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Managers Enable their Employees to Achieve their Goals (Criticism)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, January 17, 2018, 14:41 (2263 days ago)

I know what I'm talking about when it comes to management because, back when I designed test teams for all 300 of Activision's testers, I sucked balls at managing them. I was horrible and my team hated me. I was a slave-driver and a stickler for the rules to the point where I would walk down the aisles of computers and just turn off people's stations if they weren't taking their mandatory breaks. This is because I had no training, no education, and - frankly - no business at being a manager. And yet there I was, promoted to the level of my own incompetence.

Which is not to say that we weren't successful. I delivered the only game in the 6 years that I worked for ATVI that passed 1st party approval on all three major consoles on our 1st submission. I saved the company a shitload of money and I made all of my testers better at their jobs. I wasn't trying to be a dick, I just thought being a dick was the only way to manage people and no one corrected me.

Since then I have learned otherwise. I've read a dozen management books, taken a class or two, and had several more years of experience in better structured management environments (read: Television).

The basics of management are very, very easy:

- A manager needs to know what the goals of his or her team are (I'm going to say "his" from here on out because I'm a dude and this is being relayed from my personal perspective).
- A manager needs to know about how capable each member of his team is.
- A manager needs to know what his team members need in order to achieve their goals.

As Cody mentioned in another thread today, Bungie is not communicating well within the company and, as we all know, they are not communicating well outside of their company either.

So let's start there: Communication.

- The goal is to let the outside world know what you're doing with your game.
- Your team is basically only 2 guys: Deej and Cosmo, who are both nice but neither is particularly proactive when it comes to communicating - they appear to always seek approval for their words from higher ups before they post. This is either their fault for being too cautious, or your fault as their manager for holding too tight of a leash. As a manager, it's important to let go of the reins and give your team the opportunity to surprise you. Hold the reins too tightly as I did at ATVI, and you're dooming your team to a stressful life and an uninspired level of achievement. Ultimately, they will lose their zest for the work.
- And what they need to succeed is they need to actually know what the hell you're doing with your game.

So there's a secondary goal which is required in order to achieve the primary objective:
- The goal is to find out what you're doing with your game.
- Your team is still just those same 2 guys who already have a job talking to the entire world.
- And what they need to succeed is unrestricted access to everyone at your company.

This seems to be how Bungie works right now. Deej and Cosmo spend forever talking to like 700 people in order to find out what's going on, which takes so long that the outside world feels like Deej and Cosmo are doing literally nothing. Furthermore, what some of those 700 people are doing is the opposite of what the others are doing, and the overall plans change quickly enough that Deej and Cosmo have to stop and start over partway through. Which is when you get Luke just posting manifestos online in order to appease the world, but this sort of thing also undercuts the work D and C are supposedly doing.

Don't forget that any communications department also has a second important role at your company: They need to let the people within the company know what the community is saying about the game. Not like reporters, just stating the facts, but like advocates, bringing the community's concerns to the devs with passion and understanding.

So I think what D & C need is not unrestricted access to everyone. I think they need more team members. Members who understand the community and its concerns, and members who simply can take some of the work off of the shoulders of D & C in order to free them up to communicate far, FAR more than they are right now.

Remember, managers, if your team has more work on their plate than they are capable of doing, that is not their fault or responsibility; that is management's fault and responsibility. It means you need to hire more team members, either to add to the team or replace members who aren't pulling their weight. In my experience, it is usually the former.

I don't know what the inner workings of Bungie are like, other than "terrible at communicating what the inner workings of bungie are like to the outside world." Frankly, that shouldn't even be a thing we care about, but it is, because bungie is also "terrible at communicating anything to the outside world" and that failure makes us all wonder what on god's green earth is going on behind those doors. We should not be wondering what is going on in there. We should be hearing, firsthand, on a daily basis, that the gears of progress are turning. And the people who work at Bungie should be hearing, firsthand, on a daily basis, what the community is talking about.

