The importance of culture fit
For this week’s episode at Game Dev Diary, I sat down with Alexandre Salem to discuss his gaming journey. Alex is currently working as the SVP Operations at Stillfront Group and worked at some great companies like King, Google, and Huawei.
Alex joined the games industry thanks to his time spent doing MBA as King was hiring through their activities on the campus. I am not a huge fan of academic education, but investing in yourself in some shape or form always proves worthy. Whether it is doing an MBA or working as an intern or any other thing that you can do to improve yourself, Alex definitely reaped the benefits of investing in himself. Of course, it helps when you’ve already worked in another industry for quite a while and you can translate your skills into the new job that you want to have.
As someone who regularly talks to many of the studios that Stillfront has, Alex has the opportunity to observe what types of things people are missing when it comes to entering the games industry. And the biggest recommendation that he gives is around getting yourself acquainted with the industry overall. Either through conferences and meeting new people or consuming online content, understanding the business that you want to enter and meeting people that are already doing what you want to do will help you a lot to take that first step.
The importance of having mentors has been brought up many times by the guests of this podcast and Alex is no exception. He learned a ton from his mentors throughout his career and definitely recommends everyone to make sure they have people that they can talk to from time to time. This doesn’t have to be a highly structured and frequent talk which requires a lot of time and effort investment. But, having people who can show you the obvious mistakes on your path can save you a lot of time to reach good results.
The other thing we discussed to improve yourself is the value of being careful about the culture fit whenever you decide to work in a new team. Job interviews usually feel like they are for the employer to test the employee, but the other way around is also quite important where the employee tests the employer. Of course, you rarely can ask your employer several questions probing their culture and diving deep into their history. However, you can always look at their Glassdoor ratings or talk to former and existing employees or ask key questions during your interview process. It will help you understand if this is a team that you want to be a part of, which will have a huge impact on your motivation.
The importance of culture fit is often discussed in many areas, but I don’t think the ways in which it can be tested is discussed equally often. We might be going through tough times and most of us need to pay the bills and sustain a living. But if you have enough resources to be able to say “no” to things that you think are not going to work out in the long term, you will eventually find other options that will definitely work out and make you happier as a result.