Parveen Kaler

I have spent the last month or so on sort of a sabbatical. I have been doing a lot of riding and a lot of reading. The 15 pounds that I put on trying to ship CoH are slowly melting away too. I’ve been hitting the gym fairly hard and playing basketball again. I also had the chance to hang out with my dad who was in town for rehab.

This was a great change of pace and exactly what I needed. It feels like I had been working for four straight years at my last two jobs.

And that brings me to my departure from Relic. I wasn’t going to blog about it, but it is fairly well-known within the industry. I thought I would clear up what happened from my point of view in a more public manner. Well, at least for the four people that will probably read this.

After CoH shipped, myself and about 15 others were down-sized at Relic. Some of us were on the CoH team and some were working on pre-production on future projects. The official reason that I got was, “termination without cause, corporate restructure”. That is what Box 18 of my Record of Employment says.

Going from three projects in full production to a number of projects in pre-production, this was an entirely reasonable thing for Relic to do. There have been big changes at the executive and management level. A number of senior people had left Relic after the projects shipped. This is what inevitably happens after a project ships. One has to figure what goal to focus on next.

I myself was considering what my goals in the future would be. There were big changes going on at Relic and I had to decide if those changes were congruent with what I wanted do next. However, that decision doesn’t need to be made anymore.

Let me be absolutely clear. I am in no way bitter with what happened with Relic and I wish everyone there the best. I still go out for drinks with a number of people there on a weekly basis and we are on a friendly basis. The way that I see it is that I would have probably left anyway and this way I get to enjoy my severance package.

I am going through interview processes at a number of places around town and I should probably be back in the industry fairly quick. Good programmers are hard to come by and I have enough experience that I can be fairly choosey.