(Clarification: We’re looking to actually hire someone, in the real, paid sense, not in the volunteer sense.)

Tired of your job? Of waiting to finish your work day so you can come home and work on your real passion: MUDS? Then read on!

Iron Realms Entertainment is hiring for a full-time position as producer of our next world. We're looking for an extremely self-motivated person to take charge of development of our next text MUD based on NY Times best-selling author Raymond E. Feist’s series of books set in the world of Midkemia.

The ideal candidate would:
• Have experience as either the head administrator or a high-level admin of a successful (commercial or hobbyist) MUD.
• Have experience with C, C++, or Java. You will be the main developer as well as the lead designer, working with me (IRE’s Creative Director).
• Be comfortable in a Linux-based environment.
• Be an excellent writer, for obvious reasons.
• Be a capable leader, because you’ll be building a community.
• Be a text MUD fanatic. Gotta love what you do to be good at it.
• Be very self-motivated. We’re an entirely virtual company and everyone who works with us has an extreme amount of freedom in structuring his or her work time and environment. As such, we need you to be capable of working without as much supervision as an office job might involve.

We offer:
• The opportunity to work from home while managing your own time.
• Competitive compensation.
• In the words of one of our producers, “The best job in the world.”

Please send applications to jobs (-at-) ironrealms (-dot-) com. Please include all MUD-related experience you may have as well, as a player and as an admin. Please include website addresses for any MUDs you reference.

--matt

Not that I even have a hint of the skillsets required for a job like this, but I'm curious what a position like this would pay. Matt, mind giving us an idea? I don't need exact figures, but are we talking $40-60k range? A decent income range? Or would this be something where a second income in the house would be a must?

Well, it will depend on who we hire, but the minimum for anyone would be US $50k/year salary plus bonuses based on the performance of the MUD. Bonuses could range up to 30k/year or so if the MUD is successful. That's just a rough estimate incidentally. We actually have a complex formula we use to pay current producers, but I'd rather not get into it here, for obvious reasons.

--matt

Minimum 50k/year sounds really nice.

Hm....!

US$50+k/yr?

It does sound like a lot to a coding grunt like me...

Being a sceptic I immediately think that this sounds too good to be true... is there a responsibility description attached to that price tag by any chance?

/F

I don't think it sounds too good to be true at all. Logos is advertising for a real job, in a real company. It isn't a job for "a coding grunt." An exaggerated comparison might be made between a bench tech vs. a systems analyst.

Matt,

Is there an "application" form you want us to use (like on your website somewhere), or are you just looking more for a resume?

Thanks,

It could be good for people to know if there is a "last day" for sending in applications.

Coding is only one part of the job. Half our producers have no formal background in coding. We may be looking for a full-time 'pure coder' as well for the project, but we're not at the moment.

As producer, your job would be to bring the game to fruition. That means you are responsible for the game and everything that goes on in it. It's a big mistake to look at running a MUD as a coder position, since there are so many areas of responsibility. You'd be in charge of handling and coordinating, pre-release:
* Community management
* Design
* Code Development
* Building

Post-release those responsibilities would continue, along with:
* Fraud control
* Customer service

There are probably other areas of responsibility that I'm leaving out. The idea is that this would be, in many ways, your project. You'd be working with our Rapture engine, and starting with a stripped-down codebase that contains things like OLC and mobprogs along with their appropriate web applications, and all high-level design would proceed under my supervision as few people have experience with our business model.

Anyway, it sounds too good to be true because developing and running a MUD for a living IS almost too good to be true. Every day is a new challenge, there's huge opportunity to express yourself creatively, you get to work from home (assuming this is a plus to you. It is to most of us.), get to largely schedule your own time (we only have one mandatory meeting a week), and so on.

The only downside is that it's a lot of work. Like nearly all jobs in the games industry, is emphatically not a 9-5, 40 hours a week job. A lot of dedication is required and the reason someone has to be so self-motivated is that working your ass off without being physically surrounded by other people doing the same can be hard to maintain. 50+ hours/week is definitely the norm, and while we don't do a lot of crunch time (unlike, infamously, most developers), expect it to dominate your life for awhile. Just to emphasize again, this is NOT a 9-5 "done when the bell rings" kind of job. It's a (#### nice if you like MUDs) lifestyle as much as a job.

--matt
P.S. With the recent fall of the US dollar relative to the Euro, it's possibly you make more in US dollars than you think. This morning, the Euro buys you 1.329 US dollars.

Thanks! Had quite a few apps already. If you're a pure code junkie, keep an eye out for an announcement that we're hiring code junkies. Not positive we will be, but there's a decent chance we will be, for the Feist project.

--matt

Fredrik lives in Sweden, but I believe the Swedish Kronar is doing very well against the US dollar as well (although not as well as the Euro).  Of course it's not really an advantage to be paid in a currency that's doing badly against that of the country you live in, as it means the amount of money in your pocket each month will slowly decrease (although should the situation reverse you'd end up earning more - so it's a bit of a gamble).

But comparing salaries between countries is not as straightforward as just converting the currency - you need to take into account lots of other factors, such as the cost of living, taxation and additional costs, insurance, benefits, etc.  For example when I first moved from the UK to Germany I was offered an additional €17k, which initially seemed very nice - but after tax and insurances my total takehome was actually slightly less than it had been in the UK.  However I was able to make up for that with a lower cost of living and the ability to claim tax back on a lot of things that I would never have gotten away with back home (training courses, computer bits, flights to visit friends and family, etc).

If people are staying in their home country then they'll probably already have a fairly good idea of what to expect, but they still may find themselves paying extra taxes and insurance for some things, and being able to claim back taxes on others (maybe even part of their rent, as they're working from home).  I guess it would also depend on whether they're an actual employee or just a contractor, but either way it's not something I'd recommend a prospective employee to jump into blindly.