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Trenches comic: Thursday February 2, 2012 - Translation
Bogey
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02/02/2012 - Anonymous
I was testing this great game that I couldn’t tell anyone about cause it’s super confidential and I’d get in a lot of trouble, but then I was like “shit, I can’t believe these poor bastards are trusting me with this kind of knowledge.” Because you see, if a game leaks outside of our “secure” area it could conceivably destroy the testing company’s reputation and no game developers would hire them anymore and like a large amount of people would be out of a job… then I thought WOW they must be paying me a shit load of money to keep this big ass important secret to myself, oh no wait, such is not the case in fact they’re only paying me a dollar over the minimum wage… fucking bullshit man, A DOLLAR OVER MINIMUM WAGE!!!!
I know testers that can’t afford to go to the dentist, OK? I mean their teeth are literally disintegrating and falling out of their little gamer mouths daily while they brush like rabid dogs desperately trying to keep a few chompers to eat their cat food with, but I’m sad to say they’re losing the war man. If this shit is really all that important shouldn’t we be making like international spy money and shit? I mean sometimes I feel kind of like a spy… like a really poor and out of shape spy that doesn’t have any cool gear or gadgets and lives at home with his parents.
Like, for instance, what would happen if I were to get kidnapped after work on my way home and I was forced to tell them everything I’ve been up to… or be tortured?! There’s no way I’m getting tortured for a dollar over the minimum wage. I’d crack in a heartbeat.
Just sticking to a diet is like impossible for me, let me make this clear. I literally have no will power which is why I ended up as a tester in the first place. The second these guys whip out so much as a comb or anything they could possibly poke or prod me with, that’s it for me. “Sorry boys, I gave her all I could but this time the terrorists have won.”
That’s a lot of shit to put on a guys shoulders for a dollar over the minimum wage, I could be flipping burgers and not have to worry about getting snatched up like a kid who never says no to candy. In fact I probably would be flipping burgers if I wasn’t the lazy disgusting fuck I’ve turned into. I still vaguely remember what manual labor feels like… I used to work in a kitchen. It’s hot, there’s all kinds of crap piling up, people constantly asking you for crap, “where’s my salad, where’s my chicken fingers, my table has been waiting for over an hour.”
HEY MAN I’M DOING THE BEST I CAN OK, I’M SWEATING LIKE A GODDAMN STUFFED PIG BACK HERE. That shit just ain’t for me.
People always complain about being a games tester and that the job’s too boring or repetitive. See the thing is we always get asked, “Do they actually pay you guys to play video games?” but the thing is, we aren’t playing the games… we’re testing them. And there’s a huge difference, like running into walls for 8 hours straight, then when you’re about to leave they ask you to stay for a double and you’re like “another 8 hours, huh? Same task, huh? Well then I’ll just get back to it then… unless of course you want to tell me where they keep the loaded gun in this office so I can blow my GODDAMN BRAINS OUT.”
But the sickest thing is for most of us that still seems a hell of a lot better then having to break a sweat doing any job that requires moving. We will accept poor wages, constant boredom and endless sea of bullshit just as long as we don’t have to move.
And that my friends is the life of a tester, sign your kids up now and they send you a lousy $15 dollars with the referral program yippeeee.
XBox LIVE: Bogestrom
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The comic, however, has inspired me to design a game that re-creates that exact scenario.
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-deprecation
WiiU: JamWarrior
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Also, if these are the kind of stories that are published, I wonder how shoddy the ones who get trashed are. This guy is all over the place.
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But the comic itself promptly got shared around my team at work (much as the one about the Test Plan did) and I don't think one of us:
a) disagreed
b) was able to stop laughing
Looks like Dev-speak is universal the world over, and I can safely say Trenches has at least one dedicated QA team in determined audience.
What does it mean?
"Fuck off."
You fuck off. I'm just asking a question...
