[TRENCHES] Thursday, September 6, 2012 - Walkabout
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Walkabout
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/walkabout
This is what we get paid to do!
AnonymousA few years ago I got my first job as a video game tester for a mobile game. The team (myself and five other people) had been working for about three weeks out of the five that we were contracted for. Running tests that were required, filling out bug reports…pretty standard stuff.
Oddly enough during the project whenever we would send in a bug report nothing ever changed; same bugs, same glitches, every week. It wasn’t until the start of the fourth week that one of the testers noticed an article proclaiming that the product we had been testing had officially been cancelled and would never see the light of day on a retail shelf.
That was news to us since we still had two weeks left on the contract. After some digging, our lead confessed that the company who hired us never pulled the contract, so we had to just sit there in our crappy “office” without our shitty phones (since the company took them back), and our two computers that had internet for the duration of the term because, “we’re testers and this is what we get paid to do!”
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Can I get a #firstworldproblems tag up ins?
You don't feel that sitting there doing work that is completely pointless isn't a valid grievance?
To quote Gabe on Twitter a week or two ago, "You don't have to tell me all of my problems are first world problems. The first world is where I live. Oh no, all my yaks died! #ThirdWorldProblems"
It's almost as if people prefer to be paid to do actual work
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
Nope. Not a valid grievance at all. That's 10 paid days to do some self directed study to make a career change. It's only a grievance if there was someone sitting over their shoulder making them test the cancelled game. If not, they should have brought in a laptop and practiced some programming or scripting or something. The fact that the story ends with "we just had to sit there" instead of "and I made damn good use of every paid hour" just goes to show why the poster was and probably still is on the bottom rung of the ladder.
Aren't they legally obligated to work that contract? If they don't uphold their part of the contract, that company wouldn't get paid for it. They have to "work" on the game, so there likely needs to be a paper trail to indicate that they did fulfill their obligation.
Now depending on management, they may or may not actually care at this point. They fact that management didn't tell them about the cancellation probably means that yes they do need to keep working on the project even though it was cancelled. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the testers weren't informed so that their motivation/morale to work wasn't completely destroyed.
Browsing the web or practicing programming/scripting would likely have just gotten those testers fired. The company's contract and the testers contract isn't likely to cover "do whatever the I want because I want to improve myself"
See, I had inferred that they weren't allowed to bring anything else in for whatever reason. I suppose whether they were or not will change whether the story teller or their employer were dumb.
Have you never had to be at a job where there was no work, but the bosses insisted that you "look like you're working" because they don't like the idea of you being a work and doing something to benefit yourself?
So yeah, in that circumstance, "practicing scripting" would be out of the question. Reading a book, working on anything other than "the job" (even if the job is pointless) is not something management usually looks the other way on. Even if there is literally no real work for you to do they don't care.
Granted the story doesn't make it clear as to whether this is "that kind" of an office or not, but the very fact that the boss didn't bother to tell them that the project was cancelled suggests this is not an intelligent or "cool" manager they are working with.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
I guess the tester's company could have left them to their own devices on the company dime. I'd be surprised, though.
I'm in agreement that there isn't much of a complaint here.
The alternatives would've been:
A) Client Company pulled the contract, you all go home, possibly without pay (if pulling contract meant pulling the payment also).
C) Don't like it? Feel free to resign, collect your work days pay, and go home.
Really, you had a shit-canned situation, got kept on contract, kept being paid...and could leave if you didn't feel like staying.
I'm sorry, but I don't see any grounds here for filing grievance.
If anything, the client company should've fired someone for ineptitude for keeping you all contracted and paying you for doing nothing.
And as previously stated by others, this could've been time well spent on doing something productive out of own accord; the choice was made to idle instead.
I can only assume that they were not required to "look busy" because the poster did not specify that detail. That would be a very pertinent aspect of the story, but it was omitted. I can only assume that because he specified "we had to just sit there in our crappy “office” without our shitty phones, and our two computers that had internet for the duration of the term" that they were just sitting their twiddling their thumbs. If his grievance was that he was forced to work on a pointless task he would have said so.
Especially since the story specifically mentions their phones get confiscated every day?