I’m not great at mentoring entry-level folks.

This is something that I wouldn’t have expected – I was an entry-level person once, right? Should be straightforward.

But I think the weird thing is that while the advice I have for folks is often quite simple – focus on one major idea, reduce risk wherever possible, make something much smaller than you expect and only add complexity once that simple thing is working – implementing that and understanding its value requires a *significant* amount of the kind of context that you only get from shipping games.

Every young game dev I’ve talked to has huge dreams. They want to make big, complex, ambitious things. But even moderately sized things blow up into incomprehensible complexity so fast that it becomes really difficult to learn anything from the experience other than “something somewhere went wrong.” By keeping things small & focused, you can understand the parameters of the thing you’re building, and iterate with a much better understanding of what’s actually happening.

Basically, by keeping things small & comprehensible, you’re going to learn much faster than by trying to wrangle three interconnected new systems where changing one variable in one place completely changes the behavior of the all three systems simultaneously.

The reason I’ve tried for years to get this across to new devs is that if you can get to this point quicker, you’ll learn faster. Which is beneficial, right?

But I think to some degree, learning that interconnected systems explode into incomprehensible complexity is one of those things that human brains aren’t wired to naturally understand, and new devs maybe need to crash into that wall headfirst a few times before they even understand there’s a wall there. Telling someone they need to do things a certain way to avoid crashing into a wall they can’t see… doesn’t work.

So yeah. My point, I guess, is that if you’re a moderately experienced dev who’s smashed into that wall a few times & thinks, “There must be a better way of doing this!” There is! Hit me up. I’d love to help you figure it out. #gamedev

If I could get across only one thing to most folks building brand new products, it’d be this: Start small.

It’s not a simple thing to do. To start building something small means deeply understanding the problem you’re trying to solve. You have to know what’s important to end users and what isn’t. What you need in your product that will make a difference in their lives, vs. what is nice to have. You can’t get caught up in your own ego, and your desire to make something you’re proud of, happy with, or is a full realization of whatever dream it is you have.

You have to be ruthless. You have to cut away everything that it’s vital to the core of what you’re trying to build. This is where a lot of people trying to do “MVP” make mistakes. You cannot cut away what people need. You can’t deliver a shitty version of the whole product. You need to deliver the *smallest possible thing* that *does what a user needs*. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or easy to use (unless those are rare parts of the core concept). It doesn’t have to scale or be reliable. It doesn’t have to have social invites or animated buttons.

It doesn’t have to be the whole idea. Especially for games.

But it has to have that kernel of the thing you’re trying to pitch to folks. And it has to be good enough that you can understand when you see someone use it if it’s working. So while it can be busted, it can’t be *too* busted. While it can be ugly, it can’t be too ugly. And all of that is context-dependent on what you’re building and who your users are.

But the smaller you start, the more understandable your problem is. The more understandable the user’s response will be. The more you can shrink the number of variables involved, the more you can understand the variables you kept. Every system explodes exponentially with each new variable. Too many, and even if you’re getting data, that data will be incomprehensibly complex. If you can get your thing down to *one* new thing, you’ll be able to understand the impact of that one thing. Two, maybe. Three, forget about it.

Small. Build small. Pare down your idea until it’s almost nothing. Then you’re in the right ballpark.

Call your shots.

I say this over and over. Every time I say it, it’s because I see someone rationalizing away some result that they didn’t want with the explanation that, “No one could have predicted this,” or something like that. And it’s frustrating, because every time I’ve seen some leader say, “No one could have predicted this,” there’s a bunch of people on the team – boots on the ground – that are like, “We *did* predict this. We told you exactly this would happen.”

And yet, because no one put it in writing, no one planted their flag in the ground, the leadership goes, “Yep. Our decision process was correct, we’re smart, but there was no way to see this thing coming.”

Without things in writing, it’s easy to handwave them away. It’s a gut-level reaction, and something that a lot of people consider positive, because it’s a way to “not dwell on the past” and “move forward”. But it’s also a really spectacular way of *not learning*.

