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Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

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Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#31

Post by trinsic2 »

ooterness wrote: post #15
croes wrote: post #4

Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist? In science something similar happened. There was a time where some people knew pretty much in every science field, chemistry, physics, biology etc. but the amount of knowledge grew and it become impossible to know enough in every field. Maybe game development isn't any different. You either become an expert in on field or your knowledge is to superficial to actually he…

Overspecialized teams are also a hazard. The best design solutions are usually compromises, but when the trade-off crosses into different disciplines (e.g., mechanical vs electrical), it can get tricky. At minimum, you need people who can even recognize when such trades exist. It's better if you can find translators: the rare person with enough expertise in relevant domains to get to get two teams to work together ef…

"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation...It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.”

― Motoko Kusanagi ⎯ Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#32

Post by taherchhabra »

Justsignedup wrote: post #24
nitwit005 wrote: post #23

The generalist's resume looks worse. They have 2 years experience with (insert role here), compared to the other guy who has 8, because they've worked in multiple roles. Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the "full stack engineer" roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.

Hell, I experience this a lot. My experience is doing a lot of things, and being a force multiplier. However you go to a larger company, and suddenly they're looking for very specific experience doing specific scaling that I never got to do in all my roles, boom, it is terrible for my resume. And many young people see this and just decide that let's just focus on that, and make a great resume, rather than try to be u…

I am in the same boat as you. For generalist,after a point, i feel the only way up is to start something of your own.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#33

Post by oooyay »

This has probably hit the enterprise software world as well, at least from what I can tell. A lot of people are solidly in frontend or backend; backend tends to be even narrowed into asynchronous systems, identity, etc. Finding people who have some high to medium level knowledge in most of the landscape, a more low level background in general computing, and can dig into specific subjects when they need to is exceedingly rare.

If I had to guess, generalists look very unfocused to managers and recruiters and are often not considered for TL positions.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#34

Post by vk6flab »

nitwit005 wrote: post #23

The generalist's resume looks worse. They have 2 years experience with (insert role here), compared to the other guy who has 8, because they've worked in multiple roles. Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the "full stack engineer" roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.

I've been in the workforce for almost 40 years as an ICT professional. In my experience there's lots of other things going on in addition to the point you make.

People flat-out don't believe that the skills enumerated on my resume could be held by a single person, and are.

Apparently, I'm clearly "over the hill", having been at this for nearly 40 years. I should state that I have 20+ years experience instead, as-if having life experience doesn't actually make you better qualified to understand the contexts of any role in an organisation.

My skill-set is "threatening" to others, because, apparently, knowing things about a great many technologies means that I know more than the person hiring me, which somehow means that I'm a threat. As-if surrounding yourself by people who are smarter than you is suddenly undesirable.

I've been told to "dumb down" my resume because there's too much there, even if there's 99% chance that a computer will be the device actually reading it and selecting me. Apparently I'm supposed to "infiltrate" a company at a lower level and then "show" them that I can do more, despite 40 years experience showing that people only see the skills that they want to see.

According to some automated job technologies I have 104 years of experience. Not sure how that works.

Then there are those who want to know which of the experience is "professional" and which isn't. (I've been self-employed for the past 23+ years)

In the end, I liken it to this:

"How much experience do you have in eating food?"

"Do you mean, adding together each of the 15 minute meals, or how long have I been eating food for since I was born?"

"Okay, how much professional experience do you have eating food?"

"..."

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#35

Post by trinsic2 »

TheRoque wrote: post #30
mlyle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist? Stardew Valley guy did pretty much everything himself. Game design, programming, music, art. Which, it's an indie game... but clearly if he can do the whole project himself, someone on a AAA team can have cross-disciplinary skills and translate.

I'm not sure it's a good example... Stardew Valley as a technical feat is pretty average, there's nothing fancy. In fact the game could have been made 20 years ago with this looks. Comparing it to AAA is really far from the truth, because modern 3D game dev is much much much more complicated.

Yeah but is the game industry really better off having such complicated games? Some might say no. I'm finding that I have more fun and feel better about supporting indie games. Less shit I have to deal with from companies that don't have the same level of connection with their games.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#36

Post by johnnyanmac »

croes wrote: post #4

Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist? In science something similar happened. There was a time where some people knew pretty much in every science field, chemistry, physics, biology etc. but the amount of knowledge grew and it become impossible to know enough in every field. Maybe game development isn't any different. You either become an expert in on field or your knowledge is to superficial to actually he…

Possible, sure. Arguably required as an indie/small team. But if your aim is AA/AAA industry it's shooting yourself in the foot. Those industries seek deep specialists more than generalized knowledge. Maybe a director can benefit most, but you don't become a game director through that route. They promote that in-house.

On the indie side, a generalist indie needs less of what a big game needs. You probably don't need a graphics programmer at all for an indie game, for example.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#37

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

oooyay wrote: post #33

This has probably hit the enterprise software world as well, at least from what I can tell. A lot of people are solidly in frontend or backend; backend tends to be even narrowed into asynchronous systems, identity, etc. Finding people who have some high to medium level knowledge in most of the landscape, a more low level background in general computing, and can dig into specific subjects when they need to is exceedin…

Well then maybe companies should allow for more horizontal mobility for the employees that they already have instead of always hiring from the outside. Or perhaps recruiters should be trained to stop filtering out candidates from another tech stack but with many years of experience because the same patterns apply anyway, only the language is different.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#38

Post by trinsic2 »

cynicalkane wrote: post #21
softsound wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UI for Tears of the Kingdom has been quite annoying to me in this regard but so many aspects of that game were just troublesome. It's still fun, but the story and characters make no sense, the UI is modern and lifeless. They went into the weeds of the gameplay, you can see that's where they put their energy. I've been disappointed in a lot of the directions... It's just bad furries left and right. This game would…

I think this is also interesting in the direction of the OP's opinion. The new Zelda, for all its AAA chops, has in its main storyline the writing and directing of a bafflingly terrible anime. Incongruously, the story concept itself is compelling, and the scriptwriting for the game's many side characters is verbose (conventionally for Zelda) but otherwise cromulent. I kind of wonder if something internal happened tha…

I wonder if this is the reason why Starfield is so disjointed and the inventory system is the same as it always has been. You would think they would put a specialist on such an important part of the game.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#39

Post by johnnyanmac »

t-writescode wrote: post #13
grensley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience they are very limited by their lack of familiarity with the code. They might be a generalist at everything else, but that's a pretty hard ceiling.

It's the developer's job to help relay the difficulties they're experiencing to the PMs so they can all work together to reduce tech debt or weirdness. And back when I worked at Microsoft, the PMs were call-pattern experts, too, or at least the great ones were.

We sadly don't have a lot of "great PMs" in games. Pay's not worth it to begin with as a programmer, so they wouldn't make much more (or even less) if they worked as a producer or even PM.

Re: Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

#40

Post by kuchenbecker »

oooyay wrote: post #33

This has probably hit the enterprise software world as well, at least from what I can tell. A lot of people are solidly in frontend or backend; backend tends to be even narrowed into asynchronous systems, identity, etc. Finding people who have some high to medium level knowledge in most of the landscape, a more low level background in general computing, and can dig into specific subjects when they need to is exceedin…

To some degree Conway's Law [1] in that sufficiently large organizations each team will fulfill a more and more niche specialty. Basically teams get bigger and split into multiple charters, often subcategories of the original team.

I've worked in medium to large companies (3k-200k employees) and the smaller companies what is the responsibility of a team would be an entire org in the larger ones.

Even getting all the experts in a room is hard when it's the TL and Manager from half a dozen teams.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

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