"Everybody in the team needs to understand how winning looks like"... my favorite quote from this podcast.
So simple and so true. It's insane how many companies hire and build teams around visions their teams don't understand well at all. That's certainly where most killer companies win. Their force doesn't need to be extremely proficient and efficient to move the needle because everyone understands what moving the needle means and has a clear path to take small decisions without looking at a spec or consulting another party.
The best managers are certainly the ones that make an effort to enable learning around what is being build and why. That allows people to build agency and criteria to make decisions that are in the best interest of the company.
If you want teams to think for themselves you need to provide an incentive. Independent thought requires effort, if I am going to use my energy in pursuit of the company goals, what is in it for me? You can't just expect people to go above and beyond because you encourage them to and pat them on the back for it. Sooner or later it will dawn on them that this is not a reciprocal arrangement. You need to offer genuine promotion opportunities. Real financial incentives. Real autonomy, which means freedom from the quarterly demand for metrics.
I've worked at precisely 0 companies in my time that have offered career opportunities that offer the kind of incentive that I would need to go all in and give a job all my attention.
I'd like to introduce you to the games industry where the incentive is frequently just "millions of people will get to play the thing that you made". At least where I work there is a huge amount of autonomy ready and that's exactly what drives people (as a simple example - senior rendering programmers just suggesting and implementing new features and techniques for no reason other than the fact that they want to be proud of the product they are building)
At junior/intermediate level, sure. At Senior/Expert/Lead, not so much, people do stay very long time. I certainly work surrounded by people who have been at the same company for 10,15,20, 25+ years(I have a guy on my team who has been here for 27 years!).
Please take this in the constructive way it's intended. You might want to consider that your stance of withholding your full effort is very probably the reason you've never experienced a healthy relationship with your employers.
"Full effort" means different things to different people.
If your definition of "full effort" means: 50+ hour weeks with no end in sight, arbitrary deadlines disconnected from reality that exist only to give some a-hole exec an illusion of lower risk, make-believe agile, inability to disconnect after work, and countless meaningless hoops to jump through, that's NOT something which will reap rewards in the long term and it is far from a healthy relationship.
"Full Effort" should mean a solid day of work, with enough time to have a life outside the office. Sure, sometimes there's a crunch and one needs to stay late. If the relationship is healthy that will happen a handful of times a year, max. Anything more than that, and you're getting used.
Funny thing is, the second version of full effort is more consistent and sustainable in the long run, and consistent and sustainable is what most employers outside of the startup bubble are looking for.
I worked my bum off for 10 years. Saw that it had no effect on my career prospects and then gave up. Wiser employees gave up way before then. I've not seen a single promotion out of development in nearly 20 years in the industry. It's a simple fact at least in the UK, that one does not progress out of software development. Senior/lead developer is easy but after that there is no progression. Development manager roles are hard to come by and require growing into the role. Moving sideways into project manager or scrum master roles is generally very difficult to engineer as well. The simple fact is that engineers are seen as line workers. Line workers are not managers and are not suited to the role.
I struggled getting a pay rise without changing organisation until i hear the term "technical individual contributors".
A bit of a lightbulb moment for me as i didn't want to go back into people management. I now use this term to set out what i have and what i can do for the project and how that has lead to greater success/value of a product.
It also highlights to management what happens if i was to leave.
This right here is the problem though. Unless you're so good that the company can't afford to pay you a fair share of the value you generate a rational firm ought to want to keep us working for them and feeling invested in their future instead of our own.
> I've not seen a single promotion out of development in nearly 20 years in the industry. It's a simple fact at least in the UK, that one does not progress out of software development.
As someone who have experienced British managers in practice, this explains a lot.
All of this sounds like an accurate description of the software industry, and I'm not sure why you think it's unacceptable. You worked hard to become a good developer, you progressed in your career to the point where you can do it very well, but you sound offended that the industry expects you to continue doing it?
I don't think your expectations are realistic. Most peoples' salaries don't increase monotonically throughout their career, they top out around 40, the day you get your last big raise. For most people that's the day they become a senior/top/lead/etc, whether they're a chef or a welder or a doctor or whatever.
