Spotted this (the notion “DevOps”) courtesy of Matthew Weigel, a term I’d fortunately missed-out on. It seems to come down to: Software Developers (programmers who write apps that a company sells) and Ops people (sysadmins who manage servers) don’t talk enough and don’t respect each other; this cause problems when […]
recruiting
56 posts
Another excellent post by Christer – a Direct of tech @ SCEA – on calculating independent, verfiable salaries for people in videogames industry: “Unlike salary surveys, where people can claim arbitrary wages (and the submitted salaries are never posted), the H1-B data contains actual wages! In other words, it is […]
In the UK, it’s probably illegal to make you work on a Sunday: If [your employment contract] doesn’t [specifically say “you must work on Sundays”], then the only way of making you work on that day is by a change to your contract. This is something that must normally be […]
Interesting announcement from the UK schools minister, David Willetts: from 2012, UK universities will be legally required to publish their exam blacklists. This is something I desperately hope comes into practice (apparently it’s just an “aim” right now, no telling if it’ll actually happen). It’s especially interesting given the rich […]
Nicole Lazzaro’s XEO is looking for an iPhone developer (Bay Area/SF) Contact: hr@xeodesign.com If you don’t know who Nicole is, the design process for Tilt gives a good idea. She’s well known for her work on studying emotional reactions in people playing games (and designing appropriately): How we created Tilt […]
How long do you want to be an Assistant Product Manager? Assistant Product Manager 4 Life Job Summary Reference IS0012 Location Horseferry Road Hours 37 per week Closing Date 03 December 2010 at Midnight DEPARTMENT DESCRIPTION * Channel 4 Online is responsible for creating and managing Channel 4 multiplatform experiences […]
http://www.danceswithferrets.org/meeblog/?p=662 “In addition to introducing new practices and processes to our office that transformed our day-to-day operations, Dean introduced me to Dogging!” FWIW … I’d be a *lot* more likely to hire someone with that on their resume/profile than I would someone with “Dean is professional and valuable member of […]
Startup CEOs are often advised to do this, but few people explain how the heck to do that, and its far easier said than done. Ben’s got a great approach: actually do each of the jobs yourself, for real, before hiring people into them. This resonates with my own experience, […]
Anyone saying “redundancies are inevitable for games industry companies” should never be allowed to run a studio. Ditto for the raving loons who think everyone should be hired as contractors instead. I was pointed at this by Nicholas Lovell’s wholehearted supporting tweet, reminding me that Nicholas is a finance guy, […]
Came up recently on TCE. I finally figured out a concise definition of the job role being filled by the “good/great” Tech Directors – someone who’s worth every penny of the $150k salaries they command: “Figure out the worst things that go wrong which nobody is specifically to blame for, […]
Here we have Zynga recruiting for a CTO in SF: http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?k=Job&c=qoX9Vfw9&j=oRigVfw4 (see also the last post, on UK online games jobs)
UPDATE: I’ll add other roles in as/when I get the OK from the relevant people; not all of these are public yet. — Despite the heavy rash of studio closures (well documented by Nicholas Lovell), it seems there’s a lot of exciting online/social games hiring going on right now – […]
Dear Eric … here’s my problem: Somehow that didn’t feel right for Google. We wanted something much more transparent and open” (Eric Schmidt, Chairman/CEO Google, writing in the Harvard Business Review this month) How, exactly, would you reconcile that with the fact that I had to serve Google with a […]
Two more firms have proven their mettle this week (i.e.: think twice before engaging them). As always, it’s nothing personal. If a recruitment agent is doing a job that I and others think weak, but managed to persuade an employer to pay them to do it – and to accept […]
I’m doing some pretty cool stuff at the moment – I’m not looking for a job – but a few months ago I got emailed by three different Google recruiters, inviting me to apply for three (different) specific jobs, in different parts of the company, almost all at the same […]
Tim Schafer recently posted scans of his rejection letters over the years from various tech and games companies he applied to. There’s one from Atari, one from Hewlett Packard – and, eventually, his acceptance letter from Lucasfilm / Lucasarts. But far, far more important to this post is the cover-letter […]
Things are getting interesting in Recruitment land again… Received today: Adam, greetings from the Visual Computing Group at Intel Corporation. We received your contact information from the Siggraph Job Fair. Please let me know how much discrete or integrated graphics driver development, media software, or debug experience you have and […]
What’s the biggest single challenge to a Studio Director? Or to the VP of Development / Studios who oversees a handful of publisher-owned studios? Recruitment In the games industry there are no raw materials of variable quality, there is no variety of base services to build upon; everything that distinguishes […]
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1917163/?ps=5 If you have any interest in iPhone development (you have ideas for apps, or you want to start coding for your iphone, or just want to meet other like-minded folks over beers), then come along. Bring friends. Bring iPhones (I’ll bring my laptop so you can download and try […]