Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

Everyone in high tech tends to think highly of themselves and their outsized impact on humanity. Every new form of internet-plus-pizza-delivery or mental-nicotine-as-a-service we are slamming in front of your eyeballs is a part of some grand revolution. People glare daggers at me when I talk about the current generation of generative AI and how it is largely a machine that averages collective human output. “Our AI is just average?” People exclaim, “That is just mean!” Yessir, I am making that kind of math-based word joke this morning. I am not proud.

Despite my previous short story about machine intelligence I am pretty optimistic about augmenting human intelligence with machine-based intelligence. I know many people out there fear that our machines will rise up against us, and I appreciate your concerns. I know many people cheered the day that it was clear we would replace all of the slow-moving truck drivers, who cut us off on the freeway, with machines—and subsequently became dismayed when it became easier for computers to create artwork. “We want to get rid of the bad jerbs and keep the good jerbs” is something people say to make themselves feel better.

I don’t know that we are on the precipice of welcoming our new machine overlords yet, nor do I think that there is anything to be gained by warning potential investors in AI that “if you bring about AGI, then your investment may help collapse the value of money and put the entire world out of work.” You can Google the origins of that. I tried three times to find the link that included the disclaimer I read yesterday… Aaand then I got tired.

As an early-stage startup enthusiast, I should be more excited about generative AI than I am. Have I become jaded through twenty-five years of this? It is hard to say. I will say that this weekend’s news about Sam Altman And The Very Important Board Conversation has certainly captured a great deal of high-tech mindshare.

So, let’s talk about that for all of you future-CEOs out there.

I have been blessed with some great friends, advisors, and attorneys over the years. Sometimes, people were all three of these things at the same time. I will say that I did more than a little homework on what it means to start a company, and having spent some time in school serving as a part of student government organizations, I think that it is important for people to understand the notion of governance, and your good friends on the Board of Directors.

I have observed over the years that this is one of those things that most people learn the hard way after going through an experience that equates to something that will make it hard for them to sit down for a couple of days. Almost every founder I know has shared a horrible story about how their startup experience went sideways. While OpenAI is a very large company, we are seeing the exact same phenomenon here.

The whole OpenAI story has not yet been written, and with wild claims about employees and investors alike poking the OpenAI board to bring Sam Altman back, I am curious to see where this ends up in a week’s time, a month’s time, and a year’s time.

I hope everyone involved is looking hard at themselves in the mirror and trying to figure out what they could have done differently leading up to Sam Altman’s Very Curious Friday. Given his tweets (and talents), I am not very worried for him. He seems like the kind of person who has plenty of options and will land on his feet.

What about the Board and the employees involved in the decisions leading up to this moment? They are not in the exact same position, in my opinion.

So, what are some takeaways for all of you future CEOs?

Make sure you understand the makeup of your Board. If you are struggling with this, watch a few seasons of Survivor. The Board of Directors is kind of like the people who vote on the show’s overall winner. At many startups, the CEO will sit on the Board of Directors, and in some cases, they will also be the Chairman. Many investors ask for board seats when they write you a big fat check. Some CEOs also appoint “independent board members” around the same time to ensure they have a good representation when voting for important things. Given what is happening at OpenAI, and conversations to bring Sam Altman back as CEO, I wonder how many of the current Board of Directors will still be there in a week’s time if he is brought back?

Make sure you understand your stock position and your voting rights. The voting rights of many shareholders in a few companies are just polite fiction. Facebook, Zynga, and several other startups had unique corporate structures that put a lot of voting power into one person’s hands. You can see several activist shareholders in big companies like Disney, et cetera, buying blocks of shares before making big moves to change the company. I don’t know that this applies much to OpenAI, but you should educate yourself about it when you build your company.

Make sure you are communicating clearly with your board. This last point is the most important. This was certainly missing here. If you are all communicating well as a leadership team, you don’t Red-Wedding a CEO at a moment’s notice. You also don’t do it on a Friday, but that is a personal quibble. I would hope that anyone taking an OpenAI paycheck is taking a mental health day or three next week as a result of the craziness unfolding. I doubt we will see everyone’s Very Best Work on Monday.

Make sure you are doing the right thing for the right reasons. If everything we read about the motivations for the Altman Incident is all to improve the general safety and goodliness of “Making AI Safe Again,” then this is probably literally the dumbest thing you could do. So, let’s spend three minutes going through the worst-case scenario here. You are taking the person who is the world leader in raising money and pushing the commercialization of generative AI and forcing him out of your non-profit at a moment’s notice on very unfriendly terms. Are you expecting them to go into the corner and sit down quietly for a few years to think about what they did wrong? Or more likely, are they going to go and talk to all of the thirsty check-writing investors out there about how to get absurdly wealthy off of the next iteration of “new internet something-something AI,” alongside the loyal army of well-paid software engineers who are willing to follow them? It seems that is a very likely outcome that will diminish the capabilities of OpenAI even before we ask the question: “With Sam Altman as a competitor unfettered by quote-unquote safety goals, who would write a check to the remnants of OpenAI to keep their staff paid at exorbitant levels, and their server farms running?”

If you measure everything carefully on the surface, Sam Altman has considerable leverage here. There are rumors he is being asked back to the company, and honestly, given everything that has happened, I don’t know how they could make that attractive for him, let alone acceptable. Sam Altman strikes me as the kind of person who is not afraid of getting fired, as is demonstrated by the evidence of… you know… getting fired, and I wager he could raise a pretty substantive pile of money to start NOPEnAI tomorrow.

