Rich Geldreich

And so, because nobody apparently else has the balls, the principles, or the means to push back, I'm doing it.

Game industry workers tolerate abuse. It's totally normal to them. If you complain, you are fired, instantly replaced, possibly even blacklisted. Pushing back is a good thing for the industry.

Also, I'm not the bad guy here. I didn't abuse any workers. I'm just telling it like it is. Anybody defending this company online is enabling them to continue this horseshit. I'm very sick of the game industry abusing its workers.

When you worked somewhere with a huge turnover it's easy to find ex-coworkers to chat with and swap notes. Few have the guts to talk, though.

"Baron" and "Sponsor" aren't my terms, they were created by other ex-coworkers of SelfOrganizingCo. They fit well and so I use them now.

As for tweeting all that stuff: Twitter gives you live feedback after basically every paragraph. Blogs are too static. Others will copy and paste anything important.

Alright, I've been reading some reddits. Yes, I'm going through a divorce. This has been going on for a 2 years now. It's a background thing. The "Hunger Games" reference was made by coworkers, not me. I had no idea what they were talking about initially. Just passing it along.

I'm not interested in talking to the press at all, so please stop contacting me as I won't reply. For the record, all of my tweets are based off real-life events, and I have borrowed terminology, ideas, or concepts from other current/ex-coworkers at various places.

Normally, when I wrote a blog post it's hours of writing and then one atomic release. With Twitter, I can adapt the writing based off audience feedback. It's great, and very rewarding.

To make it very clear to everyone, I'm not upset at all. I'm happy as hell that I'm finally out of the corporate rat race. I got out. I've got reams of notes here for a book, and I've been testing the waters on Twitter. Twitter is great because you get quick feedback-unlike blogs

This dev got fired not because he couldn't code, but because he was unable to be "remolded" and didn't make any powerful friends. Sadly, near the end he started drinking from the office stress. He's now happily employed at a competitor, and doesn't drink any longer.

I was amazed. This developer's code looked fine. Very clean, didn't see any issues. Nobody had made any changes to these modules after the code was checked in, and the project was still active, so it looked like it worked okay. It wasn't dead code, either.

At one SelfOrganizingCo I watched as a developer I had worked with previously was being “purge tracked” across teams before being fired. I got curious so I went into the repo and examined this developer’s most recent checkins.

With all that said, if you earn enough Company Bucks none of this can matter. Just work on valuable things and make people around you happy.

The corporate arm and its resources are there to help this process occur organically. If they interfere and snuff-out organic teams they are going against the principles of self-organization. "Overwatch" team feedback is fine, but remember the system is delicate and fragile.

Central planning doesn't work well, but market principles do. So if enough employees go and form a team to do something, a smart self-organized company will watch the team grow organically and see what happens.

At a hierarchical firm, as a leaf-node worker or even manager this ability to organically form new teams can be virtually impossible. You would need to engage with the secretive hierarchy and ask for permission and resources, and good luck with that.

You could say I'm acting as a "Baron". But anybody with the ability to explain the idea and muster the resources can do this. You just do it organically from the bottom-up. It helps to have Sponsor or Baron support, but you don't absolutely require it.

To grow this team I would just talk to coworkers and convince them to join the new team. It would be an organic process. At each step I would get feedback about the idea. If it's a good idea, people will follow. I would have to be persistent, and good at selling the idea.

If I was at a wealthy and powerful self organizing company with all the things I now know, I would have to immediately start a team and grow it then attack some important problem. You can organically do that at a self-organizing firm. You can't just do that at a hierarchical firm