D&DI - Lead Developer needed.

[rounser]

To play devil's advocate (FOR HR?!?! SHOOT ME!!!) it's always better to overstate. When I read "Must know X, Y, Z. Good to know 1, 2, 3", I know that this really means "Must know X, Y, or Z. If we're lucky, we can get somebody at least casually familiar with 1, 2, or 3!"

I've got 25 years programing experience, with 10 year professional dip into 4 languages. I've never interviewed for a position that wasn't going to be over my head in. Helps to be good at interviews and be a fast learner, but that's true for any job.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Well done on living through it, but life outside of IT I've found involves less such HR game-playing, less stress, more job security, better pay, less forced travel, and less office politics. Oh, and paid overtime.

 

[Imban]

I know WotC has had one or more people move across country to work there and then get laid within a year. No thanks, I'll pass.

Maybe you would, but a bunch of the programmers I know...

 

[rounser]

Heck, doing objects in JavaScript or Perl is strange enough that noone other than library building types really tries, and they're not that obscure, being vaguely C-family and pretty widely used.

Yet JavaScript in general is pretty trivial to pick up. I didn't even know I was writing JavaScript code for some time when I first had a go at it.

Perl you may have a point with, but it's a scripting language, and seemingly purposefully black-magic-obscure and punctuation crazy. Weird punctuation languages like that and LISP are the exception, not the rule. C# has no such excuse - heck, they even let you write in whatever you choose in Visual Studio in general, nowadays. They're that similar....except to HR staff who like buzzwords, seemingly.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I know WotC has had one or more people move across country to work there and then get laid within a year. No thanks, I'll pass.

Wouldn't that be an incentive...?

 

[Dire Bare]

Am I the only one cynical enough to read this as "we think people who are excited about D&D will work for us for way less than market rate!"?

Oh please. All it says that they'd prefer programmers who love D&D over programmers who have no idea what the game is all about. Maybe I'm a weird guy, but that's a positive in my book. So, you want people working on the D&D Insider who don't know their subject material? This has nothing to do with payscale. Jeesh.

My only concern is, if they've been planning for so long, and the DDI headlines 4E, and it's only 6 months away....why are they just now hiring their in-house people?

There's definitely a lot of glass-half-empty folks in this thread. I immediately got the impression from the job ad that WotC outsourced to Radiant Machine to get the Digital Initiative started, and always planned on taking the project in-house at some point. There will probably be a relatively smooth transition from Radiant Machine to the WotC team that won't be fully completed until well after D&D 4e and the D&D Insider launch this summer.

But, then again, I'm a glass-half-full type of guy who is constantly amazed at people's ability to spin the worst scenarios out of very little information. There is nothing in the job ad that tells me the sky is falling anytime soon.

 

[Silent Cartographer]

The reqs are typical HR mumbo, but its not that hard to see what they want. Mainly, they want a total of 10 years experience with either C++ or C++ and C#. As noted, if you are mainly a Java coder, and you have everything else they want, plus a reasonable amount of VS/.NET CLR library exposure, you can probably get past that filter too.

This is a pretty senior slot; I seriously doubt they expect to pay less than the going rate, even for a gamer/fan. The market for those skills is too hot for some kind of EA-style sweatshop crap. They'll pay the market rate, methinks.

Also, who is not getting that the current DI/Gleemax development is ongoing at an outside company? The timing of this hire has little or nothing to do with current dev schedules; this internal team won't take the DI stuff over until sometime after DI is live.

 

[Dire Bare]

The reqs are typical HR bumbo, but its not that hard to see what they want. Mainly, they want a total of 10 years experience with either C++ or C++ and C#. As noted, if you are mainly a Java coder, and you have everything else they want, plus a reasonable amount of VS/.NET CLR library exposure, you can probably get past that filter too.

This is a pretty senior slot; I seriously doubt they expect to pay less than the going rate, even for a gamer/fan. The market for those skills is too hot for some kind of EA-style sweatshop crap. They'll pay the market rate, methinks.

Also, who is not getting that the current DI/Gleemax development is ongoing at an outside company? The timing of this hire has little or nothing to do with current dev schedules; this internal team won't take the DI stuff over until sometime after DI is live.

I'm not alone! Thank-you!!!

 

[BarakO]

Being heavily involved with PCGen (and CMP), I'm on their Yahoo groups a lot. This morning a message appeared on that list trolling for the new lead developer they are looking for.

"I am the producer of the D&DI client applications at Wizards of the
Coast. I am working on cool stuff like the 4th Edition character
builder or the D&D game table applications.

I have followed Nylanfs message on WOTC board and landed here
(http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=14560357&postcount=17). I'm
glad to see a group of like-minded people, who like using digital
tools at their game table, so I wanted to take the opportunity to
salute the community, as well as inform people about a job offering
Wizards has regarding our D&DI digital initiative. We are looking for
our D&DI lead developer, so if you could be interested check out our
job posting at
http://hasbro.recruitmax.com/MAIN/careerportal/Job_Profile.cfm?
szOrderID=2653

How cool is it to be able to work on digital tools for the best RPG
out there for a living?

Well, speaking from a position where I can see this firsthand, it
*is* pretty darn cool!

D.M."

Interesting, no?

Barak

 

[Mr Jack]

My only concern is, if they've been planning for so long, and the DDI headlines 4E, and it's only 6 months away....why are they just now hiring their in-house people?

What they're doing is entirely normal; standard and good practice for a project like this. They've hired an external company to do the original development - which they'll have had their existing in-house teams managing and liasing with. Now they're coming up to the hand over point they're hiring in new staff to take the project on, and get a functioning team in place well in time for the inevitable flood of bugs and change requests that will happen when the thing goes live.

Really, nothing to concern anyone here.

 

[Zaister]

I wonder who D.M. is, and why they didn't use their full name...