It's a huge invasion of privacy, but if we were in an office and they were in a cubicle I'd be able to wander by and see their screens anytime I wanted.
You need to take breaks in both cases at 1-2 hour intervalsRemember to work 8 hours straight but if you play a video game you need to take a break every hour minutes.
My advice for anyone working with outsourced workers - don't EVER do an hourly agreement.
Pay per outcome with a set deadline. You need 10 textured assets within a style guide at no more than 5000 polygons. The deadline is 10 working days.
This goes for freelancers as well. Don't charge per hour. Charge for outcomes.
Charging per hour just penalises you for being more efficient.
Paying per hour just rewards inefficiency.
This also lets you monitor your budget with WAY more accuracy. There are no surprises, because it's all been agreed to beforehand.
Hell - even when I ran a large studio with employees YEARS ago - any work done as overtime was done like this. It works out better for everyone.
Agree with everything, except your last sentence — forcing people to do overtime. That's just a sign of bad management and planning. With salaried employees working a fixed amount of hours per week it's more about planning carefully to meet deadlines, etc.My advice for anyone working with outsourced workers - don't EVER do an hourly agreement.
Pay per outcome with a set deadline. You need 10 textured assets within a style guide at no more than 5000 polygons. The deadline is 10 working days.
This goes for freelancers as well. Don't charge per hour. Charge for outcomes.
Charging per hour just penalises you for being more efficient.
Paying per hour just rewards inefficiency.
This also lets you monitor your budget with WAY more accuracy. There are no surprises, because it's all been agreed to beforehand.
Hell - even when I ran a large studio with employees YEARS ago - any work done as overtime was done like this. It works out better for everyone.
Kilg0re Trout from GOGcom team just did an interview with Ken and Roberta on Twitch:
That's just the load screens.Remember to work 8 hours straight but if you play a video game you need to take a break every hour for 15 minutes.
With Roberta, any negativity out there has less to do with her sex (especially since adventure games are a genre with a relatively large female audience) and more to do with a lot of Ron Gilbert/Lucasarts acolytes pushing the idea over the last 20+ years that she was never a good designer in the first place because Sierra's games required you to save a lot because of dying and walking dead scenarios.Yeah the gamegrumps video totally debunks Ken's claim about people not liking Roberta. The comments are gushing over her.
I'm wondering is that going to translate into sales though.
My advice for anyone working with outsourced workers - don't EVER do an hourly agreement.
Pay per outcome with a set deadline. You need 10 textured assets within a style guide at no more than 5000 polygons. The deadline is 10 working days.
This goes for freelancers as well. Don't charge per hour. Charge for outcomes.
Charging per hour just penalises you for being more efficient.
Paying per hour just rewards inefficiency.
This also lets you monitor your budget with WAY more accuracy. There are no surprises, because it's all been agreed to beforehand.
Hell - even when I ran a large studio with employees YEARS ago - any work done as overtime was done like this. It works out better for everyone.
That's why I said Ken Williams has a boomer mindset. Some of the people I know who are in the office all day long and always "busy" are some of the most useless people as well
This line might be SO true when you work for some kind of a big corporation that doesn't know how many "resources" it has (or ANY state-owned/government institution). But try it in a startup-ish company and you would learn that your limits are much higher than you thought, and very quickly. Been there, done that.I've been working for myself since I was 20 - but I had ONE job before that when I was 19 for a year... and that "you'll only work just hard enough to not get fired" line is SO true.
I put more effort into our inter office chess league than I did into my actual work.
Guy is literally this memeI've been reading Ken's book recently: https://kensbook.com/
And there's a brief Chapter about how he ranks employees that would probably lead to conniption fits among some people:
There was also a bit about how he chose designers that I believe our current video game commentators would probably point out also had something else in common:
And finally further into the book there was a bit along with his trouble with "unions" about how he was somewhat of a "slave driver" and overworked people and had them do crunch to get products ready for the Christmas sales period and how he has no excuse for it and might have done things differently, but ultimately concluding he had to do what he had to do to keep the company solvent after it almost went bankrupt once and that he was probably right because of how SIERRA as a company ended up after he was gone:
How he dealt with the unions:Unions must exist exactly to prevent people like him from exploiting his employees for *his* own profit, at *their* expense.
This line might be SO true when you work for some kind of a big corporation that doesn't know how many "resources" it has (or ANY state-owned/government institution). But try it in a startup-ish company and you would learn that your limits are much higher than you thought, and very quickly. Been there, done that.I've been working for myself since I was 20 - but I had ONE job before that when I was 19 for a year... and that "you'll only work just hard enough to not get fired" line is SO true.
I put more effort into our inter office chess league than I did into my actual work.