Stefan joins us from EA Black Box in Vancouver, BC to talk about managing engineering communities, and ultimately a little bit about engineers (and as one, I’m not sure that’s a good idea ;)

He inherited a bunch of problems when he took over the “engineering community” as CTO at EA Black Box — lack of communication within the studio engineering dept, and also facing outwards, a lot of pressure and therefore attrition. Platform transitions, lack of career definition, and little sense of community didn’t help the situation. The studio got there because it grew quickly — it built up due to enormous success of individual teams and products, primarily sports-related, and that didn’t scale well, particularly as looming next-gen requirements loomed and an argument was made for centralizing the technology.

He was overwhelmed and started off by getting the three most senior Tech Directors to have daily morning meetings to figure out how to do this, forming a sort of “CTO office”. From there, they went on to for the Technical Director group, which consisted of the 20 or so TDs from all the teams, for weekly meetings.

Stefan then talked about communication. Turns out, engineers like to communicate, but more in small groups (and with some encouragement), and they’re often too overwhelmed by project needs to do so cross-team. So he took one programmer per project per area of expertise (animation, physics, graphics) and formed Special Interest Groups to have monthly meetings to act as an advisory group to the CTO office. This led to technical policy making with cross-pollination between teams, and the nice side benefits of increasing the exposure of the Software Engineering Dept and fostering a sense of community amongst the engineers.

He also fostered more external communication (outside of project) by opening himself up as a resource, both listening as much as possible (via open-door policy, helping where possible and even occasionally getting a little more involved, which helped garner respect), and doing 1-on-1s with top talent, allowing him to take a bit of a mentoring role.

The CTO office was responsible for setting up a three-year roadmap of company technology, which is really hard when you’re talking about a lot of teams with different needs and goals. Coming up with and communicationg a technical vision was really tough, particularly when it came to higher-level game features.

The career path at EA for engineering was also a bit stalled — there was a real bottleneck going from being an SE3 to either a Senior Software Engineer or a Tech Director (no one had made that step in 6 years!). So he clarified that by identifying the top SE3s, made them into SSEs, and formed them into a little tiger team talking about what it meant to move into those roles, to become Senior SEs or Tech Directors.

Due to attrition, there was a lot of hiring going on, so improving that process was critical. Giving folks a clear understanding of how expensive it is to bring someone into the company (or not, depending) helped to emphasize how important it was to do a good job of interviewing folks to find a good fit. But of course, fixing the interview process is only part of dealing with attrition — it’s just the reaction. So the CTO office got involved in getting to know people better, making sure the right technical people were involved in the review process for engineers, and helping to be clear where people were trying to develop their careers.

Stefan was also frank about what didn’t work. Trying to set up a “portal” for software engineering was difficult and didn’t really work. Setting up a mentoring program was equally difficult and never really got off the ground, nor did a “community events” program. This was largely due to the fact that he didn’t have a big enough admin staff to get that off the ground. Having lots of meetings was detrimental to be able to get around to meet more informally with people.

However, despite the few things that haven’t worked, overall the community is a much happier place, with a better structure and better games.

Events like the Leadership Forum cannot happen successfully without the support for sponsors – those kind companies and organizations who simply want a bit of your attention and to build good will with the community. So far, Autodesk, EA, Hansoft, Midway and NPD have stepped up to sponsor the Leadership Forum.

There are still many chances to support the event. Full details on sponsorship opportunies available online.