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A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
- yieldcrv 3y agoskimmed the article, yeah dedicated time is nice. my hybrid and onsite jobs do suffer from incessant context switching which is more of a management problem. on the "video game" aspect, I have noticed that it seems my generation has created (or at least embraced) a world much more akin to the video games we grew up with. I really like that. Between gig work and waypoints on a map, its like all those open world video games One time at Burning Man it really felt like Second Life, a game that I don't consider my generation and Burning Man crowd itself skews older I like this direction of things
- smith7018 3y ago> One time at Burning Man it really felt like Second Life, a game that I don't consider my generation and Burning Man crowd itself skews older Man, that acid must've hit great
- FFP999 3y agoAll we have to do now is interrupt your game several times a day so you can sit in a room and watch an NPC read every word on every slide on a Powerpoint presentation, or listen to several of them make decisions about a subject they know nothing about.
- Waterluvian 3y agoUgh. Those bad early days of WoW where every quest description had to slowly appear on the screen.
- FFP999 3y agoThat's one thing that drives me crazy, the occasional game I see where you can't accelerate the text at all, it just dribbles out onto the screen at the pace of the slowest reader imaginable.
- devnullbrain 3y agoAs a child I could never tolerate watching my friends play Pokemon for that reason. You can increase the text speed from the processional default but none of them ever did.
- Waterluvian 3y agoLink’s Awakening had painful moments like that. Every time you pick up a piece of power or acorn or compass or map. Or bump into a slime block without the boots equipped. Etc.
- monlockandkey 3y agoThis is the 1hr long unskippable cutscene...
- FFP999 3y agoAnd for some reason if I get up and leave to get a drink of water or use the bathroom, _I'm_ the asshole.
- paulclinger 3y agoDon't worry, it will be paused for your convenience and resumed when you come back.
- FFP999 3y agoAh, good. Would you please excuse me for a second? [leaves office, walks slowly into sea]
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>A Video Game that Pays Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them. While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of which is most fun. It's nice when your job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun. For example, I went into coding because I liked it as an activity, but almost non of my workplaces had any tasks on the kanban board that I would ever consider fun, nor did I consider the whole Agile/scrum thing fun or the managemnt styles I was subjected to as part of the KPIs, but I stayed in the industry because it pays the bills not because it was very fun.
- narinxas 3y agoI had a work colleage who played games BECAUSE he made money from them... essentially some dumb kid from a real wealthy part of the world would pay my former colleague "peanuts" to upgrade their player and gather other stats.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSure. There are a lot of opportunities in the developing world to remotely extract wealth (legally or otherwise) from the wealthiest part of the world in exchange for services at starvation wages there, thar are well above minimum wages at home. Levelling up the MMORPG characters of rich western kids in exchange for money is one of them, and telling them to "try turning it off and on again" when they're adults is another.
- HenryBemis 3y agoI remember a friend buying 1000 gold coins on WoW for €20 back in the day. That was the price of 10 coffees at the time. He "spared" me 100 gold coins (I had only 1 at the time) and it made the WoW experience completely different.
- zug_zug 3y agoSo I like considering the parallel of work as a videogame, but personally the way author implies that tickets are the work doesn't align with my experience. In my experience the dealing with managers is inevitably more than half the work (just trying to work around all the churn and uncertainty of the company). NOTE: Shenzen IO is a video-game that lightly emulates a remote job as a hardware designer.
- xnorswap 3y agoI love Shenzhen I/O, it's perhaps my all-time favourite video game despite having left it uncompleted, in part precisely because it started to feel like hard work. But you're right that what makes it a fun video game is that the problems are: - Clearly defined - Well specified - Solvable - Known to be Solvable - Prioritised - Unchanging - Feedback is provided - Contains closure None of those things applies to real-life, where problems are under-defined, under-specified, sometimes aren't even known whether they have a solution, and are subject to the whims and changing desires of product management. And even if you navigate all of that and produce a solution, you often get little feedback, or indeed sometimes never get any closure at all. Sometimes the project gets sidelined and it never goes live or it goes live and you don't know if a single customer even interacted with it. You have to learn to deal with all of that, which can be harder than the actual programming.
- gumballindie 3y ago> commute has decreased by 2 hours daily. That's 10 hours a week saved. Basically, an extra weekend. The benefits for one's mental health and family or social life are enormous. Not to mention increased productivity and extra disposable income.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoYet companies still don't get it.
- sgu999 3y agoCompanies are people, and many people don't like to give others what they didn't have. They wasted time commuting to reach the top of the corporate ladder, you will too. They also like to show you that they have prettier shoes and a bigger watch.
