The Nonlinear Library LW - Palworld development blog post by bhauth
Jan 28, 2024
02:10
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Palworld development blog post, published by bhauth on January 28, 2024 on LessWrong.
Palworld is currently the most-played game on Steam. It's by a small Japanese company called Pocketpair.
Shortly before Palworld released, the CEO put up this blog post; here's a translation. Here are some points I thought were interesting:
on the co-founder:
It took me three years to quit JP Morgan, where I joined as a new graduate. He quit after only a month. The more talented people are, the sooner they leave the company.
on one of the animators:
Looking for someone in Japan who had experience with guns in games, he looked on twitter and found someone posting gun reloading animations. Contacting this person, it turned out they were a 20-year-old high school dropout working part-time at a convenience store in Hokkaido. Pocketpair hired him as a remote employee for a month, then asked him to come to Tokyo. His parents thought it must definitely be some kind of scam, but he went, and did a lot of different animation work, and was a very effective employee.
on the main character designer:
She was rejected during the initial resume screening. A few months later, they tried recruiting again, she DM'd him on twitter, and ended up being hired. In the meantime, she'd applied to about 100 companies and was rejected by all of them.
And she now draws most of the characters in Palworld. She is a new graduate, and she applied to nearly 100 companies but was rejected by all of them. (...) She doesn't like to use the word genius, but she might be a genius.
I thought that post indicated some interesting things about typical hiring processes, credential evaluation, and how effectively society is utilizing talent.
Typically, people say that the market is mostly efficient, and if there was financial alpha to be gained by doing hiring differently from most corporations, then there would already be companies outcompeting others by doing that. Well, here's a company doing some things differently and outcompeting other companies. Maybe there aren't enough people willing to do such things (who have the resources to) for the returns to reach an equilibrium?
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
Palworld is currently the most-played game on Steam. It's by a small Japanese company called Pocketpair.
Shortly before Palworld released, the CEO put up this blog post; here's a translation. Here are some points I thought were interesting:
on the co-founder:
It took me three years to quit JP Morgan, where I joined as a new graduate. He quit after only a month. The more talented people are, the sooner they leave the company.
on one of the animators:
Looking for someone in Japan who had experience with guns in games, he looked on twitter and found someone posting gun reloading animations. Contacting this person, it turned out they were a 20-year-old high school dropout working part-time at a convenience store in Hokkaido. Pocketpair hired him as a remote employee for a month, then asked him to come to Tokyo. His parents thought it must definitely be some kind of scam, but he went, and did a lot of different animation work, and was a very effective employee.
on the main character designer:
She was rejected during the initial resume screening. A few months later, they tried recruiting again, she DM'd him on twitter, and ended up being hired. In the meantime, she'd applied to about 100 companies and was rejected by all of them.
And she now draws most of the characters in Palworld. She is a new graduate, and she applied to nearly 100 companies but was rejected by all of them. (...) She doesn't like to use the word genius, but she might be a genius.
I thought that post indicated some interesting things about typical hiring processes, credential evaluation, and how effectively society is utilizing talent.
Typically, people say that the market is mostly efficient, and if there was financial alpha to be gained by doing hiring differently from most corporations, then there would already be companies outcompeting others by doing that. Well, here's a company doing some things differently and outcompeting other companies. Maybe there aren't enough people willing to do such things (who have the resources to) for the returns to reach an equilibrium?
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org