Most small indie dev teams seem to be rather egalitarian. It’s seems to be a group effort and everyone shares the profits equally.
Has anyone got to the stage of employing people like programmers or artists? As in full time employees, not just a short contract, or hiring someone off fiver.
Did it change you as a person?
What is better, being an employee, an indie dev, or an employer?
Because indies typically do it to avoid the rat-race and office politics and all that stuff. But if you become successful that you become an employer are you just going back to the rat race but in a different form? Like Reginald Perrin?
I would rather contract out work that I can’t do. Everything code-wise I would do myself and have people do 3d modeling or sound. A lot of successful indie games have remote workers working on a project
For an indie I think the most common thing is using contractors/freelances so that you can use occasional work for hire when your own skills won’t do. For indie studios that have multiple people I often see that grow from friendships or classmates so that’s not really an employee and more of a partner.
Indie studios that do hire full time employees seem to do that after 1 hit, overdo the employee hiring and then get dragged into high downtime costs (time between games) where they’re pretty much ruined if the game doesn’t meet expectations.
My impression is that indies usually enjoy the freedom of being able to use work for hire and that indies want to be independent from publishers, but also from employees and all the paperwork/costs that brings with it.
Though when you find someone really good I think most indies would love to hire that person as an employee, but working together with someone really capable also tends to grow into a partnership kind of thing. Haven’t had the experience myself yet, but this is my take on it.
I have not in the 8 years of being indie, however I am sick of doing everything myself and next year is the year I plan to grow bigger. I might blog about it because i think it will be an interesting transition, but at the same time… I am not very good at keeping blogs going…
Probably about as much as any other major life experience does.
I would say that the most significant thing specific to this experience is being able to better see things from a manager’s or leader’s perspective. It’s easy to think that a manager or leader is an inconsiderate jerk. Sometimes that’s true. Plenty of times, though, it comes down to them having a different view of the world that encompasses many more people or problems than you’re directly exposed to.
This depends entirely on what you’re doing.
Being an employee is great. If you’re in an organisation you trust you get to think about a focused little area to work in, give that your best, let everyone else handle everything else, and look forward to regular paychecks rolling in. However, it does mean that you’re typically working towards someone else’s goals at least as much as your own. Depending on what your own ambitions are and the team that you’re in that might be a great fit, or it might not.
Being an “indie dev” could mean anything. I like building my own stuff. Building stuff that makes money means I can spend more time building bigger, better stuff. There’s always compromise between “building what I want” in the purely creative sense, and “building what I want” in the harsh realities sense. Everyone has to strike their balance somewhere in there.
Being an employer definitely comes with its own set of challenges. Leadership (people skills, direction) and management (planning, resource management) aren’t the same thing, and you need both. Employees are frightfully expensive, and therefore stressful in and of themselves. That said, building a team and then leading and managing them to successful outcomes is freakin’ awesome. My main piece of advice if you want to do this is to not spend all of your time on the technical parts of your work. Leadership and management are both their own complete fields of practice. Also, don’t feel like you have to do both yourself, or that you can’t replace yourself in those roles later on.
I’m pretty sure that the “rat race” comes from constantly wanting something that’s beyond your means, and then shifting the goal posts further forwards as soon as you get there.
If that’s something you want to avoid then the question isn’t whether or not you want employees. It’s about what kind of goals you want to chase in the first place, and whether or not you’ll give yourself time to appreciate your successes when you get them.
Some people love the relentless pursuit of goals, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you want employees but you don’t want a “rat race” style of life then “organic growth” is probably the strategy for you. It sounds like that might be how @Antony-Blackett is going about things.
For me it’s going to be more about what’s achievable. up until now I’ve been content with games that are achievable with me and my co-founder. But I’m getting a bit bored of that now and want to make something more grand, what I have in mind will need a team, so a team I will find. However it also needs planning and a business strategy first.
Yes, exactly, indies seem more likely to hire contractors. Even though they can be 5x more expensive.
If had enough money to take on an employee I don’t know whether I would take on a programmer or an artist. Since I do both at the moment. Probably I’d hire an artist as I’d say I’m better at programming than art. But then again, they would probably have their own style which wouldn’t be quite the same.
On the other hand maybe a programmer because I hate fixing bugs.
A contractor only gets paid when they are working. You can normally cut off work to a contractor at a moments notice. You don’t pay them for holidays or sick leave. And so on.
An employee needs to get paid regardless. And they need benefits. And there are a bunch of legal and financial ramifications of firing an employee.
The hourly rate owed to an employee can be as low as a third of the actual cost of the employee to the company.
Well, that’s not necessarily true. If a contractor works for three months at $500 a day. It’s cheaper to employ someone for a year at $25,000. So even if the employee does three months of actual work they are still cheaper.
Then yeah, it’s a good idea to think about making them a casual employee (or your region’s equivalent) instead.
As has been pointed out, though, the cost of an employee is far more than just their hourly rate. The conditions of work are also typically quite different depending on whether you’re a contractor (external) or an employee (internal), which skews the value proposition one way or another and the various costs between sides of the deal.
Also, the words seem to be used differently in different places, just to make all this stuff less clear to discuss.
If you’re in an organisation you trust you get to think about a focused little area to work in, give that your best, let everyone else handle everything else, and look forward to regular paychecks rolling in. However, it does mean that you’re typically working towards someone else’s goals at least as much as your own. Depending on what your own ambitions are and the team that you’re in that might be a great fit, or it might not.