[jrmiii]

I had a coworker introduce me to The Five Dysfunctions of a Team[0] as a useful tool for framing problems with team dynamics.

It's easy to draw parallels between what's described and those dysfunctions. In case you're not familiar, this framework by Patrick Lencioni outlines five obstacles that can mess up a team’s flow: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

Particularly relevant to this situation: > Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate

Just to warn you though, there is a tradeoff. You can also just act like an asshole and cite a culture of toxic positivity if people take issue with your behavior. The key is collaborate, productive focus on the outcomes with the other human beings involved in the endeavor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...

[dazzawazza]

The videogames industry is completely paralyzed by fear of conflict. It's in a transition between the old guard who never had any training and revel in conflict (sometimes, but rarely, too toxic levels) and the new starters some of whom seem to have no idea that criticism is an intrinsic part of the creative act.

It's very sad and products are failing all over the place while the industry works it's way through this. It might not make it as the current solution is to homogonize all staff and remove their intrinsic value.

Oh well, I enjoyed the first 20 years in the industry, not so much the last 10 years.

[pjmlp]

Not only the games industry, we seem to be on a fluffy world where any kind of negativity has direct impact on job evaluation, and can even lead to losing the job.

A couple of years ago I worked on such good vibes project, uff.

[scruple]

There are pockets here and there, even inside of AAA studios. But I agree, I'm unlikely to stay in games once I leave this job or am laid off.

[DarkNova6]

This is a great reference, thank you. To me it was clear that Concord suffered from a deeply dysfunctional creative processes.

The character designs alone are so laughably bad that they border on caricature. They don't only violate the most basic of design fundamentals, they show a shocking amount of incompetence on all levels.

Lots of money, but not vision. It's not a coincident that Concord was a hero shooter. Of course big money doesn't understand what they invested in and everybody was just chasing trends without understanding a single dime of what made Overwatch a success.

[pandaman]

>Of course big money doesn't understand what they invested in

Why "of course"? SIE did the due diligence, not just the executives (e.g. Hermen Hulst, the head of WWS, who signed off on the deal, is lauded as the genius of game design with such amazing titles as Killzone and Horizon under his direction during his tenure at Guerilla) but very senior people at the Playstation studios (Bungie, Naughty Dog, Insomniac etc.) checked this out and identified it as a sensible investment into a successful game. These are not some VCs investing into the most hyped thing this week, these are some acclaimed developers closing their eyes on the abomination of a game they purchased with money they don't really have.

There is nothing remotely normal in this process, this is something like Toyota buying Fisker for $10B and putting its badge on Karma.

[whamlastxmas]

Acclaimed developers make flops and garbage games all the time, I don’t think involving them is really any indicator of making a sound financial decision, which is further reinforced by TFA.

[pandaman]

You don't need to be a genius to tell a flop is a flop. Even at Firewalk there were people who knew what are they making, as stated by TFA.

[anal_reactor]

I've realized something funny. It should be the company's interest to encourage employees to have productive debates and spend effort figuring out the best course on action, while in reality, from the perspective of an employee, it's an uphill battle to have your voice heard, with no reward at the end. Therefore, what a smart employee does, is shutting the fuck up.

Case in point: in my current team there's one very vocal senior who needs to have things done his way, but other than that, the willingness to participate in discussions is inversely correlated with experience, and the most experienced devs simply ran out of fucks to give because they're not getting paid extra for the time they spent in fruitless discussions. The end result is that the knowledge ends up being unused and we implement stupid ideas.

[scruple]

The reward for those things is either more work for no increase in pay or you're in conflict with one or more people who are now bad mouthing you to the boss and you'll eventually be fired or be made so miserable that you'll voluntarily leave.

[KronisLV]

> Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate

What do you do when you don't fear the "conflict" (passionate argumentation in search of better approaches) but having it leads nowhere, because people have different opinions?

For example, I responded to a comment where a person had a difficult situation with a coworker, though I didn't really have any solutions myself either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601023

There's a lot of abstract stuff out there, without always having a clear cut "best" answer, but which will have different drawbacks long term, which will impact people differently (e.g. in regards to webdev, that could be using an ORM vs not using it from a type of workload where either could suffice, composition vs inheritance, DB views vs dynamically built queries in the app, using the DTO pattern vs not, using projections for returning DTO data directly from the DB to avoid needing arguably unnecessary mapping in the app code between an Entity and DTO object).

Probably there's dozens of things like that, that apply to game development as well, with people whose opinions have been shaped by differing experiences.

I think that you will probably need to compromise a lot and with outcomes that might feel sub-optimal, hopefully without souring the team dynamics in the process.

[rcxdude]

You need to have a way of resolving conflicts independent of arriving at a consensus (which is usually the best way to do things when it's possible). Usually in technical projects this is done by escalating up the chain of technical management. It could also be done by some kind of voting process, but this isn't very common except in some larger open-source projects. It also requires that the members of team will accept the decision, and not actively work against it. If you have a team member who will not accept things done any way but their way, then they're probably someone you don't want on your team.

[dwattttt]

A phrase I heard early in my career from a superior while reviewing code was "just reminding myself that while this isn't how I'd do it, that doesn't make it wrong"

[KronisLV]

I don’t disagree with the take, but it doesn’t seem sufficient either.

Even if you have developers that know better than to toss aside each other's linter rules and don’t rewrite each other's code in the name of “refactoring”, then if you still have people with differing views working on the codebase, its consistency over time will become less than more.

Whereas if developer A tries to be agreeable then more and more of the code will be written in the way of how developer B wants it to be written and that might make developer A’s life harder over time.

[calvinmorrison]

I did not find that book compelling or realistic.