I started writing this over a month ago but, as you can tell, I’m late with post it. The short version is I recently hit my 10-year mark workiversary at Spiceworks. Yes, my first day working at Spiceworks was on December 14, 2011. A decade ago. Craziness.
If I turn back the clock a little more, I was at the crux of a personal decision. I had a great offer from Spiceworks but it would mean jumping out of game development. I was deciding between their offer and an amazing offer from 38 Studios. If you’re unfamiliar with them, it was a studio being built to create both the single-player Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and an MMO based in the same setting. There were some big names associated with it including R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane. In addition, Jess Folsom and Charles Dane were already there and I’d be on a team with them. Sounds like a dream job, right? It definitely was. Unfortunately, the dream turned into a nightmare as 38 Studios ended up shutting down some months after I started working at Spiceworks. If you’re interested in knowing more about why that happened, Jason Schreier has a good article on it:
Why did I go with Spiceworks over 38 Studios? It wasn’t because I had some magic 8-ball telling me not to. Honestly, for a few months after accepting the offer at Spiceworks, I was kicking myself pretty hard because I really did love working in game development. 38 Studios actually gave me the better offer; both financially and scope of work. Enough where I was contemplating renting an apartment in Rhode Island (where the studio was) and keeping my house in Texas so I could come home to visit my daughter as she would not be moving with me. Having moved around a lot growing up myself (I went to 10 schools altogether), I wanted to give Katryna the opportunity to have some real roots and make lifelong friendships. But between the financial side of the offer, the people I would be working with, and getting to potentially work with Todd McFarlane (was a big fan of his version of Spiderman and then Spawn) and R.A. Salvatore…
What it really came down to was family. Turning back the clock 10 years, Kat was just getting into her teen years. Part of the reason I jumped back to game systems design at UTV from community management was to have a better work-life balance. I had the #firstworldproblem of being gone during the summer months previously due to game conventions (between E3, PAX, GamesCom, Paris Game Show, etc, you travel a lot during those months) and wanted something where I could be more active in her day-to-day life and not just a weekend here and there. When it came down to weighing the options, it was the one item on the list that couldn’t be offset by moving away.
I thought it was the right decision then and some months later, I was even more glad about the decision I made when I heard about 38 Studios declaring bankruptcy. Still, a terrible thing to happen and made worse as I had friends and close colleagues that worked there. But I did have a huge sigh of relief when I thought about the “what ifs” had I taken that offer instead.
Anyways, Spiceworks. Been here a long time. It is, by far, the longest I’ve worked somewhere. I served in active duty in the Marine Corps for 6 years and between the various iterations of Wolfpack Studios (Ubisoft, Stray Bullet Games), that was almost 8 years. But this is the first time I’ve hit double-digits when it comes to working at one place.
That said, in many ways, Spiceworks feels like a variety of companies over the years. When I first started there, the community was a side project and we were just starting to dabble with “vendor social” which is what I was initially focused solely on. When Nic left, I took over both sides of the house (IT and the brand representation programs) and the community became more of a pillar of the company. Over time, I also started to work a lot more with product, not just as a stakeholder but as an active member of it. And then last year (2021), made the full jump to being a part of the product team as the Product Manager for both the Spiceworks Community platform and the Spiceworks IT Tools… but I’ll write more about that in my end-of-year wrap-up (if or when I get to that).
It is just crazy, at least to me, to think that I’ve been here for over a decade now. And the nice thing about blogging about this is it gives me the opportunity to look back over the years and remember a lot of great people and recall some amazing memories. This is part of the reason I blog; I do it also for myself. A decade from now, I can read this and relive those memories again.
Anyways, as Frank Herbert would have say (but didn’t since it wasn’t a quote in the books but rather an original addition to the movie adaptation), “the spice must flow!”