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Trenches comic: Tuesday January 21, 2012 - Concept Faces 1
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I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
The Politics of Meal Time
02/21/2012 - Anonymous
What many people don’t know about QA is that “tester” is actually an umbrella term that describes a whole host of different quality assurance roles. You could almost think of them as sub-classes in the world’s worst RPG. The one specialty that every new tester aspires toward (and immediately regrets upon attaining it) is that of the “embedded tester.”
You see, most of the time, developers don’t like being near QA, and they ESPECIALLY don’t like eating around them.
It’s a little like having a four star meal surrounded by starving Ethiopian children. It’s just not classy, RIGHT? So, as a general rule, QA testers are kept away from the core development staff. Either they’re held in a separate room of the studio, another office, or another country altogether. The one exception to this rule is the embedded tester. The embedded tester actually gets to sit with developers and for many QA testers this is a ray of hope, potentially leading to a real design job in the future.
But it never actually does. Mostly the embedded tester just sees his weekly hours double as he tries in vain to impress the fickle development staff, most of whom won’t bother to learn his name.
One weekend, our QA team was called in for an extra shift. For most of us, this meant a jump from forty hours to over fifty, but for our embedded testers this marked the beginning of an eighty hour work week. As lunch rolled around the guys downstairs had to come up with a meal plan as the development team wasn’t interested in springing for food for the test team. The developers, however, did order a massive Indian buffet for themselves which was delivered upstairs for the ravenous designers to feast upon. We assumed our embedded testers would be lucky enough to join in, but that wasn’t the case.
As the testers stood in line to grab a plate of food, the development director flatly told them that the food wasn’t for testers, just for the development staff. They would have to fend for themselves or sit at their desks while everyone around them ate. Behind them was a third younger employee, who moved passed them and started piling food onto his plate. The director almost slapped the food out of his hand and yelled, “What did I just say?!”
Stunned, the young man just stared at her and said, “Um. I’m your audio designer.”
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Power trips.
And to compound the fact, there are so many people trying to get into the video games industry that if you think "fuck this I'm out of here" like I did, there are at least 5 people who are more then happy to take your place.
What puzzles me more is a corporate culture where you don't treat the testers (or "QA staff") as part of the "team" working to create the product – they're meant to be working with the developers to improve the product. They should at least get a free meal when they're putting extra hours in.
QA testers are usually temps and there is a really high turnover. Developers don't bother making friends with them. I worked in what the company called compliance QA. Which means whatever bug I found that, that game was still going gold and shipping.
"Oh we know about that bug, there should be a patch ready for day 1"
I kinda wonder what the game industry would be like if more people were like Valve or Zappos or other progressive corporate cultures.
What REALLY blew my mind originally with these stories from the trenches was that the video game developers in general have such a sick culture. Sure I see HOW with all the QA people being highly replaceable and temps a lot of the time, but gamers and game creators have always seemed to me to be liberal or artist or nerd types. I mean you create video games for people to play and enjoy for a living. Sure it's risky and stressful, but I still don't understand why it's so widespread to treat ANYONE this way.
I would think corporate cultures like Valve would be more the norm and not the exception.
I love seeing behind the scenes stuff, so I'm actually looking forward to the content.
I'm hoping that the Troika© will use the month to refine the Trenches. So far I wasn't impressed, but I think there's a lot of potential, and given that this is a comic in its infant stages, improvement is almost a given, so fingers crossed.
Also, seriously, PA: The Series about the Trenches Friday, March 16th, 2012 would be a great way to advertise the coming Season.
And, yes, the stories could account for some of the suicides out there. I still firmly believe that there is bliss to be had in the industry, but probably not in the big companies, particularly those under the wing of one of the big publishers, and probably not as a "Tester". I also don't quite understand the Tester mindset. Looking at various job offers in the industry, not one lists "experience testing games" as a requisite. Wouldn't you rather just get good at what you want to be and apply for that position when you're ready (and in the meantime do ANY other job, 90% of which will probably give you more leisure time than testing, as it seems. And certainly more vitality)? Weird.
