[TRENCHES] Thursday, April 18, 2013 - Velocity
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Velocity
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/velocity
Like Meatloaf.
AnonymousI worked as a QA tester for about 6 months (long enough to realize I never wanted to do it ever again) when I was in desperate need of work and, you know, money. After I was laid off, I thought I was done with the job. But as it turns out, you’re never done.
Years later, doing a university course for something I actually wanted to do with my life, I find myself in the animation studio of the school taking photos of students. Some of them were working on making a game for some reason. A very excited girl runs up to me, asking if I could pretty please play test her game build for her assignment.
“Sure, I don’t see the harm.” I say, and I sit down and play a horrifically broken FPS and show her exactly where it’s unclear how to progress and what’s wrong with her level design, and offer suggestions on how to improve the product.
“Wow. You’re really good at this!” she exclaims.
“Oh? Well I guess it’s just ingrained in me from when I worked as a game tester.” I respond without thinking. Her eyes widen with excitement, and my heart sinks.
I then spent the next 12 hours testing every single game in their class and giving comprehensive analysis to each of them about the builds. I was also asked to come back in a week to do it again.
I was passed around like a lump of meat loaf and wasn’t even offered any kind of compensation for my time after the fact. They all thought “Playing games for 12 hours” was payment enough…
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Conserving time, because 1 slice at a time is just too slow.
Also it's cut unevenly by an obvious margin, which is one of my secret pet peeves.
I was seeing it as one slice being under the other.
The recommended way to eat two slices at once is to fold the tops together so that you have a pizza sandwich.
They're overlapping, because Isaac ain't got time for sequential.
I have a feeling it was one piece and it looked a little too big at the last minute so a line was added. I love the look on his face though.
Most of the time they say things like game a with parts of c would be cool
But long ago when I took computer programing classes I really felt awkward letting people play with the shitty games I built
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
Yeah that was really weird.
Also comic is great
Tester-dude is obviously a moron relative of the owner or someone important to the owner for some reason or another. So he gives him a job and 'protects' him.
There are two ways to deal with incompetent people in a company: a) fire them b) transfer them.
Tester-dude is obviously a moron relative of the owner or someone important to the owner for some reason or another. So he gives him a job and 'protects' him.
There are two ways to deal with incompetent people in a company: a) fire them b) transfer them.[/quote]
That was my first thought too, though I've seen producers that honestly believe testers and designers are essentially the same thing.
I've known testers that didn't want to be designers because they knew it's something they didn't have the knack for and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could not be a good tester. I've seen testers do things to break levels that I would never ever dream of doing and the fact they thought to do those things always leaves me in awe. Two completely different skill sets.
And yes, I enjoyed this comic.
Hell, while it seems really unlikely, it's even possible the QA guy's art critiques were good ones. It would be a shitty way of doing it anyway, but again that might not be his fault. Sure the story doesn't paint it that way, but I know plenty of people who would be bitter about taking criticism from an underling regardless of it's value.
Just playing devil's advocate is all. I feel like this is one of the high percentage of Trenches tales that can be filed under "Too little information, all of which is one sided."
My feeling on this is that the owner wanted this guy to be in design in the first place and directed him to issue design comments as bugs. So it seems logical enough. he probably didn't have enough 'experience' to throw right into a design position. So just put him in QA.
It could be one of those monster costco sized pizzas. I don't have small hands and I can barely handle those things.
As an aside, those Costco pizzas kicked ass.
Especially at smaller start-ups, I've seen a lot of testers get promoted out of QA. In fact, I've known quite a few people who were very much overqualified for the usual QA gig, but they were too scared to apply for an actual designer/developer position, so they started in QA to get their "foot in the door." Sometimes it works; they get to know the right people, someone recognizes they have a talent outside of QA, and they get promoted.
In almost every case I've seen a tester get pulled to do design/dev work, it had absolutely nothing to do with their aptitude at testing. You don't promote QA to a designer position because they're good at finding bugs. You promote them out of QA because they're actually good at design.