- whateveracct 3y agoI'm awake more than 5h/day on the weekend :)
- ta1243 3y agoSo you're saying that people should be working an extra 10 hours a day? Otherwise they are just stealing time and money form their owner^W employer
- cultofmetatron 3y agoemployees aren't paid for those 10 hours of commute so mayeb it would be more accurate to say "they are just stealing time and money form their employee"
- ta1243 3y agoSure, but I know many companies that will think it should be the other way round
- keiferski 3y agoIt does surprise me that there isn’t more direct gamification used by companies, at least by startups. Even something as simple as using a 2D basic RPG “company space” (instead of Slack, Google Docs, etc.) would be fun and visually more interesting than using a bunch of apps that all look exactly the same. While I am a little skeptical of current-gen VR tech, it might be cool if companies in the future have custom-designed digital VR workspaces.
- pablok2 3y agoAs soon as you gamify something, it ceases to be the same kind of problem it was in its original form. I can't say work was gamified, but it certainly feels closer to that considering the core ideas behind the NFT/crypto gamification craze.
- wheybags 3y agoSeems kinda backwards. I would say a video game is like a job but (hopefully) without the bad parts. I'm making a puzzle game, so the comparison to dev work is pretty obvious. The difference is when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution, and the world is crafted to make finding it as fun as possible. The real world is messy. Questions like "should we even do this at all" come up. There are edge cases, and your information is imperfect. In a puzzle game, you can (generally) see everything, you know what you can see is 100% correct, etc. Games are like an idealised chunk of real life, not the other way around. And IMO that's by design, not some accident.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 3y ago>> when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution, Not in my solitaire game. It actually shuffles the cards, dealing them rather than working backwards from a solution. I have been dealt games with no legal first move, and many more with only one or two dead-end moves. These deals have no possible solutions. Similarly, I have run across more than a few sudokus with more than one solution, meaning there is no actual final answer. Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.
- RussianCow 3y agoBut to be fair, "there is no solution" is, itself, a solution. Even in Tetris, which has no natural win condition, you're playing towards a specific, well-defined goal (points, generally). The OP's point still stands in that there's no ambiguity in a game, whereas the real world is full of it.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"The OP's point still stands in that there's no ambiguity in a game" What about minecraft and other open world sandbox games? Sometimes you can play a story, but minecraft got succesful before it had anything like it.
- mattlondon 3y agoGames are fun though, work is tedious and 99% of people would quit immediately if they won the lottery (...but I bet they'd still play games even with millions in the bank)
- JohnMakin 3y agoPeople often describe me as unhappy, yet I'm one of the only people I know whose life would barely change if they won the lottery. In other words, I'd still be doing the exact same work I'm doing now, albeit probably with greater freedoms/less stress than I do now. I guess that means I'm "content" or whatever.
- tombert 3y agoI've spent a lot of time thinking about this; certainly more energy than it deserves since I don't buy lottery tickets. If I somehow got enough money to where I never have to work again, I think I'd still do software engineering at a company, but I think I would stop focusing on how much I'm being paid, and more importantly, I'd stop being scared all the time. I've been "laid off" (really fired) twice in the last year (and there's still time for a third!), and it's led to a near-constant state of fear on my end. Every time my manager schedules a meeting, I'm petrified that it's gonna be outlining the details of my severance and COBRA. Every night, I'm psychotically checking my email to make sure that I didn't forget some requirement that's going to piss off an executive. I'm constantly afraid to speak my mind at my job because I'm afraid that if I say something unpopular that it will be the final straw, and I'll be stuck spamming LinkedIn again. If I had millions upon millions of dollars to my name, I think I'd have less anxiety about everything. If I get fired, who cares? If I get a bad review and don't get a promotion I want, no big deal. The job would be there to supply me with a stream of interesting problems, not an existential requirement. ETA: Just to be clear, my managers at my current job are perfectly nice, they've never done anything to make me feel like I should be walking on eggshells, I'm just dealing with some trauma.
- JohnMakin 3y agoTo make your problem worse, employers often use the threat of unemployment (which comes with the implied threat of homelessness/untreated illness/etc in this country) as a cudgel to get more out of workers than they are paying for them. I hope you get into a situation that gives you peace of mind soon, because they are for sure out there.
- Gwarzo 3y agoCatchy title. I work from home as an MSP Enterprise Network Engineer - nothing about work feels anything remotely similar to video games. I think I'm qualified to know, as I spend way too much time playing video games.
- bigbillheck 3y agoI wonder why the author didn't trim down that first twitter screenshot, those no-content pay-to-prioritize bluecheck replies don't have any actual content.