Someone in power at Bungie needs to figure out what needs to be done to make the game fun. Then they need to ask everyone else what they need to make that happen, and then that powerful person needs to use their power to give their employees whatever they need to make the game fun. Or this struggle is not going to go away, and the demoralizing nature of interacting with an angry public is going to become worse and worse.

Or bungie could just say "the game is what the game is, deal with it." But if Bungie is serious about wanting to make the game fun and have it be a daily hobby like D1 was, they need to double down on communication, inside and outside of their company. If they want me to throw my hard earned money at the screen, then they need to throw a shitload of hard money at their communications department.

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Managers Enable their Employees to Achieve their Goals

by Cody Miller @, Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, January 17, 2018, 15:45 (2263 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Managers also need to force creative decisions. Part of the reason the supercut was poorly received is that Jason Jones was changing his mind about the story very late in the process.

Imagine you are making a movie. You shoot it, edit it, do the sound mix, and are now starting to do the color grading. Now, the Executive Producer tells you he wants to change things… scrap this and that. We need to change the story and reshoot. And by the way, everybody is asking for a cut of the film yesterday.

So you cobble together what you can, but of course it sucks because everything is placeholder and improvised because you haven't reshot anything yet. It's a jumbled mess and people go wtf?

Would you fire the editor in this situation? Who is really to blame for this?

Well, Bungie got rid of the editor instead of getting the exec producer in line.

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Managers Enable their Employees to Achieve their Goals

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, January 17, 2018, 16:12 (2263 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Managers also need to force creative decisions. Part of the reason the supercut was poorly received is that Jason Jones was changing his mind about the story very late in the process.

Imagine you are making a movie. You shoot it, edit it, do the sound mix, and are now starting to do the color grading. Now, the Executive Producer tells you he wants to change things… scrap this and that. We need to change the story and reshoot. And by the way, everybody is asking for a cut of the film yesterday.

So you cobble together what you can, but of course it sucks because everything is placeholder and improvised because you haven't reshot anything yet. It's a jumbled mess and people go wtf?

Would you fire the editor in this situation? Who is really to blame for this?

Well, Bungie got rid of the editor instead of getting the exec producer in line.

I agree with you, of course. The exec producer is absolutely to blame here. This is a management problem. The Manager is not clear in the goals of the company, and is not providing their employees with realistic goals and timetables. It's okay to be unhappy with the results of your team's work, but it's not okay to move the goalposts and then blame the team for not having enough time to change things. You're steering a giant battleship, not a nimble dinghy. You need to set your course early on and then never waver if you want to hit your targets at full steam.

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Managers Enable their Employees to Achieve their Goals

by narcogen ⌂ @, Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, January 17, 2018, 16:09 (2263 days ago) @ Kahzgul

So I think what D & C need is not unrestricted access to everyone. I think they need more team members. Members who understand the community and its concerns, and members who simply can take some of the work off of the shoulders of D & C in order to free them up to communicate far, FAR more than they are right now.

I think this is a big, big part of it.

Bungie went from being a 35 member team that released a game a year with a 1 person community team who wore other hats as well, to a 300 person team producing a shooter every 3 years, where community relations meant coming up with something funny to read once a week that included enough tidbits to be mildly interesting while the game was released, (and then fielding questions about playlist hoppers for some months). Lather, rinse repeat.

They're now a 700 person company managing what is, for all intents and purposes, an MMO, and they haven't really changed the model of how they interact with players... and they probably should.

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They Probably Still Only Have One Bathroom Too.

by Morpheus @, High Charity, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 02:21 (2262 days ago) @ narcogen

Stupid joke over.

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They Probably Still Only Have One Bathroom Too.

by Funkmon @, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 03:26 (2262 days ago) @ Morpheus

I don't know how any buildings have inadequate bathrooms anymore.

There's a grocery store near me that has one bathroom for both employees and customers. One toilet. When anyone I know builds a new place they demand basically 3 toilets per employee.

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Bathroom Fixture Counts

by unoudid @, Somewhere over the rainbow, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 06:16 (2262 days ago) @ Funkmon

I don't know how any buildings have inadequate bathrooms anymore.

