Devices Tycoon Employees Guide: Hiring, Mood and Development Time

You recruit new staff on the Find Employees screen by paying one of three agencies to run a search: Hireon, Workify or Talentra. The agency decides how skilled your candidates are, and skill decides how fast your devices get made. Talentra charges the most and finds the best people.

Hire through Talentra whenever you can afford the fee. Your offices only hold a few people each, and a Talentra hire does roughly three and a half times the work of a typical Hireon hire for about three times the salary. Then keep your staff happy, because mood decides part of how fast they work, and it slides steadily from the day you hire them.

Recruiting Agencies

You pay the agency’s fee as soon as the search starts, whatever it turns up. Each agency rolls a quality level for the search, and every candidate’s three skills land within a few points of that level.

A candidate’s monthly salary is the total of their three skills times $250, plus $1,000–2,500. Better staff cost more each month, but they earn it: per dollar of salary, a Talentra hire does slightly more work than a Hireon hire, and per office seat they do far more.

Every search picks from people of the chosen profession you haven’t already hired or found in an earlier search. So each profession’s pool shrinks as you recruit, and a late search can return fewer candidates than it rolled, or none at all. You still pay the fee.

Which Agency to Use

Office space is the real limit. Design, programming and engineering offices hold 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 20, 30 and 40 staff at levels 1 to 8, so you need several upgrades before you have room for a large team. Filling scarce seats with Hireon hires leaves you with a slow team that costs less but produces far less. Use Hireon only to fill a seat cheaply in the first months, and replace those hires once you can afford Talentra. Workify sits in between and is a fair choice when $650,000 is too much for a single search.

What Each Skill Does

Every employee has three skills from 1 to 100.

• Speed sets how fast designers, programmers and engineers produce work. It makes up 70% of their work pace; mood makes up the other 30%.
• Design sets how much each piece of work is worth. Work arrives in bubbles worth 1, 2 or 3 points, and higher Design means bigger bubbles.
• Research sets how fast designers, programmers and engineers produce research points. They earn 1 research point per research bubble while they have work to do. Lab staff work differently: their average across all three skills sets the lab’s daily income (see the research lab guide).

Speed and Design multiply together, so the gap between good and poor staff is large. A typical Talentra hire works about 1.7 times as fast as a typical Hireon hire and brings in bubbles twice as big, for about 3.6 times the output. A typical Workify hire produces about 2.3 times as much.

Development Time and Bugs

A new device goes through your offices in order. Designers work first. Programmers then build the technology and fix bugs at the same time. Engineers build each batch you order. The game switches to the right office on its own, and only that office’s staff work on the stage; staff on vacation sit it out. Work only moves while you’re on the office screen, but the calendar stops on other screens too, so checking a menu doesn’t cost you days.

How Much Work a Device Needs

The point totals you see at the start of each stage depend on four things:

• Device type. Consoles, VR headsets and laptops need the most work; keyboards need the least.
• Cost price. A device that costs more to build than a typical device of its type that year needs more work. At twice the typical cost it needs about 1.5 times as much, and the most it can reach is double. Cheap builds need less, down to 60%.
• Versions. Each extra version you build alongside the first (Standard or Flagship) adds 35% to every stage.
• Office sizes available. As larger offices unlock over the years, every device needs more work. The game expects your teams to grow with your offices.

For the engineers, ordering a bigger batch than the batch screen recommends also adds work: twice the recommended number of copies needs about 45% more, and the most it can reach is double.

Bugs

A device starts with bug points equal to 55% of its programming points, or 10% fewer with Clean Release. A phone that needs 180 programming points starts with 99 bugs. Your programmers fix bugs alongside the technology work, so bugs don’t add a separate stage, but the programming stage isn’t finished until both counts reach zero. Express Debugging makes bug fixing 5% faster.

How Much Staff Speed Things Up

The game keeps every stage between 10 and about 58 in-game days. Between those limits, the stage time is simply the work divided by your team’s pace, so more staff and better staff both cut it directly.

• The 10-day floor. If your team would finish a stage in under 10 days, the game raises the work so it still takes 10. That’s why a strong team sees larger point totals.
• The cap. If your team would take too long, the game cuts the work. The cap is about 33 days when your team is as big as the largest office now available, and stretches to about 58 days when your team is much smaller.

Here’s how long one stage of an ordinary 2008 smartphone takes:

Three Talentra hires already hit the 10-day floor here, so no bigger or better team would finish sooner. Staff still earn research points while they work, so a team past the floor isn’t wasted.

The picture changes later. Once 40-seat offices exist, an ordinary device needs about 20 times as much work. Three Talentra hires then take the full 58 days per stage, while a full office of 40 brings it down to about 12. Upgrading your offices and filling them is what keeps development fast in the late game.

Condition (Mood)

Condition on the employee screen is the employee’s mood, from 0 to 100:

New hires arrive with a mood between 75 and 100, which is why you only see Good or Nice at first. After that, mood slips by about a quarter of a point per day on average. Starting from 100, an employee reaches Normal after about four months, Vacation needed after about nine months, and Risk of dismissal after about a year.

Mood matters because it makes up 30% of work pace. An employee with Speed 50 at mood 100 works about a quarter faster than the same employee at mood 30. Check your staff screen every few months and top up anyone sliding toward Normal.

Vacation

A vacation is free. It raises mood by 30–40 points (up to 100), and the employee is away for 30 days. You can’t send every employee of one profession at once. Lab staff on vacation earn no research income, so stagger lab vacations.

Bonus

A bonus costs a quarter of the employee’s monthly salary. It raises mood by 20–30 points (up to 100), and mood stops falling for the next 30 days. Bonuses cost more for your best staff, since salary rises with skill. A Talentra hire’s bonus runs about $15,000.

Mood also stops falling during a vacation, so both options buy you a month without decline. Use bonuses on staff you can’t spare, and vacations when you can cover the gap.

Training

The UPGRADE EMPLOYEES screen trains an employee. It costs the total of their three skills times $1,500 and raises each skill by 3–12 points. Training a Workify hire with 50 in every skill costs $225,000 and adds about 7–8 points to each skill on average. The gain stays at 3–12 points whatever the employee’s level, while the cost climbs with their skills, so each point is cheapest on your lower-skilled staff. Training a 22/22/22 Hireon hire costs $99,000 for the same average gain.

Perks That Help Your Staff