Some memories

I remember a few years ago at one company, I was explaining and showing one of my early graphics API tracing/replaying demos (on a really cool 1st person game made by some company in Europe) to a couple "senior" engineers there. I described my plan and showed them the demo.

Both of them said it wasn't interesting, and implied I should stop now and not show what I was working on to the public.

Thanks to these two engineers, I knew for sure I had something valuable! And it turned out, this tool (and tools like it) was very useful and valuable to developers. I later showed this tool to the public and received amazingly positive feedback.

I had learned from many previous experiences that, at this particular company, resistance to new ideas was usually a sign. The harder they resisted, the more useful and interesting the technology probably was. The company had horribly stagnated, and the engineers there were, as a group, optimizing for yearly stack ranking slots (and their bonuses) and not for the actual needs of the company.