That is what I think about the whole situation. Who knows what is happening at OpenAI while I write this article, and even what will happen before I publish it?

The only thing for certain is that this is a good opportunity to learn about startups and leadership.

I wish everyone involved the best of luck sorting everything out!

See you next week.

Last week’s blog post was a lot of fun, wasn’t it? I was pleased to find Oasis was available for sale on Steam, giving me a chance to own it again, for the third time. This week, we will return to “career stuff”. In at least two separate conversations this week, I observed the professional importance of being uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable generally means you are in a state of hard practice, which I think is necessary to grow. When I talk to people about taking on their first leadership opportunities, I tell them to be prepared to be in emotional freefall, because they will constantly be on the precipice of failure.

What I find interesting is that I get a large amount of “yeah yeah yeah” for about the first four months, followed by two to eight months of “holy shit, you are not kidding!”

This stuff is hard, kids, and largely because after spending years refining your expertise in one role, you are not quite prepared to change how you think about everything around you in your new role.

If you are being offered a leadership role, I want you to realize that for an indeterminate amount of time, you will be in a steady state of perpetual failure. You will not have enough information to make decisions. You will not have enough time to get everything done. You will not have enough resources for your projects to complete.

You will do one of a few things when you realize this is happening.

First, you might resort to your default tendency, which means doing IC (individual contributor) work alongside your team. This is not without consequences. It means you will spend less time looking at the overall big picture, and also, if you are really good at your job, you may discourage your team when they see how fast or efficiently you do their work. I have seen strong ICs in their first leadership roles blow up their team’s morale and desire to succeed by taking all their projects over the finish line.

Second, you might immediately go into reactive mode. This also hurts because if you spend all your time solving problems, you are abdicating your leadership. You are not setting your team’s direction or pace, and they will begin to resort to their default tendencies. If this happens long enough, your team will go off the rails.

Third, you might resort to extreme negativity. You will describe everything as a risk or a concern and spend so much time collecting all of the “whaddabouts” that you will go into analysis paralysis and render yourself and your team useless.

So what should you do?

First thing, you should take a deep breath. I spend a decent amount of time telling people they should remember to breathe. You cannot let it all overwhelm you.

Second, you should ask, “What is important?” Do you have a list of everything sorted by priority? You should take a look at the most important things first. Once you have a sense of what it would take to get your organization’s most important tasks done, you can pick up the most important thing that has to get done, and make sure it is underway. 

Next, ask, “Do we have any easy wins?” If you have a gigantic slog through the mud for your most important task, is it worthwhile to do a small project to give everyone an easy win and a well-deserved victory lap? I generally tell people that doing large projects can feel like trying to eat a thousand pounds of cardboard—the only way you can do it is one mouthful at a time. Sometimes, it is important to break up that cardboard-chewing to boost team morale.

Finally, you should also make sure you are communicating your concerns to the organization. I remember the first time I had to get on the phone with an executive to discuss a multi-million-dollar production problem. I was terrified of what the reaction would be. When I made the call, I was rewarded with a grateful-sounding “Thank you for letting me know!” The leadership team immediately went into problem-solving mode. I assure you that while you may be afraid of making the call to communicate a problem, it is much worse to be radio silent and for executive leadership to learn about problems from somewhere else! I spend a lot of time trying to instill in people the importance of early communication about issues. The more time you have to think about a problem, the more likely you will have an intelligent solution.

When leveling up into a leadership role, you need to develop new habits and ways of thinking. Make sure you give yourself enough time to develop these behaviors. Reflecting on week-over-week performance and feeling discouraged is easy because nothing feels different in the near term. Most people taking on leadership roles have been getting frequent feedback up to this point. You will need to get accustomed to getting less and less direct feedback the higher you go professionally.

Thank you for reading along! If you are looking for a good read, I am going to attempt to squeeze some nickels out of Jeff Bezos, trying to sell you a copy of my favorite book on habits: The Power of Habit. Of course, you are habitual non-clickers on my Amazon Affiliate links. I will start dropping vapid top-ten links soon since my refined attempts to instill great purchasing habits have failed.

I shall return next week, zero billion dollars richer.

They say you will eventually be the villain in someone else’s story. What happens when you become the villain in your own story? This story is fifty percent confession and fifty percent personal therapy.

In 2003, I took a role as Director of Development at Digital Chocolate. I did not have the presence of mind to advocate for a higher-level role. While I probably did not qualify for it on paper, I think it would have helped the business immeasurably due to how the first year turned out. By six months, I had simultaneously shipped one of the better-selling launch titles for the company and turned in a resignation. I think I have spoken about some of those challenges in other blog posts, and I appreciate that Trip talked me out of quitting. At the same time, the next six months were essentially me trying to make sense of being on the struggle bus.

Enter Oasis.

One of our developer partners for mobile games at the time was Mind Control Software, a company helmed by Andrew Leker. Andrew is a game developer’s game developer. I really enjoyed learning game design from Andrew and his entire team. While they were developing one of Digital Chocolate’s early titles, he was also developing a great little game called Oasis.

I don’t remember how it came up, but I was able to get a copy of the game early on to help test it.

It was love at first sight.

Oasis is essentially a speed-round of Civilization. It captures the charm, beauty, and mystery of the early phase of Civilization. This is the part of the game I totes adorbs. You have a finite number of turns to build up your cities into a connected nation-state, and when the turns are up, a barbarian horde descends on the map and tries to destroy it.

I could spend about an hour or two explaining all the intricacies of Oasis and still not be close to capturing how magical this game is.

