5 ms·

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists. The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where generalists are described as unicorns. There is usually zero organisational impetus to utilise people’s abilities outside of their job spec. There aren’t a lack of generalists, organisations are just blind to their existence and have no understanding of how to use them. As a consequence I’ve always looked for opportunities that let me be a generalist, working on prototyping teams, startups that need you to muck in and now leading a team of generalists making games. Quite a few of my team came from other industry jobs doing something specialised because of what we offered. I think Tim’s diagnosis of the issue is correct for larger teams, generalists provide glue, shortcuts and important cross-cutting expertise. It’s just the actual problem is larger teams are also terrible at finding and integrating generalists because it’s anti-thetical to their working model.

makeitdouble 3y ago
In usual business environments, generalists are usually not very valued either, but in indirect ways: it's easier to ask for better conditions if you can boast having unique skills or be strong in a specific niche, and a true "generalist" will be expected to move to a management or facilitator role, which makes them regress their technical abilities to some amount, which in turn pushes them to further move down that career path (or out of the company if they want to regain a technical role). I find it fascinating that the gaming industry is faced with similar issues with generalists, where I was expecting a lot more pragmatic choices and better paths for individual contributors even if they're not ultra specialized.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  Internally big game teams are pretty indistinguishable from any other larger tech team in how they operate in the large. There’s quite a bit of cross-pollination between the two as well and the whole is driven by wider business culture anyway. In my experience that ends up in being very process rather than results led which is definitely ends up with some perverse incentives.
- pydry 3y ago
  Ive noticed this too. A practical side effect is that most bugs in business context seem to emerge in "no man's land" areas of responsibility - e.g. not in the kubernetes system run by the kubernetes expert and not in the backend service built by the backend engineer but due to subtle interactions between the two. Sometimes the intersection point issues are due to a breakdown in communication between the two experts but sometimes its due to a lack of knowledge overlap - i.e. the lack of a generalist on either side of the divide.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >I find it fascinating that the gaming industry is faced with similar issues with generalists, where I was expecting a lot more pragmatic choices and better paths for individual contributors even if they're not ultra specialized. It's a similar solution to other tech: generalists aren't vauled as much at huge studios, but they thrive in smaller studios. So the "exit plan" for a generalist involves hitting the ground floor early on an up and coming studio and getting a significant stake in a successful release. And like those unicorns, those new studios are a huge risk. But hey, at least these days you have a huge rabid fanbase of hardcore gamers who will foam over each PR release as long as you do some form of advertising.
ahoka 3y ago
I would go further and say that most companies would prefer to solve issues via specializing instead of generalizing. For example, if there is a quality problem most products would hire someone with QA experience or create a QA team instead of increasing general QA competence. It's just a more tangible solution, even if not always the best one.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It's much simpler to hire a separate team to cope with a dev team's lack of QA than to convince that dev team that they should test things.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    makes sense from that structure. Dev is already busy with one job, they won't get a raise to also get some QA learning on the side. So there's in fact negative incentive to pick up more responsibility, even if that dev does in fact know QA (unless you own stock in the studio. But that's still a stretch).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    But that shouldn't be an either-or thing. You need both a QA team and for the dev team to do appropriate testing.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  It goes both ways, unfortunately - generalizing makes costs disappear, so to beancounters it looks like savings. Like e.g. having each employee responsible for correctly filling in their expenses into some SAP endpoint, under threat of several negative consequences if anything is wrong, should a random audit find out, lets the company reduce the financial side headcount. Less salaries to pay is legible savings. The overall drop of productivity as everyone else has to do extra job is not legible, so it isn't accounted for, and then people talk in surprise about cost diseases and productivity increases not keeping up with pace of advancement, etc.
pjc50 3y ago
> There aren’t a lack of generalists, organizations are just blind to their existence and have no understanding of how to use them. A generalist is a threat to the organization as a concept. Organizations rely on power and information flowing in well defined ways. Information flows up, control flows down. A generalist might disrupt that by passing information and instructions sideways. Which is why, no matter how often leaders go on about cross team working and matrix organizations, things tend to revert to micromanagement every time.
- specialist 3y ago
  Yes and: Seeing Like a State, the notion of legibility, really gelled these concepts for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
mcv 3y ago
This was pretty much my take too. I'm not in the game industry, but it seems to me there are plenty of generalists. Only they don't work on these massive AAA titles, but on smaller titles in smaller teams, or even on their own, because that's where you really need generalists, and where they are appreciated. The large projects always sound so corporate, structured, and compartimentalised, that it doesn't sound like there's room for generalists. I think it's simply a choice made by these big title publishers. If you want more generalists, give them more freedom, more leading roles. Mind you, I don't work in the industry, so I could easily be wrong, but this is my impression as an outsider.

