Author: helava

Don’t Play Fair

You may see parallels with the modern political landscape, but it’s just as relevant at work.

You can’t beat an effective con(person) by playing fair.

One of the most common questions I get from people who are “stuck” in their career is “when should I leave my job?” and my answer is usually “when you can’t see a way forward.”

And one of the things that people run into sometimes is that they end up in a situation where you’re at odds with someone who’s essentially a charismatic con(person) who’s excellent at managing up. I’ve encountered this multiple times in my career, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s simply no way to win.

You can fight a mediocre con(person) by realizing that part of your job is not just being right, but helping your stakeholders understand that by not just logical but also emotional appeals, etc. etc. But the problem is that a great con(person) is better at doing this, because they can do everything you can, and aren’t constrained by things like integrity or honesty or facts or reality.

You can’t beat that. Don’t try.

I know that sucks to hear, and I’d love to have some sort of playbook to beat them, but I don’t. I’ve tried everything *I* know how, and have lost *every time*. So the advice I can give is just this: There are times in your career where you hit a brick wall. And you can beat your head against it for years and maybe make progress, but at extraordinary cost to you. You feel like you should be able to overcome any obstacle, fight through any bad situation.

But if you can’t see a way forward, it’s time to go. There are times when your progress at a place will come to a complete stop, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. It sucks, but understanding that and finding a way out is much, much better than fighting an immovable force. And yeah – it sucks. Bad people win. Happens all the time. You need to prioritize what is best for *you*, and that’s often just accepting that if you’re fighting a con(person) and they’d good, and have their hooks in the stakeholders who you need… the way forward is out.

Getting Laid Off

We can all agree at this point that being laid off isn’t a mark of shame or a reflection of your quality, right? Companies making record profits just need to make record-er profits so shareholders can get $$$. It’s a cynical cash grab, and the large companies are all using each other as cover to do it while under the guise of some sort of “market contraction” or some other bullshit.

So if you have been laid off, no, it doesn’t reflect poorly on you. There is literally nothing separating you from someone who didn’t get laid off. It has nothing to do with whether they deserved it, or you didn’t. It’s just arbitrary and capricious.

When you’re applying for your next job, and someone asks you why you’re looking, my recommendation is to not hide that you were laid off. You don’t have to sugar coat it or try to evade the question. Just confront it head on.

If the company you’re interviewing with sees it as a negative, they’re so out of touch that that is in itself a red flag for *you*. But I don’t even think there are companies that are that out of it. They’ll just say, “oh,” and move on. When the folks who interviewed you talk about you later or write notes to the hiring manager, if they mention it at all, it’s definitely not going to be, “The interview went great, they were super smart, really qualified, had great questions for us… but they got laid off from their previous job. Pass.” That’s not happening.

Do not worry about having been laid off. Don’t worry about it when talking about it with your friends, don’t worry about it when interviewing for your next job. It’s just a thing that happened, and these days it could literally have happened to anyone.

Writing Structure?

One of the things I’ve just been beating my head against with this writing project is how to elegantly tie a bunch of things together. Product design is about a lot of things – but a lot of it is centered around finding a “focus” – some clearly defined problem you’re trying to solve. That focus enables two critical things: testing and collaboration.

Testing, because if you know what you’re trying to build, you can ask people whether you’re making progress in the right direction or not. Most product development processes I’ve seen are vague enough that any result can be interpreted as a good result. Which is useless.

Focus also enables everyone to know what they’re supposed to be doing, which is *the* foundation of collaboration. It allows you to distribute authority to people with expertise, rather than keeping all the decision-making in your own head, which inevitably turns you into a bottleneck and a huge point of failure. After all, you’re not an expert on everything.

But then, distributing authority requires a lot of team culture issues to be front of mind. Psychological safety first among them. Ability to communicate clearly. To communicate *intent* in addition to tasks, so that everyone can help reinforce that what you’re doing is aligned with that focus.

It’s kind of a ouroboros in a Gordian knot – everything is interwoven, and trying to explain it in some sort of linear order breaks my head, because I can’t find a way to explain one thing without a bunch of prerequisites, and untangling the web of prerequisites… well, I haven’t found the right sword yet.

I think perhaps one way will be to separate things more, rather than trying to integrate them more. Focus, Team Culture, Leadership (thanks to Eric Nehrlich for reversing my initial order) each being different sections – sort of a progression from the outside in – starting with the customer & what they need, structuring your team in a way that maximizes the experience and strength of the team, and then what your responsibilities are to your team and why your leadership can have a massive impact on all of that jazz.

Which provides some structure to the process. I think even with those things “separated”, I’m going to have some tendrils that tie concepts together across sections (maybe an explicit “prerequisites” block where necessary, or maybe a Jason Shiga-style “choose your own adventure” path through things if you want to follow that concept down a bit deeper. I dunno.

But at least it provides a reasonable starting point.

