Over many years in game development, I’ve seen QA get treated like trash and expected to be grateful just to be a part of game development. Parties hosted for “devs” where QA was excluded. Catered lunch for everyone *except* QA. Companies where QA was *literally not allowed through the front door*.

I’ve also seen QA departments that are hot garbage, staffed by folks who were barely “professional”, who generated unintelligible bugs, or who wanted to be game designers and didn’t understand what the job entailed.

BOTH are symptoms of leadership that doesn’t value QA, and both are faults caused by that *leadership*, not by the QA department.

Way back in the day on the Sims, there was a phenomenal QA dept that worked tightly with engineers & designers, that knew the product and the players inside and out. When Maxis was acquired by EA, that whole team was fired, and replaced by people they hired at a *literal sausage party*. Like, “here, have free sausages & apply for QA positions”.

The bugs we got went from being helpful feedback that closed the loop on development to useless trash, and the supposed “cost savings” was totally burned on the extra time everyone in the development pipeline needed to spend to get the QA team back up to some minimum level of competence.

QA is a critical part of the development team. Hire high-quality QA people and treat them well, and you will:

1.) Save money EVERYWHERE in the development pipe
2.) Create a much, much better product
3.) Make your engineers’ & designers’ lives a lot easier.

Bring QA into your development process early, reviewing designers’ output, because they will break design *documents* just as thoroughly as they’ll break code. It’ll be 100x cheaper AND your designers will start to think like QA folks, which will make them *better designers*.

This is a no-brainer, folks. There’s no downside. All you need to do is not be elitist ding-dongs.

I realize that a lot of folks who work in games aren’t game designers. Their job isn’t to “create fun”. Their job is to make sure the developer survives, and in that respect, the folks who optimize for $ and retention and all those metrics – their jobs are often more important than the folks who are trying to give the players a great experience.

Because it’s often fairly easy to make fun. It’s really, really hard to make fun that people will pay for.

Similarly, as you “move up” in the development chain, the more you have to be concerned with survival, and the less directly involved you are in the player experience.

So it’s natural that, as someone who’s been in and around game dev for 24 years, most of what I hear is folks talking about how to get to financial success. Why Monopoly Go is hot shit, or why this one weird trick will double your retention/conversion/ARPDAU/whatever.

And holy mother fuck, I hate it.

On LinkedIn, I see a bunch of investors’ posts, a bunch of VC’s posts, a bunch of people “deconstructing” the “fun” of games’ posts, and they’re just mercenary shit.

And so even with all the earlier stuff acknowledged, I was wondering why I hate it so much. Why hearing someone breaking down the economic mechanics of Monopoly Go pisses me off. And I think the thing is, when I was making games, the economic (out-of-game) engine of the game and the *specific fun* we were trying to provide to people were deeply interlinked. To put it another way, trying to “deconstruct” Monopoly Go and apply lessons about its economy wouldn’t make any sense unless you were building Monopoly Go.

Because the core gameplay was the main driver of everything, and the economic engine was what you did with that code gameplay to generate money. But these days, it seems like a lot of people end up talking about the economic engine, and then trying to reverse-engineer mechanics that will allow folks to ape those economies. And then they call it “fun”.

I made games for 20+ years. The one thing that was consistent through all twenty of those years was that a smash hit was never, ever, ever a direct clone of another smash hit. Zynga made a hojillion dollars by cloning games and then out-marketing the original and crushing them under their boots. But they didn’t clone hits, they cloned games that were not yet hits. Not that that’s better (it’s much worse). But so many people seem to think that if they just ape the last smash hit – if they make the next Clash, or Genshin Impact, or whatever, that they’ll have a similar-sized hit. They won’t. That game already exists. People don’t need Fortnite 2 from some unknown bullshit developer. They already have Fortnite, and Epic knows so much about how Fortnite works that you can’t anticipate their next step. So you’ll never beat them.

You have to build a different game. You have to create an economic engine that suits that game. Yes, you can learn about the mechanics of other games. But if you’re not learning about those economic engines by playing the games, you’re fucking up your job. If you’re learning about those games by listening to podcasts about techbros analyzing the economies of smash hits and thinking you’re going to imitate those features without deeply understanding the mechanics of the source… fuck off. You’re going to fail.

And I know some folks think that has value, but I don’t. I think it has anti-value, because it tries to circumvent the understanding that you gain through experience to someone telling you “hot tipzzzz” about how to squeeze money from people without actually understanding the experience of the player. And these kinds of discussions put the economic engine first, but I have yet to see any kind of game I’ve ever loved that started by trying to figure out the hot new monetization trends.

