Almost everyone in the industry has an opinion about the Valve new-hire handbook. Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, sees the advantages in such a system but talked about the benefits of having hierarchies.
“The bigger we get as a company, the harder it is for everyone here to feel comfy just walking into my office and telling me what I’m doing wrong. There’s a lot of guys here who would do that in a heartbeat because they’ve been in the trenches with me but there’s folks here who only know me as the president of a multinational,” said Capps. “An engine programmer on the editor team, if he’s not happy with the tasks he’s doing, can talk to the editor lead or if he’s not happy with the editor lead he can talk to our director of engineering or he can talk with me. But there’s a lot of different folks you can chat with about your assignments and what you’re doing and whether you’re happy about the people you’re working with.”
“If there’s no hierarchy and you’re just two hundred people standing in a building, who do you talk to about what’s making you uncomfortable who can help you to fix it You need to know who to call on and where the specializations are internally,” he noted, adding about creative liberty, “There’s a lot to be said for freeing people’s creative impulses. We try to do that as much as we can because that’s where most of our cool ideas come from.”
“I don’t think we’re quite so laissez-faire about it [as Valve]. What we tell people when we hire them is ‘you need to tell us what you want to do and what you’re good at and then we’ll make clear what needs to be done’,” he added. “If somebody really wants to be a painter but they don’t have any painting talent and they’re a great programmer, I can’t afford to let them paint all day long so they’re going to have to program. But that doesn’t mean we won’t help them learn how to paint and give them the resources to learn. Maybe someday they’ll be a great painter too. And then if we don’t need programming but we need painting, well, now you’re a painter because that’s what we need to do to get this game shipped.”
Capps said that having job-title-specific roles is destructive. “We’re certainly closer to Valve’s self-organizing process but I think we tend to try for efficiency as well as creativity and that means you balance between the two,” he said.
“We do company meetings almost every week and we try to remind people what the high level goals of the company are,” said Capps. “But I think each team handles it very differently. Some game teams will organize around a very rapid ‘scrum’ style approach where they’re doing sprints and everybody is working together on combat this month and everybody is working together on experience systems the next month. And then we have teams like the Engine team who mix their time between adding new features and fixing bugs or optimizing for games that are shipping soon.”
“Day to day, the individuals are figuring out what they need to do to be successful,” Capps concluded.
Source: Gamasutra