I don't know how people cope with the boredom of such a limited career. It's like deciding as a child that you like strawberry sauce and then being forced to eat strawberry sauce for the rest of your life.
It's madness.
I mean, if you don't like programming there are other careers; but I've never heard of a successful senior dev that a) wanted to switch in to management or PM, and b) couldn't do so easily.
Apparently! But to be clear, the reason I don't see this is because very few senior devs opt to move in to management (even less in to PM, scrum master, etc), not because there are so many management jobs available. And the converse (a senior dev complaining, "I feel like the business keeps pushing me towards roles with more leadership/meetings and less coding") is very common IME.
@zelos
For someone people, yes, it really is that bad. Lack of progression is a really really big issue for certain kinds of personality. It's also a really big issue for me because I don't like software anymore - there is no challenge left in it. I am as good a coder as I can be. There's plenty to learn on the architecture side, but..... I'm just bored of it. I want to be able to focus on something else.
That's interestingly the opposite of what I've experienced in the UK. I suppose it depends on what type of company you work for, but in my experience those that realise they are a tech company and truly value technology make ample opportunities for their developers to move forward. My current workplace has both managers (and senior/execs) who have come from a tech career and very high level ICs.
It's not that bad is it? Lead developer puts you on a similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, generally with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours.
I've seen several developers work towards management roles, make the switch and then end up moving back to IC roles after realising the grass isn't always greener.
> similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours.
There's so much to unpack here. Some doctors make 400k. Some make 700k. Some make 300k. Some are stressed and work a lot of hours. Others aren't and don't.
Some lawyers want to be on partner track at a big firm. They might be stressed and working a lot of hours so that they can make 400k or 500k or $1,000,000 annually. Some make $100k and don't work much, aren't stressed.
Most software developers make less than $150k. Most software developers I know are stress balls until they check out and then start working 24-30 hours a week and the rest of the office time is bullshit.
On the west coast of the US and in Fintech in NY some developers make 300-400k.
I read the comment as that the person has likely tried to give his or her full effort ("sooner or later it dawns on them that this is not a reciprocal arrangement" kind of implies that), or perhaps was positioned to watch others do so, and not receive the benefits.
I don't think lack of promition = unhealthy relationship with colleagues v
'full effort' might mean a variery of things, but if we are talking about working overtime to meet a sudden new requirement, or studying new framework over weekend, then thats a cancelled family trip and dissapounted spouse.
And if you do that repeatedly it will result in unhealthy relationships at home, which is much worse than at work
politics and timing can have just as much an impact as personal effort. you can put in unlimited effort but if it’s on low visibility/impact products, nobody will notice or care
Yep, I've been burned by that. Spent a lot of time going above and beyond because I wanted our product to be the best it could be, but when it came time to downsize, they still laid me off instead of the employees who barely did anything, but went out for beers during lunch with the boss.
>I've worked at precisely 0 companies in my time that have offered career opportunities that offer the kind of incentive that I would need to go all in and give a job all my attention.
You miss all the shots you don't take.
I tend to put effort into my jobs and I've gotten very large promotions or bonuses multiple times now at jobs. Other driven people I know at both large tech companies and startups have had similar experiences.
Anecdata, but of the people I know most report that significant promotions only come from job hopping, never from staying in one place. I'm glad that this hasn't been true for you, but based on hearing many stories that are unlike yours and very few that are like yours, I think your case is unusual. Hard to phrase 'you got lucky' in a way that doesn't imply it was just luck or that you didn't work hard (and that the hard work was a necessary step).
In my experience it's a self full-filling prophecy. If you don't come off as driven then companies that want and reward driven individuals won't hire you. That also extend to networking where previous co-workers won't recommend you for companies that look for and reward driven individuals. Moreover you won't know how to filter for companies that do want and reward driven individuals.
Your original post did mention "freedom from the quarterly demand for metrics" which I don't see as driven from a company perspective. Companies and teams have complex sets of overlapping goals and generally you want to align what you do with those goals. Many of those goals are disjointed from what one would consider necessary for company success. If your boss wants quarterly metrics to go up for their own promotion then you're not going to get promoted by not making those metrics go up.
