The next day at the QuiltWorld studio, everyone was in early and the office was buzzing. Allie supposed people were interested in seeing what was going to happen next and meet the infamous Yosi. She eyed the empty seats where George and his band of pirates had decamped. Annoying.
Derek was right; she needed to hire. Which meant she had to write job descriptions. She’d start with the one for art director. What did they really do, anyhow? They ran the art team, they made the game art, and what else? What else?
At least she understood CTO and game designer. Or did she? A CTO hired, fired, and managed the team, but what else? Code reviews? CTOs didn’t project manage, but she knew they certainly had opinions. She could ask Yosi later. And the game designer designed the game behavior; this she knew from years of sitting together. Look, behavior, functionality.
She flipped to her email tab and jotted a note to the recruiter, Jayla:
Please send previous job descriptions and/or job descriptions for other studios for
* Art director
* CTO
* Game designer
And any other listings you think relevant.
Thank you,
Al
She sighed. Probably would take a few minutes or so to get a response. She hopped over to a job site, looking for an art director position. Hmmm, nothing but stuff for advertising agencies. Ugh. She went to a competitor’s site and found a listing. It was not horrible. She cut and pasted it into a new document. She also found a listing for a junior game designer. She threw it into her document also.
She checked her email. Jayla had already replied.
Here’s what we have on file for role currently. Let me know if you’d like me to go into my archives and find more examples.
Have a good day!
Jayla
Unflaggingly pleasant, unflaggingly polite. That was Jayla. Then she realized she’d forgotten to ask for a product manager description. She wrote a quick reply and sent it.
Allie cut and pasted the descriptions into her document and compared them to the ones she’d found online. She decided to start with game designer. It was the role she felt more comfortable with. It was practically what she did, once the game was established.
In the beginning, when the game was being conceived, a game designer was really the only person who could bring balance and fun to a game. They had to decide dozens of things—from how to mix skill and chance, how much narrative to put in, what the players’ roles and interactions would be, and more. Allie found it fascinating, especially choosing between collaboration and competition in the social aspects.
QuiltWorld was nominally a collaborative game in which you made worlds apart and together, but in playtesting she’d seen rivalries in which players constantly tried to outdo each other’s works. Steve, the previous game designer, always said that games were a series of continuums, and the game designer had to choose which to make explicit and which to allow the player to own. Watching hundreds of players create quilts in her game had shown how right he was.
But once a game was launched and tuned, a product manager could use the mechanic’s wiki to create new “beats”—minigames in the master game—often themed around special events such as holidays. Allie loved making them, and hers were always successful, bumping up revenue and engagement.
The studio needed a lead game designer to design more complex expansions and big “bold beats”—special events that tried out new mechanics in hopes of exponential metrics. As well, the game designer reviewed the beats put together by the PMs, to make sure they didn’t unbalance the game.
Allie looked over both descriptions. Jayla had sent her a standard game designer listing, not a lead. Oh, it was her own fault, she hadn’t specified. Well, it wasn’t so different, and she felt a bit embarrassed burying Jayla with emails. She made a few tweaks to the description and borrowed a phrase she liked from the competitor’s junior description— “unchecked imagination that frightens your coworkers”—and then turned to the other descriptions.
She felt suddenly tired and overwhelmed. How could something new and complex also be so boring? Writing these made her feel like her energy was being drained. Or maybe she was just hungry.
It was almost time for lunch, and she had a lunch-and-learn session with free food to go to. She decided to just send Jayla the other two descriptions to post, untouched.
Jayla,
These are great, thanks! I made a couple tweaks on the game designer role, but left the others as is. Go ahead and post. Cheers!
Allie glanced at the clock in the conference room through the glass wall. Five minutes to ten. It was time to run stand-up, when all the teams gave short updates on progress. She suddenly realized she wasn’t sure who she would be doing stand-up with. Before her promotion, she’d check in with the team that was working on her project, and George would run stand-up with Pete and Janice. She should run a stand-up with her exec team, but she had no exec team. She had a list of people to hire, thanks to George.
Just then Yosi walked in. He was a not a tall man, maybe 5’7”, but was solidly built and walked as if he was claiming each bit of earth as he stepped foot upon it. His hair was a dirty blond and was receding like a general from a losing battle. His belly, however, had all the boldness his hair had lost, and had claimed the territory beyond his belt. He strode into the studio, looked around, spotted Allie, and walked straight for her as if they’d met a dozen times before, when in reality they had exchanged maybe a half dozen words at various events over the years. First Felix, then Rick, now Yosi. How long had people been watching her? Or did they watch everyone who didn’t flee from the unremitting stress and workload?
“So. You heard?” he said, holding out a hand to be shaken.
Allie shook it awkwardly. At SOS, and for that matter, most companies in California, folks either nodded or hugged, and not much in between.
“Yes. Thank you so much for agreeing to help out.”
He shrugged. “Nothing else to do but wait for the baby. And who doesn’t love QuiltWorld?”
Allie didn’t even know she was holding her breath until he said that, but suddenly a great deal of tension fell off her. She loved her game, and anyone who also loved her game had a foothold toward friendship.
“Shall we listen in?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she replied. “Here, this is my old team.” She walked him over to the corner where Noam’s desk was. He was standing, of course, along with the rest of the members of his pod, going over what everyone had accomplished last week. When he saw her, he paused. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Should we start over?”
“Nah. Go on.”
Each engineer reported on what he had promised to get done yesterday, said what he planned to do today, and brought up dependencies and blockers. Allie listened, nodding. She’d only missed one update. Yosi also listened, his head tilted to one side as if he was listening to the words, not just reading them.
Yosi was staring off into the distance, reading a white board that was sitting in the middle of another pod.
“Would you like to go over? I can introduce you around?”
