Today, May 16th 2024, employees of Phoenix Labs (makers of Dauntless and Fae Farm) reported on Linkedin that the company had shutdown unexpectedly, and would be laying off nearly everyone.
It is fitting then that I chose today to talk about staffing, and specifically, a phrase I heard for the first time at on Dauntless.
“We only hire seniors.”
On the surface, this sounds like it could be a sensible policy in a AA studio. With a limited maximum headcount, surely you want the most capable individual contributors?
I counter this logic with one single question.
“When was the last time you saw a major failure in game development caused by a lack of skill in a individual contributor?”
Was it… never? I can’t think of a single instance. When I look back over my long and storied career spanning both tech and games, I can point to failures caused by poor organizational management, disorganized operations, failures of individual managers, communication issues, production issues, lack of leadership, lack of defined processes, but not a single time where I’ve lamented having a junior.
In order to talk about what happens when you only hire seniors, we need to first talk about how game studios (and software development companies in general) are structured, and why.
The Normal Structure
All companies run on hierarchy. If a company claims to have a ‘flat structure’, they’re lying. They have a hierarchy, it’s just undocumented. Here is a non-exhaustive hierarchy of my hypothetical game company “40 More Servers Studios”.
Obviously there’s more disciplines, roles, and departments than this, but you get the idea.
A vertical line indicates seniority - a relationship whereby the people below a role’s seniority are bound to the decisions made by the level above it.
Decisions fall into one of three categories:
Identifying a required outcome
Deciding what to do to achieve that outcome
Deciding how to do it
The Game Director might decide “we need two playable characters: one who is out of place, and one who is local to the world”.
The Narrative Director might decide “We are going to make a Black samurai, and a Japanese ninja.”
The manager of the character narrative team might then assign the Senior Narrative Designer to naming these characters and designing their backstories.
The Narrative Designers might then be assigned writing the individual barks, dialogue, and lines for the characters to bring them to life, in line with the design decisions made above them.
If we use the RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) we can see that at each level, the lower level is Responsible for doing the work, and the higher level is Accountable for the work getting done. The narrative director is Accountable for the creation of characters that serves the game’s needs, and the narrative designers below them are Responsible for bringing them to life.
Every time you traverse down a level on the chart, the scope of the decisions you need to make narrows. They become more focused. You are bound by the decisions that occur above you, but you have the agency to make decisions within your area of responsibility and perform that work.
But We Only Hire Seniors?
People like the idea of “only hiring seniors” because seniors are experienced enough to make decisions, and execute on those decisions. As a senior, you often receive vague requirements and requests, and must not only translate the need you’ve been given into an action for your discipline, but also figure out how that action will be taken. There are many decisions to be made, so hiring a lot of people who can make decisions makes sense, right?
No. Let’s look at an alternative chart, where you only hired seniors.
Anyone who’s worked somewhere “We only hire seniors” already knows where this is going. There are three massive problems here.
There are fewer decisions arriving downwards.
The number of people that you need consensus from for a decision on your level has gone up by a lot.
The people making those decisions are also the ones responsible for doing the work.
Decisions that people should have been empowered to make now affect all of seniors, so they’re no longer empowered to make decisions. In the RACI model, you now have a large group of peers who need to be Consulted about your decisions. Every decision is everyone’s problem.
Seniors are great because they have a lot of experience, and no two people’s experience is the same. But without agency, this strength becomes a weakness because no two people’s experience is the same, so the ‘best’ thing to do and the ‘best’ way to do it can appear to be very different to different seniors. They also care more, because they are going to have to be the ones to do it. While everyone is generally very good at their craft at this level, if they don’t have management experience they are not going to know how to handle this disagreement, and will resort to the one tool they have in their toolbelt: meetings.
And all of a sudden, the calendar time to implement anything has gone up. Despite the Manager being Accountable for a task, and any particular worker Responsible, all of your peers need to be Consulted. For tasks above a particular size that may require multiple workers, the worker that is Responsible now requires people they have no seniority over to also participate in that work. Your velocity grinds to a crawl, as even things that should be simple require a lot of effective communication on, with no clear structure to define how that should happen, or who can tell anyone else what to do or how to do it.
Look at what has happened to your decision inheritance. You’ve taken a perfectly functional headcount and given it anxiety.
Does It Actually Work This Way In Real Life?
Yes. It’s common for studios to build a game, release it, and then take most of the workers off the original game, leaving only a maintenance crew to keep the game going, keep it patched, make DLC, etc.
