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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

#61

Post by dxuh »

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 consider myself a generalist and companies just do not like to hire those. The vast majority of companies doesn't even advertise jobs that are not specialized. And of course this generates some kind of force on the market, because there is no incentive to become one and a strong incentive to specialize instead.

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

#62

Post by a_c »

This is a pattern even in software industry itself. People specialise too early in their career, zooming closer and closer to a tree, knows everything about a leaf. Fewer and fewer people see the forest. A side effect of specialising is that the skill that you specialise in become a commodity. In the book Finite and Infinite Game, it is said that an infinite game can contain a finite game, but a finite game cannot contain an infinite game. Take it out of context, a generalist is an infinite game, who can be anything, who can be specialised. A specialist, or a specialist organisation is a finite game. Once we started the specialist game, it is turtle all the way down. Everything has to be specialised. So a start up usually start with a bunch of generalists. Over time it specialises into ever granular units

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

#63

Post by meheleventyone »

makeitdouble wrote: post #60
meheleventyone wrote: post #58

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists. The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where general…

In usual business environments, generalists are usually not very valued either, but in indirect ways: it's easier to ask for better conditions if you can boast having unique skills or be strong in a specific niche, and a true "generalist" will be expected to move to a management or facilitator role, which makes them regress their technical abilities to some amount, which in turn pushes them to further move down that…

Internally big game teams are pretty indistinguishable from any other larger tech team in how they operate in the large. There’s quite a bit of cross-pollination between the two as well and the whole is driven by wider business culture anyway. In my experience that ends up in being very process rather than results led which is definitely ends up with some perverse incentives.

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

#64

Post by rob74 »

This observation doesn't only apply to games development, but also to software development in general, e.g. web apps. If every developer working on a project is specialized (DevOps, backend, frontend - even for frontend there are some that only specialize in HTML/CSS and some in JS), they tend to only concentrate on their domain and lose sight of the big picture of how the app should work (or never have that big picture at all), which hurts the quality of the finished product.

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

#65

Post by ahoka »

meheleventyone wrote: post #58

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists. The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where general…

I would go further and say that most companies would prefer to solve issues via specializing instead of generalizing. For example, if there is a quality problem most products would hire someone with QA experience or create a QA team instead of increasing general QA competence. It's just a more tangible solution, even if not always the best one.

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

#67

Post by debugnik »

Kezzo wrote: post #55
chongli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Stardew Valley. One person (Eric Barone aka ConcernedApe) designed the game, wrote all the code (including the engine from scratch), designed all of the characters from concept sketches to final in-game art, wrote all the story and dialogue, created all of the sound effects, composed and recorded all the music with an original soundtrack of over one hundred pieces of music. The game has since sold more than 2…

He did not write the engine from scratch, he is using MonoGame a framework that takes care of graphics, audio and input: https://www.monogame.net/showcase/

MonoGame is a rather shallow abstraction over DX9/10 era APIs, I don't think it's fair to say it "takes care" of much beyond wrapping some platform dependent code. The content pipeline in particular ranges from painful to unusable.

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

#68

Post by robertlagrant »

ahoka wrote: post #65
meheleventyone wrote: post #58

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists. The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where general…

I would go further and say that most companies would prefer to solve issues via specializing instead of generalizing. For example, if there is a quality problem most products would hire someone with QA experience or create a QA team instead of increasing general QA competence. It's just a more tangible solution, even if not always the best one.

It's much simpler to hire a separate team to cope with a dev team's lack of QA than to convince that dev team that they should test things.

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

#69

Post by robertlagrant »

bitwize wrote: post #56

I don't work in games. I once saw a glimpse of my boss's notes on me on a screenshare during one of our 1on1s over Teams. The first two bullet points he has about me are something like: * Generalist, has worked in many different areas on different types of software * Thinks that's a bad thing And I do think that's a bad thing, from a career-marketability standpoint anyway. Back in the 80s or 90s, you could get away w…

I sometimes wonder how much could be saved if big games like Call of Duty didn't come with endless character and weapon customisation screens to make changes that just don't matter to the game. I replayed Quake 1 and 2 recently and they're so good. Terrible graphics now, but great level design, weapons, movement, music, and enemies.

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

#70

Post by pjc50 »

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.

The difficult bit, which sometimes AAA devs with large funded teams don't manage, is _shipping_ the game, and then getting people to buy it.
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