I'm sure there's articles all over the web on this, but I've never done my historical research which I think I'll do today. We all hear the stories about EA, Activision, other publishers and developers. How were things back in the 70's? Early 80's? When gaming was still a new thing. Would these stories fit Atari back then perfect? What about the early PC game makers? Sierra, Broderbund, etc. Same thing different tune? I don't know!
If anyone has good links to stories about this, I'd love to have 'em.
Google should open a games studio. Hire the good people from Team Bondi and other developers that got fucked over by terrible management.
Context: Often we're talking about people with lvl 1 motivation, lvl 1 contacts in any sort of industry, lvl 1 experience outside of video games, and who have achieved level 99 video game skills.
For many it's a no-brainer to get a job in the video game industry and "work their way up" to a job doing "fun" stuff. The fact that this is impossible takes a while to sink in, and when it does there are still many others of the same mold to take their place (or people who are just desperate for any type of work that has low entrance requirements).
Hopefully at least some of this type of people read this comic and the associated stories before they put themselves through all this. And then maybe the endless sea of people wanting to be put through hell will dry up a bit and make people rethink the way they treat their employees...
Or more likely the economy will stay in the shitter and people will still be lining up, but be less optimistic about it.
Working your way up tends to be a myth in any corporate environment, video games or otherwise. Sure, there are people that move from the mailroom to executive suite, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. But it's a pervasive myth and a lot of the advice I got after college was "Get an entry level job and work your way up." Without the right contacts, specific skills, and more than a little luck, business just doesn't work that way.
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi 3DS: 3136-6586-7691
G&T Grass Type Pokemon Gym Leader, In-Game Name: Dan
That was it? This "season" is "over"?
Wow. This is a boring, bland, uninspired comic. I keep reading hoping it'll get better, but wow. This... this just doesn't work. None of the characters are likable in the slightest, but none of them have even achieved one dimension yet; they're all still rough caricatures of concepts, ephemeral and without substance. This is a problem, because with the update schedule, this comic needs at least one of two things to work:
1. Enough funnies to make it worth the page view.
2. Enough story, plot and character advancement to make up for the infrequent updates.
Right now, it's got neither, but it's acting like it's got both. The biggest draw to the site are the Tales, which are user-submitted! The amateur content is outshining the professional content like the sun vs the moon, and each tale, even the "bad" ones, gives a far greater intellectual and emotional payoff than an entire "season" of the comic has done so far. Look at today's tale: it's funny, horrifying, and eye-opening all at once. So far in the comic, what, a dude lied to get a job, another dude got fired, some dude got promoted, and another dude went to a party. Also, there may have been a rabbit in there somewhere.
There's nothing horrifying in the comic. There's nothing funny beyond a momentary and rare chuckle. There's nothing eye-opening about the state of the industry. There's no emotional payoff, no catharsis, nothing to empathize with and no secrets to be learned. If the goal here is to put a spotlight on "the tribulations of software testing", they're failing miserably so far, in my opinion.
I am mildly puzzled at the acutely critical eye people are casting on this free unsought entertainment.
Well, see you around!
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
Thanks for the highly important opinions though, we'll file it in our folder marked Very Important Things Which That One Guy Reckons
I was going to type up something about how it might be interesting to compare and contrast the evolution of workplace norms and labor relations through the pre- and early-industrial eras to today's video games industry.
Then I read that sentence and hated myself and went to make coffee instead.
But yea, pretty much what Munkus said.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
Well, when you know you are going to have layoffs after you finish the project (very common in video game QA) it's actually a smart idea for the person doing the firing to be as detached as possible.
Or else they will go insane.
Reminds me of that quote of Bobby Kotick saying a few years ago that he was working to instill pessimism, skepticism, and fear at Activision (something about the economy) and it was working somehow.
I don't know... I've done layoffs before, and they are hard as hell to do, but that's still no reason to dehumanize someone. You can remain detached without being a jackass.
Nintendo Network ID - PirateLuigi 3DS: 3136-6586-7691
G&T Grass Type Pokemon Gym Leader, In-Game Name: Dan
It blew your mind to learn that liberals, artists, and nerds can be giant power-tripping abusive assholes? People are just like that. It's not confined to one political persuasion, career, or choice of hobbies.
If you feed them they'll just end up replacing you, like your kids.
That's because Bobby Kotick is at the least an asshole, and more than likely an undiagnosed Sociopath.
