Fungible Employees

What "Fungible" Means

Fungible means two things are identical and can be interchanged with no loss. Dollar bills are fungible. Gold nuggets, barrels of oil, bushels of wheat — commodities are fungible. You don't care which specific dollar bill you get; any dollar will do.

Employees are not fungible. Even two employees of the same type cannot simply be swapped. A network programmer and a graphics programmer are both "programmers," but putting one in the other's role creates serious problems. You wouldn't swap an animator with a concept artist, or replace a lead designer with a junior who has no experience. Yet companies routinely act as though employees are interchangeable.

Well-Meaning Fungibility

Sometimes the assumption of fungibility comes from good intentions. Producers trying to avoid crunch will attempt to solve bottlenecks by throwing more employees of a given type at the problem: "Too many bugs? Add more programmers. Creatures behind schedule? Add more artists."

The problem is that unless you understand the specific nature of the bottleneck — is it the modeling, the rigging, the network code? — adding generic headcount won't help. Even if the new person has the right skills, the ramp-up time to productivity can be enormous. A senior C# programmer pulled off a Unity project and dropped onto an Unreal C++ project won't hit the ground running.

Publishers are guilty of a related version: marketing a game as "from the makers of" a beloved title, when maybe only 10 of the 110 people on the team actually worked on the original. The game comes out, feels different, and players are upset. The publisher meant well, but they assumed the studio name was the product, not the people.

Not-So-Well-Meaning Fungibility

More cynically, treating employees as fungible lets employers devalue them. "You're easily replaceable" becomes a tool to suppress compensation, time off, and other requests. Tim speculates this may be why specialization has increased in the industry — becoming a well-known specialist in network code or another niche is a way of telling your employer "good luck replacing me."

This attitude is becoming more common as more people try to enter the industry and AI tools emerge, making employers think replacement is even easier.

What You Lose: Institutional Knowledge

No matter where you work, things are done a certain way — specific tools (some in-house, some third-party), specific processes, specific quirks. There are things that should work but don't, expectations that aren't documented anywhere.

Tim describes this as employees knowing "where the potholes are in the road." The company is still driving that road after someone leaves, but now nobody knows to swerve. He shares that both times he quit a company, he received phone calls from former colleagues: "Did this work before you left? How did you get this process running? How did you deal with this person?"

Both companies vastly underestimated how much institutional knowledge walked out the door with him. The worst part: the company often doesn't know what it doesn't know until something breaks.

What You Lose: Asset Preservation

When everyone from a project eventually leaves a company, you can end up with no one who knows anything about that project — where assets were stored, how they were stored, what software was used. CDs rot in drawers. Flash drives degrade. Nobody thinks to copy them to fresh media every few years.

Tim stresses this is not hypothetical. Even when the data survives, people don't know what to do with it. How do you compile this? What environment variables need to be set? Is there a batch file? The assets are preserved but the knowledge to use them is gone — because the people who knew left, perhaps because they were undervalued.

What You Lose: Ineffable Things

Beyond the concrete losses, Tim identifies a category of "ineffable things" — qualities that are real and important but hard to define.

Humor

Humor is notoriously difficult in games. Usually just one or a few people champion it and steer its direction. Lose that person and the game's humor either disappears or changes character entirely. Unless this is a deliberate choice, you're rolling the dice.

Style

The style in which game mechanics are designed, how they feel to play, the music — these have a certain character driven by specific people. Replace the person in charge of that style and you get a game that feels very different.

Tone

Games have a vibe — how NPCs act and talk, what quests are available, what items exist, whether the game feels academic, funny, or dark. Tone is not humor and not style exactly, but the overall feeling. It shifts when people leave. When it shifts too far, even a technically perfect sequel at 120 fps will feel wrong to players, and they'll struggle to articulate exactly why.

The Core Point

All of this know-how — institutional knowledge, asset preservation practices, the ineffable humor and style and tone — comes from the people making the game. It's not in the design doc. It can't be captured in a handful of design pillars. It's not on the company's webpage of corporate values.

Change the people, change the game. People are fundamentally not fungible, no matter how much some employers hope they are.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVQgXp7gN6s