Missives from the 6th Floor

Valve.

There are basically a few things that scare me about Valve:

1. The commute could be hell. The day I went out there for my interview it only added 15 minutes going and 25 minutes coming. That was a Friday, so the morning should have been light, and the afternoon heavy, which suggests that 20 minutes each way is a reasonable estimate, but only time will tell.

2. It's all Windows. I swear, every time I touch Windows lately it gives me another reason to hate it. It's just such an arthritic, unstable, P.O.S. I mean, christ, it won't even reliably resume from suspend! I'm a notebook user, have been for a long time, but after using OS X on a Powerbook, I just expect "close the lid, wait, open the lid" to actually work. Is that so much to ask? I won't miss the OS X eye candy, I won't miss it's inconsistent UI (Windows has plenty of that - M$ seems to change the look and feel of office every release), but I will miss Quicksilver.

3. Leaving the opportunity at exbiblio on the table is painful - it's a good core team, working on an interesting and "good" (socially speaking) problem. Equally worrisome is the knowledge that I might be walking away from the one that could be "the last one."

4. I have to tell Brad - who I actually recommended to Valve, and they passed on him. I'm not sure what this may do to our friendship. It's made even more complex 'cause he works for me, so I haven't been able to tell him nearly as much as I wanted to - and won't be able to 'till later this week, after the dust has settled.

But despite all these, or perhaps because of some of them, my gut is pointing me to Valve.

Of course, to paraphrase John Cusack's character in High Fidelity; it could be that "my gut has shit for brains."

Here we go...