- doctorM 3y agoThis seems particularly relevant: https://www.fastcompany.com/90965361/why-did-the-metaverse-die-silicon-valley-doesnt-understand-fun https://www.fastcompany.com/90965361/why-did-the-metaverse-d... (Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38110059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38110059)
- unixhero 3y agoLife... it has game-like properties
- jWhick 3y agoUnlike the in office work which is totally different than videogame. I mean you can draw comparison between anything and a videogame, but honestly working in office just sucks.
- kodt 3y agoAnd here I thought the tweet was saying you get paid to play video games all day...
- thih9 3y ago> Remote work is like playing a video game (…) Haha, no; at least not much more than regular work is - and it all depends on a particular workplace. Can you have a peaceful on-site office job with lots of uninterrupted focus time and challenging and engaging tasks? Yes. Can you have a miserable remote job with pointless meetings, deadlines, context switching and an overbearing meaninglessness? Also yes.
- byteware 3y agoI am in a such a "meaningless" pickle myself, I have never imagined that hard tasks with strict deadlines are a breeze compared to this, it slowly but surely chips away my will to live, even though on the outside it sounds wonderful
- pixelbyindex 3y agoThe best encouragement I have for this thought trap is to not put your career on a pedestal, and instead find the things you truly want to progress in or enjoy and focus on those. In my case, despite being a programmer, I am a creative type. I have found that I routinely need: - 1-2 hours per week playing an instrument or writing - A date with my wife that is scheduled like a meeting that I cannot ignore or cancel - A secondary (or 3rd or 4th) project outside of work, where there is a clear goal and progress is measurable (indie game dev for me)
- layer8 3y agoGiven how much time we (have to) spend working, I’d also recommend getting a more satisfying and meaningful job. People shouldn’t remain stuck in a bad place.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xorcist 3y agoSure, why not? In this age who can tell what work even is anymore, and even less so games. Given how much time and money is invested in things like Euro Truck and Farming Simulator, I have been silently awaiting the era where people pilot (real world) drones doing real world work, and pays for the privilege. That's when it has gone full circle. I hope I'm still around to comment on it. I also hope pensions still exist so I don't need to take part.
- michaelteter 3y ago> easy to confuse physical presence with productivity Early in my career I worked for the US division of a giant Japanese company. On the occasions that executives from Japan would come visit, we were expected to periodically stop working (programming) and carry papers to and from other cubicles and manager offices. This apparently gave the impression that we were working very hard, when of course it was really making us less productive.
- eddtries 3y agoJapan is improving here thankfully! I’ve heard of workplaces that have drones fly around buzzing at 6pm to try kick people out
- ben_jones 3y agoWait wouldn’t a drone hitting a person or a ceiling fixture and then crashing into a person be really dangerous? Like they’re fixing workplace culture by careening rotary aircraft around the room?
- jcpst 3y agoYeah, that’s why it’s so important to get out of the office by 6. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.
- tessierashpool 3y agodoes that really count as improving? another way to make sure nobody gets hurt by the robots flying randomly around the space is to not set robots flying randomly around the space
- BagelGuy 3y agoIf they aren't in physical danger why would they leave the office before 6pm?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xyzelement 3y agoThis is an example of a helpful reframe. I've done something similar. From my first job, I took the attitude of looking at work as a challenge I can take on and have fun doing it. For example "what can I learn / what experience do I need to level up to where my boss is" (then, repeat.) Or - "what hard puzzle/challenge can I take on that I don't know how to solve today?". Or "where can I position myself job-wise so I can learn the most?" I find that this is both a set of questions that leads you into good places (you're constantly evolving) but also you frame it as fun. Someone else could approach the same situation with "I am anxious and I need to constantly sink or swim, how do I make myself crazy doing a bunch of work" and they'd certainly have less fun and perhaps not do as well.
- michaelteter 3y agoThe real game in on-site and remote working is posturing and self/team-promoting during big company meetings. It’s super annoying to hear the guy who always makes his team sound like they are inventing the iPhone each week, but it does seem to result in better promotion opportunities for that person (especially) as well as his team members (to a much lesser extent). It does remind me of poorly designed quests where you have setup mini quests which do little aside from wasting your time, but are required if you want to succeed long term.
- NorwegianDude 3y agoA video game is like a very simplified world. Life is a really complicated and usually slow paced game. One thing I find really interesting is how much better some are at games compared to real life. I guess that's because games are fast paced, so you are rewarded much sooner. Just planning and sticking to that plan can get people very far in reality too, but it's so much harder because it takes so long.
