[TRENCHES] Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - Incentives
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Incentives
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/incentives
Apologetics for a Discipline
AnonymousIt’s been already said (c.f. “The Other Side of the Coin”) but I really want to echo: not everything is a screaming mess. Some companies actually learn from their mistakes. Some companies actually have their shit together.
I worked QA for a AAA-studio for 2 years, pushing out live events, patches, 2 expansion packs, and a new product launch. Sure, mediocre management can make your life super uncomfortable. Sure, there are occasional 60-, 70-, 80-hour work weeks as crunch times hit and devs get whipped into overdrive. Sure, there is resistance when people can’t be arsed/don’t have the time to fix bugs that are unequivocally right-there-on-the-Goddamn-screen-don’t-you-SEE-it-read-the-repro-steps-for-Chrissake.
For some places, though, this isn’t the norm; extremes are just that—extremes, spikes in the graph that are normalized by a perfectly acceptable and even enjoyable working environment.
I’ve seen some crappy stuff, sure: sleeping bags under cubicle desks, people getting publicly chewed out for picking quality over quantity, vicious RIFs which hit QA first, etc. I repeat: anomalies.
I don’t mean to belittle the horror stories. This is a forum set up just for ‘em! They are shitty, awful things! I _do_, however, want to pipe up for the Average, for the folks with decently competent management and semblances of proper budget work and scheduling. We exist! We toil! We go home before dark, mostly!
Ship it.
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This just had me wondering why they went with Sloths in the first place, if they didn't have any part of the books.
Well, obviously they were drawn out of a hat
Roughly what percentage of developers/QAs feel they're working to reasonable schedules, and what percentage would place themselves in the 'horror stories' camp?
Since we only usually hear anything about it if there's a notable story there, is game development just getting a bad rep from the minority?
They did indeed start off as a April 1st joke, but response was so high that they were added in as neutral heroes in TFT and there were a few instances of named characters who would join in the campaigns (Chen Stormstout being the biggest one during the Founding of Durotar campaign for Horde).
Of course, they took the info for him, that he was a monk that was really into brewing beer, up to 11 for explaining Pandaren culture in Mists.
Note that she says "No sloth RACE" - there were no complaints before, so one can presume that sloths existed in the books as companion creatures of some sort, just not a humanoid race in the same vein as elves/humans/dwarves.
The most ironic thing is that the "silliness" of most Pandaren is extremely necessary, because they live in a place where negative emotion can manifest physically ("Sha") and start wrecking up the place. So if they don't want a quick and painful course in Lovecraftian horror they take it easy and drink. Of course the various dangers (Mantid, Yangoul, Mogu, Sha) necessitated the formation of a group of BAMFs ("Shado-pan") who can turn their emotions on and off like a lightswitch, and do so when they feel the Sha are getting strong, to control where they appear. Then they kill them. There is also a lot of other darker stuff underneath the veneer of "happy-fun-panda-time," but I think near-psychopathic soldiers that summon horrors just to kill them sums it up pretty well.
The tale this time around was actually a bit of fresh air. I hate to think that every game I've played has used a "just-this-side-of-legal" version of slave labor. Good to know there is competence and, if not compassion, then at least reason in most management. Although I would like to see a study done on just where the average is and how many workers exist outside of it. Also, the fact that these abuses occur, no matter how infrequent, necessitates labor laws for the industry.
I'm not going to ignore the story, but I will crap on it. 60, 70, and 80 hour work weeks even when not the norm (as he says anomalies) aren't acceptable. They are the direct result of bad management. If you have to work more than one 80 hour week in your career, then there's a problem.
The problem is that the OP sees sleeping bags under the desk, bad management, excessive (and most likely unpaid) overtime, and deep episodic layoffs, as OK as long as it doesn't happen all the time. (Maybe once a month or so? Four times a year?)
I can tell you, I work as a developer and probably get paid more than the developers at whatever company this guy works for, I have worked 50 and 60 hour work weeks during crunch time, but only one time and it was due to bad management (my own bad management, and I did the overtime myself so that the rest of my team didn't have to) but my boss would literally kick me out the door if I even thought of bringing in a sleeping bag so I could put in 16 hour days. That's not how things are done here. The watch word is working smarter not harder. If I am putting in overtime, then there has been a failure somewhere and we need to find it and fix it. We give estimates based on realistic schedules with realistic resources. There's none of this hiring extra mothers to make a baby in less than 9 months crap that seems to be common in the games industry.
What's the down side? I make boring business applications instead of games.
Though, I have to say I get a hell of a lot of satisfaction out of it because I can see the real tangible results of my work in how the field employees do their job because of the applications that I make for them. Does it give me Rock Star status? Nope, but the users appreciate what I do for them, and I get to go home every night on time, get 4 weeks of vacation time that I can actually use, and I don't have to worry about layoffs every time a an application is finished, because I always have another project lined up end to end to start on.
Some people might say, what does it matter that the games industry is filled with shitty jobs? The employees seem to like the shitty jobs, and if that's what they want then it's their business, right?
I disagree, the terrible management and unreasonable working environment that happens all too often in the games industry is the single biggest reason that games ship as a buggy mess. A developer who is working 16 hour days during crunch time (one crunch time per game? more?) is putting more bugs into the game than valuable features, and I have to deal with that when I buy the finished product.
Yeah, they had already established a decent amount of lore about Pandaren before MoP. There was quite a bit in the RPG books (basically WoW Dungeons & Dragons) especially.
But yeah, they also developed a ton of new stuff for MoP. All the Mogu stuff is brand new.
Sloths are kind of a 'thing' on the internet (especially reddit). Since their entire point was pandering, they picked a well known famous internet animal.
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