Andrew and his team knew I was in love with their game, and I sincerely appreciated the opportunity to test it and give some feedback on the product. I probably drunk-texted my appreciation to Andrew a little too much. I was having an unusual year, and this was one of those “mistakes were made” moments for me. That year at GDC, they made t-shirts for Oasis, and I remember calling Andrew and asking if I could have the game logo ironed onto the inside of the shirt instead of the outside so it could be closer to my heart.

I loved that little game so much. I still do.

The best part about this little love story is that I have a credit on Mobygames as a scenario designer. Don’t stare too hard at the rest of my credits, you filthy creepers, because it does not include a plethora of games that I am proud of. Let us go back to the story.

Before the game went live, Andrew asked me if I would help test out the level design system for the game. I told him that I would not do it. Just kidding. I leaped into that with both feet. They had a configuration file you could use to tune levels, and I was happy to put it through its paces. I spent the next few days on evenings and weekends making an interesting little twelve-part story that was expressed through the configuration file.

I was incredibly grateful for this opportunity to do something creative due to the work challenges I was having at Digital Chocolate. I feel quite strongly that side projects give people tremendous benefits, and while I was filing at the bars of my cage at work, this project gave me amazing therapeutic value.

After sending it over to Andrew and his team to check it out, he called me up and gave me kudos for making an interesting story. He asked me if it was okay to include it in the final shippable game. Be still my beating heart! Of course, I said yes! I was humbled that this creative extracurricular task would see the light of day!

I remember being excited to check it out when the game finally shipped. It won two awards at the Independent Games Festival that year, one for game design and one for the Seamus McNally Award for downloadable games. I bought two copies of the game. One digital copy as soon as it was available so I could play the game and support indie development. I also bought a physical copy when I finally found one in a game store because I am one of those “must buy the physical thing” people.

I remember unlocking my little scenario in the game and playing it through.

This is where the lovely Hallmark Movie music starts to slow down and go off-key.

I have to change gears a second and talk about John, the player of games. One of the things that I tell people who want to pursue a career in games is that you never look at games the same way again. You always have this observer on your shoulder, taking notes and making fourth-wall-breaking comments as you play. You ask yourself what you like. You ask yourself what you don’t like. You gently “tut tut” gaffes in the first-time user experience and reflect on how you would improve this game. I am no different. Thankfully, there are a few games where their blazing brilliance makes this voice a tiny whisper at best. Terraria, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Vampire Survivors, and Ultima IV are the best games by this unusual measure. It does mean I have a small stack of games that I fear to open. The little angry observer on my shoulder glares at me as I write this because he wants to be heard. I fear his voice, and I want to turn to him and scream, “Just let me play the fucking game!” 

There are a few chief criticisms that he levels at some games, and two of them are ones I vehemently agree with.

The first thing that I detest is jumping puzzles. There are a few jumping puzzles in World of Warcraft. There is precisely one entrance to a dungeon with a jumping puzzle, and I avoid it like the plague. Shame on the level designer who thought I would look for one-up mushrooms and hidden coins in Kalimdor. Super Mario is four doors down.

The second thing I detest is cheap designer meta-gaming. Sometimes, a developer constructs an “aha” moment inside of a game where, to solve a particular problem, you need a piece of player knowledge that is generally only available by attempting the puzzle and failing to solve it. “Ha ha ha! Stupid player!” He intones, as you die and hit the retry button, “I am smarter than you!” I hate that so much because it is a stupid design trick.

You can see where this is going.

The scenario I constructed for Oasis had a player traveling through twelve islands. Each island included different challenges and used different parts of the scenario design tools. By the time I got to the eleventh island, I was largely out of good ideas. Without going into too much detail, each city in the game could include a treasure that would help you, and in one case, the city could also include a traitor that would turn the city against you at the end. I decided to test this out and make a level where you needed to waste a click on every city because I made every city except for one possess one of these traitors. That meant you needed to find one city and beef it up like crazy to survive the game-ending assault.

That is right. 

“Ha ha ha! Stupid player! I am smarter than you!”

There is a brief hint in the narrative that this moment is coming. The only way to really understand how to beat this level is to get to the end of it and see how many traitors are on the map.

That is right. In the interests of science, testing, and love of a great game, I defaulted to the most base of all designer patterns and trumpeted my shameful cleverness over the player base.

I became the thing that I hated the most.

The good news is that while the game was celebrated as an amazing design marvel and is essentially “a game developer’s game,” it was not a commercial success. Very few players were harmed by this.

It is simultaneously one of the things I am proud of, having contributed to the scenario design of a game I love to play, and ashamed of for the unspeakable crime I committed against my own design sensibilities.

What an amazing journey, right? I am emotionally spent after confessing my professional sins here.

I have to apologize for not writing anything last week. I did not put my “See you next week!” post-it note. Last week was Halloween weekend, and high winds and scheduling conspired to blow up my writing habit as I struggled to get my various and sundry decorations set up for Tuesday’s festivities. We go all in on Halloween here. Full-sized candy bars. Giant inflatable spiders and pumpkins. We even have a twelve-foot arch where most neighborhood holiday selfies happen. So it is for a good cause. I ignored you all because of the children. I would put an Amazon Affiliate Link for the said arch. Alas, it was a Spirit of Halloween purchase, so I cannot unreasonably collect nickels from Mister Bezos.

I hope you forgive the gap, and I will see you all next week.

One of the most important things you can do as a leader is to coach people. I do this with coworkers, I do this with my family, and I do this with about half a dozen other people on a part-time basis. Helping people grow is really awesome, and most times, it is its own reward.

