Open call for Board Member and Moderator positions in Coin Return. More information here.
Sign up to win MNC Dover's voice! Details here.
[TRENCHES] Thursday, August 9, 2012 - Incendiary
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Incendiary
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/incendiary
Magical Floating Days
AnonymousWe were compelled to work every major holiday except Christmas. We were told we would get “floating” days in return after the game shipped. After that magical day, I approached the boss about using one of my (many) accumulated floating days. He just laughed and told me now we had to crunch for DLC. Years later, I never got my days off.
Geth on
0
Posts
Looks like Cora is in charge of hiring people. I wonder if she'll smuggle Tarley back in somehow?
Maybe Cora misheard and her nose will be on fire.
Who do you think the firely latina will be?
Seems like almost a certainty she'll at least try.
It'll have to be a pepper of some sort. Anything less would be unacceptable.
Unionize.
Regards,
Henroid
Feel free to outline how unionization would hurt employees more than they are already treated.
Fixed that for you. I have been in game companies that ensured you got days off if you worked holidays. Some places will literally tell people that they're working themselves too hard and need to plan and take a vacation.
Her name is Marleyna. Her turn-ons are long walks on the beach, weed, and hallucinations. Her turn-off is Crunch Punch.
And game makes would immediately ship every last testing job overseas.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Everything I read makes it sound like the current setup is less than ideal for pretty much everybody
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Before Unions would work, you'd need more education about the actual conditions, because I think any Union formed right now would be scabbed into uselessness by the amount of people who think testing games is awesome.
there is no protagonist at all and everybody is a self serving dick
This is the fundamental problem union or no union: a near-limitless supply of stupid young people who will do anything for a chance to "tighten up the graphics on level three."
Actually, if you read PvP you'll understand that Isaac/Icey had a high position (possibly CEO?) in the company that produced Steel coffin (kind of a raunchy god of war/just cause type rip) which francis tested the shit out of. Anyway, yeah he's a dick and certainly self serving...can't think of too many redeeming qualities other than not firing the guy with all the pics of his kids.
Anyway the story is all about him trying to ascend through the ladder once again by stepping on heads and the like. And possibly mad lessinz? Getting his own head stepped on last comic must have been a doozy, whether there was stomping of the scalp or not (dawwwww, cora...Cora is far too friendly).
This is actually mentioned in PvP? I didn't know there was any direct crossover.
It is called CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. If Isaac starts off as a great guy with sterling character the story has nowhere to go. Regardless, he isn't half as bad a person as the crowd on this forum makes it out to be - almost the entire cast is in their own way jerky and self-serving. Nice, friendly Cora, for example, may see herself as a champion of the game's playerbase as clearly has a strong sense of personal ethics she's adhering to, but she's has basically been screwing over all her fellow employees with her leaking - and she wasn't above letting Marley take the fall for her with nothing more than one comic's worth of huffing and puffing at Isaac over the frame-job.
This is actually mentioned in PvP? I didn't know there was any direct crossover.
It is called CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. If Isaac starts off as a great guy with sterling character the story has nowhere to go. Regardless, he isn't half as bad a person as the crowd on this forum makes him out to be - almost the entire cast is in their own way jerky and self-serving.
Nice, friendly, huggy Cora, for example, may see herself as a champion of the game's playerbase and clearly has a strong sense of personal ethics she's adhering to, but she's basically been screwing over all her fellow employees with her leaking - and she wasn't above letting Marley take the fall for her. Sure, we got one comic's worth of huffing and puffing at Isaac from her over the frame job, but in the end she was still apparently happy enough to reap the benefits from his dirty deed.
As for the others...yes, Isaac is a self-centered twit with delusions of grandeur, and is also impulsive and excitable.
Credenza is an oblivious airhead as a boss, avowedly has zero leadership skills, and makes hiring decisions while drunk and firing decisions by randomly throwing darts.
Q is arrogant, overrates his own deviousness and intelligence, and doesn't take responsibility for things that happened on his watch as test lead. He also wears a fucking utilikilt.
Marley is a stoner jackass who habitually gets so damn high that he's unable to maintain a grip on reality while on the job and makes critical mistakes because of it.
This comic is about flawed, incompetent people working for a dysfunctional, shitty company.
Yeah, it would have to come from the devs and artists. But, for some reason there's a huge libertarian streak in the software engineering crowd so it will never, ever happen. As for shipping jobs overseas, I think not - no company that was even slightly worried about protecting their IP would contract out to India or China. Otherwise they'd be doing it already.
This is it right here. People having no will to fight for fear of losing their job perpetuate this shit.
They're shipping out to Canada.
I certainly hope you're not suggesting that the people being taken advantage of need to just sack up and accept that they might be fired. It's far more easily said than done.
Now, let me be clear - I am not in this situation. I am well taken care of by my company, and they treat us with respect and dignity. However, there are enough studios where this isn't the case that it is certainly an industry problem.
