Behind the Curtain:
Hangin' with the Headhunters

By Matt "Thraka" Gilbert

orgive me for the hiatus, folks, but as I have told you many times, this biz eats up time. What isn’t consumed by the job itself is often spent shoring up the ruins your life occasionally becomes during weeks of neglect. There are bills to pay, parents to call, spouses to interact with, and household chores that have gone from small, daily tasks to monumental, weekend long endeavors. And, of course, there are games, which call like a siren at times. I wouldn’t be doing what I do if that wasn’t true.

Let’s start off with some talk about my last column, "You are not Da Man". I received a lot of response to this piece. Almost all of the mail I received was positive, including a few bravos from some big names in the biz. One single letter took exception. To the guy who wrote it: I have not forgotten you, bro, I’ve just been busy, so don’t think I blew you off. You raise some valid points, and I just haven’t gotten around to answering them.

The mail wasn’t the only medium for comment, however. Some people spoke to me, verbally, about their take on it. I got about a fifty fifty mix of pro and con, but one thing is clear: some people on my own team felt like I was beating them over the head with a club.

Let me give some perspective and put some rumors to rest. I do not hate my team, or anyone on it. Any problems I might have with them are not huge issues. But here is where I fucked up. I mixed together some personal issues I had with some teammates, some general philosophy, and an external thing that I was absolutely furious about. I couldn’t, and still can’t, really talk about the latter, except to say that it involves someone I know getting totally screwed around. And, since no doubt someone will try to read between the lines here, let me make perfectly clear that this is not something going on where I work.

Some of the examples I put in the piece were issues I have had, either on this project, or on others. I thought it would lend a personal feel to the piece, to communicate that everything is not always rosy, despite the fact that the corporate types would like to present that view. From my perspective, it didn’t seem that bad. But I can see how some people, not knowing the whole story, could have seen it very differently. It didn’t help that I threw in references to Nazi’s, either, since one of the guys on my team is German. He didn’t say a word to me about it, but I know it must have hurt him, and I feel awful that I put things so that it looked like I was leveling that charge in his direction. I fucked that one up pretty well, I’d say.

For the record, there is not a single person on my team that I don’t regard as a genuinely decent person who does his best to get the job done. I wish I could tell you who was the real target of my anger, folks, but I just can’t do that without causing someone close to me some real grief.

So on to the headhunters. It’s a short one this time, since this isn’t the most complicated topic, but it’s a serious one.

Hangin’ with the Headhunters

Changing jobs is a fact of life in this business. Fortunes vary. Companies close or shift direction. I’ve been over this before, so if you want a recap, go back to the first appearance of this column and have a look. Bottom line, it’s a good idea to keep an updated resume on hand, and to keep in touch with friends, because you never know when things will turn south and you find yourself in need of a job. And one of your best friends, at such a time, can be the sort of guy we call a headhunter.