It sucks that this is what a lot of games has become. And it’s frustrating to see a lot of really smart people devoting their mental bandwidth to this bullshit, instead of trying to come up with new, original things that create unexpected joy in players, who love it enough that they’re happy to spend money on it. Instead, they’re satisfied smashing a derivative parasitic version of success onto a photocopy of something someone loved, and believing they’re building something new.

Fuck that shit.

I often hear that startup founders need to have a kind of unreasonable positivity in order to succeed. The belief that this impossible thing will work carries you through the pain and obstacles to finally achieve success, or something like that.

I think this is total fucking bullshit.

I mean, yes – you need to believe the thing will work. There are going to be ridiculous obstacles in your way, and the most likely outcome is failure. But so often, I see people espousing this, “I have to be confident it’ll all work out!” and there’s two ways I see that play out, one alright, one terrible:

Way 1: I look at the thing we’re trying to do and with clear eyes, dive into the potential problems. I may not have all the answers, but I dive deeply enough that I can understand the relative risks involved, and make a clear assessment of whether we’re likely to be able to overcome those obstacles, tackle them in risk priority order, and make things work. It looks daunting, but I understand it as well as I can, and believe we can get through it, even if it’s not clear exactly how yet.

Way 1 isn’t terrible, and if you’re in a startup, it’s what you have to do. But a shocking number of people interpret this call to positivity in a different way.

Way 2: I look at the end goal of the thing I want to achieve and visualize that we’ll get there. I don’t really need to think about the obstacles in the way, because I know we’ll be able to achieve the end result. Over the course of development so far, we’ve run into a bunch of problems, but they’ve always worked themselves out, and so I know that if we just keep at it, we’ll get to the end goal. I just need to stay positive.

Which, when I write it like that, sounds really stupid. But a surprising number of people in positions of power over the course of my career have mistaken “positivity” for “lack of diligence and awareness”.

And that goes for at least two things. First, they’re not diligent about actually understanding the obstacles, in number or scope, in front of them. Second, they don’t understand how those obstacles were actually dealt with during development – who struggled with them, who overcame them, how, or at what cost. So they also don’t understand what it’s taken so far to get to where they are.

When you have a problem with a startup, someone fixes the problem. It may not be you – hell, often it’s better if it’s not you – but nothing ever, ever, ever “resolves on its own”. And holy shit, the number of times I’ve heard these positive people say “It just works out,” or “The problem just goes away,” makes me want to stab a lot of folks. Nothing “just works out”. Nothing “just goes away”. Someone makes it happen. Someone dives into the complex problem, builds understanding, attacks the weaknesses, and figures it out. What you’re saying when you say the problem “just works out,” is really “I have no idea how it worked out, who put in the work to make it happen, but I don’t really care to give people the credit they deserve.”

And yeah – I’ve often been in the situation where I’m solving critical, urgent, difficult problems and then had someone above me say, “Yeah, these problems just work themselves out! Amazing!”

“Positivity” isn’t something you inject into the process. Positivity is a symptom of trust, understanding, and hard work. Running into a room full of bears with your hands over your eyes yelling, “I believe it’ll all just work out!” is a surefire recipe for being eaten by bears. And that’s the correct god damned outcome for you if that’s your approach.

You want positivity, look at your problems. Assume that no problem will ever solve itself. Figure out who is doing the work to solve the problems, figure out who should be working on them if no one is already. Give them the time and resources they need to take a solid stab at figuring it out, and the credit the ever-loving shit out of them if they make it happen.

As a leader, some folks think that “the buck stops with me,” means “I can take all the credit for everything,” because I’m ultimately responsible. And sure, to some degree that’s technically true. But it’s a really counterproductive, ego-centric, and … well, childish approach to things. A good leader takes no credit. They give away all the accolades for success. They take all the blame for failures. Because leaders get too much by default. People remember Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs didn’t resuscitate Apple or invent the iPhone on his own. Leaders get too much credit. It’s their job to give as much of that credit away to the people on their team who made things happen.

But that starts with being aware of who’s making things happen. So if you think positivity is that problems just go away on their own, you’re failing as a leader and you’re failing at your job.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed over the last few years has been helping folks write effective resumes. I started out just helping friends, but then helping friends-of-friends, and then randos through LinkedIn. And over time, a few things became pretty clear:

• Everyone makes the same mistakes
• I was repeating myself a lot

Every time I’d sit down with a new resume, my criticism was the same. My approach was the same. I assumed that for different people in different industries, with different backgrounds, I’d end up with more varied approaches. But no – almost everyone made the same mistakes with their resume, and because of that, the advice and perspective I tried to impart was nearly identical for everyone.