One thing that I’ve observed with terrifying consistency is that in senior-only environments, every time a team shuffles workers off for new title teams, the work output of the team increases. I don’t even mean “per person”, I mean total completed work.
This sounds insane until you remember that seniors are smart people who work best when empowered to make decisions in areas they are responsible for. Large teams of seniors around them create roadblocks that everyone within them must clear in order to perform work they should have just been able to do.
Some examples:
A team of services engineers reduced from 7 to 2 more than doubled their work output, as measured by delivery time of requests for new services, and changes to existing services
An engine programmer who had always run into roadblocks around addressing the root cause of high server costs and poor performance no longer having anyone to tell him to address “low hanging fruit” first was able to prioritize the medium-sized task of reworking the server core and reduced costs by millions of dollars per year.
A designer who was able to design and implement entirely new gameplay features on their own faster than with a team, for simply not having to have so many meetings about it.
A delivery specialist (packaging, compilation, distribution) who lost two senior peers and gained two interns able to bring forward the “drop dead date” of last call for content by multiple days by simply having people they could tell what to do, who then did it.
One side effect of this problem is decision paralysis. When Seniors who are used to making decisions just go ahead and do that, it creates problems when their peers disagree with the methodology. So you yank the emergency brake to set up meetings about work that’s already in flight, and have to discuss whether you’re going to undo it or keep going. It doesn’t take long for this to train everyone on the team that they’re unable to make decisions without everyone’s input, which again, creates delays and disempowers the people who should be making decisions.
It also creates an institutional knowledge problem, because instead of formal responsibilities for particular systems or areas of the game, people can fall into undocumented roles where they’re “the audio person” or “the one that knows about player blobs”. Organizationally, it looks like there’s redundancy, but corporate can’t see this when they’re getting ready to do layoffs, and the next thing you know, the only person who knew how your ambient sound emitters operate just got booted from the company slack.
Juniors In Action
Fresh graduates coming out of universities and colleges these days are shockingly good. They know significantly more than I did when I graduated, and they’re better with their tools. What they lack is experience in the workplace — how to operate in teams, how to communicate, how to use collaboration tools, good practices for being functional in a company full of moving parts.
You just need to tell them what to do, with occasional guidance on how to do it. This necessitates good documentation practices, since you can no longer count on ten years of experience to ‘figure it out’; you have to plan. Seniors in these situations have more than once said to me that they refused to write documentation or comment code, because “we only hire seniors” so it’s fine because people would figure it out. I do not need to explain why this is bad.
Games take more work to make than they ever have. Engines are more complex. Server infrastructure has to handle larger player counts. Players expect longer play time and higher graphical fidelity. The amount of raw work that needs to be performed has gone up by so much that Doom (2016) had over 100x more workers than the original Doom (1993).
By giving seniors who are empowered to make decisions juniors to instruct and direct, you allow them to take horizontally-scalable action on those decisions. Those juniors will probably not work as quickly or effectively as an appropriately skilled senior, but they will receive far more specific instructions and be able to act on them quickly and in parallel with other juniors on their team.
By removing decisions as a choke point in a broad senior level you increase velocity using juniors to act on those decisions.
They’re also just cheaper per person in pure labor cost! By a lot!
Also, We Want The Future To Be Bright
The final, obvious problem with only hiring seniors is that you’re breaking your progression pipeline.
Seniors are generally pretty capable, and there are very few paths for advancement in these broad teams. Most organizations don’t have advanced individual contributor tracks, and sending people who are subject matter experts straight into management is part of the reason we ended up in this mess in the first place. Knowing ‘how to Make A Good Art’ is very different skillset from ‘how to get a team of ten to Make Many Good Arts’.
This shortsightedness blinds people towards how unsustainable this is for the industry at large. If you are not bringing juniors into the industry and giving them experience, they do not ever get to be seniors. You and I will get older, we will burn out, we will retire, we will move into other industries when we get sick of layoffs, and there will simply not be enough experienced people to replace us. The attitude of only hiring seniors shoots itself in the foot with unsustainability because it prevents the kind of people you want to hire from existing.
“We only hire seniors” is a red flag of pointless meetings, thrash, and low-velocity low-satisfaction work environments, and should be treated as such.
Stay tuned for next time, where we’ll be learning about how to use the Wwise audio engine with Unreal Engine 5 by addressing the basic concepts and objects involved, and how to avoid the undocumented pitfalls that await you within.
// for those we have lost
// for those we can yet save