It is also very hard to do. One thing I remember from childhood was watching my father try to coach my brothers on the farm. Sometimes, he would explain a particular job to them, and it was clear they weren’t interested in learning to do it his way. He was pretty insistent about doing it his way because he learned some painful lessons in the process. When it was clear he was not getting through after repeated explanations, he would sigh and tell them, “Remember, when you are sticking your hand in the fire, you are dragging my hand along with yours.”

It was a particularly gruesome metaphor that stuck with me all these years because it was so apt. Now that I am all growed up and managing people, I find myself understanding where he was coming from. Sometimes, the people you are coaching will ignore your recommendations because you learned something valuable from failing that you are trying to convey to them in words.

So what can you do?

Welcome to the world of indirect coaching.

Indirect coaching happens when you help someone decide independently rather than telling them directly what they should do.

The Socratic Method is one way you can indirectly coach people. You can ask a series of questions to people to help them understand the outcome.

“What do you think you should do here?”

“How will the customer respond to your change?”

“What will happen when you push that code to production?”

“What will the product management team say about the changes to this feature?”

“Is there anything missing in your proposal?”

There are lots of questions you can ask people to see if they can reason it out on their own.

Sometimes, the answers you will get need to be corrected and indicate a lack of awareness or understanding of some element of the problem you are working through. This happens more often than you think.

When faced with someone not responding to coaching, you can walk them through a few likely scenarios about what will happen, or perhaps have a deeper conversation to help them become aware of things they are not considering when making their decisions.

Another effective indirect coaching tool is to rope in an additional leader or coach to help teach a valuable lesson. This is an especially powerful tool if you have teenagers and they have sports coaches or influential teachers. Whenever I needed to give my oldest son some important feedback, I would ask one of his coaches to talk to him about it. I have also asked peers at work, and sometimes even my boss, to help coach people on my teams. Bringing another voice to the conversation is an excellent coaching tool.

These are just a few ways you can coach people more effectively. Understand that people learn and grow differently; not everyone will respond to the same coaching techniques. Developing your coaching repertoire also takes time, so it is better to start experimenting sooner rather than later.

I tell everyone interested in leading and coaching that they should consider volunteering for a youth sports organization. I learned much about coaching people from AYSO soccer and Little League baseball. Both organizations give you a lot of training on how to grow and nurture young athletes. For young kids, you also get to witness a tremendous amount of growth and progress from eager and impressionable young minds over the course of the sports season.

The next time you are helping someone at work, and they are not picking up what you are putting down, maybe it is time to change your tactics. Try to coach them indirectly and see if it makes a difference.

We are closing in on the end of 2023. That means I am about to pour a dump truck of money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets for Christmas toys, and everyone is trying to think about next year’s career growth. I mean, I hope you are thinking about that and not just waiting all thirsty-like for your end-of-year bonus.

Do not get me wrong. It is nice to get that annual bump. Ultimately, if you want to get paid moar, you should think a bit more about the total package. When you are working for a public company, you probably have some Tweetable percentage of your income coming in the form of stock grants, and if you hit the two-year mark of employment, you should be prepared for that to be re-upped. Otherwise, I would work on that resume dot doc file and find out if the marketplace agrees with your employer on total net worth.

You might be raising your eyebrows here because so much of what I do for a living focuses on employee retention. Why am I telling you to consider testing the market for a cash upgrade?

That is a great question. Allow me to play Devil’s advocate to myself… while… playing Devil’s advocate to myself? Maybe that is a little too cerebral.

The end of the year is an important time to reflect on what you are getting as a total package for your time-in-role and efforts for your employer. And if you are unsatisfied with it, then you should ask yourself what needs to change.

Are you paid competitively for your role? Are you doing the right work to begin with? Is what you are doing now going to help you for “2028 You”? These are some important questions to ask yourself and presumably your manager.

If you do not have good answers here, and neither does your manager, maybe now is the time to explore getting a mentor. They might tell you that your cheddar looks “mighty fine” and that it is not a great time to be out pounding the pavement for some new nine-to-five digs.

If you are not really sure you can get paid better, then maybe the right answer is to skill up and get promoted from your current role.

So, how does one get promoted?

There are two paths to promotion. There are step-function role promotions in accordance with a promotions ladder according to some internal rubric. This is one of those things you find at bigger companies. Many companies maintain a published hierarchy of titles and roles for their various disciplines. Engineer, Senior Engineer, Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, and Staff Engineer are examples of a hierarchy of roles. Maybe they chose to stretch it out into four times as many titles by adding a Roman numeral at the end, and you need to go from Senior Engineer II to Senior Engineer III. These are reasonable career progressions to consider and generally include a slight bump in pay. The title matrix is usually much smaller at a startup and may not exist formally… yet.

At that point, you might ask yourself if there is a promotion to a different work style. For Individual Contributors (ICs) you might ask yourself if a management role is right for you.

This gets a lot trickier. Rather than a step function increase in your current responsibilities, you might need to make some transcendent changes to how you do things. Managers of ICs behave differently than ICs, and Managers of Managers behave differently than those two.

This is where coaching and mentoring help. Some companies possess progression plans for their teams and staff to support career growth. They may establish some goals and objectives for you to develop effectiveness in your new role and work with you to get there. It is tough to put a timetable on this. Speaking for myself, I have yet to progress along a given path to a promotion. I tended to have my head down and push on a particular set of problems until there was a human-sized hole in the organization created by attrition. About half the time, I would throw my hat in the ring to fill that hole. The other half of the time, someone would come to me and ask me to step into that role because it was urgent to fill it, and it was credible for me to do that work based on prior successes.