Or your employer goes bankrupt because a company that isn't unionized beats the shit out of them on costs and is able to produce better product for less money.
If you need a little more understanding of what I mean, drive through Flint some time.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
Even then, in an industry that barely has any unions to begin with it'd be extremely hard to introduce one without massive pushback. Hell, even voice acting for games is done "under the table" in regards to unions, which is why a lot of games don't list the VAs for certain characters or the voices for characters suddenly change (see Persona 4 Arena for a recent example of this).
No, I understand the fear of losing a job, especially in areas where there aren't many to go around. Me, I'm stupid enough to risk it and have at every job I've had. I've never been belligerent about standing up for myself or coworkers though (as my fear dictates part of that approach). I've gotten myself and coworkers raises or better hours if they were better contributors to the job over people fucking around being lazy.
But I've never worked any salary gigs before. I know enough that the terms are very different in that case and have no idea how to angle things to make that fight happen with the same positive results.
As far as I can tell testing games neither requires, "advanced knowledge ... customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction." Nor would they be covered as computer workers because they would need to be, "computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer or other similarly skilled worker".
Disturbingly though the minimum salary requirement to be an exempt worker is $455/week. Which at 40hours/week works out to a little more than $11/hour. If they're working anything more than about 60hours/week they're making minimum wage or less though.
Another thing is they just might be straight up breaking the law and not paying overtime at all, capping the weekly time to 40 hours and basically forcing the person to work extra hours for free under the threat of being fired. It might be something like an hour transfer where time you work overtime is instead turned into vacation/sick time that's cashed in at 1:1 instead of whatever the normal overtime rate is, so the company ends up paying out less money in the end. It could be any sort of crazy idea the accountant dreamed up and put to action to minimize payout.
Meh not as direct as one would like....as in names, don't think or remember him being mentioned by name, but steel coffin is something he claims to have a big part in when he thinks he's getting a promotion :P
The steel coffin used to be or mayhaps still is one of the suggested starting point/funny point banners over at PvP.
aside from that, yeah, totally agree. Total dysfunct in the air at ye olde make believe comic. Makes for comedy. Is that not why we read PA? If they weren't dysfunctional would we care as much?
Disclaimer: I work corporate QA, not game QA, so the environment may be different.
That said, offshoring QA is likely to be a last resort solution for many (if not all) companies, for several reasons.
1. A lot of shops are now going Agile (or at least attempting it). Generally speaking, that requires an integrated Analyst/Design/Development/QA team who are, at the very least, in the same building, if not in the same room. The whole fast feedback, continuous integration, rapid development style of Agile pretty much requires an in-house team.
Mind you, a lot of places stretch their definition of Agile, but, speaking from experience, when your QA guys are 8-12 hours behind you, you are not an Agile shop, your project suffers because you're crowbarring a methodology, and eventually the PM is likely to demand a fully integrated local team.
2. Offshore QA leads to slower turnover of tickets, and potentially lower quality as a result. Your development team does a build and goes home. Six hours later, your QA team gets up, and logs tickets. 12 hours after that, your Dev team is back in the office, and can start looking at the raised tickets. Maybe 8 hours after that, your QA team is awake and can respond to comments, reopen tickets, retest, etc. The time delay you get with offshoring will slow everything down. In many cases you're looking at a timeshift of 8+ hours, and that can hobble issue turnover.
3. Environment problems will waste days. Your dev team sets up a build before they go home. It deploys badly, or some code is crap, and it totals the Test environment. Your QA team comes in for their morning, discovers the environment is blown, and spends the rest of the day in the pub. They're *probably* not paid enough to go and wake you up to fix it.
4. Cultural and linguistic differences can be an issue. Even working remote projects in the US from the UK, using different nouns or spellings or terminology can cause the sort of confusion that gets a ticket rejected, or the wrong issue fixed, or the fix misunderstood. Factor in a QA team whose first language isn't English (assuming a US dev team), and even if they are very, very good at their jobs, there will be problems with miscommunication, problems of misunderstanding, frustrations, and general chaos.
And that's just off the top of my head.
This isn't to say that some companies don't outsource their QA work. Many do, and for some the savings in internal costs may make up for the increased risk. This is especially true in sectors where you're working on non-public facing work, and if something goes wrong, you can fix it by stealth. Gaming, though, is high visibility, high-risk tickets all the way, especially on AAA titles. If someone screws up, it's going to be noticed. If they screw up badly enough, especially on console launches, your AAA multi-million title is now a paperweight.
As such, I'd say the risks of outsourcing (especially to company reputation) are far higher than not doing so, especially in the gaming industry. The far likelier scenario, as noted above, is that any unionised band of QA are immediately fired, and replaced with a bunch of college kids who want to break into gaming. It's probably almost as cheap as outsourcing, and you bypass all the risks above. And you can always lay them all off at the end of the project anyway, right?
Goodreads
SF&F Reviews blog
This exists, they just don't send anon stories to The Trenches because they have nothing valid to complain about.