Last week of summer with our interns we skipped the goodbye lunch and booked an esports arena. Split them into teams. Valorant. Best of whatever until the room kicked us out.
I run go to market at a startup. I have sat through a lot of team exercises. Trust falls. Escape rooms. A guy with a flip chart. None of them came close to what I watched for three hours in that room.
The quiet ones were calling rotations. The loud ones shut up and listened. Someone who had never touched the game was getting coached mid round by someone who was clearly very good and clearly not making a thing of it. Lose a round, thirty seconds of "ok what happened," next round. Nobody sulked. Nobody quit. The room got louder every map.
Then I went home and thought about which of those people ship the thing at 2am and fix the demo at 8am. Same people. And almost none of them had ever mentioned they played. Not in the interview. Not on the resume. Not once.
So this one is for you. The one who peaked Diamond, or Immortal, or Radiant, and wrote "strong communicator" on the resume instead.
You are underselling the most relevant thing you have ever done.
the ladder does not care about your story
A resume is a story you tell about yourself. Your rank is a number the world assigned to you.
You could not network your way there. You could not talk your way through a placement match. Every game was a fresh evaluation against people trying to end you, and the rating moved whether you liked the result or not.
That is what working at a startup is. The market does not read the pitch. It uses the product or it does not. You already know how to live inside a number you cannot argue with. Most people your age have never had to.
you lose four out of ten and queue again
A 60% win rate at high rank is elite. Read that again. You lost four games out of ten, closed the scoreboard, and queued.
Do you know how rare that is? Most people lose twice, tilt, blame the team, and go do something else with their evening. You built a loop instead. Lose. Watch it back. Fix one thing. Next one at full intensity. No sulking. No speech.
That is a startup week. Demo breaks. Deal slips. Benchmark run dies at 3am. Queue again. You have done this loop ten thousand times. You just did it with a crosshair.
your comms are already better than the senior dev's
"Two A short. One low. Rotating." Nobody gives a TED talk in a clutch round. Nobody goes quiet either.
Now think about the worst standup you have ever sat in. Someone spends eleven minutes explaining why the thing broke. Someone else says nothing and then it turns out they were blocked all week.
An eighteen person company is a five stack in a clutch round every day. Short, precise, useful updates are the whole job. You have years of reps on this. You got them for free. You just never thought of it as a skill.
you fill
What do you main? Now what do you play when the comp needs something else?
If you are any good, you fill. You controller when the duelist instalocks. You IGL when the IGL is missing. You hate it a little and you do it anyway, because the point is winning, not your slot.
At a startup "not my job" is a firing offence. The person who goes backend to demo prep to support tickets in one afternoon is the person the company gets built around. You have been that person since Silver. Fillers build companies. Instalockers build politics.
you already watch your own tape
You watch your losses. Not the highlights. The losses. Where was my crosshair. Why did I peek that. What did I know in that moment and what did I ignore.
Postmortems are a religion in esports and a suggestion in most companies. An engineer who reviews their own failures without a manager standing over them gets better with zero supervision. There is no supervision at a startup. That is the entire game. You have been playing it for years.
the grind is the resume
Silver to Immortal is not talent. It is a thousand hours of deliberate discomfort. Two hundred dry runs of the same lineup. Deathmatch at midnight because your flick was off.
That is the exact texture of building something from nothing. Boring, repetitive, unglamorous, at full intensity, because you believe the number goes up eventually.
You have done it once. So you know you can do it again. The person next to you in the interview with the nicer school and the cleaner resume does not know that about themselves yet. That is the gap. That is your edge. And you left it off the page.
what to actually do
Put it on. Peak rank, game, how long it took. One line.
When they ask about it, and they will, do not get sheepish. Tell them what it cost. Tell them where you plateaued and why. Tell them what role you ended up playing versus the one you wanted. That answer is worth more than any project on your GitHub, and it is the one answer nobody else in the pile can fake.
Some hiring managers will screen you out for it. Good. You did not want to work there. The ones who light up are the ones who will actually let you play.
so we are running a league
Backboard Valorant League. University teams, the whole school year, two games a week on Twitch, finals in Toronto in the spring.
Partly because three hours in that arena did more for our team than any offsite I have run. Mostly because the people who show up for something like this are exactly the people every startup should be fighting over, and I would like to meet you before someone else does.
If you are on a university team, comment below. Rank is not a requirement. Showing up is.
I co-founded Backboard. A lot of the team plays. It shows. We're going to start a Valorant league.
Top comments (6)
I love this perspective. I think alot of people carry some level of trauma or guilt over their 'hobbies'. As an example, many people in particular age range were coached that video games caused brain rot, or whatever the term was. Now I know for a fact this is not true.
I think this underlying concept echos throughout niche interests. The artist, the metal worker, the jewelsmith, the writer. The ones that do well in these fields are the ones that don't give up. But what if some of the absolute best are hiding because they dont perceive these things as a viable career?
I think your post here speaks not only to gamers, but a much wider audience. It highlights that one should stay closer to their true selves. As the Oracle's door said above it in The Matrix: "Temet Nosce" (To know ones' self) ✨️🦄
Really enjoyed this one, Jonathan. 🎮
I think the strongest part is not even the rank itself, but the feedback loop behind earning it: fail, review, adjust, try again under pressure.
Competitive games create a surprisingly unforgiving external feedback system. You can explain why the round should have worked, but the scoreboard still records what actually happened. That habit of operating inside feedback you cannot negotiate with transfers very naturally to engineering and startups.
I would only add one nuance to the “rank as evidence” idea: the rank is real evidence, but we still have to be careful about what property we infer from it. Being Immortal proves something meaningful about performance, adaptation and persistence inside that environment. It does not automatically prove every workplace skill we might associate with it.
Which actually makes the interview conversation you suggest even more valuable. The interesting part is not “I reached Diamond”, but how they plateaued, adapted, handled failure, changed roles, reviewed mistakes and eventually improved. 🔁
That story probably tells you much more about someone than another “strong communicator” bullet ever will.
Also, the Valorant league sounds like a very Backboard way to recruit people. 😄🔥
Been a gamer my whole life. Never really talked about it in my professional career. I even saw a post that we should add our game ranks in our resume/cv way before reading this 😂
But I get it, there is some wisdom about someone being so focused on a goal that they ended up learning, failing, queueing again, and then achieving a high rank. But there is also something in me that tells others that this seems "childish" that's why I am reserved in opening topics concerning my gaming hobbies (even though it is really fun to talk about).
If anything, I guess I'm still grateful that I am a gamer, else I will not have something for my brain to engage with from time to time other than work. I learned more about managing my own emotions and know that I can't control other's outrage, toxicity, and emotional outbursts, just learn how to control our reaction to it.
Currently, I still play but not that much anymore. But I know that whenever I get bored, I know that playing games will always have a place in my heart (God knows how try hard I am when I want to achieve something fast in-game)
This is such a relatable take 😂 Gaming skills definitely teach teamwork, communication, and handling pressure. Maybe it’s time to stop hiding that rank on the resume.
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