So for me, when faced with a fork in the road – some decision that either I need to make and be accountable for, or a decision someone else needs to make & is asking for my input – I write it down. I say what I think will happen and why. I try to imagine what will happen if they do something else, and describe that as well. I talk about the circumstances, my assumptions, and what kinds of things would change the outcome. And I give it to them in writing.

It doesn’t magically fix things. Your boss (or whoever) will still handwave things away. They will still say “No one could have predicted…” even after you remind them of this thing that you wrote and sent them *before* the decision was made. You will need to remind them of this in a graceful way that absolutely is not, “See, I told you so!” But you want to be firm and say, “This is what I predicted, this is what happened, here’s why when we come to this kind of crossroads again, I’d love to help you understand the potential outcomes.”

It’s a slow process. But this does make progress. It helps build your credibility. It takes time, it’ll be frustrating. But it’s also so much better than hearing the folks in charge behave as though this information never existed, and it’s the only way I’ve found to actually make positive change.

Sometimes you’ll be wrong. Own it. But always call your shots.

When I left my last job, I thought, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not going to have to figure out what ‘work’ looks like after the pandemic.” But I’ve now got a potential opportunity, and have to actually at least give this some serious thought.

For me, there are a few things that I’m certain of:

* It’s not going to be 40-hrs a week in an office. Never. No chance.
* It has to provide enough flexibility that anyone can go pick up their kids at school, or attend whatever events they need to.
* Periodic in-person time together, and the riffing on ideas that comes from that, is an important part of the early phase of product development.

So no daily commute. Maybe one weekly. Probably not folks who are spread across the countries & time zones, at least not yet. Some overlapping guaranteed hours, but with the goal of providing a lot of flexibility.

For me, the thing I *love* about work is bouncing ideas around and seeing them get better. Creating memories with people I enjoy spending time with. The satisfaction of seeing the business engine start to crank, and seeing players enjoy what we’re building.

I think that for me, work is likely “nearby enough to meet once or twice a week, but mostly remote”. I don’t yet know the details of what that means, but what are your thoughts? I know a lot of folks who’ve gone fully remote and love it. Thoughts? Would you ever consider even partially co-located work at this point?

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.

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.

You know how in school, you’re often told to be quiet, to raise your hand, to wait your turn, that the teacher will notice you?

That doesn’t work at work.

Even when you have excellent managers, there will almost always be times when your accomplishments are invisible, your desires and goals are overlooked, and you feel like you’re getting screwed or left behind because the teacher didn’t notice you, sitting in the back with your hand up. You’re doing everything right, and getting passed over.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Sometimes, it’s because some kinds of work are totally invisible. Make a systemic change that improves everyone’s efficiency by 5%, but adds no new features? Likely to get overlooked. Sometimes being really great at your job means that your manager feels no “pain” coming from you or your area of responsibility, and so they start ignoring you because other things are painful and on fire, and those things need attention. And they begin to take your accomplishments and efficiency for granted.

That sounds like a “bad boss”, but honestly, it’s just “most bosses”.

Sometimes, you need to be more proactive and vocal about telling people what you want. I wanted a game design position, and busted my ass working toward it. Then got passed over. Why? Because when I talked to my boss, they *didn’t know I wanted the job*. I thought it was obvious – I was doing the work. But I didn’t *tell* them, and it took me years to realize that was my failing and not theirs. Once I told them, I got the next opening that came up.

Squeak, sometimes.

We’re told the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Then we see unqualified self-promoting hucksters squeak all the time and get rewarded, and feel resentful and bitter about it. That sucks. But sometimes, you need to make some noise.

It’s not that you need to inflate your accomplishments, or steal other peoples’ credit. That’ll all get back to you in a bad way in the end. But you need to be upfront and often more aggressive about letting people know about the work you’ve done, and what your goals are. It feels bad if you’re an introvert or used to “being recognized for your accomplishments”.

But think of it from the manager’s perspective. They need to try to understand what their employees are doing, and what kind of impact they’re having. A great manager does the work and takes the time to understand these things, and they’ll still overlook a bunch of stuff. All you want to do is help them form that understanding easily, and make sure that you can’t get overlooked. Done well, that makes their lives easier, not harder.

So yeah – make some noise.