A sense of belonging to a social group.
With anything from families, to local sports teams, to nation states, humans have a natural (and quite rational) desire for their own (current) group to succeed. This desire for belonging, and often 'identity', is quite powerful and it typically requires some really bad circumstances for a person to decide to switch groups.
Not everyone sees their company as their group. Companies like to talk about how they treat their employees like family, but it's just a way to manipulate them into doing extra work. Once you see it for what it is, it's easy to start thinking of jobs as something you just do for a paycheck, not something you do because you care about what happens to the company.
But even if you don't care about the company as an entity, isn't it nicer to work for a company whose mission you care about and with peers why care about the same?
I would agree with it written like you just did but not like written before.
What I mean is that I really don't think of my co workers as family at all and any company actively trying to promote that is going to find me very annoyed with that. It's not my family. Don't force me into parties and such.
What I am looking for though is peers that care about doing a good job. I'm tired of working with people that don't know how to do their job. That don't care about clean code. That follow the letter of agile practices but not the spirit.
I couldn't care less about the mission. Every company I've been at so far has had a completely different domain and many of them I couldn't have cared less about.
>I belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"?
Well, I suppose this would mean that instead of just being a passive participant, you go out of your way to look for that cool new pub that your friends might enjoy, or a way to make the hamburgers more juicy. You'd take some pride in your ability to provide this value to the group and enjoy the improved social standing of being 'the one who really knows this stuff', and of course just enjoying a better culinary experience overall.
You do not in fact need that. It can work, of course. Financial traders and salespeople, for example, often work in situations with strong extrinsic motivation.
But I've spent years in both startup and non-profit contexts, and I think intrinsic motivation is much more powerful, especially for work that requires creativity. The best people I've worked with, even in startup contexts, weren't focused on the money. They liked making things and solving problems.
And I don't think it's just my experience. McConnell's Rapid Development has data from surveys of developers; they were much more motivated by things like responsibility and challenge than they were by cash.
I don't think there are fixed categories of people for this. I've never met a child who wasn't intrinsically motivated to do creative work. E.g., I think of the many hours I spent lost in drawing and making ascii art.
I think it's mainly a matter of training. People who want us to do things for them train us in responding to extrinsic motivation. That's not terrible; some amount of it makes the economy work, after all. But for me one of the essential characteristics of adulthood is deciding how to train ourselves. If you want, you can reconnect with your intrinsic motivations.
Exactly. I'm hiring right now for 3 developer jobs at a mission-driven organization. I user-tested the job posting and found that mission-driven people loved it and more mercenary people were put off by it. Which is exactly the effect I wanted. If you have smart people aligned on the same mission, you get higher productivity with much lower managerial effort.
I don't think it's impossible for cash-maximizers to be good developers, but I do think it's hard. A lot of software is essentially a long-term investment, so the short-term thinking of people hustling for a buck works against it. More than once I've had to clean up code bases put together by contractors who were clearly in it for the money and it showed in their work. There might be some theoretical way to bridge the long-term needs via a complicated short-term incentive structure, but I doubt it. It's too prone to things like the "code me a new minivan" problem: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does...
Don't get me wrong, I am in it for the money in the sense that I need a proper salary but I couldn't care less about a 'bonus' being dangled in front of me and putting metrics in place that I'm supposed to hit to get a larger or smaller raise and percentage of the measly bonus (and no, making the bonus larger doesn't make it better. Makes it worse).
I do my best every day just because I enjoy my job. I won't try to do it better because of some metric someone is judging me on. I might actually do a worse job if I find my employer trying to use these metrics to deny me proper raises. Worse in the sense that you will probably see the metric reached. Actual output or overall results for the company will suffer.
> It's insane how many companies hire and build teams around visions their teams don't understand well at all
Conversely, it’s also insane how many companies hire and build teans around visions the teams know won’t work. The knowledge is there (perhaps distributed), but it never congeals, and everyone just plows ahead.
Hah, this is me right now. Architects sold the business on a pie-in-the-sky grand vision, and teams are now busy implementing it even though its value is almost certainly a net negative. (Replacing something currently working with a highly over-engineered "platform" solution-for-all that will end up requiring heavy customization for each client.)
