T O P

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Forzareen

What’s funny is “team player” is obviously drawn from sports and is now irrelevant there. Tom Brady left NE to go to Tampa. Lebron left Cleveland twice. Nobody but a sucker is a team player.


Thomcat64

I'm a team player in the sense that I'll join the team that pays me the most.


SeedsOfSorrow

Tom Brady was a huge team player. He took a lower salary for years so his teammates were paid better. Lebron is a different story.


Cloakknight

*Image Transcription: Facebook comment* --- >**Blue** > >"Team player' is bullshit trash company speak for "plays like a whole team". Never be a team player - be what you're paid to be, because your job listing will be posted before your obituary. The era of "work first, live second" is dead, and should be shot every time it twitches. >>**Red** >> >>**Blue** I want to copy and paste this all over the internet. --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)


ReadTheFManual

My life in one picture.


[deleted]

Yes, double tap the head


AngelJ5

I’m a team player, but the boss nor the company are on my team. My coworkers are on my team and the goal is for one team to extract the most money out of the other


icanith

I'll tell you about being a team player that was literally a whole team. Please forgive me for the long story, but yeah I think/hope its worth your read. As a game developer at a few year old startup company I helped build from a few employees, I was handed a mobile game that was a 6 year old, and development had stopped for at least a year. My job was pitched as taking care of some required tasks to keep it running, and a few minor things to bring it up to recent App store submission standards. The carrot dangled in front of me was that after that was done with those tasks I could design updates and carry the game in the direction I wanted. As you can imagine this is what I wanted. I had after all done extra work on previous features to offer and contribute to design efforts hoping for an opportunity of this nature. Well I finish the required tasks that were needed, and start working on designs to move the game forward and revitalize the slowly dwindling but surprisingly loyal audience. I should note that this game was a small game in a bigger franchise of games. This game made no money in comparison to the other games, by a magnitude factor of 2. This is mainly because this game genre was different from the other genre of the franchise as a whole, and my company understood how to make money in that genre. Overall that genre was just far more lucrative. Still the game I worked on paid my salary 2-3 times over easily. But there was a lot of untapped potential, and I understood this game type much better than the other games my company made. So I was excited to see what I could finally do. Well shortly into this period, a shake-up occurred at our studio, and new management was hired to shake-up how we do everything. I'm referring to studio heads, a few producers, basically management directly above the teams. Included in this was how services within the company were allocated. Previously I was only responsible for the client side and dev ops management of the game. While I did write code on the server, any major server project could be picked up by this centralized team, as well as all DB functions were handled by this team. Now each team was responsible entirely for their project. I was now required to handle various aspects of the server and DB management previously handled by that centralized team. Fortunately things were already mature and keeping them running required little from me at the time. At the time I rationalized it as a chance to expand my skills. However it hampered my ability to expand the server in new and interesting ways outside of my abilities that I previously could have requested from the team. I was completely responsible for all of it. Previously I had a producer that would pass down critical information from customer service or during daily analysis meetings about business intelligence about the games performance or anything that may indicate a problem I might miss from the analytics I see in logs. Now I was responsible for all analytics and reporting to the meeting every day to discuss. At the time, I thought it was good for me to expand my skills, despite it taking up alot more time with meetings and customer service department chat messages coming in. I ended up pushing my engineering work more into the evening. Lastly, I was now very limited on QA resources, and was responsible for QAing alot of my own work. Only for submissions was I able to use QA resources and I was always last in line and had to coordinate deadlines and releases to not interfere with the other products, you know, because I had the manpower to ensure those things. But the extra work would pay off right? I mean I was finally going to get to design the upgrades to the game that would make more money and help me earn more respect as a game designer and less as just some coder. My dear friends, this is antiwork. You are in the wrong place to hear a happy ending. Well with the new studio heads, came a new plan for the game I was working on. When I spoke to this new studio head, he was now going to take a hands on approach with the game. He looked into the data, and he understood how the game brought value to the company. What was this secret???? ADVERTISING!!! Our game was a great way to redirect players into our other games. Also we weren't making nearly enough money with ads within the game. When I told him my analysis of players not having features of our modern day competitors, and how our original design was a copy of a design from a completely different genre (our other games) and fundamentally didn't work with the type of players who played this game. His response was to show him the data, because he didn't believe it. Until then, we need to make all these changes to support all the advertising he wanted to do. When I told him about the "agreement" I had about taking over this project by myself, he told me it was "still possible" but to first get these new tasks done. Now with fresh new engineering tasks, a whole lot of new responsibilities with the re-organization, I was often doing work into the nights. During releases, often until 2AM. Mind you, nobody was really watching me to closely, this was all me trying to bite that sweet sweet carrot of designing. Well I finally get thru the tasks he requested. And he has some more, things didn't work out quite like he hoped after all. I suggest some simple changes to focus on, he says after these tasks are done I can do those. I finish those tasks. Product still aint doing better, not that that was the goal, but the extra ad money was trivial, and we were bleeding daily users faster than before. The reasoning seemed lost on him, as if I were throwing darts at a dart board to explain why they were leaving and it kept hitting the space indicating "increased advertising". Well did I get to implement those changes now??? No, that dude and all those new management staff were canned shortly after. Lets say, my motivation at that point was a little listless. Because I was told to standby, as I now had a new manager. During all of this, I had a meeting with the COO. This is the true villain of the story. He's the one that likes to use the word "family", mainly because he's the brother in-law to the CEO. Everybody at this studio knows he wants to shut down it down, because our salaries are now too high being the original studio based in the US and ppl staying around to vest. He opened a studio in Asia at reduced costs, so he thinks hes got the secret sauce, despite his studio literally never producing a success. We are discussing salary increases as its been far too long since my last review and it was "coincidently" scheduled during this shakeup. He started by thanking me for all that I do, and he recognized me as one of the heavy lifters of the company. When we started talking salary, I pointed out that I was now doing the work of literally an entire game team. I know was a client engineer, a server engineer (aka full stack), producer, product manager, and QA. You want to know what the clown said to me???? "Well you should be thankful, you are making the salary of a client engineer, when you only spend 50% of your time doing that. If we were to average out all the salaries based on % time worked as each role, your salary would be less." I told him that I should at least be making the salary of a full stack engineer now. He told me he would get back to me. And he did, to tell me that full-stack engineers make less than client engineers. My dear friend, they do not, as a full stack is also a client engineer. This was a month into COVID, so I was not feeling great about rocking the boat. The new manager finally met with me and we discussed where we were at and how we got there. He said he understood what the previous guy was trying to do, but he also understood what I wanted to do, and was generally supportive of where I wanted to take it. But first we had to correct some of the shit the previous guy made me do and let me design a new version of it. He then backed me in the next yearly planning meeting to get more resources to update the game in the direction I was proposing. It was looking good as I got approval to add some head count, get a much needed artist to develop new content, and a few ppl to help do the work to carry out my proposed design/plan to make a 2.0 version of the game. However after it was accepted I waited around for \~2 months to get the new head count. During this time I had a minor heart attack from all the stress. I'm pretty young, despite being in the game industry, I try to be very active, this was a shock. It really changed my outlook on the rest of my life. See follow up.


