Why being a double developer is a win/win

Hello again everyone! If you've been following along with this blog series, you'll know I've been posting about my personal experience as a "double developer", which is a term I've coined to describe my life working full-time at a developer in the games industry while also working essentially full-time on my own indie venture. Last week's comments section was on fire with people chiming in about their own experiences doing something similar or about their perspective on my admittedly hectic schedule. In order to keep this blog series from being a one-sided story, however, I thought I'd switch tracks a bit today and touch on a new topic: why I believe that employers allowing the type of arrangement I'm doing is beneficial to both parties.

So before I begin I should perhaps explain why this blog post is necessary at all, in case some people are unaware of some of the contractual arrangements that go on in the video game industry. So a typical contract that an employee of a game company gets would say something to the effect of "In exchange for x dollars for your salary, everything you work on becomes the property of [insert company name here]." That's a very rudimentary re-statement of what would be in the contract; the real thing would contain much more legal jargon, including more complete definitions of "everything" and "work on". 

Now from the company's perspective, of course this makes a lot of sense. They wouldn't want to train an employee using potentially proprietary knowledge just to have that employee turn around and re-purpose what he worked on to turn a personal profit. And I believe such an outlook is justified; I think we can all agree that for someone to do that would be pretty underhanded, so it's good that the company seeks to protect itself. 

But the problem I have with it is that I believe it's overkill. In my first blog post I explained some of the more draconian ways in which this protective policy has been enforced. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of employees at a company have no desire to rip off their employer by canabalizing their market or sales by leveraging the company's own knowledge and technology against them in order to turn a personal profit. I'm not saying there aren't a few bad seeds in the world, but I think we can agree that the average person isn't going to do that. In fact, based on my experience, the average person usually not only does not want to hurt their employer, but actually likes their employer and is happy to do things to help them! If this is the typical case (and I believe it is), why are all of our contracts treating us like it's the other way around?

When employees are treated as potential hostile thieves by their employer, morale suffers. For some people who never have any intent on working on their own projects outside of work, maybe this isn't such a big deal. However, I think I speak for a lot of programmers at least who would argue that they really do enjoy what they do and they like doing it on their own time as well. As long as what they work on has no negative implications on the product offerings of their daytime employer (i.e. your employer makes puzzle games for the mobile market and you plan on releasing a puzzle game for the mobile market, or perhaps any game for the mobile market), is there any harm in letting the employee go hog wild on whatever captures their interest? I don't see why not.

In fact, I hypothesize (but cannot prove, since I have only my own experience to draw upon) that if employees were given the option to work on personal projects at home that their morale would improve because they would feel that they are being treated as individuals with integrity, as opposed to potential thieves. One might argue, however, that the increase to morale is not worth the added hassle of having to deal with a potentially large group of employees producing products that would have to be vetted by the company to ensure they aren't competing with their product offerings.

While that decision comes down to a company's values and culture, I would raise one issue: making a game is hard. How many employees are truly going to go through the long-term, focused effort at releasing a game for sale at all? My guess is: not many. Therefore I postulate that there would be little to no hassle involved in just letting employees putter around at home on personal projects, since the chances of any becoming viable marketable goods is small. This is not because I assume the employees are lazy or untalented; rather, because a lot of people just like messing around on projects for the fun of it!

So my first point is that letting employees work on personal projects provides a morale boost for the employee, which generally translates into happier, more productive employees at work. Now while I perceive this to already be a tangible benefit to the company and enough reason to let employees work on personal projects, I propose another benefit: employees working on projects at home provides free training for the employee that the company doesn't have to provide!

I'll explain what I mean from my own experience. At work, I am a gameplay programmer. Without diving into my exact responsibilities, it suffices to say that I do not write rendering code, multi-threaded systems, audio systems, memory allocators, etc. These are all outside the scope of my responsibilities at work, and indeed were once out of the scope of my abilities altogether. But since I'm making my own game at home, I suddenly had to learn about all of these things, and more. And now if ever my employer would need me to fill one of those roles at work, I would be able to step into that role without any training needing to be provided by the company. 

If you read my last blog post, you know I spend a considerable amount of time at home programming (around 40 hours per week). This means that on average, for every 1 hour of work my employer pays me for, they gain 2 hours worth of experience in terms of my skill and knowledge growth. I believe this to be of considerable benefit to my employer, and given that they choose to keep me around I think that they would agree! Like anything else, practice improves our skills. Does it make sense then that most employers intentionally limit the opportunities for their employees to practice on their own, where it doesn't cost the company anything?

To sum up, I believe that employers that allow their employees to live a double developer life as I am doing will reap numerous benefits, including happy employees and more skilled employees that they don't have to train as much. In case you're thinking differently, allow me to mention one very visible success story: Google. In case you're not aware, Google has an 80/20 rule. Searching for it will yield a lot of explanations, but here is one: http://smartstorming-blog.com/googles-8020-formula-it-can-work-for-you/. Google believes in empowering employees to work on their own projects so much that they give them time to do it at work! This is much more radical than what I'm suggesting, since in my example the company doesn't have to pay anything at all, but simply let employees work on projects outside of work. But the last time I checked, Google was a pretty innovative company with happy employees.

One potential question I didn't cover in this post (which I might cover in a subsequent post) is: "While learning things at home unrelated to my tasks at work is great, what about learning things that does impact my day job? Are there any conflicts of interest there?" Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any comments/questions of your own!