The unfortunate situation is that continued employability in this industry almost requires a certain amount of resume-driven-development. It's much harder to get $newJob when your resume is full of stale tech from $currentJob.
I'm not sure Riot is experience that would make me trust someone's advice on running a company, even where the contents seem reasonable. Their work culture has led to some pretty public problems.
I think most HN readers are intelligent enough to be able to consider the quality of advice as something separate from its source. That is, a source need not be perfect to be worth listening to.
Riot's obviously far from perfect, but this advice seems reasonable to me. Do you think following it is likely to lead to problems similar to Riot's? If there's some sort of causal link between empowering teams and failing to build an inclusive culture, I'd really find that interesting.
Good point, and to penalise companies practicing transparency also means boosting those that work to hide problems and fake the context in these kinds of interviews.
> If there's some sort of causal link between empowering teams and failing to build an inclusive culture...
I don't know. Listen to yourself. There are a lot of companies out there that manage people well, and also didn't have such pervasive sexism problems. Let's talk about those instead.
And before you say no such company exists, listen, I personally just don't say and do obviously sexist shit. It's really easy! A lot of people go their whole lives without farting on someone's face, unlike that Riot exec. So of course if you can't get these basic things right - if you don't know you can't fart on people's faces - why are we elevating your opinion on "self managed teams"?
The bigger takeaway here is that their sexism problem was so much more devastating than their executives could have ever anticipated. It has miscolored every single aspect of what they do, a complete trashing of years of hard work by thousands of people. Why in the world would you ever want to work for these people? There are a lot of shitty MOBAs out there, truly, there is nothing they have besides a player count, that will someday be zero that no one else has or ever will have.
How do you determine quality of advice separate from the source without research? "seeming reasonable to me" is not science; In a vacuum, all you have is one case study that links this set of advice to a toxic culture.
The way you replied to a comment that mentioned people being "able to consider the quality of advice as something separate from its source" as if it had instead said "Ignoring context" breaks the guidelines in several places, e.g. Be kind...Please don't sneer...Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize etc.
Advice always depends on the context, which includes the circumstances and history of the provider. The comment was a bit too mean (I'd have objected to "not a sign of intelligence"), but it's definitely not bad for the "ignoring context."
I've already given a reason in a sibling comment why I thought the phrase "ignoring context" was bad—it's a straw man: it acts like it's refuting a particular argument, but it's actually refuting something else.
> Advice always depends on the context
It's not clear to me whether that's true, or what it means exactly. It seems to mix at least two senses together, one (A) where it's self-evidently true, one (B) where it's not true. (I believe that's called equivocation, and it's a very common way of going astray, in philosophy, informal arguments etc)
(A) Yes, when someone tells you something, you should take into consideration who is telling you, like when you assess the credibility/reliability of what an unfamiliar website says. Not doing that would be very foolish.
(B) The sense of the original "quality of advice" quote: You can read a quote somewhere, not knowing where it came from, or it's some author you know nothing about, or anonymous etc, and think it's good advice, and follow it. Where it came from doesn't really matter, i.e. the quality of the advice is separate from its source. Good advice can come from a "bad" source, or bad from a "good" source.
Whatever their problems, their results are pretty damn consistent.
League of Legends remains the premier e-sport, dethroning all competitors in viewership rates and numbers.
Valorant is rapidly rising, and threatens the long-incumbent direct rival Counter-Strike
Teamfight Tactics, while not an e-sport, still remains in the top 10 streamed games on twitch.
3 releases, all (at least by twitch streams) major successes. From the product point of view, they're clearly doing something right, and whatever work culture issues they're claimed to have, they're certainly outperforming.
Note: As most of riot's releases target the e-sport crowd, I'm using twitch viewership numbers as an analogue for success. Sports, after all, are judged by popularity amongst viewers above all.
Success isn't everything. It is very possible (and arguably more likely) to be a successful company and still have a shitty culture and/or work environment.
Riot is a prime example of this, but unfortunately they are hardly the exception - it is a fairly common pattern amongst the AAA game companies and publishers.