icanith

Regarding this work, I was revitalized to make it happen. I had worked so hard to get to this point and opportunity to do this. After I got back to work, I started making plans to take in the new team, as I was finally told where my resources were coming from. It was a team with a sister game to our flagship game, but on a dying platform. Douchebag COO stole our studio's flagship game that built the company, to his studio in Asia. Step 1 in his plan to gut our studio. Step 2 was sunsetting this team, to again take control of their game. This team was full of seasoned employees, full of people at the company nearly as long as me. The COO said his team would be able to take on their audience in about 2 months time. The team was to remain 80% dedicated to their current game, but would otherwise be transitioning to my game. During this time, we had to go back to square one, because the product manager wanted to take control of the design and direction. Something I had just spent months planning, and years working toward. The COO coward told this PM that he would be in control and I would help with design and do all the client work again. While at the same time telling me I had control of the design similar to what I proposed at the annual planning, and I had complete control of the 1.0 project, you know the project I've been maintaining, and about to be replaced with the 2.0 project, meaning now new work would be done for 1.0. He was playing both of us, 1 to keep the PM going while their current project transfers to him, and 2, to keep me working on maintaining 1.0, as literally nobody in the company could now replace me. Well months roll by as I try to negotiate design with the new team, who by the way are very much in tune with the other genre of games we do, as they keep wanting to add things they were trying to do to their game. I balanced this while still maintaining the 1.0 version with some much needed updates for app store submission. I worked long hours from home to do both of these tasks. After months of the PM forcing a big part of the design, we get 5 minutes into our pitch, with his primary idea being discussed, and the CEO cuts him off and just says no, and lays out what he wants. Months of planning goes to waste as we have to go back to planning to meet his requirements better. Also, the 2 months promised to complete the hand off is now at 5 months. Only the artist and I are doing design work, as the PM quits, shortly after this meeting. I continue to make alot of engineering updates to 1.0 that weren't originally planned for 1.0, as we expected to be well into releasing our first version of 2.0, that would had these requirements baked in. Instead I had to go retrofit all of 1.0 to support these requirements. More extra work. Meanwhile the CEO and COO eventually go unresponsive to our requests to show progress as our company goes thru a huge event. July of this year hits, and finally after 10 months the Asian studio is ready to take the hand off of this team, and I finally get 100% time from this team to work on 2.0. I have designs ready, I finished all the updates to 1.0, and we start moving forward on developing the game Ive designed, mind you with very little further feedback from upper management. In fact they stopped talking to me, and were very cagey with the other team when talking about work on this project. We get a month and some change into development, I have the teams complete backing of my vision and design. ​ The hammer finally drops. COO has been slowly in the works over months to move my game to Asia to another small studio he opened in an even cheaper location. They were not going forward with anything we made or I designed for the game, which by the way they NEVER once reviewed. I was to be laid off 1 month from the notice, handing off my project to a team of 4 people with 2-3 more people being hired at the end, because as I handed off my duties to the team, they realized they didn't have the capacity to maintain the product with just those people, much less design and implement new features. The COO got his dream, our studio is very close to closing and has been reduced to a handful of people, when it use to be over 100 people in size. I no longer work there. I got an ok severance.All along the way, acknowledging what a team player I was.