Working into a new role at an existing employer is a great way to level up professionally and generally includes some financial upside. If you are not experiencing a financial step up from this exercise, you should chalk it up as a win in the learning column of the “you are either learning or earning” fortune cookie mantra. After enough time-in-role, if your pointy-haired boss does not reward you for having more responsibility, you can use that to negotiate a new role at Not Working Here Anymore! I have always counseled people to avoid side-grades when looking at new opportunities. This is one of those rare times that I think that it makes sense.

So, let’s recap.

The end of the year is a good time to figure out if you are “earning or learning.”

A mentor is a valuable tool if you and your boss keep shaking a Magic Eight Ball to figure out what next year looks like.

Avoid career side grades.

And finally, John’s American Express card is about to get abused for Christmas.

Thank you for reading along. I posted yesterday to LinkedIn about Epic’s plans for item trading in Rocket League and why it makes me sadge. A pile of people from the web3 space started following me after that post. If you are one of those people, welcome to my blog! Yes, you are probably wondering why the hell I went from web3 to career management. That happens here—a lot. In the coming weeks, I also want to talk about how my most beloved video game design credit was earned doing a thing that I despise as a player. The storytelling is part of my therapy.

See you all soon!

I wrote a blog post about the importance of writing stuff down. I want to write a follow-up for a particular kind of writing: taking notes in meetings.

You will attend a lot of meetings throughout your career. Some of them will be good meetings, and some of them will be bad meetings. I have observed that the best meetings have someone officially taking notes.

Having someone taking notes helps make your meeting more effective. You will have a written record of items discussed that can be shared with those who attended the meeting and those who were not.

Meeting notes are an excellent place to capture action items from the meeting. An explicit list of people assigned action items ensures clarity regarding the next steps. Otherwise, people might not remember who is supposed to do what, especially if it was just said out loud once.

If you are having a follow-up meeting, the notes will help save time because everyone can quickly recap the previous meeting’s status.

The last thing I have observed is that teams that take great notes encourage people who do not feel they need to be in a particular meeting to skip it to do other, more meaningful work. Good notes should be enough to keep you “in the loop” if you need to stay informed.

How do you get someone to become a note-taker? And how do they get good at it? As with just about anything else, you need to practice. Taking notes in meetings is a hard habit to build and does distract at least one person’s focus from the meeting. It is so highly beneficial to everyone else that it is worth it. The next time you are in a meeting and do not have someone taking notes, I highly recommend volunteering.

Here are some tips to help you with note-taking.

Feel free to repeat something back to ensure you have the notes correct. It is better to do that in real-time. It also helps people understand that you can only write so fast, and people need to help you ensure the official record is correct.

Develop your own shorthand. You do not need to record everything word for word. Put your notes in point form to review later to see if they need refinement.

Send out the notes as fast as you can. It is best to send the notes the same day the meeting happened or very early the day after at the latest. If you send meeting notes a week later, you should stand in the corner and think about what you did wrong.

That is it. That is the whole blog post. Taking notes in meetings is important, and your teams will benefit from it. If no one you know is a good note-taker, this is a leadership skill you can develop for cheap or free. Speaking of cheap or free, this LARPing helmet is neither. But it is linked under the Amazon Affiliates program, and I get paid if you buy it. Halloween is around the corner, and who doesn’t want to run around with a bucket on their head? As a bonus, you can use it to double up on candy if you fill up your treat bag.

See you next week.

A long time ago, I was approached by a Little League coach. “Hey John, would you like to be my assistant coach this season?” He asked me. I replied, “I do not know anything about baseball.” He smiled cheerily and said, “Oh, I know that!”

I was confused about it for a while, but it had more to do with getting my son as a free draft pick than any actual ability on my part.

This was how I started going down a deep rabbit hole for several years. I now know far more about baseball than I thought could even exist. So why am I writing about baseball? Because there are some interesting things to learn about software development from baseball, including how teams function and, more importantly, how to learn new skills.

Today, we are going to talk about hard practice.

The first thing I remember after signing up for baseball coaching is sitting through the required “new coach” meetings. Little League, like so many youth sports organizations, gives you a tremendous foundation in how to work with young people and also how to not get sued. The next thing I did was go and find something on Amazon to throw some money at. Yes, that is correct — I bought some books on how to run baseball drills, including this one (disclaimer: cheerfully linked to Amazon even though you won’t buy it).

I have a lot more to say about youth sports at some point in the future, but I have about one more year of being silent about it because my son could still technically play baseball for a few more years at a college level. Yes, I have unkind things to say about the whole experience.

The one thing I personally learned from the experience is that you can learn how to develop new skills and habits by coaching youth sports. You get a great opportunity to see young and impressionable athletes applying themselves to become better players and achieve success or, in some cases, mastery of various skills needed to play the game.

Watch a college baseball tryout near you if you want to see some of this in action. You will observe that several assistant coaches will be near home plate conducting simultaneous drills in the infield, hitting balls to two different players simultaneously and having them throw across the field. Your first thought might be that this is dangerous—I was admittedly surprised nobody was getting clocked in the head by a baseball. This is done deliberately to help build situational awareness. While very few baseball games are played with multiple balls, you have multiple base runners, and being situationally aware is super important to the game’s success. I learned that around “13u”, for players thirteen and under, players realize that just because you can make a throw to attempt an out, sometimes it is better to hold onto the ball. I have seen kids many times airmail a ball over the head of a baseman, creating an opportunity for chaos and the other team to score.

