A Gustav 30 in 30, #7: The Kids Are Alright

[Gustav 6,468]

 

Reducing VHL unemployment since S65.

 

It's true that I have an important job. It's true that I have a lot of posts, that people have liked those posts a lot, and that I'm a big fancy old guy who can make targeted attacks against you and your player specifically influence league policy through both my job and my role in the Board of Gustav. But I still find it hard to claim that I'm any more influential than I used to be. Maybe I'm a little more respected as the portion of people here newer than me continues to grow, but influential? I think I was at my peak as a VHLM GM. That influence stayed within our own team for the most part, while others just heard about it--but I've never been able to say that the work I put in to interact with people helped to shape them into active members quite as much since then.

 

I won't tag everyone who played for me and eventually ended up in a management role of some sort, because that would be a few too many tags (). Instead, I'll point out a few who started on my teams and made it really far. I like to think that the work of @Ricer13 and @Berocka speaks for itself, and while I take zero credit for anything that's happened since S68 or so, I still think about their beginnings with the Hounds--Ricer as a then-pass-first forward who initially described himself as a "lurker" in our server after we drafted him late, and Berocka as a waiver signing who didn't even join our server at first and who we had to pressure a bit to talk to us. I think both of these were cases where the VHLM can really change the course of a person's involvement--I described in my first article here how I was very hesitant to say or do much at first, and the teams that go beyond a simple "welcome, tell me if you need anything" can make lots of things happen.

 

VHLM GM is also the one job I've had where I feel no need to self-deprecate. I never won much on the VHL level, I've done some unpopular things and been less visible as a commissioner, there have been times where I've said things I now disagree with in BoG, and my heart was never in updating during the time when I did it. But I was really good in the M and I believe that on some level, the league has seen activity from people other than myself that may not have necessarily happened had my team been run by some other GMs of the day.

 

This led to me writing up a statistical article a few seasons in where I concluded that people on my teams were more likely to get hired than people off of them. Looking back on the first one, this wasn't even true. It's a long story, but my analysis showed a p-value of about 0.2 and most stats people don't care until that goes under 0.05. Some of the comments I got weren't incredibly friendly, either--I managed to make it funny by joking about it on Discord a lot, but it definitely rubbed some people the wrong way. It was still a joke about 6 months later, and I still occasionally caught some snarky comments about it at that point, so I ran the numbers again.

 

This time, it came with a better understanding of calculating statistical significance (along with a better understanding that maybe I shouldn't tag 27 people in passing mentions to get my point across). I had the right p-value in mind and put together an updated list. And lo and behold, after a few more seasons as a VHLM GM, it had become super-ultra statistically significant. In fancy statistical talk, our "null hypothesis" was "Gustav does not positively influence a member's chances of being hired" and the results pointed to strongly rejecting that statement. Like anything in stats, though, this isn't direct proof, and I also think that the multiple layers of interpersonal relationships and luck and whatnot that are separate from the numbers don't make any test like that definite. But I'd done my best to quantify it in a way that I've never seen anyone else do, and I think that in the end it is a real testament to my own effect on the VHLM (however seriously you want to take the results). 

 

In the end, 15 people who were either my teammate or a player I had GM'd (mostly the latter) got jobs as GMs or AGMs between S65 and S70--not counting three hires I'd made on my own terms by making my players my own AGMs. At a rate of about three hirings per season, I think that's pretty solid. So I hope you can forgive the ego stroking in this article, because it's kind of what I have to do to make it a readable piece about what I've done for the league's first-gens. What happened to these players on my teams is a different (and less biased) story from the player and team end, and I'll be happy to tell it soon.

 

 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka):

 

#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name

#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?

#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?

#4: The House That I Built

#5: Can We Fix It?

#6: American Beauty

[BOOM 8,809]

I have only just discovered this series. Quality and will look forward to subsequent "episodes".