no-crunch development (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, August 07, 2017, 17:04 (2752 days ago) @ grantixtechno

Honestly, when I read most of these types of articles (which seem to be coming out more frequently recently) about leadership style changes and management changes within Bungie... it just seems like a no brainer to me.

The most important thing I took from my 7 years in the Army was how to be a leader and how to manage your employees. It's something that the Army has excelled at for decades now, and not merely in a military manner.

When I see articles like this, it just makes me thing like... maybe more video game companies need to invest money into sending managers and leaders to corporate leadership classes, or something similar. It's a necessity to have good leaders and managers in such a stressful environment such as video game development.

YES! Holy god, YES. There were, as far as I could tell, zero management courses when I worked EA, Fox, Mindscape, and Activision. None at all. You know how you got to be a team lead? Be being reliable. That's it. Heck, at Activision they would promote terrible employees simply because they'd been there a long time. One guy, within actual seconds of being promoted to team lead, started giving the only girl on his team a backrub and said to her, "So... I hear you're attracted to men with power." He was fired so quickly the rest of the people there didn't even have time to gasp. And being production team lead just was "Hey, who wants to be the team lead?" and whoever volunteered was it. At the time I volunteered, the team was two people. At the end of the cycle, it was 300. I don't know how they expected me to be a good manager, because I definitely was not one. I had to go out, on my own, and read loads of management handbooks in order to become better at it (years later and in a different industry).

Anyway, yes, they need to provide management training BADLY, but they won't because (a) corporate views testers as swine (b) they're 90% right, only about 10% of the testers they hire are any good, mostly because they hire literally anyone so they can make the shareholders happy with how many testers they hired, (c) spending more money on management training would not directly result in more money for the company, and would thus make the shareholders unhappy... It's a bad, bad environment that would benefit greatly from training.

PS: The military guys I've worked with have all been terrific, both in the game industry and out. Always reliable!