The specifics are not the same from company to company, but arguably the end result is. People are unfortunately willing to endure a lot just to get into their "dream industry".
League of Legends is a premier e-sport more so because of marketing than game design or engineering. In fact, their game client remains worse than dota 2's in every way.
It's actually pretty hard to take them seriously considering their client is still such a buggy mess after about 10 years.
And the esport viewership of CS-GO is much larger compared to Valorant.
And while Teamfight Tactics was an success, Legends of Runeterra wasn't. So they are 3/4... which is still pretty good - but can also be explained by good marketing and IP handling. Similar to the new Activision-Blizzard.
Not to mention they've had money flowing like water. When you don't have to worry about being financially efficient a lot of management structures and unstructures seem like they "work".
It's when the money dries up that cracks in the foundation are evident.
Even without considering the "boy's club" stuff, LoL never seemed to be very competently programmed back when I played it (admittedly I've hardly touched it since ~2012). I wouldn't really trust them for engineering and programming expertise either, except maybe from whoever manages their servers/online infra.
I don’t know much about League of Legends or its architecture, but I could imagine they were making tradeoffs at times for the product’s sake. I think they hint at this with `std::string` usage in their tech debt article. [1]
It’s been said to death at this point, but technical shortcomings can be orthogonal to a video game’s success on the market.
That said, refactoring for later gains might be wasted time if you have only a certain amount of scope planned for the rest of time, counter to the typical heuristic.
Some of their decisions didn't make any sense, even at the time. For example, each champion is coded separately for each team, there isn't just a single champion where they toggle a flag or something. That's led to bugs where champions are stronger depending on what team they're on. Skins work the same way; instead of just changing the appearance, every skin is a seperate hero in the code.
You're not wrong. Their engineering seems incredibly incompetent. I've often postulated that they have like 500 junior developers and like 12 people with more than 5 years programming experience.
There is probably like 2 people who keep the game engine running and when they quit the game will fall apart.
You should look at some of their dev blogs. Their engineering team has done some pretty remarkable things, like re-writing the game server to be deterministic so they could better deal with problems that occur in pro play[1]. They've also talked a bit about the past and future of the game engine specifically [2]. They also have blogs talking about operations- taking the game from something written by 2 dudes in a dorm room to being one of the most played games in the world- how their stack has changed, how they're set up to do patches and rollbacks, how they do their internal testing and playtesting, etc.
No, I down-voted each of you because your comments are anecdotal at best and don’t add to the discussion at all.
Saying the game doesn’t appear to be “competently programmed” is analogous to the “coded badly” that gets thrown around, not taking into account that all successful consumer software has tech debt and inefficiencies.
(I don’t work for Riot and have no affiliation with them)
Yeah, I've gotten into it recently. Ignoring the nearly impossible problem of game balance, the actual software is not well engineered. The non-game client is chock full of bugs. They do have quite a legacy problem: 11 years is forever in computer game time, but still, with their resources you'd expect the big bugs to be fixed by now.
Disclaimer: I am not voicing any opinions about Riot or the people mentioned in the articles below. Just compiling what I’m aware of and letting people make their own opinions.
> COO, Scott Gelb [...], as a comedy bit, [...] has repeatedly touched subordinates’ balls or butt or farted in their faces. [...] his punishment—two months of unpaid leave and training. [1]
From OP's interview with CTO Mike Seavers:
> Every time we sat down to go through the past quarter and plan the next one at Riot Games, we came up with a leadership theme for the quarter. For example, we weren’t going to make decisions for others for a month. This put all of us on the same page, and we got everyone to think about it and talk about it. When my direct report came to me asking, “Can I do this thing?” It was easy for me to say, “I’m not going to answer that question. You know the theme of the quarter, so you need to at least think it through before I give you an opinion.”
"Toxic boys club" sums up a lot of the historical problems, but a quick Google of "riot games culture problems" will give you literally dozens of articles to read.
I have work with a few ex rioters and have interviewed a few (at the time) current ones, and have heard personal confirmation of many of these problems. It's a big company though, so some departments are better or worse in this respect.
But yeah, it's not really a great place to emulate if you're trying to build a healthy culture, at least IMO.
