[TRENCHES] Thursday, June 27, 2013 - Platinum
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Platinum
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/platinum
Streamlining
AnonymousI work at a medium-sized developer, and we’re currently on a project under amazing amounts of stress. We don’t have enough people, turnover is really high, and firefighting is an everyday activity - like any software producer, I’m sure.
Our Leads have been locked up in meetings literally every day. So much so that they can’t get any work done or, say, lead their team. It was so bad, that our weekly Thursday 30-minute check in with our lead engineer had been cancelled 8 times in a row.
With this in mind, management instituted “No-Meeting Thursday.” As its name implies, all Thursday meetings were to be cancelled, to allow teams some time to work with their Leads. This week, when our meeting on No-Meeting Thursday rolled around, our Lead told us that the policy was going to be a real boon to us, because we could now have our meeting on No-Meeting Thursday. So we did.
This week, unfortunately, we were not able to have our meeting with our lead on No-Meeting Thursday, because it had been superseded by another, more important meeting.
Posts
And then the Leads are told they're integral members of the management team, and need to go ahead and report to the regular meeting to discuss how well Tactical Thursdays are working out.
It's like a version of the Peter Principle, where the best developers got promoted to leaders, then ended up spending all their time in meetings, leaving the less experienced developers to actually, you know, develop.
Ok, I get that there's always something about games that looks like a "money grab" nowadays, but I just don't know who to root for anymore. Maybe no one? Is that the idea? Is/are Scott/Mike/Jerry trying to tell us that absolutely everyone in game development is an insufferable asshole in one way or another, or, at best, impossibly incompetent? Because that's the message I'm getting. It's not even funny anymore, just depressing and a bit angering- especially since the things shown in the comic are probably truer to life than most people would care to admit.
The Tales still amuse and enlighten, though.
Those words.. I dunno theenk they mean what you think they mean.
Maybe that's what they're making fun of, but it's still saddening to know people actually think like this.
EDIT - Cora looks uncomfortable with it, and that's to be expected, but she still clearly doesn't give two shits about the QA team- either that, or she's too weak-willed to say anything to Q (who is a massive, manipulative, lying dick). Like I said, I just don't know who to root for.
It's not just limited to corporate environments; certain manager types in every industry just love to hear the sound of their own voices, love to present common sense as The Wisdom of The Ages and love to put their noses so far up asses that it becomes physically impossible to do your job because they are in such close physical proximity that you might as well be conjoined.
If I had a nickel for every overblown and useless shift meeting I had at a restaurant ....
That's the point of the comic.
At least Q was up-front about it:
oh my god
Now, supposedly Q holds this particular IP in the highest regard possible, that's how he landed it. Yet he obviously doesn't care if the shittiest game ever imagined comes out under his beloved IP, and more importantly with his name stamped on it.
I think he's still passionate about the source material, but he's getting caught up in the moneymaking potential and just losing sight of what he's doing.
And conversely, Cora, who saw herself as a white knight defender of the players with Lawstar, seems unwilling to stand up to Q's efforts to milk and exploit the playerbase here. Although in fairness, she hasn't had much of a chance to respond yet, so we'll see.
What hasn't changed, of course, is Cora's disregard for the well-being and interests of her co-workers.
It seems like Q learned all the wrong lessons from what happened with Lawstar; going freemium with Lawstar saved the game from a player revolt caused by dev/QA incompetence and made him wealthy, so now he appears to only be concerned with monetizing the freemium model for all it's worth.
that first space-cowboy shit. And now he knows what profit you can make with Free to Play game, so it's not about passion now.
His pitch to Cora's dad points to him being pretty damn passionate about Rhymeblade.
and here too: http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/history
And as I said above, now Q knows what money you can make with F2P game.
This is also what happened in every (Vampire) LARP I've been involved in, as a player or GM. Though that was as much a case of the "adults" sequestering themselves for the serious political roleplay while leaving the larger mass of "kids" to run around unsupervised and, inevitably, get into mischief.
Nope. Not like any software producer. A properly run software house is nothing like that. Your company simply has awful management.
Ah yes the lesser known cousin of the extinct Ground Sloth
the Space Sloth