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1 hour ago
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I’ve sunk more hours into playing Factorio than I’m willing to admit. This post is my after-the-fact justification for how that was all really just a ploy for professional development.
I mean, from the outset, you wouldn’t expect to learn any management skills from playing a video game. But with enough desperation, you can convince yourself that Factorio’s focus on task delegation makes it a surprisingly effective simulation for many parts of the management job; it even holds two great advantages over real-world management: First, the barrier to entry is very low — you don’t have to be entrusted with a 1,000-person team to start. Second, the stakes are a lot lower — it’s far easier to reload a previous factory snapshot after it’s been overrun by enemies than it is to restart your career after your entire team walks out.
Anyway, here’s what I’m pretending to have learned:
Disclaimer: I’m a manager working on ML Infrastructure at Google. All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.
Delegation is key. Factorio thrives on the idea that you can delegate a lot of your tasks to automation. In the beginning, you mine your own resources, but you can quickly build a miner to do that for you. Crafting items is quickly outsourced to assemblers, and moving items around gets delegated to belts and inserters. Eventually, you get construction robots to build your factory, and artillery to deal with enemies. You can even download blueprints for your factory and outsource the factory design. While you can do everything yourself, you can ultimately only do a single thing at a time, so delegation is absolutely key to make your factory grow — and the factory must grow. As a real manager, you have almost unlimited freedom to delegate tasks, and you have to use that power to scale.
Protecting your time. In Factorio, you can almost always get “that one thing” faster by just doing it manually. You need just five more assemblers to finish a build? It’s easiest to just get all the items and craft them by hand. Have a couple thousand items stuck in a chest? Go run around and distribute them to the right places in your factory. Are you overrun by enemies and need laser turrets ASAP? Just craft them by hand. Your space ship just ran out of ammo and is about to be destroyed? Jump into the action and manually move ammo around. While those moments feel great, meaningful, and are sometimes necessary, they are distractions from building your actual factory. If you want to be successful, you need to build reliable self-sufficient systems that minimize the number of interruptions. It’s the same for managers. When things go wrong, you need to be there to quickly get things back on track, but to scale, you need to build a team that doesn’t need your help all the time, even if that means things will take longer while you get that system running.
Management isn’t for everyone. My kids love playing Minecraft. They love mining resources, they love building houses, and they love running around collecting chicken eggs. That’s also how they play Factorio. They don’t want to build a miner, because they enjoy mining themselves. No offense to my children, but that’s not how you beat Factorio. Personally, while I outsource almost everything in Factorio, I still do all the design myself, because that’s what I love — but I would be much more effective if I just download the best blueprints. In real life, you may be an incredible individual contributor, and be great at what you do, but being a manager and delegating everything is a very different job. You may not be good at it, you may not enjoy it, and you may have to delegate the very thing you love the most.
You need to know how things are going. Your factory will fail from time to time. Maybe one of your resource patches ran dry, maybe some biters made it through your defense, maybe a new part of your factory is draining resources from some other part, and now your whole production has come to a halt. When this happens, it is your job to discover that things are broken, and quickly get things back on track. This means you need good visibility into how things are going. End-to-end metrics, like science per minute produced, are key, but you also want some lower-level metrics for crucial things that are very hard to fix once broken: like the available fuel for your space ship, the bioflux available for your biter spawners, etc. You also want alerts when those metrics go below acceptable levels. Once an alert goes off, you need to be very quick to come up to speed on the failed component and figure out a way to fix it. This is the same for managers. You need to be aware of key metrics: what is your customer’s perception of your product, are your projects on track, how do you compare to competitors, etc. You need to be alerted before things go really bad, and you need to be able to quickly find out what’s going wrong, and fix it.
Managers need to be versatile. In Factorio, you need to be incredibly versatile. While your miner can be good at just mining, and your assembler can be good at just assembling, and your laser turret can be good at just shooting biters, in an emergency, you have to be able to do it all. You don’t have to be the best, but you need to be passable at it, until you find a way to delegate it. It’s the same for managers. If your product manager/software engineer/recruiter/etc quits, or turns out to not be up to the task, you can’t just throw up your hands and quit, you have to fill the gap. You are the ultimate backstop.
The limits of delegation. In Factorio, at some point you will have a factory that automatically mines all its resources, moves them around, processes them into useful stuff, automatically kills all enemies, repairs stuff, and self-replicates to take over the whole world. And all you have left to do is sit there, marvel at your creation, and see the numbers go up. Well, at my real job, I’m not quite there yet, and there’s still a lot of stuff I haven’t figured out how to delegate. But, in my free time, I have this little side hustle of running the world economy. And all I do is put some money in my worldwide diversified index fund every once in a while, and that’s it. I just sit back, relax, and see the numbers go up. All the hard parts are efficiently delegated away. Some active traders make sure I invest in the right things, market makers ensure that I can trade anytime for almost free, someone catalogs all the companies in the world for me, etc. The one thing you cannot delegate is the overall responsibility; you are the ultimate backstop. When the government changes its tax scheme, or hyperinflation ravages your country, your investment strategy, or place of residence, may need some rethinking.
Please take these insights with a grain of salt. For all its complexities, Factorio is still just a very crude simulation of real life. Also, this post is likely just an after-the-fact rationalization to make me feel better about playing a video game, so maybe don’t take it too seriously. If you liked this post and want to encourage me to create more, please subscribe or find some other way to let me know I’m not just screaming into the void.