makeitdouble 3y ago

In usual business environments, generalists are usually not very valued either, but in indirect ways: it's easier to ask for better conditions if you can boast having unique skills or be strong in a specific niche, and a true "generalist" will be expected to move to a management or facilitator role, which makes them regress their technical abilities to some amount, which in turn pushes them to further move down that career path (or out of the company if they want to regain a technical role). I find it fascinating that the gaming industry is faced with similar issues with generalists, where I was expecting a lot more pragmatic choices and better paths for individual contributors even if they're not ultra specialized.

meheleventyone 3y ago
Internally big game teams are pretty indistinguishable from any other larger tech team in how they operate in the large. There’s quite a bit of cross-pollination between the two as well and the whole is driven by wider business culture anyway. In my experience that ends up in being very process rather than results led which is definitely ends up with some perverse incentives.
pydry 3y ago
Ive noticed this too. A practical side effect is that most bugs in business context seem to emerge in "no man's land" areas of responsibility - e.g. not in the kubernetes system run by the kubernetes expert and not in the backend service built by the backend engineer but due to subtle interactions between the two. Sometimes the intersection point issues are due to a breakdown in communication between the two experts but sometimes its due to a lack of knowledge overlap - i.e. the lack of a generalist on either side of the divide.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>I find it fascinating that the gaming industry is faced with similar issues with generalists, where I was expecting a lot more pragmatic choices and better paths for individual contributors even if they're not ultra specialized. It's a similar solution to other tech: generalists aren't vauled as much at huge studios, but they thrive in smaller studios. So the "exit plan" for a generalist involves hitting the ground floor early on an up and coming studio and getting a significant stake in a successful release. And like those unicorns, those new studios are a huge risk. But hey, at least these days you have a huge rabid fanbase of hardcore gamers who will foam over each PR release as long as you do some form of advertising.

ahoka 3y ago

I would go further and say that most companies would prefer to solve issues via specializing instead of generalizing. For example, if there is a quality problem most products would hire someone with QA experience or create a QA team instead of increasing general QA competence. It's just a more tangible solution, even if not always the best one.

robertlagrant 3y ago
It's much simpler to hire a separate team to cope with a dev team's lack of QA than to convince that dev team that they should test things.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  makes sense from that structure. Dev is already busy with one job, they won't get a raise to also get some QA learning on the side. So there's in fact negative incentive to pick up more responsibility, even if that dev does in fact know QA (unless you own stock in the studio. But that's still a stretch).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  But that shouldn't be an either-or thing. You need both a QA team and for the dev team to do appropriate testing.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
It goes both ways, unfortunately - generalizing makes costs disappear, so to beancounters it looks like savings. Like e.g. having each employee responsible for correctly filling in their expenses into some SAP endpoint, under threat of several negative consequences if anything is wrong, should a random audit find out, lets the company reduce the financial side headcount. Less salaries to pay is legible savings. The overall drop of productivity as everyone else has to do extra job is not legible, so it isn't accounted for, and then people talk in surprise about cost diseases and productivity increases not keeping up with pace of advancement, etc.

pjc50 3y ago

> There aren’t a lack of generalists, organizations are just blind to their existence and have no understanding of how to use them. A generalist is a threat to the organization as a concept. Organizations rely on power and information flowing in well defined ways. Information flows up, control flows down. A generalist might disrupt that by passing information and instructions sideways. Which is why, no matter how often leaders go on about cross team working and matrix organizations, things tend to revert to micromanagement every time.

specialist 3y ago
Yes and: Seeing Like a State, the notion of legibility, really gelled these concepts for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

mcv 3y ago

This was pretty much my take too. I'm not in the game industry, but it seems to me there are plenty of generalists. Only they don't work on these massive AAA titles, but on smaller titles in smaller teams, or even on their own, because that's where you really need generalists, and where they are appreciated. The large projects always sound so corporate, structured, and compartimentalised, that it doesn't sound like there's room for generalists. I think it's simply a choice made by these big title publishers. If you want more generalists, give them more freedom, more leading roles. Mind you, I don't work in the industry, so I could easily be wrong, but this is my impression as an outsider.