Indie devs - have you ever taken on an employee?

Most small indie dev teams seem to be rather egalitarian. It's seems to be a group effort and everyone shares the profits equally.

Has anyone got to the stage of employing people like programmers or artists? As in full time employees, not just a short contract, or hiring someone off fiver.

Did it change you as a person?

What is better, being an employee, an indie dev, or an employer?

Because indies typically do it to avoid the rat-race and office politics and all that stuff. But if you become successful that you become an employer are you just going back to the rat race but in a different form? Like Reginald Perrin?

 

I would rather contract out work that I can't do. Everything code-wise I would do myself and have people do 3d modeling or sound. A lot of successful indie games have remote workers working on a project

 

Start with contracting out specific bits of work to freelancers. If you like the results, then you can move towards hiring your own employees.

Employees are an expensive, high risk item. You might find the work more enjoyable and profitable without them.

 

For an indie I think the most common thing is using contractors/freelances so that you can use occasional work for hire when your own skills won't do. For indie studios that have multiple people I often see that grow from friendships or classmates so that's not really an employee and more of a partner.

Indie studios that do hire full time employees seem to do that after 1 hit, overdo the employee hiring and then get dragged into high downtime costs (time between games) where they're pretty much ruined if the game doesn't meet expectations.

My impression is that indies usually enjoy the freedom of being able to use work for hire and that indies want to be independent from publishers, but also from employees and all the paperwork/costs that brings with it.

Though when you find someone really good I think most indies would love to hire that person as an employee, but working together with someone really capable also tends to grow into a partnership kind of thing. Haven't had the experience myself yet, but this is my take on it.

 

How many times have we heard that story? Its got to be one of the most common tropes in the indie industry.

1. Make a hit
2. Hire up big and expand based on the money from the hit
3. Fail to make another hit
4. Studio has big internal fights between founders, or between founders and employees
5. Go bust financially
6. Everyone ends up worse off then they were before the hit

 

I have not in the 8 years of being indie, however I am sick of doing everything myself and next year is the year I plan to grow bigger. I might blog about it because i think it will be an interesting transition, but at the same time... I am not very good at keeping blogs going...

 

Probably about as much as any other major life experience does.

I would say that the most significant thing specific to this experience is being able to better see things from a manager's or leader's perspective. It's easy to think that a manager or leader is an inconsiderate jerk. Sometimes that's true. Plenty of times, though, it comes down to them having a different view of the world that encompasses many more people or problems than you're directly exposed to.

This depends entirely on what you're doing.

Being an employee is great. If you're in an organisation you trust you get to think about a focused little area to work in, give that your best, let everyone else handle everything else, and look forward to regular paychecks rolling in. However, it does mean that you're typically working towards someone else's goals at least as much as your own. Depending on what your own ambitions are and the team that you're in that might be a great fit, or it might not.

Being an "indie dev" could mean anything. I like building my own stuff. Building stuff that makes money means I can spend more time building bigger, better stuff. There's always compromise between "building what I want" in the purely creative sense, and "building what I want" in the harsh realities sense. Everyone has to strike their balance somewhere in there.

Being an employer definitely comes with its own set of challenges. Leadership (people skills, direction) and management (planning, resource management) aren't the same thing, and you need both. Employees are frightfully expensive, and therefore stressful in and of themselves. That said, building a team and then leading and managing them to successful outcomes is freakin' awesome. My main piece of advice if you want to do this is to not spend all of your time on the technical parts of your work. Leadership and management are both their own complete fields of practice. Also, don't feel like you have to do both yourself, or that you can't replace yourself in those roles later on.

 

I'm pretty sure that the "rat race" comes from constantly wanting something that's beyond your means, and then shifting the goal posts further forwards as soon as you get there.

If that's something you want to avoid then the question isn't whether or not you want employees. It's about what kind of goals you want to chase in the first place, and whether or not you'll give yourself time to appreciate your successes when you get them.

Some people love the relentless pursuit of goals, so it's not necessarily a bad thing. If you want employees but you don't want a "rat race" style of life then "organic growth" is probably the strategy for you. It sounds like that might be how @Antony-Blackett is going about things.

 

For me it's going to be more about what's achievable. up until now I've been content with games that are achievable with me and my co-founder. But I'm getting a bit bored of that now and want to make something more grand, what I have in mind will need a team, so a team I will find. However it also needs planning and a business strategy first.

 

As artist i get hired by indies all the time to work on their projects.