So, how do we help players achieve these kinds of realizations? It is a mix of game time and hard practice.

Hard practice is practicing something at the edge of your competence, pushing yourself as hard as possible. If you are just half-assing your practice, you are not learning anything. I do not have any additional affiliate links to share for books you will not buy. Still, it was definitely discussed in several of them and clearly observable as I attended more and more tryouts and camps for my son.

I think that hard practice is also important for software development. I always try to determine the best tools to help teams develop their skills. Many companies and industries hold “hackathons” that are an opportunity for hard practice. The problem with hackathons is they generally run at unfortunate times for parents. Some are held over short bursts of time, including all-nighters and weekends. A few companies offer hackathons internally. Some product managers use hackathons to lobby engineers to make features that did not make it through the greenlight committee. Some engineers use hackathons to pretend that product management does not exist and demonstrate that they can also design features.

I like to work on some of my own projects on the side. I am trying to figure out if I think this is an important part of my professional success. I am also trying to figure out if doing a side project is a structural part of career growth in general. It is certainly an opportunity for hard practice, and hard practice is good for you. I do know of at least two instances in the past two years where some of my work projects have benefited from things I learned while wandering around in the side-project desert.

When I am helping people grow through mentorship or direct job responsibility, I ask them if they are working on a side project. While it is hard to maintain a solid work-life balance, having a small project will help you accelerate your professional learning. If that is important to you, you have to make your own decisions on whether or not it is worth an hour or more each week to invest your own time in your own success. I think this goes without saying; it is important to let people make their own decisions about the pace of their professional development.

Thank you, as always, for reading along. Writing this blog is hard practice for me, and I appreciate all of the responses, likes, comments, and shares. I would appreciate the Roosevelts if you ever bought any of the stuff I link to Amazon, but even not making any money there has its own level of reward. I am not a shameless sellout if I continue to suck at affiliate marketing. If suddenly it starts to rain cheddar, then hey, I got paid. That is some win-win right there. Alexa, insert a smarmy picture of a product manager winking and doing double-finger-guns.

See you next week.

Have you ever sat down in one of those meetings where someone patronizingly draws a triangle on the whiteboard, writes Quality, Speed, Cost in the corners, and declares “Faster, Cheaper, Better… You can pick two!”? Yeah, we all hate that guy, right? Right. I have to confess I recently decided to be that guy and was told “Slogans are invoked to avoid thinking” by Bill Grosso, my boss (manager? leader? mentor? co-conspirator?) at Game Data Pros. That was reasonably fair. We proceeded to unpack the rest of the conversation we were having around engineering deliverables and I realized that there is actually a fourth element that most people do not talk about. In addition to examining the cost of development, the speed of development, and the quality of development, there is one more mutable axis for a project to consider.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet, I hereby declare that the Triangle of Faster-Cheaper-Better has been upgraded. Instead of a triangle where you get two items, we are upgrading our shape and including one more choice for you. Yes, yes I know, your teams will totes adorbs this.

Today I present to you Szeder’s Quadrangle of Software Shippiness… I am claiming this fantastic law as novel and non-obvious. I have cited Bill above as an inspiration here, I should also add that I am not going to give him a slice of the voluminous royalties from becoming Internet Famous unless he joins me on the inevitable world tour.

When building your software, you may control the delivery (the Shippiness) of your software with four levers:

QUALITY

SPEED

COST

And the new addition:

SCOPE

Allow me to illustrate with this handy and informative technology drawing.

I will give you a moment to let this sink in… It hits different, doesn’t it? It is always important to realize that the idea of “product” itself is malleable when trying to figure out how to deliver high-quality products on time and under budget. You can always adjust the scope of the project itself.

You already know you can pick two from Faster, Cheaper, and Better, so why not add a fourth option of Smaller, and now you get to pick three!

Google reminds me that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said ‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.’

I think this is an important lens to apply to your upcoming projects. If you are struggling to figure out how to fit all of your deliverables into your schedule and budget, maybe it is worth figuring out whether or not everything that you want to deliver is necessary. If not, maybe it is a moment of renegotiation with your product partners. Maybe the items you feel are not necessary, are necessary, and this will give someone the opportunity to explain their importance. 

If nothing else, your shared understanding of what needs to be delivered will be higher, which always helps.

That is the entirety of the post today. I leave you with the poignant thought that this post is reduced to its smallest size possible in honor of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the subject matter, and out of respect for your time.

Speaking of respect for your time, I recently saw this amazing programmable multicolored wall clock on Amazon and am shamelessly linking it to you for profit.

Do I own one? No. Will you click on it? Also probably no. Eventually, I will figure out Amazon Affiliate Marketing.

Update: I guess this became old news while I was sleeping.

I was out of the office this past week when Unity emitted some signals about business model changes that were primarily perceived on a scale from “toilet flushing” to “death rattle” by most of the game developer community. You know how to Google if you want to know more.

There is no surprise to anyone that Unity is trying to make more money. This is what businesses do for a living—especially public companies. The big surprise came around the details of what they were proposing. I counted precisely two people who responded with “This is an entirely reasonable thing to do.” One of them claims this because it does not affect their personal project. The other one surprised me with the depths at which they tried to say “This is fine!” The second one has an entrenched position as a former game publishing executive and current Unity shareholder that gives them some plausible rationale for their batshit lunatic uncaring personal opinion. That is right everyone, I am subtweeting on my blog. Nanner nanner poo poo.

So what is wrong with Unity’s new proposal to charge per install?