“Okay,” he said. “Do you have lunch plans?”
She was surprised by the sudden change of topic. “Not on Mondays. I usually just grab something downstairs and eat at my desk.”
“We’ll go out. Meet me out front at 11:45. I hate lines.”
He walked over to the pod with the intriguing white board, leaving Allie a bit thrown. Maddening to have so many elements moving all at once. She longed to settle for just an hour into something familiar. But instead she trotted over to Yosi to introduce him to the cross-game marketing team.
Yosi moved from pod to pod, chatting with everyone amiably. His reputation as an antisocial engineer had been greatly undone as he smiled at each member of the studio, asked who they were, what game they were playing, where they’d been before SOS. He was better at small talk than Allie, and she felt like her skills were respectable. Around 10:45, he’d returned to his desk, still by Rick’s, in order to catch up on email. He promised he’d be in the studio later that day, and he’d have IT move his things over lunch.
Now she stood outside the SOS doors and glanced down at her watch. 11:44. And right as her watch changed to 11:45, Yosi appeared at her side.
“Shall we?”
Allie nodded in assent.
Yosi led, not asking her where she’d like to go. They walked by the sandwich place, then the Mexican place, and the odd little Brazilian joint in the World Gym, crossed 16th, and went to a small strip mall, really a mini, only five stores wide that held four restaurants and a bakery.
They had changed. There used to be an English bakery there where she’d get sausage rolls when she was hungover. Now it was a place selling organic and gluten-free foods. The mom-and-pop diner had been replaced by a hip brewery. And she couldn’t recall what had been in the spot now sporting the sign “Oren’s Hummus.” Allie realized she hadn’t been beyond a one-block radius of SOS for over a year.
“Hey! It’s up here now!”
“You know it?”
“I live in Mountain View. I get takeout from it all the time. It’s great.”
“I know Oren. Angel investor, from Tel Aviv. He missed good hummus, and had a machine brought over from Israel.”
They went into the bustling space and found a small table. It was an odd place; it had table service but was incredibly unfussy. The servers were fast and pleasant. On the wall was a big blackboard exhorting customers to call and share any complaint they had or just give feedback.
“He runs this place like a startup. Prototyped it, iterates, constant customer feedback.”
“That’s cool.” She meant it, but at the same time felt too off-balance to really appreciate anything.
“Shall I order for us?”
“As long as you get the chicken skewers.”
Yosi smiled. “Not vegetarian?”
“Not even a little.”
“Good to know.”
He ordered a variety of food, the chicken the only meat.
“Are you vegetarian? I hope you don’t mind?” Allie didn’t mean to insult her new ally.
“No, not at all. I’m just reducing my meat intake. Health reasons. And with falafel this good, I don’t miss it!”
Allie bit her tongue. Oren’s chicken was the best she’d ever eaten. She’d miss it. But why torture him? “So, you wanted to talk?”
“Yes! We need to talk plans. The baby is due in January, and babies keep their own schedule. I could be out early or late.”
“I thought you were heading back to Tel Aviv?”
“Yes, but my wife is American, and our first was . . . difficult. It was good to have her family so close, and she decided she didn’t want to make the move until after. The American health system is crap, but better the devil you know.”
The devil you know was something Allie understood, though not why anyone would want to have a second kid after the first one was such a hassle. She hadn’t decided if she wanted kids. Derek said he’d like to, someday. Allie wasn’t so sure. They had good jobs; they enjoyed each other’s company . . . why mess with perfection?
“So, you’re still moving, but just a bit later? How long can I keep you?” She flashed one of her most winning smiles.
“Nothing in life is certain, and less so at SOS. But we think we’ll move in April. Still. Have you hired a CTO before?”
“No,” she replied.
“It’s slow. You need to be careful. It’s like finding the right person to marry. You need someone who is not only good at his job. Or her job. But also, one you can trust. Lean into. It’s hard work, bringing a game into the world. It takes a strong partnership.”
Jeez, this guy has babies on the brain, she thought. “Okay, I get it. Good teams make good games. So can you help me figure it out?”
“That’s what I’m here for!”
“Where do I start?”
“You need to change how you think about hiring. Hiring is just one piece of the puzzle. A role, a job, it has three parts. Set, check, and correct. You set the role and hire someone into it.”
“What?”
“You design a job.”
“Jobs are pretty much the same, here.”
“Are they? Are you sure you want the same kind of game designer that NoirTown has? Or Baccarat?”
“Hmm.”
“So you’ve hired someone. Now you want to have regular check-ins to give feedback to make sure you get what you need from the role.”
“One-on-ones.”
“Yes, or even just having lunch and saying, ‘There is something I’ve been meaning to mention. . . .’”
“Ugh. Sounds like an ambush.” She eyed him suspiciously.
Yosi shrugged. “You do what you need to. Anyhow, all those little check-ins are all right, but eventually you need to step back and ask yourself if the person is right for the job.”
“Performance reviews.”
“You got it. You can promote, you can fire, or you can do something in between.”
“Sure, bonuses, raises, whatever . . . this is pretty straightforward. It’s what everyone does.”
“No! What everyone does is grab a job description off the Internet, hire whomever the team likes, then live with the results.”
Great, thought Allie, I’m halfway to mediocrity. “Okay, so what should you do instead?”
“You have to define the role and then interview the person so you can make sure they can fulfill it. Then you use that same role description for one-on-ones and performance reviews.”
That made decent sense, Allie thought as she grabbed some pita bread that had magically appeared in front of her. “Oh, this bread is magic.”
The conversation drifted to the proper way to make pita bread, then hummus, then the virtues of dark meat for chicken skewers. Allie knew she was going to enjoy working with Yosi. Anyone who loved well-made games and well-made food was her kind of person.