Musk & Software

Videogames are software. And as critical as engineers are to videogames, if a game team fired most of its designers and artists and said that engineers would constitute the majority of the development team and that all other disciplines were secondary… you’d end up with some terrible videogames.

No disrespect to engineers at all. But just because software is code, software is a creative collaborative multi-disciplinary effort that requires top-level work from ALL disciplines involved working *together* toward a shared vision.

Creating a world where designers, artists, audio folks, producers, project managers, etc. are “second-class” citizens relative to engineers is not how to create great software. I say that with a 20 year history, and at least a few significant successes that illustrate that I know what I’m talking about.

Musk may be smart in some fields, but it’s clear he’s got a 101-level approach to building consumer software, and if I was a Twitter employee, I’d take the severance and GTFO. This is the wrong approach, and since it’s worth calling your shots, it *will not succeed*.

Done?

I loved being a game designer & developer. I loved working with artists, engineers, producers, animators, musicians and SFX designers, testers, the works. Sitting in the middle of this disparate set of skills and helping us all try to build something genuinely new that stood on the shoulders of the giants that came before us? It was always a pleasure.

But at the same time, now that that part of my career is almost certainly definitively over, I’m *so* glad it’s over. Whether it was the constant stress and drive, the fact that so many managers seem to think their random opinions are worth as much as my expertise, the ridiculous unrealistic expectations, and the overall disposability of the work and its continuous devaluation in the market…

I don’t need that.

I used to have these really poofy eye bags under my eyes. I assumed that’s just “how my face was”. But I sleep better now. Not great, but better. And some days? Those eye bags are *gone*. It’s like waking up and finding out my NOSE is missing. Something that I assumed was just part of “me” isn’t – it was a manifestation of the constant stress.

So yeah. I’m grateful for my career. I was luckier and more fortunate than almost anyone I know, and was blessed to work with wonderful, creative, and brilliant people. I’ll miss that a lot.

The rest? Not even for a minute.

COVID

Caught COVID a few weeks ago.

I’d gotten all the vaccines & boosters. I’ve worn masks indoors and at public gatherings well after most people stopped. My kids are masked up at school almost the entire time. We weren’t perfect by any stretch, though, and our luck finally ran out.

Do I regret all the precautions having gotten it anyway? No, not for a second. My experience was relatively mild. One of my kids got it, and had similarly mild symptoms, and the other didn’t get it at all. Certainly a far cry from if we’d gotten it in 2020.

Here’s the thing – in business, sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get unlucky. You can’t always control the outcome, and sometimes some small bit of bad luck will be fatal, and sometimes everything will go wrong and you’ll miraculously be fine.

The only thing you can do is to try to be prepared for things. To take smart precautions. To try to mitigate risk as much as possible. And sometimes stuff just goes cattywumpus anyway. You can’t control everything. All you can do is mitigate risk and try to be prepared.

For me, having gotten vaccinated, having worked to minimize whatever exposure we *did* get – the result was that it was a mild experience, and I’m grateful for that. This is the same approach I did my best to take when at work – to anticipate the things that were coming at us, to try to prepare, to minimize risk, and maximize our flexibility and reactivity, so that we could change plans on a dime when needed.

And yeah – that may be COVID, that may be business. But it’s also almost everything. Be prepared, but also be flexible. Mitigate risk where possible. Assume disasters are inevitable. Work to prevent them where possible, but build in the resiliency and flexibility to deal with them when they happen.

If you think you can prevent or avoid all disaster… you’re in for a bad time. Which probably leads to a future post about ostrich optimism, and how much I hate working with people who believe “it’ll all work itself out”. 😐

Inclusivity

Every society that becomes more inclusive becomes better at stuff.

It’s not rocket science. The more people you empower, the more likely you are to find brilliance. If you exclude women, you cut 50%+ of the population, lowering your odds to find brilliance. If you make your workplace hostile to people of color, queer folks, etc., you dramatically lower your odds to find brilliance.

It doesn’t even really matter *how* you define brilliance, unless to you, brilliance is literally homogeneity. Your odds get way worse. If you’re a company trying to live on the cutting edge of anything, where the number of people who can make outsized impacts is already relatively limited? You’re *dead*.

Globally, look at all the repressive regimes across the world that exclude huge swaths of their populations. How many are leaders in innovation? None.

So if your company isn’t providing opportunities at ALL levels for everyone to be engaged and contribute and lead, you’re trashing your opportunity to be the best organization you can be.

There are tons of *other* reasons that building a representative/diverse/welcoming/inclusive organization matters. But if you want a simple argument? It’s just a numbers game.

Every person you exclude is an advantage you’re handing your competition.

Team Culture

I had an absolutely marvelous conversation with Kim Nordstrom yesterday about team culture, re: a book he’s been writing for a while. I’m SUPER jazzed about it, and I’m really glad someone’s doing what he’s doing.

