Amethyst Reese

The past two months have been intense. At the beginning of May, I was let go from BioWare and Electronic Arts in a round of budget cuts for my studio. Since then, I’ve played far too many video games (and beaten multiple titles), slogged through innumerable interviews, redesigned my website from the ground up, and celebrated my seventh wedding anniversary in some of the best summer weather I’ve ever experienced.

Oh, and I got a job at Facebook.

On May 3rd, BioWare informed me that my position in the studio was being eliminated. My terrible luck had struck again. But this time was different; within a few days, a recruiter from Facebook found this website and my open source work, reached out to me, and encouraged me to apply for an engineering role. Four weeks later, after phone screens and an on-site interview, I was offered a position as a Production Engineer. My luck had not only reversed, it had gone off the scale in the opposite direction.

Alongside Facebook, all my other leads paled in comparison. I wanted to stay in gaming, but here was the opportunity of a lifetime, to join one of the biggest and best engineering companies in the world, and the chance to learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry. The position is similar to the role I had at BioWare: writing and maintaining software to manage and automate the vast array of infrastructure that supports the front-end applications and engineers. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Monday was my orientation, and I was immediately impressed by the level of passion, vision and dedication from the entire team. Boz discussed the culture of “hack”, and told a story about building a loft in a war room when it couldn’t fit everyone in just two dimensions. Chris Cox gave an inspiring talk about where Facebook is heading, and I got a surreal sense of wonder when he mentioned our long term goals or the level of impact we have on global society and the way people communicate. It feels amazing to be part of a company that truly wants to change the world and improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Even the training process embodies those same ideals. The first few weeks, every engineer goes through “bootcamp”, attending learning and development sessions, sitting among other bootcamp engineers, and working with veteran teammates on real tasks to get familiar with the infrastructure, tools and codebase. Everyone is given the chance to progress at their own pace, with as much or as little help as needed. I’ve already learned so much in a few days, and I’ve also had the chance to share my own knowledge and experience with my fellow newcomers. And yet there’s still so much left to cover.

Wednesday was my first day at a desk. Taped to the monitor was a sheet of paper printed with bold, red lettering.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

I don’t have an answer for that yet, but I will soon.

Last week, I received an offer from EA BioWare: they want me to join their San Francisco operations team as a Platform Systems Engineer! I still can’t believe that this is happening, but I’m going to be moving to California to work for a game studio. This is practically my dreams come true, and I’m excited and overwhelmed beyond my imagination.

I won’t be working on games directly, but I’ll be working in a devops role to automate and manage servers for games and internal projects. It’s a good fit with my experience in web applications, system administration, and tool development. It also can be a potential stepping stone to a game development position later on.

The next two months are likely to be hectic, as I move to temporary housing in California, and then find an apartment and move into it. Ongoing projects may have to take a back seat until I can get the free time again. But the weather and job will be worth it!

I’ve just reached the 1000 commit milestone as recorded by my Ohloh profile. By far, most of them are related to my work on the MantisBT project and associated plugins.

Now if only I could find a job local to Cincinnati… If you are interested in hiring me, or know someone who’s looking for an open source developer, take a look at my resume.