"Look, we need QA for 6 months. It's grueling. There's a chance, albeit small, that you'll be able to stay afterwards, but 99% of all testers will be released after."
Problem is, that doesn't make for a good sales pitch.
Back in those days things were a little different. There was no gaming culture so the huge demand for jobs wasn't there yet so employees had to treated properly. Also most games were made by one person so there was no room for these kind of shenanigans. Check out http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=60785 for more info on what the gaming industry was like back then.
If that story is real then there is a big difference between testing in the us and the uk. Any QA manager I worked for would have taken that director aside and laid into him for pulling a stunt like that. Also once the story got around the game he was working on would suddenly have a ton of bugs reported against it as testers who would have been willing to do the devs a favour lose their goodwill.
there's no need to mislead about the expectations on a job, and there's definitely no need to be a jackass to an employee "just because". i firmly believe you can run a business and make objective, necessary business decisions that are still ethical and not "shitlord" in nature.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
It's hard to not read these stories and think of my career only 10 years ago. I was a frequently unemployed contract IT guy, who went from gig to gig with long stretches in between. It was a rough time to work, very much paycheck-to-paycheck. And then I landed a contract no similar to the all the other shitty, 2 week to 5 month contract installing new PC's on a military base. After 5 months, of the 100 guys on the project, I was the only one offered a full time job to stay on base and work. The only one. I worked hard for it, but I was a professional in attitude and work ethic, and didn't suck at my job. I've been that 1% who was allowed to stay. It can happen.
It just seems like a lot of these stories are of QA testers who are fueled by their delusions of working in the gaming industry, and then wash out or burn out, or are just discarded. They have become the day laborers of gaming industry - it would truly be cemented in stereotype if they only spoke Spanish and bivouacked at a Home Depot. I'd love to hear some successful stories of SQA guys making it ahead in the gaming industry, and how they did it. Did they take the career seriously, and pursue an education or professional development track to supplement there SQA on the (admittedly, not fun and shitty) job experience?
It'd be great to hear some mentoring from the industry on this site, or through The Trenches. Even if it's some simple encouragement, there are guys out there who've had to eat the pile of shit that is gaming SQA, and lived to tell the tale and be successful. Those are stories I wouldn't mind hearing.
I once worked a testing job where they kept QA in a separate room, behind a locked glass door that only the leads had access to open. On one side was the devs, the producers, and the rest of the studio, including the breakroom. On the other side was QA. And a microwave, minifridge, and a broken coffeepot. We had our own door in and out (bathrooms were in the hall, we had access to those), and only went in the studio side if we were told to, which meant almost never.
Every once in a while a dev would wander past the door, and look in. It was probably the closest I'll ever come to understanding what a zoo animal feels like.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I can concede that the comic isn't the best vehicle for mentoring or 'happy' stories. That's not it's thing. It's not a compelling narrative if a guy enjoys his SQA gaming gig, and easily gets promoted upwards with little trouble.
I enjoy the comic, it's characters, and it's plot, and even the reader submitted stories. But after a while, it's a negativity overdose. I wonder if PA, or the PA readership wouldn't mind an industry site where a spunky SQA guy/gal can prepare for the shit fest that will be there jobs. And maybe a few can learn, and move up and out. Seems to me like there's a vacuum, or at least, PA is uniquely situated to fill what appears to be a void. Maybe in comic form - maybe not. Just sayin'.
Are you serious?
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
It's self-explanatory. World domination.
Hey, thanks, that's really interesting. Ah, that intimate creative environment full of people with principles and ideas... How the Mighty have Fallen.
When Campbell described the playtesters pickpocketing children to plant explosives and run competitions to see who could blow up the most kids at once, though... Doesn't seem as if they were of sound mind - but whether that's due to a career in playtesting or something else is for a professional psychologist to decide. I can't even bring myself to play a dark-side character in any kind of game.
Quite. Sure, we can make educated guesses about who's who and such, but wouldn't it be a lot more interesting to hear Mike or Scott (or maybe Jerry too but he's not an artist) talk about the ideas they kicked around for what the characters should look like and how they evolved? Instead it's just, "Here's some faces." Actually not even that, the faces just appear without the barest introduction.