Oleksandr Kaleniuk
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Sure, here’s one example. While working on my thesis, I had a side job in a small casual games studio. One day we hired a guy to work on mini-games. He aced the interview, well, he is undoubtedly smart and skillful. Then he was given the first assignment. It was a simple Hanoi-tower-like mini-game. It usually takes a day or two to both write the game and polish all the animations. He had a week for that.

When two days passed, I began to wonder, how it’s going. “It’s fine,” he said, “I’m working on animations.” Good! Excellent! If anything, animations are secondary to the gameplay, so even if there is some trouble, we can also go on with raw graphics and polish it any time in between the real work.
On the fourth day, I once again asked if it’s going ok and whether he need some help. “It’s ok, I’m working on animations”. I should have suspected that something wrong.

On the fifth day, the day we were to send a build to our publisher, I told him: “Look, it’s perfectly fine if you don’t have your animation ready, let’s just finalize it as it is and send the mini-game to a publisher a bit raw.” “I don’t have a mini-game,” he said, “I never got started on it. How could I, I didn’t finish my animation engine yet.”

He started from making a whole animation engine with elaborate architecture and of course failed to make it in the week time. But he was never asked to do animation engine. His job was to make a mini-game. He just felt that simply writing some 200 lines of code is the wrong way to do it.

It’s not that he lacked experience or knowledge. It’s not that the task was unclear. Do how did it happen? My theory (and this is only a theory) is he lacked confidence at the moment. Being a smart guy he did what a smart guy should have done to look smart. Simply copy-pasting a piece of code and rewiring it to do what it has to do is considered sloppy programming, a complete no-no for a smart guy. But this is exactly what it takes to do the job.

I guess, what I’m trying to say is: taking decisions despite own self-image requires confidence.

)

    Oleksandr Kaleniuk

    Written by

    I do wordsandbuttons.online