Posting from Portland
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| Portland_2 |
I arrived in Portland (OR) a couple of days ago and I'm going back to Tokyo tomorrow !
It was my first time here, though I've been in Oregon before.
Compared to San Francisco, Portland looks a lot more safe. But also deadly cold. It seems that most people wear hats, and I can see why. One day I had my ears freezing from the cold wind.. so hats after all aren't just a fashion thing !!
I'm here for business, but I can't really talk about it. Exciting things, but I still think I'd be more excited if I got a substantial pay raise ;) ..cough cough !
I'll be back on Sunday and Monday already to work. I want to get busy with code, but instead there will be some management/business/financial things to talk about.
Talking about code. Just before leaving, I made some sensible changes to the engine I'm currently working on.
There really isn't a proper way to do anything. One can throw random polygons at a rasterizer and get terrible performance or group geometry (and textures) in a certain hardware-friendly fashion.
Depending on the file format and on the average organization of mesh data, one has to come up with the best compromise. So, for example, in most cases having every polygon listing a different material is a bad idea.
Then one can group polygon lists using the same material, but do those polygon lists all share a common vertex pool or should every polygon list have a separate vertex pool ?
If lists are few and made of many polygons, then it may be wiser to have separate vertex pools, this is also because if every list has a different material, different materials could imply different vertex attributes (if there is no texture, then there is no need for texture coordinates, etc).
This also reminds me of the pain of using uber-shaders (long shaders) with DX10. Sometimes long shaders will ignore some input vertex data, but feeding null buffers gets DX10 debug mode to spit out thousands of warning messages in the output console.
I dunno.. DX10 doesn't really seem like the ultimate solution. It shifts the weight of state changes towards the application program, which is nice and not so nice at the same time.
And finally, some great news ! I'm leaving in 5 hours and I still haven't lost my digital camera 8)
woooooo
Seems like you are badly
Seems like you are badly affected by the money factor. There is very limited amount of engineers that can go high salaries without gaining management positions. I do not believe in highly paid engineer working in a corner for a big company. And you do work for a big company. In such cases the only way is to escape into management because such positions are seen from top of company.
Unfortunately it is hard to keep engineering job and mix it with management job. At some time, one realizes that there is no more room for slamming the keys oneself. In many cases I know that I could do certain tasks much faster than my engineers. But if I focus on them I will end up not doing my work. The trade off is to understand who can save you most time on which tasks. Who can help you and whom you need to keep busy by any means. Not easy thing. But forget coding at work if you aim at making money.
PS. No single picture of bathroom while a lot of food pictures there!!! Was there some kind of constipation and thus no need to visit bathrooms?
I don't know if I'm badly
I don't know if I'm badly affected. Certainly I think I could use a little incentive...
I understand what you say about shifting to management. It makes sense, in general. I realize how business works and how engineers are generally replaceable.
But I'm not a generic programmer. At my age I'm supposed to be a family man that wants to enjoy quality time with his kids. I'm not such a person.
I don't want to waste my life tuning nuts and bolts to squeeze a few fps. I realize that perhaps I could focus on a more creative side of research and development. But still, my strength is not in my fading experience, but more on what new I can come up with.
There is an infinity of things that can be done out there, but most people don't do them because they just want to code what some trend tells them to code, or they get so highly specialized in some field.
Speaking of which, one of the ways to get a better pay as a programmer is indeed to get specialized and start publishing articles etc etc... though I think that's restrictive and it doesn't really do much to innovate.
So, while it's important to work in a group and to manage things and communicate at the business level, it's also important to have someone sitting in a place concentrating on something without having to worry about floods of emails about business activities, system setup updates, medical checks, schedules, budgets, arguing on things, etc etc.
It sounds stupid not to want to be advancing career, not to want to get away from the code. But I like it so much better to do research, it's where I can give my best (though it's not always easy to judge fruits of research).
I'm being slowly shifted towards management. My capabilities as a programmer/researcher are being diluted, I'm told that I'm becoming a manager, but at the same time I'm new at this, so I can't claim a manager's pay... but I can't claim a raise as a software engineer either because I'm not supposed to excel at that.
P.S. About the bathroom.. I forgot.. hotel bathrooms are starting to all look alike 8P
Cut the crap: where are the
Cut the crap: where are the pictures of the american food? :)
What ? You didn't see them
What ? You didn't see them ?
http://picasaweb.google.co.jp/dpasca2008/Portland_2008_01Public
8P
Hmmm, "Gentle Dental"? =)
Hmmm, "Gentle Dental"? =) Must be Oregon....
http://picasaweb.google.co.jp/dpasca2008/Portland_2008_01Public/photo#51...
Oh, well, I was worried...
Oh, well, I was worried... :)
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