The Developer S Dilemma

An examination of work—including the organization of work and the market forces that surround it—through the lens of the collaborative practice of game development. Rank-and-file game developers bring videogames from concept to product, and yet their work is almost invisible, hidden behind the famous names of publishers, executives, or console manufacturers. In this book, Casey O’Donnell examines the creative collaborative practice of typical game developers. His investigation of why game developers work the way they do sheds light on our understanding of work, the organization of work, and the market forces that shape (and are shaped by) media industries. O’Donnell shows that the ability to play with the underlying systems—technical, conceptual, and social—is at the core of creative and collaborative practice, which is central to the New Economy. When access to underlying systems is undermined, so too is creative collaborative process. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in game studios in the United States and India, O’Donnell stakes out new territory empirically, conceptually, and methodologically. Mimicking the structure of videogames, the book is divided into worlds, within which are levels; and each world ends with a boss fight, a “rant” about lessons learned and tools mastered. O’Donnell describes the process of videogame development from pre-production through production, considering such aspects as experimental systems, “socially mandatory” overtime, and the perpetual startup machine that exhausts young, initially enthusiastic workers. He links work practice to broader systems of publishing, manufacturing, and distribution; introduces the concept of a privileged “actor-intra-internetwork”; and describes patent and copyright enforcement by industry and the state.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Developing countries seek economic development which is broad-based or inclusive in the sense that it raises the income of all, especially the poor. Yet this is at odds with Simon Kuznets' hypothesis that economic development tends to put upward pressure on income inequality, at least initially and in the absence of countervailing policies. The Developer's Dilemma explores this 'Kuznetsian tension' between structural transformation and income inequality. The book asks: what are the varieties of structural transformation that have been experienced in developing countries? What inequality dynamics are associated with each variety of structural transformation? And what policies have been utilized to manage trade-offs between structural transformation, income inequality, and inclusive growth? Across nine country cases written by academics across the Global South, this book answers these questions using a comparative case study approach with a common analytical framework and a set of common datasets. The intended intellectual contribution of the book is to provide a comparative analysis of the relationship between structural transformation, income inequality, and inclusive growth; to do so empirically at a regional and national level, and to draw conclusions about the varieties of structural transformation, their inequality dynamics, and the policies that have been employed to mediate the developer's dilemma.

This paper discusses the 'developer's dilemma' - a tension emerging from the fact that developing countries are simultaneously seeking structural transformation and broad-based growth to raise incomes of the poor. Simon Kuznets originally hypothesized that structural transformation may have a tendency - in the absence of policy intervention - to put upward pressure on income inequality. However, broad-based economic growth requires steady or even falling income inequality to maximize the growth of incomes at the lower end of the distribution. The purpose of our paper is: (i) to revisit the seminal Kuznets paper in order to understand how Kuznets understood the structural transformation and income inequality relationship precisely; (ii) to discuss the empirical experience of the developing world in terms of structural transformation and, in doing so, to outline a typology of 'varieties' of structural transformation; and (iii) to discuss the structural transformation-inequality relationship and how it may differ under different patterns of structural transformation.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2016, held in Trondheim, Norway, in November 2016. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 21 short papers, 1 keynote, 3 invited papers, 5 workshop papers. 2 doctoral symposium papers, and 6 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Early Phases in Software Engineering; Organizational Models; Architecture; Methods and Tools; Verification and Validation; Process Improvement; Speed and Agility in System Engineering; Requirements and Quality; Process and Repository Mining; Business Value and Benefits; Emerging Research Topics; and Future of Computing.

The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

The fundamental aim of youth work is to build trusting and mutually respectful relationships with young people, creating transformative experiences for young people in formal and informal spaces outside of homes and schools. These complex and multidimensional situations mean that the day-to-day work of youth workers is full of dilemmas, pitting moral, developmental, motivational, organizational, and other concerns against each other. By showing how different youth workers respond to a variety of such dilemmas, this authentic text makes visible youth workers’ unique knowledge and skills, and explores how to work with challenging situations – from the everyday to the extraordinary. Beginning by setting out a framework for dilemma resolution, it includes a number of narrative-based chapters, in which youth workers describe and reflect on dilemmas they have faced, the knowledge and experiences they brought to bear on them and alternative paths they could have taken. Each chapter closes with a discussion from the literature about themes raised in the chapter, an analysis of dilemma and a set of overarching discussion questions designed to have readers compare and contrast the cases, consider what they would do in the situation, and reflect on their own practice. Teaching us a great deal about the norms, conventions, continuities, and discontinuities of youth work, this practical book reveals essential dimensions of the profession and contributes to a practice-based theoretical foundation of youth work.

(Book). Human beings are natural storytellers, and it's never been easier to access digital technologies that allow anyone, anywhere to share their story with the world. More stories are being produced and consumed now than at any other time in our species' history yet, for some reason, it's never been more difficult to cut it as a creative. Consumers are paying less (if anything) for all forms of entertainment, traditional media companies are tanking, and the advertising realm has been turned on its head. Although operating budgets have increased in every sector, storytellers are making less than ever before, as the lion's share of new revenues cyclically feed mechanisms for distribution and monetization. Our media landscape is, in short, unsustainable and in the midst of a crisis. What went wrong? How can we fix it? Although he presides over Avid, the leading provider of audio and video technology for creatives and media professionals, Louis Hernandez Jr. isn't your typical multinational CEO. In his two previous books, Too Small to Fail: How the Financial Industry Crisis Changed the World's Perceptions and Saving the American Dream: Main Street's Last Stand , he chartered his vision of an egalitarian America structured around the communities that compose its very foundation. He brings the same mindset the same notion of countless small actors with unlimited potential to the tumultuous world of media with his third book, The Storyteller's Dilemma: Overcoming the Challenges in the Digital Media Age . In The Storyteller's Dilemma , Hernandez puts forth another comprehensive vision for our future that aims to advantage all while disadvantaging none. This book is neither a diatribe against economic elites nor a postmortem analysis of the ills of digital distribution. Instead, it proposes a new approach with the potential to benefit all involved parties an approach that at once embraces the intensifying power of storytelling and eschews the notion that disruption and instability must greet an industry hand-in-hand. Rather than favoring any given group over another, Hernandez imagines a streamlined world of shared platforms and common standards that empower storytellers, developers, and deliverers alike. By dispensing of business models that have proved unviable in the digital age, we can turn higher profits while more equitably compensating creatives and creative endeavors. In today's networked world, the economics of storytelling matters to everybody. It's time we all got onboard.