- FFP999 3y agoI think one key thing is, games are designed to be winnable. Despite what we tell children, in the real world, often clever ideas and hard work come to nothing.
- NorwegianDude 3y agoGames can be designed to be winnable, but many games are not. Working hard is not the same as working smart. That's kinda what I was hinting at. Many people are able to make much better decisions in games compared to real life.
- wenebego 3y agoWhat games are not designed to be eventually winnable?
- porterbeats 3y agoTetris and many Sim games come to mind.
- iamcasen 3y agoI still find it hard to believe that fully-async working style is more productive in the long run. My experience with it was that the pace of synchronous collaboration and decision making is about 5X faster than async. A group of engineers or a product team standing around a whiteboard in physical space is going to win the day every time IMO. Perhaps if a company has reached series A and developed a lot of in-person trust and communion, they could successfully start expanding to a remote situation. I really think it just depends on the work that's getting done, and the nature of the collaboration and decision making that's required.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoI prefer fully async for the simple reason that programming is all text. A programmer is first and foremost a textsmith. They create increasingly complex textual creations, and develop a deeply refined, idiosyncratic toolkit over the years for doing so. No reason to strip them of their best toolset if you don't have to.
- sojournerc 3y agoIf a job as a developer was 100% coding you might be right, but collaboration, problem solving and brainstorming work far better in person, at least in my experience.
- ipaddr 3y agoThat's an old outdated way of viewing the world. Everyone sitting around a whiteboard trying to brainstorm an idea is wasteful. Someone comes up with an idea and then everyone takes some credit and you've spent $10,000 and wasted the day but feel productive but deep down you know you didn't need most people in the room.
- iamcasen 3y agoI disagree. My best ideas come in the presence of others. Something about the collective energy evokes new perspectives I did not have alone. I think its a waste to get 10 engineers in the room to decide how to build a single module. That would be stupid. But it likely makes sense to get a designer, an architect, and a product manager in a room. It might also make sense to get an embedded systems engineer, a cloud engineer, and a web engineer in a room to architect something.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoI wonder if I've had an unusual start to my career wrt remote work. My career began remote, stayed that way until my employer enforced RTO still during COVID-19... which I proceeded to follow for about 2 weeks before moving to Finland for some reason, where WFH is more the rule than the exception for software jobs. On the other hand, WFH is the only reason I have any desire to do 10-11 hour days, because I genuinely like working but only from the comfort of my own home. Even when I was in high school I preferred to skip class to read the textbook instead.
- jimmydddd 3y agoI was the same in high school. I always did well in classes that followed the text book, because I would just read it and learn the material at home. Teachers who didn't follow the book and tested from their notes always gave me a problem. :-)
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoThey were the worst! Luckily I had less and less of them as I got older.
- HomeDeLaPot 3y agoFor some reason? Did you just go to sleep one night and wake up to find yourself in Finland? :)
- gryn 3y agohe probably doesn't want to delve into it because it's not relevant the his point or a private matter. btw, is your name a pun on "Home De_pot" ?
- HomeDeLaPot 3y agoYes and yes. Just needed a unique username!
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
- helloplanets 3y agoOut of all the games that would be closest to WFH, EVE Online takes the cake. Most people who play the game seriously are part of a bigger organization, usually climbing the ladder by being trustworthy throughout the years. A lot of important things take place outside of the game itself, on Discord and sometimes even face to face. The end game is basically you being able to effectively operate within an organization. I'd argue that's what most MMOs end game is at its core, but with EVE Online there's no sugar coating whatsoever.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoFor anyone interested in learning more, Into The Deep recently released a 6 hour documentary on the history of EVE Online [0]. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BCSeISYcoyI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BCSeISYcoyI
- qup 3y agoI have an interest, but I'm not sure if I have a six-hour interest. Wow.
- larodi 3y agoSo office work is like playing games in a gaming club then? OR all IT work is just a joke, or this whole article is a joke marginalizing the work of IT personnel?
- majormajor 3y agoMuch of the video game metaphor isn't unique to IT/Software/Remote work at all. "You have a list of tasks, and some are side quests! Sometimes you work more directly with coworkers, some are more solo!" It's almost as if video games are modeled after life and work and "quests" just naturally have a lot of structure in common. ;) (Most of the rest of the post seems worlds away from video game similarities, though...)
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoIf only job quests' completion status was determined by a machine as in the video game case. There also aren't many video games which keep assigning the same quest because the game forgot why it's a "won't fix" quest when it hired a new QA person.
- rchshld 3y agoWell, it's funnier to play inda game club