I interviewed with them a few months ago. They are really -really- putting work into 180'ing their culture. I'm sure it's not there yet but there is a serious effort being made, even from the hiring side.
We had a term in the Airborne community called "Little Groups of Paratroopers"; frequently you'd be split up from your direct team but would find small groups of others scattered across the drop zone. We'd work off of "Commanders Intent" which was the goal or mission that needed to be done.
There would be a plan to accomplish that goal, but it was pragmatic in that if we knew what good looked like, constant management wasn't needed for motivated troops.
You see a similar thing in Pragmatic Marketing's "Enlightened Teams" and other frameworks.
I dont have empirical data to back it up, but I believe that you get the results because of all the small things that teams take to get to good because of that higher level objective. I think Ben Horowitz's talk about these small here is golden:
https://a16z.com/2011/11/13/lead-bullets/
Some good insights in this interview. I especially liked the comments and the closing statement regarding that "Self-managing teams isn't for everyone". It's easy to get caught up in the idea that self-management is some sort of "end game" for everyone when for some contexts and for some people it just doesn't work.
I think culture plays into this quite a bit. E.g. it's probably a lot easier to build these kind of teams within a Scandinavian culture, due to extremely strong belief in egalitarianism.
It kind of begs the question; how does one hire for this?
You just say that the teams are self-managed. I worked in self-managed teams and dont want to do that anymore. I will self-select myself out, because I hated the politics and toxicity it brought in.
DOTA is such an amazing game that even a blatant low quality ripoff could launch a company like Riot into success. it really is a testament to Kyle Sommer - what a visionary!
of course I mean the original. I agree making it into a standalone was a great idea and Heroes of Newerth was amazing. LoL remains a blatant low quality ripoff whose success is due entirely to the novelty of the genre.
I can't speak to LoL's quality because I haven't played it, but I personally believe the largest factor was LoL's business model. League was free to play and attracted a huge player base because of it, while you had to spend ~30USD (?) to play HoN. They eventually switched to a free to play model as well, but it was way too late. I have spent thousands and thousands and thousands of hours in DotA, HoN and DotA 2—and HoN was a great game with a worse business model and sadly horrible leadership (CEO caught on several occasions dropping the most vulgar racist and homophobic remarks, banning people in-game if they upset him).
HON was clearly superior in terns of art and style, and hero names actually made sence. Magmus, pyromancer and swift blade sound like what they mean, and do what it says.
Wtf is Juggernaught? Something big? Wtf is sandking ability, quicksand?
We must have played HoN at different parts of its lifecycle.
When I played it at launch, the heroes were just reskins of the DOTA heroes. The art style was less cartoony than LoL, but the graphical fidelity also meant that it was more difficult to pick out the HoN heroes from the background than it was in LoL, and the graphical clutter was a fundamental part of why HoN failed.
Ah, I didn't realize it was so easy to make a game so popular. I guess it makes sense, given how HoN, Dota 2 and a million others have been equal "low quality ripoff"s and had similar success.
Riot introduced lane pushing moba to the widest audience possible - their game sucks - the genre is strong. If those other award winning dotas were willing to make the hard choices and sacrifice hardcore gamers in favor of the larger casual market then yes they too could have enjoyed Riot's level of success.
> Riot introduced lane pushing moba to the widest audience possible - their game sucks - the genre is strong. If those other award winning dotas were willing to make the hard choices and sacrifice hardcore gamers in favor of the larger casual market then yes they too could have enjoyed Riot's level of success.
fair, honestly - I probably wouldn't be saying it sucks if I liked it, but then if it didn't suck I'd probably like it especially considering how much I love the genre. either way the fact that Riot has been this successful with such a low quality game is a testament to the strength of the genre and the vision of the original creators
Next you're going to tell me all the mobile free-to-play games are clearly the best games ever because they're "popular".
Popularity and quality have a very tentative relationship at the best of times. When differences in barriers to entry and network effects come in, then quality has to at most just clear a watermark.
