Rocket Arena is a game about fast friends.
A medium-long time ago I was a tester. Not a quality assurance professional, not a platform engineer, I was an "Answer an ad in the classifieds section of the Reader, show up to a cattle call, sit in a chair, do this thing till we say stop," tester.
As I said before I loved the job. Up to that point, I had never worked a job where being treated with respect or even common decency would ever come up in conversation, it being grounds for immediate termination and all. So a job with all the conditions I am used to but doing something I actually enjoy? Sign me up twice!
My peers were weird, couldn't stop complaining about it. It would be all "Oh my me-ma died and they won't let me take a day off for the funeral." Or, "I have debilitating cramps thanks to the carpal-tunnel I acquired here, but I'm scared to say anything because they will %100 fire me." Or, "The boss is pressuring me into sex but I can't say anything about it because their roommate is HR."
My lead would sit the new folks near me because I was just super quiet. They knew I came to write bugs and go home. A safe bet in a room full of wild cards. Yay me. And for some reason, the new folks would confide all this stuff to me. It's that Shawshank Morgan swag, I don't know.
Anyway, my response would be, "Fam, aren't all jobs waking nightmares where the people in power are monsters and all your peers are at best silent and at worst complicit? Where you been working, heaven?" They would be like, "No, no to all of that, and it's terrifying that you think that's normal." And I would look at them like they were from Jupiter because you know what, to me, at that point in my life, that is where they were from.
And what's more is I looked at them with great envy, because they made me realize there was a significant portion of people living life with a whole different set of expectations than me, and I couldn't center how that was fair at all.
So what I would do was I would turn to them and say, "Listen, this environment is toxic and you will think it will change over time, but it won't. You will. At the end of this road is an industry that you love, but doesn't love you back. What you should do is get up, leave, and find a place that truly respects you. I'm not kidding."
And that is what they did, they would get up and leave the gaming industry.
The office made up some stupid name for me for the way so many new testers would just get up and leave after a few weeks of sitting next to me. The "Noob Slayer" or some-such. Earned me a lot of clout in the building. A lot of theories thrown around for why it was happening. No one got it right, and I never bothered to correct them. Some days I would sit there and stare at the empty chair next to me and prayed that the person that left was walking toward something better, then I would wonder when it would be my time to move on.
The average lifespan of a tester is two years, I did eight. Like I said, I loved the job. Would have done it till I retired, if the game was designed that way. Anyway, rip tb rip tc rip Tall-T. Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Get out there and do great things, we believe in you. Also Jobs.
The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Obsolete
