Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games

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.

It's their rules. I'm just playing the game.

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 belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"?

Local sports groups dont win championships, most of the time they don't even compete. I struggle to find an example where this analogie hold.

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...

> 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.

LoL is a far more forgiving game for newcomers. Easier return to base and self-minion hitting are the big differences.

It also has a more cartoony art style which attracts a wider audience.

"I don't like a game so it is bad"

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.