Darkened Software

I now believe there is 2 fundamental problems with people that one would get through a recruiter.

1. Who would leave their career path in the hands of a someone else that based on the economics of the situation can not have your best interest in mind.  They get more money for placing in the harder to fill spots, so their job is to try and convince you to take a terrible or risky job.  They spend a lot of time trying to spin it but if it was a good job at a good company it would have been filled by one ad placed on gamasutra for a fraction of the price.
2. Who can not take the time to search gamasutra, linked in, and jobs pages of their favorite companies.  Searching for a job takes about 1/2 hour a day at the most, maybe more if you find something you like and need to write a cover letter.

Neither of these traits sounds like something I in general want in a programmer.

Then there is the problem of dealing with recruiters in general.

1. Shelling out and additional 20% of employee’s wages in recruiter fees.
2. They will be calling him/her to move again as soon as he passes the 2-3 month contracted must stay period.
3. 90% of the people the bring you are remote and there is an additional 20k in moving needed if not visa issues.
4. If they have dealt with your company for awhile they coach the candidates and your interview process becomes less effective.

So recruiters get paid a lot of money to bring you temp false hope in the form of coached candidates.

What is the little company that does not have a big reputation yet suppose to do?  They do not have people hitting their website every day hoping there is jobs opening up.  These companies put job posts up and only get 1000′s requests for internship from the local universities.

First line of their job post should be:

Company ownership after 1 year.

This will ensure they stay 4 times longer than the average recruiter candidate will stay for.  This will attract the risk takers you want and will ensure they will be bought into the entire project.

Sadly most small companies will not consider this.  They will offer royalties or something like that but everyone knows that it is < 5% to ever even pay out.  Yet companies still stay afloat and manage to make money.  Why are companies not sharing that with their employees that are also sharing the risk.  Small company owners can be 33% owners of nothing because they only have temp’s and interns or 20% owners something great if they just got the right employee’s.

Some time ago I interviewed at Sony based on the recommendations of a friend who had joined their R&D department and was really loving his new job.  Their R&D department at the time only need a hard core graphics specialist but they had some other positions that they wanted to interview me for.  So I took a day and went to see what things were all about at Sony.  Most of their jobs were doing some sort of lead tech support for other developers so I expected I would get grilled on:

• Tech & coding skills
• Customer support
• Documentation
• Time management skills

After an entire day of interviews I had not had any questions on anything that was not tech & coding.  In fact many of the questions were so esoteric that I do not believe they were really looking for a programmer but a PS3 manual with a better personality.

eg. Interviewer:   How many instructions would this take on the cell processor

float temp = (bool) 0;

Me:  Not sure, why would you ever cast a bool to a float?

Interviewer:  You wouldn’t, but if you did how many instructions would it be?

Me:  Not sure, on the PS2 they had an Zero register so it would have been 1 instruction but since your asking I am sure that is no longer the case.

Interviewer:  See he does not know.

This in my mind clears up a lot of stuff, if they do not value customer support, documentation or coding samples to even ask about it in a interview then it is no wonder they are so badly know for the poorest developer support in the industry.

Contrast that to the interviews at Microsoft I recently went through for similar positions.  The first half of the day was all about tech and coding but they asked relevant questions about algorithms, error checking, comments and architecture.  Second part of the day was all about dealing with customers, creating white papers, writing good sample code and other tasks.  Last part of the interview was about what makes great games and user experiences, tech trends and how it will shape the games of the future and last how to communicate and let people know how to take advantage of it.

Perfectly clear why in one generation Microsoft has taken over the console market, they understand what is real dev support is and know that supporting the dev teams has to be the one of the core’s pillars in getting the best games.

At Secret Level I used to do a lot of hiring and I would often see resumes where some programmer worked at 1 or 2 companies for the first 8 -10 years and then for the next 5 years or so they jumped jobs every 6 – 12 months.  My first thought was these guys had cracked under the pressure or had in some way become flawed.  Why would they not want to finish out these games and put some more completed titles on their resume.

Having just passed the 10 year mark in the industry myself I now realize I had drawn the wrong conclusion about these guys.  While your learning about the industry you care less about Quality vs Quantity.  But once you have a good handle on things you become very impatient with people and companies not going down the right path to AAA games.

A little quick math, if you finished out every game you start you have about ( 30 years left in career / 3 year dev cycles ) 10 chances to be involved in that hit game .   Since only about 10-15% of the games even make their money back and < 5% are run away hits you only have a 50% chance to ever work on a hit game.  That is not really great odds when you think about it.

But if you drop the requirement for finishing games and leave as soon as you determine the company is both not on the right path and will not listen to the voice of reason to correct itself ( 6 months – 1 year ) then you have at least 30 – 60 chances ( 150 -300% ) to be involved in a hit game.  That takes your career from 50% chance of being meaningless to almost guaranteed success at some point.

But there is a little game theory in it, how many times can you try out a few companies before your resume becomes a liability.  Given that leads have to worry about people leaving at critical times right before shipping and major milestones the number is pretty low.  If I saw a run of 3-4 companies and no explanation ( ie they all went under ) I would only hire them as last resorts.

So in reality the optimal strategy is ( 30 years / ( 7 ( 3 year + 4 * 1 year )  )  = 22 with a 110% chance of shipping a hit and your resume never becomes a complete liability.   This should be the path for the gamblers out there that want to help small companies succeed and risk it all for the chance at big buyout money or crazy royalties.