A lot of people are griping about the notion of “democratizing game development” from the early Unity founders and previous promises made that this will never happen. I concede that these two things have amped up the emotion around the subject.

I want to talk about four things here: Timing, blast radius, enforcement, and shenanigans.

Let’s start with the timing. About a decade ago, I used to work in developer relations for a social games platform. It was not a successful social platform in some ways, especially for people who migrated games over from Facebook and their North American-centric audience. A number of companies that brought games to us at Hi5 decided that the platform was not working successfully and wanted to sunset their games. We would ask them to give an announcement to the community about the coming event as well as give them thirty to ninety days to play on the platform with commerce options turned off. This was generally accepted as a good business practice for someone spending five, ten, or even one hundred bucks on a social game.

This is not the timing for a tectonic shift in your business model for thousands of business partners generating millions of dollars of revenue.

If you are going to make a substantive change like this for your partners, you want to give them six months to a year of notice, and potentially phase it in for new titles or on specific versions of software. This made a really bad announcement into something much worse.

The next thing I want to talk about is the blast radius of the new pricing structure. There was a super-gaslighty attempt to reassure everyone that this only affects ten percent of their developer customers. Whether this is true or not will be up to someone else to figure out. I will say that one person I have spoken to has said this will not affect them. A significant number of other people have done some math: between three percent to a whopping one thousand percent in some worst-case scenarios for mobile game developers. Most PC and console games will not be affected by this, and I would imagine that mobile developers greatly outnumber console or PC developers based on my own suspicions. I know that the ten to fifteen people who have asserted it will impact them are just an empirical data point, and there are also dozens, if not hundreds, of other high-profile mobile game developers out there making bombastic statements about how this hurts their business.

I freely admit that I have more direct conversations with mobile developers than PC or console developers on any given day. I also know that Mobile contains a lot more “free to play” behaviors where you typically install a game and hope that one percent of your users will convert to a paying audience. I will talk more about this shortly. 

The third thing that strikes me as a serious red flag is how Unity will define and enforce installs. In their own words:

“We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.“

That raises all kinds of questions and concerns for me. Having worked with GDPR and ‘right-to-forget’ implementations, there is certainly a world where this data will be hard, if not outright illegal to track. It is called Europe. There will be lots of unusual edge cases for demo software and also lots of new vectors for angry game audiences to inflict economic harm on a game studio.

The final thing I want to talk about here is related to mobile again, and some shenanigans. I do believe that more than ten percent of the game companies out there will be materially impacted by Unity’s pricing changes and that many of them will be mobile game companies. A significant number, if not the majority, of these companies will be companies that are using advertising platforms to generate revenue off of a large number of installs in order to make a modest amount of revenue after spending a considerable amount of money on buying traffic. The hypercasual game segment is a good example of this. Unity has merged with Ironsource and is offering to waive the majority (or entirety) of the install fee for partners who sign up with Ironsource ads.

On the face of it, these look like some monopolist-style shenanigans to me. A quick check with some of my super-secret spies has confirmed that it would be more effective for some people to pay the install fee than switch over to Ironsource, which is pretty shocking. This winds up being a pretty slimy way to induce people to try your advertising services, which is where Unity makes a large portion of its money.

I am going to set aside all of the fist-shaking, emotional feelings about the current leadership and how this is essentially “EA destroys Bioware” all over again, or any of the similar threads making their way around the internet. Unity is trying to make money and it is trying to make money fast. We can gripe about their merger with Ironsource, or their acquisition of Weta Digital, but attempting to navigate the near future is why Unity pays their CEO 11 million dollars a year.

We all have ideas about where things are going and sometimes they are not even close even after drinking three or four or twelve beers.

So what should we do as developers? 

What should we do if we are pointy-haired bosses at Unity?

If you are a PC or Console developer you probably price that install fee into your overall game plan and weep silently as the door to easily adding revenue in mobile just got twenty cents farther away. I know one person who has already written off this cost.

If you are a mobile developer, you are probably halfway out the door to a different platform. And I would be too.

If you are making 3D mobile games, you are already paying one to seven dollars to purchase an install regardless of whether or not they make money. If you are making less than two million dollars on your game, as a mobile game you are probably better off migrating to Unreal Engine for some measly unit economics. If you are making more than two hundred thousand dollars, that is absolutely true. You are probably already upgrading to the next level of Unity subscription because you have a gun to your head for your existing project, and figuring out how to keep your existing Unity experts around while spinning up a mobile team using Unreal Engine.

If you are making 2D mobiles, you are probably switching to a different engine too. Godot is probably the most fully baked engine out there and if it had a decent community following before, it would surely increase substantially as a result of this past week’s news from Unity.

Half of the reason for you to make this drastic change is the immediate economics. The other half is the deep truth that until Unity has plugged its revenue hole significantly, it will do other, similar drastic measures in the future. This will be a calculation that happens every three months because it is a public company.

There are already people installing new SDKs and evaluating the cost of making their next game in Unity. There is some subset that is probably going to migrate their current game to another platform out of sheer spite despite the cost it will incur because the timing and intention of the messaging are so violent to the community at large.

So what would I do if I were in leadership at Unity?

That gets complicated. The first thing I would be doing is wondering how we went out to the world with such a toxic, poorly incentivized debacle. The amount of damage that has been done has barely registered with its shareholders yet.

The second thing I would do is I would start with some very thoughtful changes that will help with damage control.

