Everybody's Blogging!

And Rob "Xemu" Fermier of System Shock and Age of Mythology is blogging also. He's apparently at work on some new IP - such a rare, delicate thing in this day and age - but of course he won't tell us anything about it.

Here's an interesting thing I heard about Ensemble - like the Rise of Nations team - they hire by consensus. If any one person vetoes a new hire, that new hire is out.

A practice like this has its cons and pros.

One con is it becomes nearly impossible to hire anybody. I think they have at least fifty people - so that means getting fifty people to agree on something. It's nearly impossible to make ten people agree on a place to go to lunch, so how on earth can fifty people agree on a new hire? By the time they've come to a decision the prospective employee may have been snapped up by someone else! When we hired Andrei Pokrovsky, I was upset that I wasn't consulted, but Don told me that another company was bidding on Andrei also, so he made a command decision and made an offer. And Andrei quickly become one of our MVP's - without him Spider-Man 2 would have been a different game.

Another con is what Parkinson (or was it Peter? Too lazy to look it up.) called 'injelitis' - some people don't want to hire people who are better than them, because then that person will get promoted past them. They'll write it up as 'personality conflict' but really it's a mixture of insecurity and jealousy.

A "good" way to make a big pile of cash in the games industry is to grow your company rapidly - get as many game contracts as you can and staff as quickly as possible. Don't let on that you're doing this, but you can even use the money from new projects to finish the old projects. Then sell the company before everything caves in on you. (Easier said than done.) A hiring policy like Ensemble's will not support this strategy.

That said, I would love to work at a place that had a policy like this - that is, if I didn't already have my dream job. As long as injelitis doesn't strike, you're guaranteed a close-knit team of talented people, the single most important thing when you're trying to make good games. Which could be a big part of the reason why Ensemble can make a game just as good as Warcraft 3 in three years instead of four years and four months. (I'm going by gaps in release dates, here.)

Comments

[Badman]

Rob Fermier is who I want to be when I grow up. (Well, not REALLY, but you get the idea.) I think the fact that he's blogging (and that Ensemble seems to be cool with the idea) is awesome. I can't believe how many great game development blogs have started up just in the last year!

I like to listen to Rob's web lecture on data-driven engine design while I program. It's available on Gamasutra at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/slides/fermier/index.htm .

[Patrick Sullivan]

I've always prefered a variant of that hiring strategy. The team the person is getting hired into votes on the hiring. If they are some sort of lead (team or otherwise) then the rest of the games or companies (depending on where in the dev process things are) decide. This way more people are happy but it doesn't become quite so... overblowm a process to hire something as simple as a concept artist heh.

[Tom Henderson]

One problem with this system is that it assumes that everyone in your company knows how to interview, which is hardly likely to be true. Interviewing is a skill although this fact is often ignored, especially in our industry. I've been interviewed extremely poorly several times by game companies.

On the general subject of hiring my pet peeve is companies that set absurd hoops to initial submission. This includes designing whole levels and taking 10 paage questionaires just to be able to submit a resume! The idea is to filter out frivilous candidates but what your really filtering out is people who value their time. I'm not talking about some sort of test later on in the hiring process, when BOTH sides are commiting their time, but just to submit a resume. Even if I had the time I wouldn't submit to any company that arrogant.

[Rob "Xemu" Fermier]

Badman, you're making me blush! Glad you enjoyed that GDC lecture -- I hope to do an updated version of it at some future GDC with all the lessons learned finishing that project and since then.

Anyways, yeah, it's true, Ensemble's hiring processes is wholly by consensus. I totally agree with Jamie that it has it's cons... it definitely isn't for all companies. Fortunately once you reach a critical mass that can support that kind of hiring process, it can become self-sustaining. It has undeniably cost us a few hires, but IMO one bad hire is a lot more devastating to your company in a small, close-knit environment than very slow growth.

[Paul "Gamegeek" Stephanouk]

Ensemble's success with the group-hire process was a major factor in Big Huge Games' decision to go with that style of hiring. It's not as easy to do as it sounds but the results are worth the effort.

[Tom Henderson]

It also seems like a system whose success is hard to measure. How would you know? Your certainly expending more resources in the form of developer time. On the other hand Rob Fermier's point about bad hires being expensive is well taken.

[Jamie Fristrom]

You can't prove stuff like this, of course - sample size too small and all that. But I'm more than willing to do crazy things on the basis of a couple anecdotes, because that's really all we've got...

[Tom Henderson]

In that case I should tell you the story about the coworker named Jamie who gave me all his mooney.

[Badman]

Oddly enough, I was recently reading an article on Blizzard's history and Blizzard's hiring policy is that you must be a gamer. If you're not a serious gamer then they wouldn't hire you (this article was a few years old, I'm not sure if that policy is still in place). They also said this lead to them having to turn down some very talented people, which was painful...but it did an effective job of promoting the company culture they desired.

I'd love to go to a job interview and be asked, "What are your five favorite video game characters?"

[Badman]

Doh. I broke the first rule of the internet - if you mention a site, post the URL:

http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/blizzard/