Nurturing Talent Directly: Face
Time
Go and talk to students. Get your staff
to return to their old universities as alumni lecturers -- they have
a foot in the door and universities love to promote them as it shows
the undergraduates that they really can succeed. This is what we do.
Last year we delivered around 20 lectures across the UK and this year
there'll be even more. Deliver lectures on real subjects like "Real
Time Computation of Global Illumination" and "The History
of Computer Game Development" -- not "Come and work for Rare,
we rock".
I recently delivered the inaugural
lecture to the first-years at my old university, all 1200 of them in
the science faculty on their first day. Funny thing was, one of the
lecturers had been trying to get a computer game development society
off the ground for years and failed because the first-years just wanted
to party. This year he's done it. They actually went to him to ask if
they could set one up because they wanted to make sure they get into
the games industry when they graduate, and all for a few hours of my
time.
Giving undergraduates something tangible
to aim for that also seems attainable helps lecturers so much,
by generating enthusiasm in their class, and it's well known that when
someone is enthusiastic they apply themselves and usually achieve better
results.
Nurturing Talent Indirectly: Meeting
Time
As I said earlier, some courses are
good, some not so. Should we ignore the bad ones? Or is it better to
try and help them improve with advice and guidance? After all, if educators
are trying to generate employable graduates but no one tells them what
qualities that person needs, that just makes their job even harder.
The main thing that helps universities here is just talking to developers
to see what makes our industry tick, but it's worth remembering that
we have a responsibility to explain our needs at a higher level than
solving our immediate development problems.
 I've seen so many courses where they
are teaching the use of a specific package because a developer has said
it's very important to do so. Unfortunately this is completely wide
of the mark, teaching an undergraduate 3DSMAX or Maya or Visual Studio
or DirectX is NOT giving them transferable skills.
They are useful additions,
yes, but shape, form, color theory etc. for art, software engineering,
math, concurrent programming for software, that's where the real skills
lie. Packages can be learned on the job. Educators want to know this
kind of thing, but obviously they're not as attractive to students as
"learning to program an Xbox 360" so we have to help them
out by explaining first-hand to the undergraduates what our business
is about.
In the UK there are also some great
organizations and events that help us to engage with academics. Skillset
(The Skills Council for the Audio Visual Industries) currently has a
program of accreditation for courses, which are based on criteria, arrived
at by developers and the Skills Council. GamesEdu is a conference that
runs alongside the UK's Develop conference with the aim of bringing
together developers and educators to discuss all aspects of our relationship.
Dare to be Digital is a wonderful student game design and creation competition
run yearly, there is now a game development track for Microsoft's own
Imagine Cup and there are many more around the world -- this is my call
for you to get involved.
The Payoff
So we go to universities, give lectures
and meet the staff and students whenever we can, we also send as many
different staff out as possible and have a varied roster of lectures,
but does it actually pay off? The obvious answer is yes, but
it's not an easy thing to track and the benefits of one lecture alone
are quite difficult to see sometimes.
The obvious thing to do is ask your
applicants where they heard about your studio and if they had met, or
attended a lecture by, one of your staff in the past. However, if that
applicant met them three or four years ago as a first-year student then
there is a huge gap between investment and payoff.
Being part of an
organization like Microsoft lets us take this long-term view and hopefully
help grow the industry talent pool -- yes, it benefits other studios
too, but I think we have to get over that. If it benefits your studio
and the industry as a whole, that can only be a good thing. So, putting
my money where my mouth is, let's look at a few examples of this payoff
working.
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Historically I came back to college to study games as a new skill. I worked in I.T and technology for many years and one of the things you said rings very true.
I am 30, I think the industry might drop me for that as well so I do not put my date of birth on my CV. I get the feeling they want young code monkeys. Some one that can burn out, and I feel that this might not be the industry for me. Having worked in technology I know the difference between a good and a bad place to work, and can feel the company culture from interviews. This whole area scares me. I do not want to leave college to be overworked and underpaid, as I am already doing this in the college :)
This is why I am looking into getting back into web technology and looking at gaming from a social networking perspective. My Final year project is pretty much about this, and the problem is that the companies I have been interviewed by generally pass over my final year project , I have no portfolio as the college never nurtured the creation of any such thing.
