Life at the Studio
After victoriously defeating the traffic on the way to work, I finally manage to walk into the office. First things first: Lunch goes into the fridge and the power button on my workstation gets pressed. Ready for the day to finally start.
Being an employee of Spiraleye Studio’s means a bit more than just being a programmer/web developer/coffee maker. It’s a lifestyle. My workstation up and running, so I go ahead and fire up the De-facto browser of the office:
Google Chrome. First responsibility of the day is going through a bunch of tech blogs and catch up with what’s happening in the world of tech. After that a few web-comics, and then the work starts.
Being a fairly new addition to the team, I still have the ability to observe from an external point of view – and today I shall observe, coming back to you with said observation.
Working for a software development company means you have to belong to a specific breed of human: You need to have the metabolic ability to convert caffeine into code. You need to find programming jokes funny, have a general interest in all things related to programming, and you need to be curious. Very curious.
The stereotypical programmer is a pasty geek with complete social ineptitude, who never leaves the house, who shudders at the thought of sport. Someone who wears broken glasses and harbours a general poor sense for self-hygiene.
The interesting thing is that Spiraleye has it’s own custom breed of programmer.
Some of us at the Studio are geeks. And I’m damn proud to be one these geeks. We all have the ability to convert caffeine into code, we find programming jokes funny, we enjoy reading technical manuals, find complicated technical stuff fun and we’re generally very curious. But that’s where the similarities with aforementioned stereotypical geek ends. In this company the geeks are different.
We have a runner training for the Comrades marathon, a cyclist who loves to tear up a mountainside, we have a couple of swimmers preparing for the Midmar Mile, we love hiking and jumping off cliffs into deep rock pools. We love to have fun with real-life other people, case in point, two of the guys here are married! Married to real-life women!
So it is safe to say that at Spiraleye we are a collection of that special type of geek. The kind that can actually sit with a client and understand their needs. Someone who is able to carry out a conversation with a normal person without difficulty. A person that will go out of his/her way to make a client feel comfortable and ensuring the client is happy and more-than-just-content with a more-than-just-average end-product.
We at Spiraleye have the edge over the competition: there are humans working here – not code monkeys.