Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis)

Leadership

How to turn a team around in one easy step

My last four roles have all been “turn-around” scenarios. At CCP Games I had three: as Technical Art Director, I turned around a group that was struggling on executing basic tooling; as Technical Director I had to turn an entire engineering department that was writing an order of magnitude...

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You’re probably not affirming your employees enough

I thought I was a good manager. I listened. I gave feedback. I mentored. I found solutions. I motivated and supported. People trusted me. The first time one of my reports told me that I needed to give more praise and affirmation, I thought perhaps they were being fragile....

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My Framework for Compensation

As CTO at Cozy, I came up with a framework for compensation that I was able to mostly apply to the engineering/ops/fraud teams, and tried to impart onto other groups though not always successfully. There are a few parts to this framework, but nothing about it is complicated. Some...

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When advice turns out to be a mistake

I remember reading Clinton Keith’s “Agile Game Development” and getting to an anecdote about CCP Games, where I worked at the time. The following is from a Gamasutra repost of the book’s “Teams” chapter: In the fall of 2008, CCP undertook the development of its tenth expansion pack called...

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Hiring in a time of scarcity

I’ve never understood the hypergrowth mindset that’s guided the tech industry for the last few years, and part of me is happy that the investment bubble has popped. I’m not interested in throwing around money to solve problems; my experience is this creates more problems than it solves, and...

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Questions to ask before you make that hire

When I was at CCP, I blogged a lot. I was able to try out many new ideas, and my disagreement with certain decisions sparked a lot of good writing. I’ll get to why that matters in a minute. At one point, one of the American executives hired by...

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What do you want next?

We are focusing on A and B, and in a month or so we’ll start focusing on C, while also keeping focus on A and B. Sound familiar? When we do prioritization at work, I insist we have a single column of priorities or coarse features. In other words,...

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Anxiety causes selfish behavior

BPS Research Digest is a great site, highly recommended for anyone interested in why people behave the way that they do. A little while ago, they reported on a study where anxious participants were more likely to cheat and excuse their own unethical behavior than the control group. When...

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Could employees choose their own manager?

Someone once brought up to me a plan about enabling employees to choose their own manager. The idea has stuck with me for a while, and being in my current position of authority I’ve pondered it more actively. I’ll use this post to collect my thoughts, and maybe present...

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Automated testing shows a respect for employees

In the tech-artists.org G+ community page there was a comment on a thread about unit testing: A key factor in TA tools is the speed at which we need to deliver them, and our audience is considerably smaller than, say, engine tools code. Therefor it becomes somewhat hard to...

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