Gamers Need Not Apply

Recently I came across this forum message where the author describes a conversation he had in Australia with a recruiter who, at some point, said that:

"employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc."

"He has been specifically asked to avoid WoW players."

This post is not about gaming. I'm not a gamer (just so you know, wink, wink) and I'm not going to attempt to get into behavioral patterns or stereotypes of gamers. I want to understand the rationale behind a request like the quoted one. Replace gamer with audiophile, or sports fanatic, or someone that is too deeply consumed with other activities (e.g. parenting, church, small business on the side, etc) and you get the same issue.

No one needs to be as passionate as you

As much as we would like everyone to be as passionate as we are for our job (I'm assuming you are,) that doesn't represent the real situation in the vast majority of the workplaces.

For many people, arguably most of them, what they do from 9 to 5 is just their job. When they get home, they shut off or, more likely, the better part of their day starts.

I have even talked about Wally before, which represents a much more deteriorated stage.

The following quote from a message posted by Charlie Poole pretty much summarizes how I try to deal with this situation and how to recognize brightness and passion even in someone that doesn't share the same thirst I have, 24h a day.

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[Kurt]: To me the separation seems to between .net programmers of the type that wouldn't consider letting their job interfere with their leisure time by reading development books and blogs, and taking part in mailing lists and user groups, or programming at home, and those that do who are also likely to follow most alt.net principles and practices (even if they haven't heard of alt.net)

[Charlie]: I used to make that separation. Well, I still do, but without the implied value judgement. IMO, folks have a right to a life outside of the development world and the vast majority of professional programmers don't live and breathe it the way some of us do. Those folks need to be reached as well.

I did a gig a while back with a bunch of mainframe COBOL guys, helping to re-invent agile techniques for their environment. Most of them had families and wanted to go home to them at the end of the day. But during the day, they wanted to learn new things and do the best job possible. I respect their choice - maybe it makes more sense than it does for me to be typing this note in the wee hours of the morning. :-) I think there is room for folks like that - there as to be, since they seem to be the majority. We just have to figure out how to reach them.
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But it is still your job

Everything has a healthy limit, even gaming.

At the end of the day, you're (hopefully) still earning your pay for the job you perform. If these other activities start taking their toll on your focus and stamina to get your work done, it's a sign you need to exercise some moderation or find a job that allows you keep them or, better yet, make them your job.

Everything has a healthy limit, even the passion for your job.

Moderation applies here too. I'm in a constant struggle to manage my time responsibly. Even if the activities are (somewhat) job-related, many times they are not appropriate during billable time.

Some examples of things I avoid or moderate during work hours — and leave them for before or after work:

• Twitter - a huge attention whore. I try not to have it on during the day or at least disable the pop-up and minimize it, checking it only when I have or need a break.
• IM - mine is usually very quiet. I use the busy status when needed
• Reading tech blogs or news - a few before work. If they pile up I'll catch up at night
• Writing a blog post - any blog post worth reading takes time to be written. This is my blog, so I'll have to use my time feed it.
• Mailing lists - I don't actually spend too much time on these. I only monitor a handful of them and only one is fairly active. I check new topics once or twice a day. Only read if sounds interesting.

So, can we hire gamers?

Although I can understand the rationale behind not hiring someone that has an extreme, obsessive compulsion for playing video games, which could prevent him/her from performing the job, I could never agree with the implied blanket statement that all gamers will become bad employees and should be avoided. Again, replace gamers with...