There's a grocery store near me that has one bathroom for both employees and customers. One toilet. When anyone I know builds a new place they demand basically 3 toilets per employee.

Here are the codes for fixture counts if you get bored.

https://codes.iccsafe.org/public/document/code/550/9793343

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Bathroom Fixture Counts

by cheapLEY @, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 06:47 (2262 days ago) @ unoudid

That seems likely exactly the sort of thing Funkmon will read and add to his vast collection of random knowledge.

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Bathroom Fixture Counts

by Vortech @, A Fourth Wheel, Saturday, January 20, 2018, 14:06 (2260 days ago) @ unoudid

Single-occupant gender-exclusive bathrooms annoy me. The inefficiency is so pointless.

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Bathroom Fixture Counts

by unoudid @, Somewhere over the rainbow, Saturday, January 20, 2018, 16:43 (2260 days ago) @ Vortech

I'm all for them if it keeps a screaming kid being changed out of the bathroom I'm using.

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+1

by breitzen @, Kansas, Saturday, January 20, 2018, 16:56 (2260 days ago) @ unoudid

As a parent of screaming child (she really doesn’t, but still) those are a godsend.

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Bathroom Fixture Counts

by Vortech @, A Fourth Wheel, Sunday, January 21, 2018, 06:55 (2259 days ago) @ unoudid

I'm not against single-ocupant bathrooms. I'm against single-occupant gender-specific bathrooms. It's stupid to have people waiting to use the "men's room" when the "women's room" is identical except for signage. Or vice versa.

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Bathroom Fixture Counts

by unoudid @, Somewhere over the rainbow, Sunday, January 21, 2018, 10:30 (2259 days ago) @ Vortech

I'm not against single-ocupant bathrooms. I'm against single-occupant gender-specific bathrooms. It's stupid to have people waiting to use the "men's room" when the "women's room" is identical except for signage. Or vice versa.

I completely agree with that. We run into this issue a lot on projects I work on. After a certain point you are required to have a minimum of one each to meet building codes. In practice though, once you pass the code review, you can switch those two single gender specific restrooms into two uni-sex restrooms. you design the bathrooms the exact same, and then you just put up a uni-sex sign instead of a men's and women's sign.

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Job posting

by Funkmon @, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 08:32 (2262 days ago) @ Kahzgul

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Job posting

by Kahzgul, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 19:45 (2261 days ago) @ Funkmon

https://www.google.com/search?ei=ruteWu7sKuGR0wLA4oHwDw&q=jobs+bungie+jobs&oq=jobs+bungie+jobs&gs_l=psy-a...

Everyone here should apply.

How many of us actually live in or are willing to relocate to Bellview, Washington, though? Personally, they would have to nearly double my current income for me to justify uprooting my whole family, which is, ah, exceedingly unlikely.

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I would, but no chance of getting it.

by Funkmon @, Thursday, January 18, 2018, 21:59 (2261 days ago) @ Kahzgul

And I think Narc would. He loves moving.

You can do it!

by CougRon, Auburn, WA, USA, Friday, January 19, 2018, 13:15 (2261 days ago) @ Funkmon

Narcogen would be good at it but don’t sell yourself short.

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I would, but no chance of getting it.

by Kahzgul, Saturday, January 20, 2018, 19:13 (2259 days ago) @ Funkmon

And I think Narc would. He loves moving.

You don't get 100% of the jobs you don't apply for.

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I would, but no chance of getting it.

by narcogen ⌂ @, Andover, Massachusetts, Sunday, January 21, 2018, 19:07 (2258 days ago) @ Funkmon

And I think Narc would. He loves moving.

What job is it in particular?

That link for me just goes to the front page of their Careers site.

UPDATE: Nevermind, I found it... applied.

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Isn't Urk still part of that team?

by Vortech @, A Fourth Wheel, Sunday, January 21, 2018, 06:59 (2259 days ago) @ Kahzgul

- No text -

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