I feel I am onto a losing streak here , and its pretty depressing , I think all of this article should be taken as the new recruitment gospel in the Industry. Thanks Nick for having the guts to point this stuff out.
You don't have to believe me, just use logic and life experience: Hire someone out of school. Watch as the people hired 3 years ago in the company begin to feel old, or no longer feel they are the shining apple of their boss's eye. Observe as the older engineers form cliques, and feel threatened by the new hire. Soon, they say "screw it, they give the new guy the stuff they used to give me before I became valuable at memory management/network coding/mundane but important task", and leave the company. Rinse, and repeat.
What you are left with are has-been mentors who are too insecure to strike out on their own, so they power trip the wide-eyed callow young hires who will eventually become envious of the cracker-jack kid right out of school who they will say "has not paid his dues yet, why should he design/have input/not make coffee???" Again, rinse and repeat.
In closing, I beseech the young people reading this to heed my warning: do not follow the path the author has laid out in this article. Rare wants the best people to "mold"? Read: The best people to use. They have a bottom line and rent to pay, just like everyone else.
They want young people who don't have families of their own so they can work you 60-70 hours a week because that's what all your peers will do. At least, the ones without families. Those with kids/wife/life are called "managers", and are not truly necessary to the end goal: making money.
It steams me to no end that Gamasutra would not advocate getting together with your friends/classmates, getting day jobs, and working on your dreams at night. That's what I do. Way more payoff, and I never feel like I am getting screwed.
RARE may be a great company but the fact is that the industry as a whole is really screwed up. If you have any involvement with the actual production and development of the game then expect to be working weekends and putting in 60+ hours a week.
I currently work on high profile console titles and what I'm saying comes from 5 years of experience. Do yourself, your family, and your friends a favor and get a different gig coming out of college. Work for a company or two that are very stable and offer you a decent salary and plenty of free time. Use some of that free time to work with other people in your boat on a decent portfolio and the other part of that free time sewing your oats and getting a steady partner for life.
ONLY THEN would I advise you to get into the gaming industry. At this point you will have:
- enough real world working experience under your belt to allow you to negotiate your salary and schedule.
- game development experience (outside of school) that has proven you have the drive and the know how
- a spouse / would-be spouse that will be there to support you and stand by you through the *crunch* times
people to use', when you have no idea about what working at Rare is like. Nick does explictly warn against doing this very thing, and I can tell you from experience that Rare does not treat employees the way you describe. Maybe Rare is a minority on this issue, and maybe that was one of the reasons why Nick wanted to write this article?
I came to Rare straight out of school. We work 9-5 except in crunch (which is a very rare occurnce, no pun intended - I've only been here for two years yet, but I've yet to be asked to stay late), except when I *choose* to stay longer. There's no pressure here, most of the time people really do leave around five - but occasionally you may want to stay late and finish something off.
I agree that treating employees the way you describe is horrible, and hurts the industry as a whole, but I do think that we should encourage the few companies that do treat their employees well and hope that others follow suit, rather than just blindly spew bile all over the industry.
On the last programming project I managed, i had a team of 18 programmers, of which around 10 were raw graduates or equivalent when
they were hired. Whilst this isn't as high as Rare's 90% graduate to experienced develop stat, it's my belief that it's a more useful recruitment mix.
One of the things i find far more concerning is the belief from companies that they only need to recruit fresh graduates as experienced developers are somehow tarnished through their experiences.
From my experiences, I found that experienced staff have got a colossal amount to offer, usually far in excess of graduates. The issue with some staff is that it can take a while to break down the issues that have been built up from previous jobs, but once you can get though that, you normally end up with staff with a burning desire to create great stuff
and the experience to get round most of the issues that often fox new programmers.
I think it's great the Rare is building links with academia to create and interest in their company and in the games industry in general, but please recruiters, don't overlook the colossal benefits of experienced staff.
