Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Jam tomorrow

cliffski

The rumour is that a lot of people are staying on at Infinity Ward because they are owed huge bonuses from COD:MW 2 and if they quit before they are paid, they lose the right to them.

This is depressing, and very evil, and not at all uncommon. Not just in games, but everywhere. I’ve had a lot of different jobs, in a lot of different companies, and the vast, vast majority of them have an employee incentive scheme called ‘jam tomorrow‘. They don’t call it that, but that’s what people call it when they see it for what it is.

There are basically two strategies to keeping decent staff. (Nobody cares about keeping bad staff, in fact, they are doing you a favor if they quit). They are:

1) Make the job great, in terms of earnings, benefits, working environment and job satisfaction

2) Vastly increase the opportunity cost of quitting.

Now clearly 1) costs a lot more than 2). You can pay the gullible fools a pittance, not pay out any benefits, and make their lives miserable, and the dumb schmucks still stay in their cubicles. Clearly 2) is the way to win!

But that is old school thinking from factory floors, the industrial revolution, people churning out simple, measurable, mechanical work, where the objective was just to keep people working.

Game development doesn’t work like that. The work is very difficult to measure. You can’t stand over a programmer and tell if he is working well, or hard, or at top efficiency. Ditto an artist.  Is that texture the best you can do? Really? How do I tell?

Activision are using the sort of trick that cynical factory owners used to try and keep people working the lathe, and that just plain does not work for knowledge workers. I did my best work when I was motivated and happy, and my worst work when I was cynical, negative and felt cheated. I’d wager you are the same. It’s a worse strategy than just flinging monkey shit at your staff, because at least then, they would quit and you would realise you are doomed. This way, the staff stay there and grumble and drag the productivity of the company down.

Activisions strategy might look to them like it is working. But it isn’t. They are just demotivating their staff and delaying the inevitable resignations. This isn’t a 19th century pin factory, it’s 2010 and the new economy. Someone tell the activision bosses that.

7 thoughts on Jam tomorrow

  3. We had some serious jam tomorrow going on when I was in the industry.

    When your business runs on the morale of your employees, that’s just no way to play. There are a lot of non-obvious or non-common-sense issues with managing creatives that obscure the business case for treating your people right. You’d think that with all that’s been written on these issues (just looking at software development) that more companies would catch on.

    Lots of these problems stem from shortsightedness. This tactic may keep butts in chairs today, but after treating them like this, a lot of them will be done with Activision. Either they’ll leave, or they’ll be so disgruntled they won’t produce good work. Nobody wins in the long run.

  4. Jam Tommorow is certainly a good tactic, but a horrible strategy for a business. At least I know that the best managers know that. The concept of the serving-leader is way more efficient.

    That said, while it is difficult, a manager, team-lead or anybody else in leadership role in an organisation must find a way to measure his team. Choosing those metrics and evaluating people against them. One caveat, poorly choosen metrics (like sheer number of commits, number of line in the code, hours in the office, etc,) will lead to a poor team performance.

    Companies that have a jam tomorrow policy should do a “five why” questionning on themselves and fix the problem(s) in the company.

    On that, great work on the blog Cliff.

    marvellous day to you

    -MFillion

  5. Cliff, since you touched on motivation, I’d like to add to that. I’m reading a book right now called “Punished by Rewards”. The basic thrust of it is that extrinsic rewards decrease intrinsic motivation.

    It seems to me that the “jam tomorrow” strategy is a double whammy. Not only does it cause your employees to regard themselves as “doing it for the money”. But is also de-motivates them with manipulation. People aren’t stupid, as you pointed out – they catch on to stuff like this.

    Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if there was a game company out there that had the 20% program, like Google does. I suspect that the result would be scarily awesome.

  6. That is so true of the games industry!

    I have worked for EA, Lionhead, Climax and a couple of others and all of them used that tactic. Funny enough the worst ones were EA and Lionhead.

    I was working on a new title while the majority of the studio just shipped quite a big name title and I have never seen so many disgruntled, negative, soul destroyed employees moaning every day. None of them wanted to leave because they knew they would be sacrificing a couple of quids spread over a period of time.

    Really not a good team environment to be in.

  7. Yup. That was the carrot dangled in front of the folk at Realtime Worlds too, but look what happened there.

    Given that, and other experiences, I’m always a little cynical when I hear THAT motivational speech. I think it is going to become a bad idea to promise it for a lot of folk. An unnecessary alam bell. Kinda ironic really. If you really want to get people excited about cake, give them a slice from time to time, not just tell them you might one day.

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