Point is these guys with somewhat jumpy histories are not necessarily flawed programmers, they are often the really good programmers that are tired of wasting their time at bad companies and are going to jump until they find the right chance for success.

After 10 years I can barely remember why I got into games in the first place, but recently I was reflecting and here is what I remember:

• Make the coolest games ever
• Make tons of money in royalties
• Coding hard core real time algorithms
• Small amount of fame and great release parties

After the first 2 years of being abused in this industry it is safe to say my original dreams were simple put to rest and new goals were born out of the pain:

• Work on a game that I would not be embarrassed to send my family.
• Get paid for the next milestone so we could issue pay checks to the rest of the company at the end of the month.
• Some day stop cleaning up and optimizing someone else’s crappy code.
• Not get crucified by meta critic; hope the company stays alive long enough after the game ships to have a release party in a run down bar in the scary part of San Fransisco and not get knifed on the way home.

Not that this industry has not been good to me over all, but for the first decade the dream and the reality are a very long ways apart for 99% of the people.  The reality is only about 10% of the games are making money and even a smaller % of the total publishers and developers are making enough money they can even give out royalties.

The stable companies can roughly be split into 2 types, factory and innovators.   It is not as hard to get into factory company and kick out another sequel that will most likely sell lots of units.  But it is not that rewarding either and people tend to burn out really quickly and want to go work for an innovator company.  It is really hard to get into the innovator companies that will give you some creative input and allow you to do some interesting and rewarding work.  They are taking a ton of risk on their games so they try to minimize risk everywhere else and only hire seasoned pro’s that they know can get the job done.

Luckily after ten years or so in this industry you start looking pretty good to these innovator companies and your original goals can become a reality.  The irony of it all is after 10 years most people have changed enough that those goals no longer apply.

Now if you asked me my goals:

• Start a successful game company.
• Be a tech director for a company with a real budget.
• Lead a programming team on creating the most user friendly engine ever.
• Create a game with characters so amazing that hot girls around the world are running around in skimpy clothing trying to look like them.

If your thinking about getting into this industry assume that you are majority case you never really reach your goals.  That will force you to get into the game industry for the right day to day reasons.

• You like programming
• You like playing and thinking about games
• You like a constantly changing environment that forces you to learning new things all the time.

I have gone to 100′s of pre-interview resume reviews with other programmers to discuss our thoughts on a candidate and determine what everyone will quiz them about.  I am always still amazed how everyone can read the same resume and have completely different take on what could possibly be good or bad about this candidate .  It is a different trigger for everyone, sometimes if anything is a little vague or over sounds overstated people get turned off and suddenly the interviewee  is fighting an up hill battle.

Be very careful with the resume wording because given the chance people will often interpret it completely wrong…

Even if you write the clearest resume possible it is not even close to 100% so you still have to then anticipate all the ways they could take everything on your resume wrong and and figure out how you are are going to convince them of the right story on the phone or during the live interview.  Is it a pain, yes.  Is it right, probably not.  But you literally have to be prepared to defend everything on your resume to make the interview go well.  Some people will always come to the interview assuming the worst about the candidate and you will have to change their mind about every point.

Lets hit the examples:

Worked for company X for a long time.

You might be thinking that it shows loyalty to the company, dedication to your job and that your not a quitter during tough times.  You might also be rightly thinking that is shows how valued of a employ you were, you survived 8 round of layoffs and your position was never in danger.

Others might see X years and think that means you have no ambition at all.   They instantly think you are one of those  people that found a place to hide and have just been collecting a paycheck for X years.

Defending working at a company for a long time, sounds silly right?  When they comment that you about working for a company for a long time.  Don’t just answer yes.  If you started during the beginning, talk about how you helped grow the company and it was pride thing. If you got shares then talk about the ownership responsibility.  If you did not have the above then talk about the great projects you got to work on or great friends you made or how much you learned there.  Make sure they believe you had reasons to stay and now have a even bigger reason to leave.

Have a bunch of grind tasks on your resume.

Say you have done UI, TCR’s and some of the other grind tasks that people do not generally like to do.  You might think this shows you are willing to take one for the team and do what is needed to get the game out.  You might even think is shows you are not a prima donna and will not be bitching all the time.

Others will see it and think that you must not have any real skills if you have been given grind tasks.  They will automatically rank you intern status because that is usually who they give those tasks too (yet they wonder why they often fail first submission).

Defending grind tasks.  If you were on a time line explain that the project could not afford to be kicked and had to get through first time, it was an insurance policy thing.  If you were doing other tasks as well explain that the grind tasks were in addition and you are really a super man in human cloths.  If you were really only doing UI / TCR’s then explain how you were building tools and infrastructure so it would be less work for those that followed you. Point is to make sure they do not believe that you were tasked with grind work against you will or that you were not happy with it.  Make it seem like it was a challenge or accomplishment.

There will be a second part to this topic as there are many more potential issues.  Big take away should be to read your resume over and try to predict how people could take it wrong and be prepared to talk them down from that position.  The thing is they will not ask you to defend your work experience, they will just drop an off hand comment on something and you need to detect it and then take over the conversation till you get your point across.  Missing these small hints in the conversation means people will be leaving the interview with bad thoughts still and you have lost.