The tl;dr version that’ll get you halfway there in one sentence is this: Your resume isn’t an advertisement, but it should be. Most people don’t really think too much about what a resume is trying to do, or who’s reading it. It’s not a historical record of your work, even though you’re told that’s what it should be. It’s an ad. It’s purpose is to get you an interview. That’s it.

This message seemed to surprise nearly everyone, and the consequences of it were things people just didn’t ever consider when writing their resume. So I finally decided to just write it down. You can read the doc here, totally for free. If you do read through it, comments and feedback on the doc are totally welcome.

If you find that doc useful, or if you just have different preferences for format, you can also check it out here, where you can pick it up for a few $ for your Kindle, or in paperback form.

At some point I’m going to write a second version of this with more detailed examples, but this version has all the perspective and wisdom I’ve acquired from working with dozens of folks over the last few years.

If you know anyone whose resume could some help, or someone who’s sent out a lot of resumes but hasn’t received a lot of calls for interviews in return, please pass this on to them.

There was once a time when I felt like if I worried about something, I’d somehow be easing the situation in some way. I think it was this sense that the paranoid hyper-alert feeling that comes with obsessively worrying about something would help me catch some important detail or not let something slip.

Sure, there are things I worry about, still. But it’s a lot better than before. And I think a lot of it comes down to understanding that worrying doesn’t actually do anything.

That sense of hyper-alertness isn’t real. It’s like being super buzzed on caffeine. You feel awake, but you’re not. You feel like you’re sharper, but you’re not. It’s all a delusion. I think the same is true when you’re worrying. Yes, when you’re worrying, you often sweat the details. You try to cross every t and dot every i. But you can also be diligent and calm, and do the same thing even better. Being calm isn’t “not caring”, it’s simply not being worried, and because you’re in a more focused mental state, it’s actually easier to understand and react to things.

In some ways, the way I think about a lot of things now is, “Everything has already happened.”

A friend recently had cancer surgery. It was big, invasive, scary, life-threatening as any large surgery is. But in some ways, everything that needed to happen had already happened. They’d found great doctors. They’d done the necessary scans. The cancer was already there. The doctors had already practiced as much as they possibly could, and whatever preparations would be made… nothing I could think or do would make any difference. Ei-Nyung stepped up to be the “in-person” support, and so she had a lot of things she could do, and then did.

But for me? In the past I’d have been incredibly worried. But now I realized there was nothing for me to do, nothing I could do, and worrying… would simply not do anything. Everything (that needed to happen) has already happened.

There is a time in the past where I’d have been utterly wracked and useless with worry. I’m sure there will be times and situations in the future where I still am. But it’s not just this one incident – it’s showing up more and more in my reactions to things, and it’s not that I care less. It’s not that I’m detached from the situation. It’s simply that I have a better awareness of what I can and cannot actually affect, and the realization that me twisting myself up with worry over what might happen not only doesn’t make things less bad for anyone, it often makes it worse. Not just for me, but for everyone I come into contact with.

Trust your gut.

Sometimes.

The mind is a strange thing. Consciously, you can’t process or hang on to all that much. Trying to come up with a linear, rational explanation for everything you encounter is a slow, strenuous process. You can’t do it on a day-to-day basis for most things. And even if you could, you’d be constructing rationalizations from the things you can hold in “active” memory, which isn’t all that much.

The unconscious part of your brain, the gut, has access to a lot of things that your conscious mind doesn’t. So your “gut” can see patterns your brain can’t. When something feels wrong, but you can’t figure out why, the difference between the information that your conscious mind can access and the amount your unconscious mind can access is often the reason.

So you learn to “trust your gut”. And that can be good.

At a previous job, I first met the team about a month before my start date. And one of the people on the team – I knew instantly that this was going to be a terrible fit, and that this person would likely be why this job would eventually end. And I could point to a lot of reasons why. Obvious misogyny, overwhelming arrogance, etc. etc. These things are obviously bad. But unfortunately, they’re easy to rationalize away. I won’t have to work with him directly all that much (wrong). His work won’t impact my work (wrong). Blah blah blah. Rationalize away. But my gut was right. I didn’t trust it, and it cost me dearly.

So trust your gut.

But also don’t.

Because your “gut” is also a collection of patterns. Habits. Biases. Your gut may tell you “this guy is weird and different”, but it’s actually just that he doesn’t look like a lot of the people you normally interact with. That gut feeling… it’s racism. That indignation, when a woman on the team questions your decisions – I’m the boss, I’m way more experienced than her… that’s misogyny. And at some point or another everyone feels some version of this. The difference between someone who acts in racist/misogynist ways and people who don’t isn’t always what they think, it’s how they respond to what they think.

