Interview Crazy
We’re still buffing up our lighting artists team. I conducted over 100 inteviews in the course of the last two days. Two look like what might turn out to be good candidates — we’ll have them do some tests today. I have’t seen the city for quite some time, office hours are getting longer — if you conduct interviesws for nine hours, you’ll have to do all the real work in evenings — no suprise here, really. Our new project manager, Anandarup, suggested to the management to conduct interviews in the all mayor Indian capitals. Sounds like a good idea to me, after the disappointments of the last two days. The basic problem in India, as far as I figured for now, is that the CGI industry is very young. People with a production background of three, even two years, are hard to find and they have neither theoretical nor practical knowledge when it comes particularly to lighting. India — in terms of 3D — is on about the level Europe or the US where in the mid-late 80’s. Thus, people are not specialized at all. Everybody is a jack of all trades, and calls himself “3D Animator”. The diversification created by the required streamlining of the production process over the past decade has not yet reached India. It s hard to find any people that specialize at all and miracolously everybody shares the misbelief that ligthing & rendering is really not that of a matter. Just place some lights so you can see the objects and press “Render”. Part of the problem might be that 80% of the people we interviewed, that have actual production experience, where animating rotating logos for local TV channels most of the time … I’m already looking into several “Plan B” scenarios. If we continue finding ‘capable’ people at this rate, we’ll have all talent in place in about three months but I won’t have had any chance to do anything else but interviews.
Speaking of inaptitude — can you magine that our system administration team was unable to run a Python script? But let me elaborate a bit more to cap this: The respective script was meant to compare two filesystems, each 1 TB in size. So what they did in lieu of running the script was this: one guy read the filename on one system and shouted it over to another guy on the other system who in term compared it, shouting the name back for confirmation. As it took them about five seconds for each file and we have approximately 77,000 files in that system, they would have finished doing this in only five days (assumed they don’t need to take a break during that period)! The Pythod script ultimately took one our to spit out the list.
Time for some interviews …