 

Yes, exactly, indies seem more likely to hire contractors. Even though they can be 5x more expensive.

If had enough money to take on an employee I don't know whether I would take on a programmer or an artist. Since I do both at the moment. Probably I'd hire an artist as I'd say I'm better at programming than art. But then again, they would probably have their own style which wouldn't be quite the same.

On the other hand maybe a programmer because I hate fixing bugs.

But artists are cheaper so...

 

Not really.

A contractor only gets paid when they are working. You can normally cut off work to a contractor at a moments notice. You don't pay them for holidays or sick leave. And so on.

An employee needs to get paid regardless. And they need benefits. And there are a bunch of legal and financial ramifications of firing an employee.

The hourly rate owed to an employee can be as low as a third of the actual cost of the employee to the company.

 

Well, that's not necessarily true. If a contractor works for three months at $500 a day. It's cheaper to employ someone for a year at $25,000. So even if the employee does three months of actual work they are still cheaper.

 

That's probably because $25,000 a year is underpaying the employee. What currency are you working in?

 

Could be a junior employee.

 

You can earn that sort of scratch working full time at McDonald's. That's no excuse.

 

I started on $40 something thousand (NZD) back in 2006 as a junior programmer straight from uni.

edit:

$45k i think it was.

 

I started on about $18k pro rata for the first 6 months. Mind you I was self taught and was pretty bad at the time! That was about 10 years ago.

 

Congratulations on getting exploited for cheap labour I guess???

 

Then yeah, it's a good idea to think about making them a casual employee (or your region's equivalent) instead.

As has been pointed out, though, the cost of an employee is far more than just their hourly rate. The conditions of work are also typically quite different depending on whether you're a contractor (external) or an employee (internal), which skews the value proposition one way or another and the various costs between sides of the deal.

Also, the words seem to be used differently in different places, just to make all this stuff less clear to discuss.

 

I guess you may be wrong. In fact, only person of interest will know best. Either way, if for that period @yoonitee did took opportunity to learn, to get better position, It can be treated as investment. Taking short job somewhere to learn things, is often mutual benefit. For employee for being cheap. For labor, for having chance to work in a field, to gain experience. Then move on. All happy in the end. (Hypothetically).

 

This is the same bullshit that people who say you should work for free for "exposure and experience" say.

 

An employee being paid $25 k a year will probably cost you closer to $50-60 k.

 

Total rubbish. How you can judge, if you don't know the person, living costs, and other conditions? So you simply imply, get high salary, or none. I mean, in certain situation you can not get better salary not having experience. You need some hook to start of. Some start with pizza shop and climb up. Other as well paid designers.

In the end, is not important where you have been, is important where you are now.

Just to add, considering there are staff cost overheads. From insurance to holidays, to bonuses, to taxes.

 

lol if you won't pay your employees at least a living wage, you shouldn't be hiring employees.

 

Maybe you can hire one, but only when they are looked after at a reasonable rate can you consider a second. Fact is most indies don't even look after themselves, so under this rule, most shouldn't be hiring.

Anyway, this is a bit off topic. Those who have hired, I'm sure you're wonderful employers who have done wonderful things for all your staff. I know I will.

 

You are not wrong. But no one even mentioned living wage in this context. So where this came form?

 

I don't think this is quite true. When you get hired as freelancer/contractor, it is always for specific tasks. For example: "create 5 characters". So after i do that, i get payed for those characters and unless there is more work at the moment for given client, we are done. They only pay me for that task, which is way cheaper for them then to hire employee. You pay someone a wage only if you need them constantly.

 

I had a intern for a few months before summer. It worked out pretty ok, he created a POC for a new map. I had to put in alot of time to help him though.

 

Why, thank you! To be fair for the first couple of month I did nothing of any use.* In fact for the whole year, I probably only did about a couple of months work that could have had any profitability for the company! Then I left after 11 months because I hated the job. So all in all they probably made a loss on their investment! But I had that on my CV and later got a job in a games developer company which has a claim to fame of making the worst game of all time Ride To Hell. (I didn't work on that). Then I left that as well cos I hated it. To cut a long story short.... I realised I hated being an employee so I became an indie developer instead... and once I get sick of that I hope to buy a farm in Texas and raise chickens.

*Unlike if I worked in MacDonald's I'd be making them a profit from day one by grilling hamburgers. Which you would probably get about $15k a year.

 

Yes, it is important to create People Of Colour for our games to represent the diversity of mankind.

 

Proof of concept