In the course of the conversation yesterday, he mentioned that in the interviews he’s done, he’s found that for team culture, it’s often better to have values that are “brutal”. And I thought “that’s a strange word to use,” but as the conversation went on, it was clear that part of the meaning was that the stated values were specific, black and white, and controversial.

And I think he’s totally right. But if you know me, that’s obvious, right? Because I often state things hyperbolically, and sometimes it bites me in the ass, but I’ve found in general, that more extreme way of framing things pays more than it costs.

Not in everything – but in what a team should be, and the kind of culture that you need. You want to exclude people who don’t believe what you believe. You want people to question whether they believe it or not. You want people to stop and say, “Wait, what?”

And I think one of the reasons is that in the “middle”, once you come away from some extremes, there’s a huge grey area that can be read in so many different ways that it can be anything to anyone. If your team cares about “honesty” and “quality” and other generic pablum, then people can interpret that in a dozen different ways. And if you have a dozen different interpretations, then you have… nothing.

If, on the other hand, you say, “No crunch, ever,” then you need to really think about what that means. What happens when you’re butting up against a deadline? What happens when your team has more work than they can handle? All your experience says, “work more, work harder.” But if your team’s culture says, “No crunch, ever,” what do you do?

Plenty of people *say* that they believe in sustainability. But you only *actually* believe in sustainability when you push the date, or start hiring early enough and with enough advance prep that the new folks will make a positive difference. Or you build an infrastructure that can push at any time. Or you commit to never promising release dates, no matter what a publisher wants.

All those things *cost* something. Culture, to me, is how you spend money and time. Until you pay the price, your beliefs are just words.

But it makes me feel better on reflection a bit – sometimes I worry that my way of phrasing things is a negative, and my perceptions of its benefits are illusory. I fluctuate between seeing it as a superpower and a fatal flaw. And you know what? It’s both. Which, if you know me, you’ve seen both sides of that equation echoing through the last 20 years again and again.

It’s great, it sucks, and you know what? I’ve come to peace with it.

Learning Through Play

One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that the best way to learn is through playing.

And I don’t mean “how we learn X”. I mean “how we learn.”

To me, “play” is when you are trying to do something in a safe environment with rich feedback and encouragement. That describes most video games, but it describes lion cubs wrestling with and gently chomping their siblings.

It also describes school.

But only in the most abstract possible way. At least in the US. And even then, only sort of.

Standardized testing makes the stakes too high. Consequences are permanent WAY too early. You can’t play if failure is an *actual* fail state. You can’t adapt to feedback if you don’t get a chance to iterate. You can’t process criticism if you don’t feel safe.

Students have little room for experimentation or exploration. The actual mechanics of the game are often incredibly uninteresting. It’s all cerebral and abstract, and there’s little physical engagement in subjects that aren’t explicitly physical.

It’s weird that “school” is how we’ve standardized “learning”, and that we smash kids into rows of chairs so early throughout their most formative years and that most of the feedback they get is *punishment* or *failure* for trying new things.

It’d be interesting to contemplate a more play-oriented learning process. I know some other countries do a much better job of this. And as someone who did well in the “traditional” schooling methods, it’s taken me a really long time to realize how *weird* it is that this is how we do it.

Balancing Exploitation & Aggro

I am firmly in favor of workers not being exploited or treated poorly. As a leader, I’ve made it one of my primary focuses. Am I perfect? Of course not. But it’s not just that I do my best at it. It’s that I consider it one of my primary responsibilities, and that it’s as important as literally anything else I do.

I believe that if you are an employee, you should not settle for a place that treats you badly. Places that call you “family” when they need you, but lay you off when you need them. Places that “work hard play hard” and expect you there 60-80 hours a week by default. Places that ask you to miss important life events, or come in on the weekends because the boss needs butts-in-seats (even though I’d finished every task I had) so that he looks good for the C-level folks who are gonna be walking around on Saturday (yes, that has literally happened to me at EA/Maxis. You know who you are.)

BUT…

I struggle with this a lot, because a lot of the best memories of my career are from those torture chamber moments. The 46th day straight of working 11 hour days, the 3am trying-to-get-this-thing-to-build before a huge demo the next day… those things are memories. And a lot of the people I made those memories with became friends that lasted beyond any single job.

Those moments were also where I smashed peoples’ expectations, and built the reputation that was the foundation for the whole rest of my career.

So the advice I have for young people is twofold. Don’t settle for a place that treats you badly. But also, kill it. Overdeliver. Do insane things, sometimes at the cost of other parts of your life. But do it because *you* choose to do it, not because it’s the baseline expectation of an exploitative company.

But if you’ve *got* to choose between the two, and you have the ability and privilege to do it, choose yourself. Choose sanity. Choose life. You’ll eventually be able to get another job, and no matter how good or rare this one seems, you’ll always always always be able to find something better in time.

You’ve only got one life.