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+---- Thread: *Hiring: Head of Graphics Grading! (/showthread.php?tid=20896)
*Hiring: Head of Graphics Grading! - Nokazoa - 04-08-2020
Hey Everyone,
So, I guess we can talk about the elephant in the room. I am stepping down as the GFX Grading Head this offseason. I know most are not shocked by this, and some are probably glad. I don’t know if I will stay around as a grader, nor do I know who will succeed me. I am not going to be stuck in a job I do not want. There are a lot of reasons I want to step down and a lot of reasons I don’t. They are all things I want to go into. Now I am mainly writing this for myself, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this alienated myself and hurt other’s feelings. I’ll try to not do this, but I do want others to be aware of some issues with the job, the department in general, etc.
When I got hired to be a grader, it was just a few months into being on-site and maybe a month into me being a grader. Eco, our esteemed crouchy old man, had been the gfx head for a long time, and he had wanted out for a few months. He really wanted out of the league altogether. So, he asked me if I wanted it. I said sure because I wanted Eco to feel like he could leave. I was never the most jazzed about taking it, but I acted like I earned it and just hoped it would work out all right.
I didn’t come into this job wanting to make a lot of changes. I had very few grievances with the department. At the time, we would get about two pages of things in a season. We were loose with money, and I hold that is a good thing. That said, most GFX submitters would agree I came off as harsher than Eco, and I am. I will fully admit to that. Now, this obviously led to complaints. So, I did my due diligence and I talked to a few of the more seasoned GFX guys on site. We got together and I discussed my goal, an increase in quality for graphics on site. They understood, but we concluded that we weren’t giving them tools for people to succeed. You can’t be harsher on the grading and never give people a book to study. That meant we needed tutorials and solid write-ups. I had big dreams for tutorials and making videos. How many have I done since that conversation? I could count on one hand. I could even count on no hands because it is 0. Nada.
Now writeups were always my strong suit. I also wanted to hire graders that could do writeups and tell people how to fix their issues. It was my emphasis on hiring, but that led to some issues. To do a solid write up, you are essentially doing about 100 words. You can do it with less or do it with more, but I would say that seems right. If you do above our minimum grading, then you are doing multiple PTs worth of writing a week. So, I would hire somebody, and they would figure out this wasn’t giving them the best bang for their buck or that it was too time-consuming to do. Hell, sometimes you needed to take a break from grading to come back to it with fresh eyes. Again, more time is lost if you want to do it properly.
Anyway, I concluded we needed to focus on that, but we were starting to get submissions that were not exactly signatures. I think the turning point was a pixel logo for the butchers that Blueline did. I gave him 1.5m for it because it was good. There was nothing wrong with it, perfect execution, but I knew that it was time for a change. I couldn’t give logos 1.5m when they are really easy to rip off well. I felt it was exploitable, so I proposed the Misc. GFX rubric. It was essentially a rip from SHL’s rubric because its pretty perfect. Some wording was changed along with the pay scale. I remember trading card cap being lowered along with the amount they payout. We also went from a strict 1-5 scale to adding half points to the scale for signatures since there is much more of a gradient. In addition to that, I have hired five graders with two leaving for different reasons. Outside of that, I didn’t contribute much to the department outside of grading.
Grading itself is not the worst job in the world. There are a few things that make it very hard. One is how subjective it is. You must make sure what you don’t like isn’t just a mismatch in taste. In that what the person is trying to accomplish falls flat. You also must look at the effort and where they can improve, and you need to be able to communicate that at some point. By that, I mean either to the person during your write up or to your head when he gets three messages from people about the grade you gave someone days earlier. It happens at least once a month. As I mentioned before, the writing aspect is a turn off for other people. It gets very hard when most of a person’s work has similar issues. Lastly, group grading. We grade as a group in the NSFL. It is the system I inherited from Eco, and it has been around for a while. If you have a limited schedule, you have to talk about your threads early to get them graded in time. I don’t want to move away from this, however, because it typically removes an individual grader’s bias.
Reasons why I don’t like being the head.
I am ultimately responsible for the department. When someone insults it, complains, or what have you, I feel responsible in some way. Now if it is about our backlog, I can’t defend that. It is not excusable. Yeah, the new rookie class buried us in GFX submissions, but I should have moved faster in getting new graders. That is my fault. No, the complaints I get tired of are the ones about grades. Especially ones where someone gets a high grade. Someone feeling like we graded too harshly is far more understandable than being upset someone scored higher than you. When someone usually comes up to me and complains about that, they are wanting to say, “I should be getting more money because my work is better.” Listen, all our shit stinks. Not everything someone does is perfect. I give Infinite, Shadyshoelace, and RainDelay a gambit of grades. Someone could have scored higher than you for a variety of reasons. If you are to message me about a grade someone else was given then bring up how your submission should of went higher, well that’s bullshit. Trust me, I understand wanting similar grading across the board, but you are putting others down to put yourself up, and I find it gross. Especially if I have never once talked to you because, man, some people come out swinging.
I can bitch and moan about a lot of this stuff though. However, it comes down to two things. I am not the best person for this job, and it is hurting my enjoyment of the league. Which is honestly enough of a reason. I’m definitely a person who takes stuff a tad personal. Only on my own work do I let it have the separation from myself to be judged and even then, I struggle with it. I don’t like to micromanage people and I don’t want to field complaints when I am not getting paid for it. I do that enough in my own life. Now the complaints about grades where I personally got a message did not happen all the time. Maybe once a month? I still saw a lot of complaining, but I do want to say that I didn’t get messaged all the time. I don’t think this is the most coherent article I have ever written, so thank you all for reading this far. I made sure to get us to two pages of submissions to leave the department in less of a hole. I am not the worst for the job, but I am sure there are better people. None of my graders will do a worse job than me, and if you, too, are interested in applying, message HO.
*Hiring: Head of Graphics Grading! - Nokazoa - 04-08-2020
This isnt really a job opening. Clickbait title smh 1/5