Trying to understand that certain “gut” reactions are the accumulation of patterns and experience and knowledge, but it’s locked away in a place that is impossible to directly access, and that certain “gut” reactions are the accumulation of biases and social constructs… and they both feel and look the same at first… it’s difficult. It leads to a lot of second guessing. It leads to a lot of difficult contemplation and self-analysis. Most of it’s not all that pretty (and if it is, I’d question whether you’re staring at yourself hard enough).

So trust your gut. But question it. Ask yourself why your gut felt one way, and see if your mind feels another way. In some sense, if I have, for instance, a negative reaction to a [different in some significant way] person in some context, and my gut says, “Hey!”, and my mind says, “Yeah, that’s not a great reaction, and it comes from (relative) lack of exposure,” the gut is me reacting to my history and society. The brain in this case is me exerting my will and striving for something better. Does it always succeed? No, of course not.

But this is one place where I think sometimes when someone screws up publicly initially then apologizes, this is where the difference between and good and bad apology can totally change how I react to a situation like this. Because we all have biases, and many of them are not good. Sometimes people can react “automatically” based on those biases, then they catch themselves, assert that this is not who they want to be. A good apology addresses the damage done, explains where the problem was, and how that person will work to be better in the future. So a good apology to me is the transition between a gut reaction and a thoughtful one. And I don’t blame (most) people for their guts.

A bad reaction (sorry if you felt..) shows you’re saying, “My biases do not need to be questioned,” and isn’t an apology at all.

But the gut/mind problem goes beyond just large-scale prejudices. It also goes to a lot of “how you respond at work” issues. My gut often tells me to get demonstrably angry. My mind tells me to not. I think if folks believe I’m a good leader, it’s because I often go *against* what I want to do based on my gut, and wait until my mind has a chance to formulate the kind of person I want to be.

So should you listen to your gut? Yeah. Sometimes. Is there a clear place to draw the line where you should & shouldn’t listen to your gut? No. But I think it’s still straightforward. You should always listen to your gut. You should question that feeling. You should say, “Is this reflective of who I want to be?” and then make the determination of what to do from there.

I think if that’s the only step you take, you’ll make a significant improvement in your life.

But it’s also not easy. It leads to a feeling of constant second-guessing. It’s a lot of work, and often interrogating your biases is unpleasant. It’s much easier to go with your gut and let it take you wherever. It feels better. It’s cathartic. But it also leads to a life led without improvement or direction, where you’re simply a passenger, with your biases and history driving the bus.

So yeah. Listen to your gut. Interrogate it. And then be the person you choose to be.

When I was starting out in positions of leadership, I felt like my job was to give each individual in my charge the best opportunities, give them increasing responsibilities and creative ownership, and to help them learn and grow as teammates who could one day hold positions of leadership of their own.

I don’t think that’s necessarily the wrong set of things to hold dear as a starting manager. But the one thing that’s changed the most about my attitudes as a leader is that when someone’s struggling to be a good teammate, or a good manager, there’s a certain set of flaws that I’ve never seen anyone overcome, and that in those situations, the 100% best thing you can do for the team is to fire them as fast as possible.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my last job was that I kept on a “brilliant asshole,” because they were a critical bit in getting the project shipped. I’d continue to address their behavior in every way that I could short of letting them go, but I couldn’t fire them until we’d shipped. It would only be another few months.

Of course, those few months dragged on to a year+. And I knew that entire time that this person was unsalvageable. For that year+, a huge portion of the team bore the brunt of my mistake. They dealt with a teammate who generated great individual work, but had a catastrophic impact on their team. I heard the feedback. And I delayed, because firing them would push the launch back inevitably by 6+ months. But we ended up pushing the launch 6+ months for other reasons anyway.

I hoped I could make a difference in their attitude, and help them grow as a teammate. I couldn’t. I’d repeatedly give them direct and honest feedback. They’d say they’d do X, Y, and Z, but ultimately, they knew that firing them would have a really heavy cost, and I think they hid behind that in order to not change. But at the same time, when you have someone who’s this combination of abrasive, domineering and condescending… I’ve never seen anyone with that kind of personality change to the degree that they go from an intolerable drag on the team to even mid-level competent. I’ve never seen it. Ever.

