20 Lessons in 20 Years Part One of Four

Last year I sat down and realized that in 2020 it will have been twenty years since I started doing professional games development. So what better time to reflect on the “20/20 hindsight” lessons of 20 years than to do it in 2020? Surely the fine folks at GDC would not say no to such a cleverly titled session… Would they? Maybe let’s change the subject.

So here are my thoughts from twenty years in the games industry. I am going to write this in four parts since this is a considerable buffet of trauma and “learnings”. I don’t know that you could stomach it all in one sitting. I am not sure I could write it in one sitting either, honestly. So let’s talk about the first five years of my career and things I ought to have learned.

Lesson the first: Don’t Just Sign It.

Whether it is a non-disclosure agreement, a work-for-hire agreement, or an employment contract, it is important to understand what you are signing. Some states and some countries, like Canada for example, enforce variations on non-compete clauses. That would be a tragic way to lose out on exercising lucrative employee stock options as I may have accidentally discovered. Setting aside the fact that I would have made the most amount of money on stocks from my first official job, it takes my feral equity negotiations with startups to the next level knowing that I had a multi-million dollar paper loss the first time out of the gate. Just about every other piece of equity I have had has gone to nearly zero or precisely zero since then, but that does not stop old people from buying lottery tickets when they go to get their White Claw and Marlboro menthols on their way to bingo night, does it?

I have to give a shout-out to the small handful of great corporate attorneys I have had over the years. I do not regret a penny I have ever spent on a lawyer and in some cases I paid extra to have them sit down and explain to me what it is that they are bickering about. As a result, I have enough of an understanding of what goes into a legal agreement that I can sign most of them without need of writing a check, and in a few cases, have taken expensive attorneys to the mat on issues I care about. I am grateful for the education I received in the process of working with some of the best startup attorneys in the world. I wish I would have had that benefit when I flipped a coin and decided to arbitrarily quit my first job ever, seemingly for no good reason.

Lesson the second: Let The Dough Rise.

It is no less than the esteemed Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA, who counseled me after I handed in my first resignation at Digital Chocolate that “You need to let your success catch up with you”. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about at the time. I understand it a little better now.

Early on in my career, I made a silent one way contract with every employer I had. “You have exactly one year to prove to me I am not wasting my time here” was the ultimatum I harbored in my soul. Perhaps it was a toxic overreaction to the one year vesting cliff; If I have one year to prove myself to you, then you have one year to prove yourself to me. Early on I enjoyed the defiance of Hammurabi’s inflexible eye-for-an-eye wisdom in many of my professional decisions. We can let the consequences of zero-sum-game thinking be debated at a later date. What I did learn from this, eventually, is that one year is nowhere near enough time to invest in a career choice. The skipping stone trash heap of entries on my resume and the scrutiny I get for latter-year career conversations on leadership roles is a dance I must make frequently. I caution you that that is a regret you would best avoid. When you make a career-choice to join a company, you will be better off if you stick around for three to five years. Seven if you can stomach it.

Lesson the third: Deal With It.

I remember going to a meeting with a business development person who would later on become a mentor of sorts for me as we gallivanted around the globe. I was given a product demo for an unsellable pile of garbage. I proceeded to dismantle it, point for point, as to why no one would want to buy it.

After shredding it to pieces and standing defiantly over its defeated corpse, I was not expecting his next question.

“Would you like to come work here with me?”

Learning how to sell things and the art of making a deal was probably one of the best early wins in my career as a software developer. I had a pretty myopic view of the value chain, and this was something that was transformative for me.

It does not matter if you make the best thing ever. If you do not know how to sell it, no one will know. I am grateful that I spent the time outside of formal engineering amongst a team of hardcore old skool enterprise sales people. I learned so much from them that reverberated through the course of my career.

I profoundly recall the advice that my soon-to-be manager would give me upon handing me an offer letter.

“Before you sign this letter, go watch Glengarry Glenross.”

So I did. And if you have not seen it, you should. It is a powerful piece of film.

Lesson the fourth: The Five Year Plan.

If you made it this far, you are probably halfway through a box of kleenex, a cup of chamomile tea, or a tub of chocolate ice cream. Maybe all three. Or maybe I glossed over the trauma that was experienced from the journeys described above. Or maybe I have forgotten it. There is photographic evidence of me being detained in a foreign country without having the right entry papers to give a presentation on multiplayer technology: I am in possession of an ear infection at the time, a not-quite-sober boss who is about to go to prison with me, and a belt that 96 hours previous to that had three thousand dollars of emergency cash money. We will not speak of what happened to it. I assure you, gentle reader, we all survived, with our freedom.

Instead, let’s talk about something more exciting: Career planning. Always have a plan. I know that is very ‘A-team’.

Fairly early on in my career, I decided it was a good idea to have a plan. After a few iterations of “I will figure out what to do after I sober up”, I realized I needed to set my sights a little higher and my view a little farther. Eventually I settled on having a five year plan as the right length. If you have read everything above you might correctly conclude that I was never able to get to the five year mark on the majority of my plans. Indeed I am pretty sure that I failed at almost all of them. The truth is that I always change my five year plan every three years. I assure you this is okay. If I ever become your boss, I will work with you on a five year plan. It is a good thing to have. If you cannot come up with one on your own I will give you one. Just understand that if I give you a five year plan, it is a part of my five year plan. You might want to ask me how long ago I came up with it. Keep me honest.

Lesson the fifth: Understand Your Passions.

I did a little zigging and zagging in and out of games in some tumultuous years. The games industry is cruel to people who have a “high cost structure”. HR does not like it when you refer to your “high cost structure” as “families”. I guess in California it is not an okay thing to tell someone “I cannot hire you because you have kids” but that is what they are saying by keeping the salary so low that they can give you a bucket of “ blah blah blah culture fit” as they walk you to the exit.

Always try to work on something that inspires you. I say this with a bit of caution. I got into game development because I loved playing games. It turns out that if you really love playing games, becoming a game developer is the last thing you want to do. You will likely never work as hard, for less money, than as a game developer. There is a lot of supply and demand economics at work that keep the wage claims low. There is always someone willing to do your job for ten percent less money because making games must be as fun as playing games.

Now that I have seen the truth I still care deeply about making games, but mostly because I found that it is something I love much more than playing them. Whenever I try a game now I find myself evaluating the experience as if I was watching the experience through a one way mirror. The instant I find structural flaws in the experience and I can map it to the deadline they were rushing to hit, I am done with the game. I add my learnings to my little notebook of “things to do” or more likely “things not to do” in my own projects.

I am passionate about a handful of things in work. I can emotionlessly perform at a high level for things I am not passionate about, provided I am putting danger-pay in the bank to buy future-me some time to get back to my passions. That creeps people out by the way. If you cannot check the “this is my passion” box, people think you are a weirdo, and they probably won’t want to pay you without a more in-depth explanation.

I will leave a list of John Szeder’s Four Passions off of this article out of self-preservation, in the unlikely event some future hiring manager uses this article against me. You might find it in the Young Adult Fiction section someday.

Stay tuned next week for lessons six through ten!