless lives like the Nameless One, I didn’t want to drown myself in regret when getting old, I had garnered enough savings, I could communicate in English, I was ready to get out.
After getting IELTS overall 7 mark on the first try, I was attempting GRE while applying to Canadian universities. There are colleges specialized in gaming programs, but my status was working against my favor. The assessment I got did not look optimistic — single, almost reaching in my 30s, study permit application that indicated “backwards” to my education level would have a very large chance to get rejected. Out of much options I had to apply for masters’ level program, at least it would be a foot door to my dream job.
Setbacks
The irony of reality never ceased to surprise me, COVID hit exactly the day I got my offer. I lived in a city fairly close to Wuhan, the citizens of Wuhan and cities near it were instructed to isolate themselves at their home in order to prevent COVID from spreading.
GRE was cancelled. I stayed at home anxiously waiting for my study permit approval while studying and taking courses entirely online. Normally the study permit application would take at most three months for approval. Sending email, making phone call, consulting immigration advisor from our university, going to Canada Embassy in Beijing, every effort I made never was like tossing a stone into dead water, it didn’t have any splashes. For unknown reason, it took me a whole year to finally get it.
The time zone difference was exactly twelve hours between China and Canada. Courses and exams took place in mid-nights. Some courses had loose policy, we could watch playbacks if we were unable to attend. But there were still courses that requires students to present progresses online. Making presentation at 3am was not fun. Crush-learning pre-requisite math courses in the meantime was also not fun. Dealing with the Great Firewall and spending extra days looking for machine learning packages to complete assignments was not fun.
The only fun I could have while studying like a mad woman was to find memes that I could resonate with. With the dream I had in my mind, I kept going nonetheless.
It was already October 2021, before I could do anything I had to be under required quarantine for two weeks. By November I quickly got myself setup. Strangely I didn’t feel much of a culture shock. It felt natural for me to acquire official documents, apply SIM cards and open bank accounts in a foreign country entirely by myself, especially I’ve never been outside of China before. Which was something I was proud of and that’s what I’ve always wanted: to be an independent woman who could take control of her own life.
There was an additional challenge: finding co-op placement for my program. I’ve heard that having work experience was important for applying for jobs after school. That went without saying, I kept applying for jobs and co-op work permit the first day I set foot in Canada.
My First Canadian Job
With hundreds of applications sent, just before the holiday season I got my first co-op placement at PointClickCare. It’s a health-care cloud platform company providing medical services. Due to the COVID policy not lifted at the beginning of 2022, I was able to stay on campus working remotely.
Overall I was happy to work in a more tech-oriented setting. Exposing myself to large code bases, getting to know new techs and frameworks. My teammates were quiet engineers, every time I had questions they were always ready to answer, which I was always grateful for. Opinions were shared and asked during scrum sessions even though it was long. My manager was quite diligent, kept track on my submits and issues resolved. He often asked about my well-being, work and life goals during one on one. Being an immigrant himself, he understood there were struggles for people like us. By the end of the term I was given endorsement for my work, provided with suggestions to keep applying for better positions.
Still Looking for A Job
Anxiety crawled back to me. Looking for work was hard. With limited coding and Canadian work experience was extra hard. I lost track of balancing the researching work for my degree project, applying for jobs for my next co-op placement, reading self-help books to keep my sanity in check, going to gym everyday to prevent health issues, doing volunteer work like crazy to gain more experiences and opportunities to communicate.
Hundreds of applications out again, I was beyond exhaustion near holiday season in 2022. What kept me going was the dream I still had — working on games, and the determination of never going back to the place that gave me nothing but nightmares. At least one step closer to my dream job was enough.
Life certainly knows irony, that step was exactly to my dream job. In the meantime, several interview requests and technical tests suddenly showering down on me after months of being ghosted and silenced. What I could do was to re-collect myself, prepare every interview like I was doing it the first time, try to present my best self.
Of course, there was a limit to such pretense and it was extremely energy consuming. Being a lonesome introvert for my whole life, making friends and maintaining connections was a tall order for me. In the past the best solution for me was to not have any form of relationships at all, I didn’t want to hurt anyone, in return I didn’t wish to be hurt by people either. In order to function as a contributing member to the society I had to wear masks. There was also an inner voice kept saying that failing to be my authentic self would always backfire.
Those all came true later on.
My First Dream Job
One interview request was from Rec Room — A VR Game Company. Although I kindly requested the interview to be several days earlier than it originally planned so that I could know whether there would be an offer or not. The request was ghosted. It went on while I had to deal with the conflicting time table of interviews.
The interviews with Rec Room was the best one I’ve ever had. Being able to talk about games during interview was already a boon. Talking about games with game devs, double awesomeness.
The next day during two technical assessments, all sorts of unexpected events happened entirely outside of my control. The first one was interrupted by a group of students who came into the studying hall for a party where I thought it would be a nice place. It resulted me being brain dead at the beginning of the second assessment. Although I was able to solve the problem in the end, it would be a miracle to get an offer out of an average performance.
At least it was a good experience to know what game company interviews were like. I thought.
The semester was about to end, I accept a Data Engineer offer from another company. A co-op placement was better than none, and I needed one to complete my program.
Days after, a miracle happened. A phone call arrived said I got the offer from Rec Room.
Never had I known how to deal with multiple job offers, nor how to reject an accepted offer for one of my dream job. Being in Canada not for long, I was not prepared for this at all. At first I asked if I could take the job as contract. Later on my roommate came back from her class and she said it was ok to reject an accepted offer. Quickly I informed the talent acquisition specialist about my rejection of Data Engineer, and she kindly acknowledged it. Fortunately it happened in a few hours and the offer was not gone.
The entire holiday season was just me lying in bed all day, recovering from burn-out and trying to learn something about the project in my new job. Obviously not much can be learned in this sorry state.
Caring deeply about the job and the fear of losing it put heavy weights on my mind. The more I worried about it, the less confident I could ask for anything that would help with my work. The less confidence I had, the more I wanted to do to prove myself. It was a vicious cycle. Imposter Syndrome was also the by-product of being surrounded by highly skilled people. Trying to be friends with my manager and colleagues resulted in me oversharing and intentions misinterpreted.
Failing to be my authentic self in the end, backfired in every way possible.
Introspection
Looking back at all the experiences is, actually, very funny. You could look at one game dev’s career trajectory and say that this person has xx years of experiences in this discipline. My experience could be summarized as: this person has more than ten years of experiences trying to get into game development.
At the end of the day, getting into game development I just need to make games.
It’s simple, but never easy.
And I don’t expect it could ever be.
