Talent Development and Scalability

As a technologist one of my favorite topics is Scalability. Of chief importance in online game development today, Scalability is not a feature that can be simply checked off in a Game Design or Product Requirements Document. It’s a design goal of each step in the game production, from the initial architecture to the way in which updates are deployed to production after the game goes live.

Scalability is about preparing for the future and the possible scenarios of growth it mightbring. Like the scenario of a successful integration of social features that bring virality to your game (Yay!), throwing the concurrency of your backend servers through the roofand making your data store overflow with user-generated content faster than your ability to provision more hardware. Or when the number of events in your analytics system soars to hundreds of millions a day and your optimization algorithms require near real-time completion of your ETL process. Growth, as much as it correlates to business success, is highly desired, but also sometimes scary.

No matter what scalability challenges you encounter, they will require multiple dimensions of optimization and many minds working together in order to craft effectivesolutions. This leads to one aspect of scalability that is often forgotten: The ability to scale the organization (your engineering capacity) to future business needs.

A recurring comment amongst technology managers here in Silicon Valley is that we’reback in the .com days when it comes to hiring engineers. Managers are disheartened by the severe shortage of specialized technical talent and the lengthy hiring lead times inour industry. The root of these hiring blues is their sole focus on finding talent.

Since talent availability is a factor of the economic forces of supply and demand, relying only on finding talent to grow engineering capacity makes an organization vulnerable to the uncontrollable dynamics of the marketplace. The solution is to devise ways to create and grow talent in your organization.

To win the talent game, companies must see Training and Development as a required investment in Scalability, and not just as a component of benefits packages. In fact, I argue that nurturing technical expertise through a solid investment in training is the only scalable way to grow your organization.

Here’s why: The current skill set of your team will become less relevant as new technologies emerge. The old LAMP model from the 90s is giving way to event-driven frameworks such as Node.js. As HTML5 continues to gain adoption, mobile development will require novel techniques for exceptional client-side performance. Instead of just joining the rush to hire new experts, you should focus on creating those new skills in your organization. You should hire intellectually curious engineers and train them on new technologies your business needs.

At GREE we look at Training as a key investment in the business. For example, a few months ago our management team was discussing how hard it was to find Android engineers, despite the fact that Java itself has an extensive community of developers. With this mindset of creating skills in the organization, we started a program called “Android Bootcamp” in which new hires with great Computer Science foundation get trained on Android Development as their first assignment in the job. So we went from a discouragingly short pipeline of potential Android hires to hiring great engineers who soon became productive members of our Android team.

Another important point is that the foundation technologies of scalable systems are continuously getting commoditized, reducing the competitive advantage of companies that only focus on technology leadership. Previously unmatched proprietary technologies such as Google’s BigTable or Amazon’s cloud infrastructure are now accessible through their open source contenders such as Hadoop’s HBase and CloudStack. With lower barriers to entry, technical supremacy alone will not guarantee the longevity of your market leadership.

In the long run, companies will increasingly compete on the basis of the collective intelligence of their organizations, a characteristic that is much harder to replicate. Investing in training as a core strategy makes your organization’s strengths unique, promoting a culture of continuous improvement and novelty, key requirements forbuilding great technical teams.

So the next time you stare at your hiring goals take another look at your Training plan and ask yourself: Am I scaling my organization for the future?