Hiring staff

ID:115386
 
Jul 3 2011, 1:45 pm
I've been wondering about this for a while now and I got a couple simple questions. When you develop your game and go to hire staff, are you comfortable hiring people you know rather than complete strangers? Or are you fine with just hiring people who you can trust and do you have a way to tell if they're trustworthy?

The reason I ask is when I go to develop a game, I'm not sure which way I should go about hiring staff members. Many of my friends have offered to step up, but I'm not sure if my staff should be made out of my friends. I feel comfortable about hiring friends, but I don't think my players would be happy because of favoritism. I don't know, that's just my general concern when I get everything up and running.

Cheerios BYOND~
Have a good day.
Jul 3 2011, 2:36 pm
Your staff should be made out of competent, trustworthy people. There is no point in having your "friend" on the team if they won't be contributing. Besides, just about everyone in the world shows favoritism, so ignore the players who whine about that stuff. I'm willing to bet those players would help their mother, father, sibling or significant other before they help a complete stranger, which is favoritism.
Jul 3 2011, 2:54 pm
EmpirezTeam wrote:
Your staff should be made out of competent, trustworthy people. There is no point in having your "friend" on the team if they won't be contributing. Besides, just about everyone in the world shows favoritism, so ignore the players who whine about that stuff. I'm willing to bet those players would help their mother, father, sibling or significant other before they help a complete stranger, which is favoritism.

You have a real good point, thanks for the comment.
Jul 3 2011, 3:24 pm
In my experience, doing business with friends tends to be unpleasant and not very effective.

When you hire someone you're not particularly close to, you're in a position of authority in that relationship, it's strictly business.

When you hire a friend, that authority falls flat unless you're willing to sacrifice that friendship for the sake of keeping the chain of command in order. I find that most people simply aren't capable of keeping their business relationship separate from their personal relationship, and this tends to cause problems on both sides.

I personally don't do it if I can avoid it, unless the business is relatively small, such as commissioning some graphics or music on a reasonably small scale, but hiring a friend for a long term staff position doesn't usually work out very well.
Jul 3 2011, 4:33 pm
Uhh. I'd pick both, you can be good friends with strangers(like me), but your friends, you've known them longer so yeah.. to it its sorta a 50/50 on that ...
Jul 3 2011, 7:39 pm
i agree that people do favor there freinds
Jul 3 2011, 11:10 pm
Masterralphy55 wrote:
Uhh. I'd pick both, you can be good friends with strangers(like me), but your friends, you've known them longer so yeah.. to it its sorta a 50/50 on that ...

Well the dilemma with friends is that when you hire them. They get this idea that they can do what they want, and not get in trouble for it. This creates a problem with the players because they think that this is favoritism. You're enforcing the rules on other people, but you fail to enforce the rules on your friends.

Making you a hypocrite in the eyes of your own players. I know a lot of game owners who did that, and still do it. At least I think most cases happen like this, which concerns me a lot. But now that I have an idea with what I want to do, and its simple thanks to Empirezteam. A competent and trustworthy staff/

But I get your point as well, you've known your friends longer so it makes sense to trust them. But the problem is that friends, backstab you! haha.

Robertbanks2 wrote:
In my experience, doing business with friends tends to be unpleasant and not very effective.

When you hire someone you're not particularly close to, you're in a position of authority in that relationship, it's strictly business.

When you hire a friend, that authority falls flat unless you're willing to sacrifice that friendship for the sake of keeping the chain of command in order. I find that most people simply aren't capable of keeping their business relationship separate from their personal relationship, and this tends to cause problems on both sides.

I personally don't do it if I can avoid it, unless the business is relatively small, such as commissioning some graphics or music on a reasonably small scale, but hiring a friend for a long term staff position doesn't usually work out very well.

I've seen that so many times in most of these games on BYOND, most of them being rips of course. But still, bad staff can even happen on original games.
Jul 4 2011, 5:35 am
Hazordhu's Dev team is made up of people I've known for years. My viewpoint on it is that if you and your friends are capable of working together, and they respect that it's your game, then everything will work out fine. I've never had a player call me out for favoritism, nor a staff member call me out for giving them flak about doing something they shouldn't have. It's all about chemistry.