There’s a point when you’re a team lead where you can’t think about the individuals. Where I could invest hours and hours of my time, and of the team’s mental energy to changing this person. But I absolutely should not. It’s my job to fire them and get them out. I don’t have to be mean about it, but I do have to be ruthless about it and efficient. Because it has nothing to do with that individual, and it has everything to do with the team.

One smart person cannot make up for the drag of an energy vampire on the project. There’s no level of individual brilliance that’s worth it, and that can’t be made up multiple times over by the increase in morale and cohesion and communication that come with getting them out. So for both “efficiency”, and morale, you cannot keep these kinds of people on the team. You have to cut them. You can’t let their rot fester on the team for months while you bend over backwards to give them opportunities to change because you are not the only one paying the cost. Everyone on the team is paying the cost for your indecision and inaction.

Your job isn’t to change people. Your job is to maximize your team’s efficacy, and that comes with getting rid of the assholes that make teamwork impossible.

I’ve always said that one of my core tenets was “no assholes,” but your core tenets are only what you do, not what you say. And in that respect, I failed at a very important part of my last job. It’s not a mistake that I’ll make again.

Note: I’m reposting some things I wrote a while back on LinkedIn here, in part to slowly “port” the content back to my own blog, but in part because some of this stuff is worth resurfacing. This was from Dec. 2014. It still feels relevant, and probably always will.

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Someone on your team comes to you and says there’s a problem. The last release broke the purchase flow of your product, and it’s costing you $10,000 an hour and lost customers. What’s your first reaction?

A lot of times, regardless of intent, the first reaction is one of bewilderment, anger, or frustration. Over the course of my career, I’ve heard managers shouting at people more often than not, almost every time, it’s the wrong response.

Which may sound obvious, since we’re sitting here looking at a post, and not desperately trying to get a $10K/hr problem fixed. But in the heat of the moment, most people revert to the full-scale freakout, and it’s in those moments where reacting differently can have a dramatically better effect.

Here’s the thing – a lot of places say, “Move fast & break stuff,” but they don’t really mean it. They don’t want you to break important things. They don’t want you to break things that will make them look bad. If you really mean for people to move fast, and you accept that the consequences of moving fast means that sometimes things get broken, then you need to accept that this will often cost actual money, and that breaking things is often not a failure of the team.

What you want as a leader is that in times of crisis, people should want to bring things up as quickly as possible. You want them to tell the truth immediately and work to fix the problem without worrying about blame or consequence. In that moment, you want no barriers to fixing the problem.

If you’ve reacted badly in the past and yelled at someone when something’s gone wrong, that’s not going to happen. First, instead of “moving fast”, those people are now in “risk mitigation” mode, which means they’re worried less about finding success and more about avoiding failure. These are dramatically different mindsets, and risk mitigation prevents people from making bold choices.

The correct response in a time of crisis is:

1. Remain calm
2. Help people get back to an acceptable situation as quickly as possible
3. Follow up by understanding what went wrong, and if there is a good way of preventing the same or similar mistakes in the future.

I understand how simple and obvious that sounds.

If more people actually responded that way, I wouldn’t be writing this. But primal reactions are hard to suppress, and even if most people want to react to things this way, often they start with a “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED!?!?!” Some people think this is their “right” or that a bit of fear makes for a good motivator. But the reality of it is that if you have hired good people, there is nothing you can say or do that will make them feel worse than they already do. You don’t need to point out their failing, they already know something terrible has happened.

They’re coming to you because they need your help to recover. If you yell at them, or threaten them, or otherwise react badly, consider how they’ll respond the next time something bad happens.

Creative, collaborative, risk-taking environments are built on trust. Trust is a brittle thing. Once it’s broken, it’s incredibly difficult if not impossible to recover. If you want the benefits of a highly iterative, fast-moving team, you need to pay the cost of learning to react to crisis situations well. You need to make sure that you are the first person that people want to talk to in case of a critical emergency. Not because you need to be the lynchpin of the response (usually, you won’t be anyway, because it’s the team that screwed it up that will fix the problem), but because as a leader, you need to know what is happening and you will set the tone for how the team responds.

For that to happen, in times of crisis and chaos, before flying off the handle, you need to remember that the best way of getting the result you want is simple: be nice.

* Addendum from 2023: “Help people get back to an acceptable situation as quickly as possible” is definitely an important step. But a lot of the work involved in this step has to be done before anything goes wrong. You need to build the infrastructure that lets you roll back code easily and reliably. If you don’t have this infrastructure, every mistake will be a disaster. So since you know for certain that things will eventually go wrong, you have to build this out as early as you can. If you think you can build this out after the 1st crisis happens, the 1st crisis may be the only crisis your company ever has before it dies.