That was my first guess but he whines about everything else too much to be self-deprecation. It's not enough "I suck and here's why." Instead it's more "Everything sucks (including me)" It's not so much funny as it is a look into the mind of someone with severe anti-social disorder. And that's why I thought it might be satire.
I'm over-thinking it.
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi
This is why they have testers sign an NDA. The developers prefer the stick (i.e. "we'll sue you into the stone age if you leak anything") over the carrot ("we'll pay you well enough that it's not worth disclosing secrets").
Of course, the comic is an example of the other use of Works as Designed. But still. Sometimes, it really does work as designed.
But re: the Tale. I worked for flat minimum wage at a call center. They hired kids right out of high school like the dang military, in batches, and dumped us on the work floor where we handled stuff like people's Social Security Numbers and all that.
Awful story. The writer is trying way too hard to be funny and failing miserably.
Don't worry, you didn't miss anything.
Tell that to banks. If you're protecting valuable company secrets, you better f***ing well believe that your silence is something your company should be buying from you.
Yeah no. "Working as Designed" is what you send back when the bug described by the tester is the damn design. If fixing A breaks B and C, that's poor implementation. Not "working as designed".
Unless your design is fail (which it could totally be).
Yea, the proper status for something you're just not going to fix is probably gonna be "Won't Fix".
Also, I possess a security clearance. Yet, somehow, I have yet to have a single Chinese superagent drive up to me with a briefcase full of money or a honeypot scheme to steal my secrets. It's like they aren't even trying sometimes.
Also every person in the chain of trust can potentially spill the beans and a majority don't not due to pay but due to common decency. Contractors are at the bottom of that chain and are exposed to a small slice of the development so they have a proportionally smaller amount of time/material to spill the beans compared to anyone else.
Y'all produce a high-quality product here, and I don't have a problem with the fact that you run anonymously-submitted prose of widely varying quality alongside it. I confess to some irritation, however, that you choose to present the random crap as the thumbnail or preview. Not the best promotion I could have devised.
I get tired of hearing that phrase from Game Mods.
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Really liking the comic so far; it's funny that my job started around the same time as the comic did, so I get where they're coming from.
poorly written.
Also, I agree with Opty. The better testing jobs aren't going to have many stories that get leaked, if partly because the better testing jobs tend to hire the better testers with more professional attitudes. I have lots and lots of amusing anecdotes I'd love to share, but I'm respecting my NDA.
Yeah, no, 'working as designed' is what you send back when it's working as you designed it to avoid breaking something else.
'Will Not Fix' is what you send back when it's a bug where the time spent to fix it would be vastly unequal to the severity of the bug.
You're entitled to disagree, and maybe it's different where you are, but I've been doing this for five years (three as QA), and it's worked for me thus far.
EDIT: And, I mean, yeah, in an ideal world changing one thing wouldn't have the possibility of breaking something else. But when you're talking about non-critical bugs, particularly minor art and content issues, then it is entirely valid to say something 'Works as designed'. Yes, the character goes off-frame in a kind of weird way, but that is to hide the fact that there is a giant pop if that doesn't happen.
That is the definition of 'works as designed'. It may, technically, be a bug, but it's there to fix a much larger and more noticeable bug.
And will not fix is when it is a bug but there is some reason to not fix it.
Unless it was triage time and someone is writing annoying bugs, like crouching 40 times in a corner while spinning at 2 degrees a second will make you fall through the floor. It's a bug but will not fix means "congrats you broke it but we're not going to spend time on this" and works as designed means "fuck off".
Sometimes I wish you could just send a bug back as f off just outright, one of the dumbest ones I heard of was a bug written saying something happened by the place with the stuff, and after much deciphering it was realized the guy was complaining about grass bending in the wind.
Wasn't on one of my projects but it was pretty silly.
Or my second favourite, which said the developers needed to make a bad guy's face 20% more evil.
"ISV" or "in shipping version" means "yes it's a bug, no it's not gonna be fixed in time"
basically saves QA from regressing it.
though there are certainly times I just send these back as "no repro" just to fuck with a particuarly shitty tester.