I'd much rather want some young guy that thought I was a god and a buddy who took care of him and his dreams. I do like helping other people and feeling their gratitude towards me, don't get me wrong. It is satisfying and would probably drive me into the Uni's to do lectures. It would also remind me of my early days and their youthful enthusiasm for games makes me feel for a second that my work might have had some meaning. I need to stop kidding myself that doing good things and being nice is purely because I'm such a nice guy.
The reality is that running a games company is bloody hard and competitive so I wouldn't expect any charity. I'm not imagining or expecting that any of my staff would come to my aid if things go bad either. If you want to be in control of your own destiny then create your own or do something else. I have my dream too, which is to drive a Ferrari and/or a DB7 and I'd need to balance that against your needs. I might be able to save 10k per person per year and if I exclude the agency fees which I might be able to if I write articles and get direct hires then that's a 100k per 10 staff members per year probably.
I'd also try to make sure that my studio was somewhere that wasn't too easy to get to, as that would hopefully keep people longer at work, it also creates a sense of isolation and peacefulness which reminds me of what the middle ages were like in monasteries. They didn't have kids either there or they were frowned upon, but worked together in silent brotherly love and appreciation for a higher common goal. Any suffering just made them feel closer. If someone got cynical and said god didn't exist, they had to go as well so lots of parallels there.
I might consider providing new recruits with a version which is the glossy sob story with the violins or the harsh truth of the matter. I'd probably feel gratitude towards someone that had worked for me for a while and would hope they wouldn't feel bad if I had to let them go, but life is life and a company has to watch the bottom line or it won't exist or make decent profits.
I've been reading Gamasutra for 10+ years regularly and have not commented on a single article because no other article sounded alarms in my brain as much as this one. And if my voice is shrill, well...shouldn't an alarm be shrill for people to react to it?
Sadly, companies prey, and will continue to prey on the wide eyed exuberant fresh graduate who is darned lucky to be working in the games industry.
Tell me, Rare employee, do you get a piece of the action if the game does well? Do you suffer if the game pans out? Probably not. My opinion, and I'll reiterate it, is for any young graduate thinking of getting into the gaming business. You will be better served learning the subtle office politics, general business lessons, and professional nuances of working with highly engineered or creative types in a regular 9-5 software shop.
There, you'll learn about egos, both easily bruised and "how does that guy get his head thru the door each morning?", deadlines, teamwork, etc. without the headaches of 50 starving students pretty much wanting to kill for your job because they think it will be glamorous.
Unless you hire on as a game developer, and you have proven properties that sell, the most you are going to have input on is what color your cog is, or how many teeth it will have. And that's about it. It becomes a job like any other, only now you have a car payment, and your friends want you to party every Friday night after work...only you have to turn them down because you have to work a "half day" on Saturday, but how's about Sat. night? Well, along comes Mr. Monday morning, and you got bills to pay, and a friendly boss who kindly reminds you about free dinners until you get your cog built, cuz you're really good at building that one shiny cog. The grind of making a living , and you thought doing something you love would be great.
Call me cynical, or bitter, or whatever, because what I AM...and what I write, are two different things. I have since taken the road of developing games in my own time, with my own cash, and working a steady 9-5 job that I like, and I am infinitely happier. Rather then judge me, just follow your dreams, or better still, the dreams that Rare says they can help you fulfill...and then get back to me in about 3-5 years.
I see that you're bitter, but understand that your experience is not everyone's experience, and I think you're projecting your own bad experience on the rest of the industry which paints a highly inaccurate picture.
Exactly. 90% graduates means only that they were graduates when hired, not that 90% of the present staff is just off the university campus. (Nick says right at the beginning that he himself was an example, and he's been at Rare for ten years! Hardly a rookie...)
Shigeru Miyamoto is a game creator. Will Wright is a game creator. David Perry is a game creator.
Recent grad being wooed by Rare : NOT A GAME CREATOR.
Getting a degree in game making, or computer science, or whatever and then hiring on into a game company will not get you this COVETED title. I'll just submit an article to Gamasutra to explain this to you. Either Gamasutra or the author is trying to mislead people, and the record needs to be set straight.