I can talk a bit about my experience in industry, somewhat related to this. But mostly it comes down to the realisation that I wouldn't want to be a manager.
I worked in game development for 4 years, and now I'm mostly studying for my PhD while working on occasional UX projects as they arise. When I was working in the industry I was often the lead of those individual UX projects, but that would only put me in charge of 2 to 4 people, it was more of an organisational responsibility.
In any case, during my time in the industry I really found that I don't want to be part of a big organisation, but also that game development does not need to take place inside those big organisations.
When I was working in the industry, I was originally working for a theoretically flat company, where everyone was treated equally. It wasn't truly flat, but everyone had a say and I didn't experience any instance where people were directed by a manager or anything like that. Everyone at the company was on the same page with what they wanted to achieve, and everyone enjoyed working together, it was a great experience.
Most importantly it felt like everyone was treated as an intellectual equal. No one above you was making decisions for you because they didn't trust you, or anything like that. It was a really great work environment.
I moved studio, because I wanted to experience working in another country, so I moved to a studio that was just starting up in Montreal. While in principle this studio was similar to the last, it was different from a managerial perspective. There was a clear manager, and he would frequently remind us that 'he was the boss'. This guy would frequently impose his ideas of how projects should be run, and speak over people as though he was an intellectual superior. He would use phrases like 'I'm the boss and I'm making an executive decision'.
I disliked this approach to working, I didn't like feeling as if I wasn't an intellectual equal to my peers. At that studio I also experienced a vast number of other issues that did not present themselves within the flat company. Employees generally had a very peculiar attitude to them, adjusting their behaviour depending on whether people from management were around, and there was a constant feeling of 'us and them', where their behaviour and tone towards management would change depending on the presence of people above them.
In that studio, I also experienced very evident racism, and sexism. Staff members would make sexist jokes, other staff members would tell me how muslim people were the problem with the world. We were a user research company so it was clear that sometimes these prejudice perspectives would affect attitudes towards work, as user research often involves people from the outside. In any case, I found it much more difficult to address these issues within this organisation, as when I mentioned these to management they never seemed to do anything.
Eventually there was an incident which pushed me beyond the point where I wanted to continue working for the studio. I became pretty ill and I took 2 weeks off work, unpaid. I went to the doctors and provided an explanation, the doctor signed me off. I had no health insurance because despite the company claiming I would be able to sign on to their company health insurance policy, they later changed their mind and said that as an immigrant I wasn't able to. So, no equal access to health care across staff members, depending on where you came from.
In any case, a little while later I fell ill again and took another 2 days off from work. This time I refused to get a doctors note, citing the $200 cost of seeing the doctor as a waste of money. I could have gone to see the doctor, but I was truly unwell and the doctor was across town. The cost and inconvenience didn't make any sense, I would be wasting money to see a GP and trekking across town when I was feeling unwell wouldn't make me feel any better. I offered to work from home during that period (which we were perfectly well equipped to do). Anyway, when I returned to the office I was formally warned for not providing a doctors note for that two week period of sickness. That was where I decided to leave as I felt the company did not value me or my health.
Ultimately, the contrast between those two experiences made me realise that I don't want to work in a managerial position, or even within a company where people are treated as more or less important based on their managerial status, or anything else. At that company I felt like I was viewed as less valuable than other members of staff, I felt like our management would needlessly protect people within the company who held sexist and racist views. I felt like I couldn't speak openly within the company, and that not all staff were viewed as intellectually equal.
So, what I mean to say I suppose, is that I would never want to make those executive decisions in game development because typically I feel that those business decisions impose on the fair treatment and equality of staff. We see that all the time with crunch, and we see many issues manifest with sexism and prejudice too. It's fairly evident, that to be the most effective manager, you have to impose upon the individual freedoms and well beings of your employees. To be good at capitalism, you have to offset your employees well being against the success of the company. You have to prioritise things that will make the game more successful or profitable, that ultimately negatively impact the well being at the studio.
Being a 'business expert' under capitalism, necessitates imposing over the well being of staff and employees. It's the business experts that decide that staff at studios like Rockstar and Naughtydog should work 60 hour weeks to make a specific deadline within a specific fiscal quarter. It's the 'business experts' that decide that the game should distribute content through manipulative and harmful monetisation systems that take advantage of their consumer base.
So what I'm saying I suppose, is that when I was younger, I had a view that I would work in the games industry, then perhaps work my way up through an organisation to take more and more responsibility. But now that I realise what that entails, it's not something that I want. I stepped away from working day to day within the industry to work on a PhD focused on game accessibility. I feel that going back to academia was important to me, as it has always been a space where everyone is treated as an equal (or close enough). I have meetings with my supervisors about my work and what I'm achieving, but never are they directly telling me to do anything. I take the responsibilities that I choose to take, and I manage my time and workload. For me, it's a better way of living that doesn't involve stepping on other people in order to achieve personal success.
It's worth noting though, that I firmly believe that you can be successful outside of that typical organisational structure that I found problematic. There are relatively flat studios who are making games which are ultimately, made for their employees, not for the corporate interests of a small number of people. A number of independent teams are like this, with responsibilities and profits shared equally across the studio. So what I'm saying is that there are many ways to make games, and the way that the large corporations do it, usually feels like the wrong way. No triple A games are worth the human cost implicated in their development, and the further removed I can be from that, the better.
But that doesn't stop me providing opinions on game design and strategy, on ERA. When I write that I think x approach won't work, or that x design isn't interesting, I'm not saying it's okay to send staff into another 8 week crunch period in order to implement my suggestion. I think it's okay to be able to talk about games, and also not considerate of the individual implementations that design and strategy would have on the employees within any one individual company. Ultimately even with managerial experience, you can't know how the internal workflow pipelines and organisational structure, of any one individual company, so you can't provide that kind of advice from outside. I think it's reasonable to discuss ideas related to the games output, outside of the games organisational context. What begins to get weird is when you see folks who are angry because the developer didn't achieve x thing within x time frame, because then your thoughts are beginning to impose upon what you believe they should be able to achieve within an organisaitonal context that you're not privy to.
Lot of rambling thoughts there.
