were never caught up with regular duties. Or, thanks to our ever-so-thoughtful game developers, you were on a last minute crunch deadline. And when we bothered to complain about this ridiculous dev behavior to the management, it never failed. Management favored their sob story over ours.
Now that the new expansion was complete, Dragon Epoch: The War of the Sunderlands was nearly ready to be rolled out. And we were on the eve of that release. And here I was, in the boss’ office, waiting to hear if he’d come to the decision I’d been waiting over six months to hear. That he’d chosen me to head up the new Virtual Reality division that Draco Multimedia Entertainment was soon integrating from a separate company.
“Lucas,” my boss said from the spot where he was perched on his expansive desk in the fancy CEO’s office. “I’m going to put it to you straight. I didn’t pull you in here at this late hour to listen to you bitch about the devs.”
I blinked, straightening in my chair as if I weren’t already sitting upright. “And I’m sure that you’ve heard plenty of bitching from them about QA.”
“Always.” Adam Drake’s face split with an understanding smile. This wasn’t his first rodeo. Or even his fifth. He wasn’t even thirty years old and yet here he was at the top of his game, CEO of multiple companies and on the Board of Directors of several others.
He was living the dream of a self-made man. My dream.
If I was being honest, I had a bit of a dude-crush on him. Adam Drake’s trajectory was the perfect example of work industry goals. I’d followed his career since the days of his first game, Mission Accomplished—a game that had obsessed me as a teen. And over the years, I’d used him as a model of what I wanted to do with my own life and career.
Everybody had to have a hero, right?
I flicked a glance over at Jordan Fawkes, CFO of the company and a close friend. He twitched his eyebrows at me as if to say, Well played, then flicked his gaze back to Adam.
Adam’s foot swung where it hung over the corner of his desk, his arms folded across his chest. His eyes went to the window as if thinking about how to say the next part. I tried hard not to grip the arms of the chair while I willed him to continue.
Just say it, dude. Just say I got the job. It won’t kill you…
Adam cleared his throat and turned back to me. “The position is down to two people. And I’ve got to say it’s been an arduous process to winnow it down to just that.”
Not exactly the news I’d been hoping to hear, but good enough for now. I shifted in my seat. “Hopefully that means I’m one of the two.”
Adam laughed. “Yes, of course.”
I fought against the impulse to release the breath I’d been holding.
He continued, “You did an amazing job with the QA on the expansion. I know we gave you an extremely short time window. I was expecting pushback on that and you never gave it. You hit that deadline and made it your bitch. Well done.”
I nodded, gratified by the recognition. It had been an exhausting six months. Seventy- and eighty-hour workweeks on my own part, and as much as I could push out of my team. And Katya… well, she’d been my secret weapon. She was beyond qualified and with a keen eye for detail that made her talented for QA. Because of her strong understanding of back-end code, at times, she’d been able to work at triple and even quadruple the speed of my other testers.
She alone had carried us through that deadline and rallied many other testers along with her. Just as I’d known she would.
Which was why nearly losing her at the beginning of the year, when she’d informed me of her possible deportation, had spelled near-disaster for my goals. They would never have given me the budget to replace her with three new QA people. And I would have been required to spend costly weeks training the newbies. All valuable time I could have spent furthering that goal to hit the early deadline.
Adam mused with a smile, “I’m not sure what you did to sweet talk your team into pulling that one off, but it was impressive. Don’t think I didn’t notice or am inclined to let that go without an appropriate reward.”