Notes on a talk by Richard Vogel of Certain Affinity
- Observations:
- You have a 90% probability of being laid off within your first 5 years at least once.
- Your average lifespan in a company is around 4 years.
- Change is inevitable.
- E.g., today we have streaming coming, VR, AR, etc.
- Game companies have little to no onboarding, training, mentoring, or career counseling.
- Work/life balance can be miserable (much better today than 10 years ago)
- The “hierarchy” in game dev:
- Programmers are king
- Programming is measurable, but design/art/QA is harder to judge
- Then designers
- Then artists
- QA is the bottom rung, get no respect
- Bonuses are the most obvious way you see this hierarchy playing out
- Ideally design would be king
- Programmers are king
- Tip 1: Culture
- Learn what the culture of your work (or prospective work) is
- Top-down: Groups are separate, people take orders
- Bottom-up: Collaborative
- Can be either design-heavy or tech-heavy
- Make sure as you hire you’re bringing in people that fit with the way you work
- If you’re not a cultural fit at a place you’re hired, you’ll be constantly trying to swim upstream
- Tip 2: Soft skills
- Hard skills x soft skills = value to the company
- Hard skills may actually be less important, because they’re way easier to acquire
- Emotional intelligence:
- Need self-awareness foremost
- Necessary to be able to leave your ego aside
- Relationship management: need to be able to get along with your coworkers, have a good relationship with them
- Need self-awareness foremost
- Adaptability (building games is chaos)
- Being collaborative—especially in a small studio, conflicts become amplified
- Humility—ego doesn’t work well (despite their presence in the industry)
- Confidence—need to be able to persuade people you can do the job
- …despite maybe feeling insecure
- You still need to be able to ask for help if you don’t know how to do something
- Balancing humility & confidence
- You should believe in what you’re doing
- It’s okay to have strong opinions (with a good rationale, data that supports what you’re doing)
- Need to have humility to recognize when you’re wrong
- Communication: be able to get to the point, without writing a thesis
- Non-verbal matters
- Two dimensional spectrum of communications: introvert vs. extrovert, rational versus emotional
- Need to be able to identify where other people are on the spectrum, and how to handle it
- If someone’s emotional, try focusing them on the facts
- If you want to advance your career, this is a prerequisite
- Tip 3: Dealing with WTF moments
- Take a breath, go for a walk—don’t send that email!
- Deal with it after you’ve calmed down, so that you don’t regret what you say later
- Tip 4: Work/life balance
- Managing stress: when someone calls your baby ugly, you get super emotional
- Fear that when you launch, it isn’t going to go right
- Fear of losing your job
- Put it in perspective
- Look for solutions or a way out
- Exercise!
- Crunch happens because schedules are top-down, not bottom-up
- If your schedule isn’t realistic, the importance of your date doesn’t matter if you release a really problematic game
- Managing stress: when someone calls your baby ugly, you get super emotional
- Tip 5: Reflect, but move forward rather than looking back
- This stuff isn’t life or death
- Don’t get “abused puppy syndrome”—just because things were bad in your last job doesn’t mean this one will be bad too
- Leave your baggage at the last job
- Always look out for yourself, because no one else is
- Your company isn’t loyal to you, so don’t turn down a new opportunity
- Make sure it’s not just a “grass is always greener” situation
- How do you talk about past experience with a bad boss?
- Always ask questions (like “what do you think are the issues?”), don’t make statements
- If the boss is very emotional right now, wait
- Know whether you should ask something one-on-one or in a group
- How do you assess the culture when looking at a new job?
- Ask to go to the bathroom, then get lost
- Watch how people are interacting
- Go hang out with the smokers during a break and ask them questions
- Find other people who work there on LinkedIn and ask what it’s like—also look for people who worked there in the past
- Advice for improving issues in the industry?
- Make a big issue out of work/life balance problems
- If it doesn’t change, don’t stay—find another job
- It’s always going to be chaotic, you’ll always have overtime—but it should be a very finite duration
