[TRENCHES] Tuesday, January 28, 2014 - Tabled
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Tabled
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/tabled
Of course I wasn’t doing my job…
AnonymousI applied to one of my favorite RPG companies and got a job testing a game people were very excited to play. We were the localization team.
The first week of the job, the parent company didn’t have the English translation. So we played the game with vague handwritten guides telling us what to do. This should have been my first clue that things were not going to go well.
The second week the team got the English version of the game and I got my assignments. Test two portions of the game. Excited, I rushed to the first of my parts of the game to test, and it was a mess. Happily, I logged the errors. Only to be told that they knew about this problem and it wouldn’t be fixed for a few more versions and not to bother logging the bugs.
So I rushed again to my other assignment. Only to find out that the game crashed and I wouldn’t be able to get to the epilogue (my other task) for a few more versions. Again, I was told it was a known problem and not to bother with it.
For four weeks I logged problems on the game that had nothing to do with my assignment. At the end of the 4th week we were all given evaluations. I was told that I was doing the “best I could with a bad situation” and they promised to “have a working version by next week.”
Week 5 rolls around and on Wednesday I’m finally given a working version of the game. I once again rush to my assignments. At the end of the day they called me and the other guy working with me into the office and fired us for “low productivity.”
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Of course they weren't actually fired for low productivity, that was the excuse the company used officially just in case they tried suing for wrongful termination. The real reason they were let go was because other team members whose parts of the game had been working were starting to run out of things to test and now could be given the recently working pieces, making the author and his co-worker redundant. His/her manager probably made the mistake of letting their manager know that the poor condition of the builds left two testers with nothing much to do, which looked to upper management like an opportunity to reduce overhead. It was a shitty thing to do and proof that that part of the company, at least, is controlled by the bean counters.