I missed this in the pastebin text, it adds a dimension. My impressions to the OP : The description of the reason for working the extra weekend, I think refle

I missed this in the pastebin text, it adds a dimension. My impressions to the OP : The description of the reason for working the extra weekend, I think reflects well on your motivation. I'm not a games company, but I have hired developers and testers : if I saw this bullet point on a testers CV, that would stand out. So instead of feeling taken advantage of, which you were at $11 an hour.. put a more positive vibe on this and see it as a path from tester to whatever is next. Maybe your passion is some aspect of developing games, or developing better automated test tools? Is there some open source thing you can work on, that will give you a lot more leverage when the next gig comes around? Somehow get your CV to stand out from the mass of guys who will work for 11/hr and into the more professional 50/hr skill-set bracket. Maybe that's not happening right now in games, maybe take those skills and put them to use in another industry that is happy to pay better. Or stay in games but specialize and become killer and own your particular niche. Wear this experience as a Medal of Honor [pun, ouch] that you worked on Halo4.. how many people get to do that? It is money in the bank when gaining street cred with any young person, even your own kids later. I would rework this story.. put a more positive slant on it, its a great blog post, shows character, yadda yadda. Squeeze a bit of mileage out of the pain and glory you went thru. I love reading these war stories and postmortems on Gamasutra, you have an audience.