The first is to revisit the timing of the new pricing scheme. I know Unity needs money today. The right thing to do is to give everyone a three-month extension on this and have its new pricing plan rolling out in the May time frame. Set up the new system and the new reporting and give everyone a chance to see what it looks like. They have made a bold claim that this will only affect ten percent of its customer base, so why not prove it first? Give a public report of the new pricing scheme and how many developers were charged and at what tier.

The second thing to do is revisit the unit economics and the tiers themselves. Take a page from the Epic playbook here. Their revenue model has the first million dollars of revenue being royalty-free. It steps up to five percent beyond that which means you are paying two point five percent royalties on the first two million dollars of your game. That is pretty good for a game engine that does not cost you any money upfront. Putting a two hundred thousand dollar threshold in there for the indie developer was incredibly stupid. That number is way too low. They should step it up and make it one million dollars for the free tier and the former Plus tier. They should move the Enterprise tier to five million dollars or five million installs.

The first thing this will buy you is a sense of relief that this probably is more in line with your customer’s expectations that this will impact ten percent of the audience. Like it or not, independent game developers all believe they will get to a million dollars or a million installs of their game. Even if they do not fall into the affected developer who will need to start paying an install fee, they all believe they will.

It is super important to make sure that people feel that their platform partners support them.

Setting the install and revenue threshold for personal projects to two hundred thousand basically makes the independent game developer community feel like you are a baby-eating fucking cannibal.

These two steps alone would give people a tremendous sense of relief and probably bring a lot of the negativity down.

You could go a third step and stagger the install fees on top of that, starting with a penny. Increase it over time, or increase it over volume, I don’t care. If you built a system like this, and you weren’t making enough money, no one will overreact to that number going up as you struggle to make enough money to get your CEO his next Bentley.

So what is likely to happen?

Who the hell knows? Maybe someone at Unity is going to print this page, run it up to the C-staff, and make a few of the proposed changes here to help bring the temperature of the room down. Maybe the next time I am in the halls of GDC someone will give me a fist bump for saying that these kinds of business decisions make people think you are a baby-eating cannibal.

Maybe I am going to spend next weekend downloading the Godot engine and seeing what it will take for me to build a game in it, so I can provide advice and counsel for the dozen to two dozen companies I know who are already in the planning phases for their migration out of Unity.

Thank you for reading along. I was out of the office this week and spent hours today catching up on emotional Slack threads and multiple horrified cost calculations. I narrowly avoided turning into 2010-John and getting into a vicious emotional argument with someone online about how this is still a luxury compared to how musicians are treated, or participating in a dozen other fruitless conversations. I was appreciative that two to three people who were misinformed about Epic pricing were able to learn that there is a royalty-free million dollars to be had if you download and start using their tools for free. The deep truth there is if you got far enough along on using Unreal Engine in your game that you were paying a big enough royalty on it to matter, you are probably making enough money to just build your own engine anyway.

All of that aside, I am deeply curious to see how many Godot and Unreal Engine developers will be created this month.

See you all next week!

Remember that song “Lean on Me”? I kind of do that, except instead of leaning on someone, I am making noises at them, and they are generally frustrated and angry. It is basically the same thing.

My name is John Szeder and I love therapeutic ranting.

It feels good to stand in front of a gigantic canyon and scream your head off when things are a little out of control and crazy. Sometimes it is not always a gigantic canyon, and certainly, it is not always the right idea to scream, but you get the idea.

I am glad that I have a few specific people that I can rant to when the situation warrants it. I have my movie-rant person, my work-rant person, and yes, even my children-rant person.

Being able to articulate all the things that are busting my chops helps me process them and figure out what I ought to be doing differently. Sometimes it helps me understand that maybe I should not do anything differently at all.

I can pinpoint the time I first understood the value of ranting. I was a sympathetic ear for someone else’s rants. The year was 2001. I won’t name names, but anyone who was there probably understands what the ranting was all about. The rest of you can remain guessing—what happens at Rant Club stays at Rant Club.

Before you randomly start popping off to the person next to you on the subway, I want to establish a few things.

It is important to rant to the right person. Do not assume you can rant to your boss. Sometimes it makes sense. You should test this carefully before it shows up in your end-of year-review, and not in your end-of-year bonus. Some people do not love a complainer. You may have a special relationship with your boss with some amazing trust if you can rant to them, and vice-versa.

It is important to rant about the right things. Do not rant about your children to single people. This is perhaps a very extreme example. You may wish to have your ranting relatable to your audience.

While it is important to respond appropriately to someone else’s ranting, do not assume you have to fix whatever it is that they are ranting about. Also, do not jump immediately into Devil’s Advocate mode. Sometimes all you need to do is listen and agree.

It is important to thank your listener. “Hey sorry for ranting” or “Thank you for listening” are good things to include in your ranting ritual. Let your rant recipient know that this was a cathartic cleansing exercise and that you do feel better.

I don’t want you to read this one page and necessarily pick up the phone and start bitching at someone all day every day. Well, maybe I do if you are going to stream it online.

I will say for the people who rant to me about things, I do feel special about it. There is a level of trust that they have given to me by opening up about things that deeply disturb them. It helps me to see that other people are struggling with things from time to time, and I appreciate having that glimpse into who they are and the things they do not believe make sense. I also know that having someone to talk about stuff like this helps them to process an issue, or at the very least just feel better about it.

Well, that proved to be shorter than expected. I also somehow have it in my head that I could make a pretty good TokTok about this. I won’t do it, but I am scared that I thought about it. Someone somewhere is going to go and get themselves an incredible twenty or thirty views based on this sentence. I would say thousands or millions, but you all know from your love of reading words that you are just as much a boomer as me.

See you all again next week.