A week later, very little had changed. Christie wouldn’t start for another week yet. Mick and Kendra fought. A trail of candidates for the other roles had passed through the door, but nobody was right. Allie wondered if SOS’s reputation as a toxic workplace was part of the problem. She rubbed her neck. She was getting a headache.
Noam tapped her shoulder. “You’re up.” She had an interview with a potential new CTO they hoped to lure away from Epic Arts. Noam held a printed résumé covered with doodles.
“What do you think?” Allie asked. The doodles suggested boredom.
“I would hate to bias your experience.”
“Since when? You love to tell me what to think.”
“True, but it will be more entertaining if you find out for yourself.”
Allie gave him a glare, then stood and walked to the conference room. She could see the candidate through the glass wall, his back to her. He was tall. It was hard to tell as he was sitting down, but he looked over six feet tall. He had a soft layer of fat over a layer of muscle, a baseball player’s body, or maybe a golfer. He was sprawled in his chair, legs spread wide, basically taking up as much space as any one human could.
She glanced down at his résumé. It was impressive. He’d run teams in a couple of major game companies and at Microsoft’s Xbox. He likely understood both game development and platform. That could prove a serious competitive advantage.
Allie opened the door to the room. He turned his head, and seeing her, pulled himself out of the chair to shake her hand.
“You must be Allie. I’ve heard good things.”
“I pay good money for that. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Noam got me some water.” He gestured to a bottle sitting next to him, half full with the label peeled off. He was a fidgeter, then.
Allie sat in front of him, clasped her hands together on the table, and smiled. Then her smile froze. She’d forgotten the questions she’d written down. They were on Post-It notes. At home. On the kitchen table. Her mind raced to recall them, but in the sudden panic, she pulled up a blank. Idiot!
Then she recalled an interview she had had, many years ago. A surreal, weird interview. And she decided to try the same approach the Twitter CTO had used on her so long ago. “You’ve been asked questions for hours. Do you have any questions for me?”
The candidate looked at her and paused as if to size her up.
“I am wondering how many meetings you have in this company.”
Allie was surprised by this question. “Well, we’re mostly an Agile shop, so the usual. Standup, planning, retrospective. And there are meetings with the leadership in the studio as well as across SOS, and one-on-ones, of course. There are a fair number of optional meetings to keep in touch with new learnings, and whatever you set with your staff. Nothing out of the ordinary. Why do you ask?”
His face was sour, like he’d bit into underripe fruit. “Meetings break up your day, keep you from real work.”
“What is the real work of the CTO?” A question she never imagined she’d ask, but Rob’s coaching had taken.
“Programmers like to work with the best programmers. I lead with excellent code.”
This was a problem. Programmers did like to work with someone who could outcode them, in her experience. But meetings had to happen, or she’d hire an MIA boss, like George.
“Do you have other questions?”
“What is the relationship of CTO of the studio to CTO of SOS?”
“SOS is probably not very different from other companies. We have a few centralized functions, like HR and data, but each game studio is completely independent. The general manager is essentially the CEO of the game, and has a CTO, lead game designer and art director, and head of QA. Most data analysis is done by product managers here. Some studios have producers, some don’t. We don’t . . . so far.”
Allie paused, suddenly realizing she had a chance to change that, if she chose. It might give her more support. If Virginia was free . . . she stopped herself. Be here now. “SOS has a CTO at the company level as well, and you’d report to him, matrixed to me. I have input into raises and bonuses.”
AKA complete control. The GM was held responsible for the outcomes of the studio, and thus had control of the money that could influence those outcomes. Allie had a budget and a headcount, and it was her call how that was used.
“Other questions?”
The candidate looked at her quizzically. Apparently, he wasn’t allowed free rein on questioning very often. Allie smiled at him. She remembered how she felt when she’d been invited to ask all the questions she wanted. Now that she was on the other side of that, she could see how powerful it was. What you ask about is what you value.
He continued on to ask about promotions, bonus structures, hiring practices . . . he didn’t ask about code health. Which if he had, Allie would have had to tell him was dubious at best. She’d heard Rob rant about it enough times. And he didn’t ask about the games, which bothered her even more. She heard a soft knock at the door, and then it cracked open.
“Oh, hi, Yosi. Just a second.” She finished up her latest answer, about transfers from one studio to another, then shook his hand. He had a perfect handshake, strong, but not crushing. She thanked him and headed out.
Yosi touched her arm quizzically. She shrugged. “You tell me.”
“I will,” said Yosi, and headed into the interview.
Allie walked over to Noam.
“Okay, tell me,” she demanded.
“What? You were in there,” Noam teased.
“Noam!”
“Didn’t you just love him? So handsome. So charming.”
“Cut it out.” Allie was getting impatient.
“But you’ll never love him as much as he loves him!”
“Okay, so you don’t like him. What else? Can he do the job? Does he know his code?”
“In my opinion, he’s a bullshitter. He spews out whatever he reads on a blog, but I don’t think he’s sat serious at a keyboard in a long time.”
“Hmmm. Anything else?”
“Yes. He’ll be here as long as it takes him to figure out where is more powerful, then he’ll go there.”
“Yeah, that, I got.”
Allie walked around, gathered feedback. One engineer raved about him, saying he was exactly what the studio needed to update their practices, another dinged him for not being rigorous enough around Agile, another said he was “fine.”
“What do you mean, ‘fine’?”
“Don’t need much for a CTO, so I suppose it might as well be him.”
“What?”
“We get tech specs from Uri, so not sure what the CTO does except call meetings. This guy, whatever he is, Shane? Shaun? He doesn’t like meetings. So he’s fine.”
Allie returned to her desk to wait for Yosi to come out. Did she really know what a CTO of the studio did? She hoped Yosi did. She hadn’t really thought about it. Pete sat typing at his keyboard, but was it email or actual code? She hadn’t noticed. He hired, fired, and gave feedback in between. He went to meetings.
Hell, what was her job? How would she define it, if she had to hire to replace herself? A million tiny things that add up to a healthy studio. So frustrating. She chewed a pencil, which she hadn’t done in a long time. What was taking them so long?
Finally, Yosi came out with the candidate. Now Allie couldn’t remember his name either. Yosi walked him to the door to the studio, seeing him to the other side of the keycard lock. On the other side was the atrium, and he could easily find his way out, and not into anything else, beyond maybe some free soda.
Yosi walked back toward his desk. “Nope,” he said, as he passed.
“Hey, what, wait.” Allie hopped up and followed him. “Don’t you want to debrief everyone?”
He stopped and turned around to face her. He let out a long sigh. “Not really. He doesn’t understand the real work of a CTO. He’s in love with the title, but not the work. He’ll hurt the team.”
“But he’s the most qualified candidate we’ve seen!”
“A bad employee will bring down two good ones. How much worse is it at the exec level? He doesn’t understand that the CTO is a people manager. People write code. People need to be inspired, to be coached, to be focused.”
Allie knew he was right, but she could feel too keenly that Yosi was also leaving in a couple months. She ground her teeth in frustration.
Yosi saw her face, and replied to the silent thought, “No, Allie. He’ll make you do three times the work, just undoing his bad interactions. I was that guy. Trust me.”
“You?”
“I’ll tell you at lunch Monday.”
Great, another long lunch offsite. Well, if it got her a good story about Yosi. . . .