So I'd say it's probably more likely "not bad enough to lose popularity" than it is "so popular because it's so high-quality"
HoN and a "Michelin star restaurant" aren't the same kind of restaurant, and don't target the same customers, so popularity says nothing about their relative quality. Plenty of people, myself include, like McDonalds. Not many people think McDonalds is the best restaurant ever. However, comparing the popularity of McDonalds to other similar restaurants like Carls Jr or Jack in the Box would be a good indicator of perceptions of quality.
LoL and HoN are essentially different versions of the same game, so popularity is a good indicia of the market perceptions of game quality. LoL has been popular since it was launched over a decade ago, and remains popular to this day, outlasting dozens of other e-sports games, indicating that the player base thinks the game is still good enough to keep playing it even in the face of competition from newer games. DOTA2, similarly has a large player base, indicating that a large number of people also find the game to be of sufficient quality and enjoyment to spend years playing. Both Riot and Valve earned hundreds of millions from their respective MOBAs, and continue to make large amounts of money from these games. In contrast, the abject failure that was HoN almost bankrupt S2 games (their followup MOBA, Strife, finally killed them off.)
On a further note, I find it quite humorous that the parent to which I was replying accused LoL of being just a clone of DOTA, despite Riot actually putting a significant amount of effort into differentiating the heroes and combat. At launch, the HoN heroes were just reskins of the DOTA heroes.
a lot of us og dota players got on the hon beta around summer 09 and appreciated how it faithfully preserved mechanics to the point that a lot of your skills just transferred over - the graphics were beautiful and it really felt like an upgraded dota experience. the attention to detail was absolute quality. I played it for years and it still holds a warm place in my heart. it started going south with the switch to f2p, lame in-game purchases, and generally trying to emulate LoL's pandering to the wider/younger market. I tried to like LoL and gave it an extended trial but ultimately hated how they simplified the mechanics and the casual nature of it all. they obviously made the right choices for making the most money possible but they made the shitty version of dota. it just turns out there's a bigger market for shitty dota than proper dota.
So, you're basically admitting that HoN was just a reskinning of DOTA...
IOW, HoN was entirely unoriginal and players might as well have just stuck with the original DOTA. And people did...DOTA on a given day had more players than HoN during its entire run.
LoL may have simplified the mechanics of DOTA, but it did something new and fundamentally set the stage for e-sports as we know it. Complex mechanics in themselves aren't to be celebrated; a lot of what LoL did was to eliminate the pointlessly complex mechanics. Even the edit:[lead developer] of DOTA thought the mechanics had gotten too complex to be enjoyable for more than a very niche audience, which is why he streamlined a lot of them when given the opportunity to develop DOTA2 for Valve.
it's not a scandal, we were invited to beta hon under the explicit expectation that it was dota remade on a modern engine - and that's what we wanted as wc3 and bnet were awfully dilapidated by then. it's more than a reskinning it brought modern match making and stats and nice community features, etc. and I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers but I recall bnet becoming a ghost town once hon started to get popular not to mention the quality of the matches. from what I can tell hon had decent run - won plenty of awards, made plenty of money, it's not league of legends but nothing is even close to that. and apparently there are people still playing hon - they just released a client for M1 a few months ago.
Wow it's like he's talking directly to me. There is so much here that I am currently struggling with in running a team. How to manage the decision making when I have deadlines, I do tend to just give the answers because it's quicker, but it's short term gain very long term pain. This is a really excellent resource for any engineering managers out there.
How can managers hold back to allow their employees to turn into self-managed teams?
honest question, but what justifies having a manager if your going to have "self-managed teams"? what justifies keeping the (now redundant) position around?
> 1.9 million people played LoL in April 2021.
> LoL is the third most watched game on Twitch.
> In March 2021, 117 million hours of LoL gameplay were watched on Twitch.
> LoL is the second most popular eSports in the world.
So simple and so true. It's insane how many companies hire and build teams around visions their teams don't understand well at all. That's certainly where most killer companies win. Their force doesn't need to be extremely proficient and efficient to move the needle because everyone understands what moving the needle means and has a clear path to take small decisions without looking at a spec or consulting another party.
The best managers are certainly the ones that make an effort to enable learning around what is being build and why. That allows people to build agency and criteria to make decisions that are in the best interest of the company.