[TRENCHES] Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - Infinite
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Infinite
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/infinite
You People
AnonymousOne Saturday a friend invites me to tag along to a board game day she goes to. I walk into the house and immediately recognize one of my company’s programmers so I give him a friendly ‘Hello!’ He pretty much ignores me. Fine, whatever. Later in the afternoon he notices that the hoodie I’m wearing bears our company’s logo and aggressively demands of me “Where’d you get that?”
“Umm, I work there.”
He narrows his eyes and searches my face as if he’ll catch me in a lie. “Well, I don’t know you.”
I tell him my name and add, “We’re on the same project; I work in QA…” sure that will ring a bell.
“Oh!” He looks relieved, as if he’s solved some riddle. “I don’t bother getting to know any of you people.”
....
QA is just as vital to the game development process as the programmers, designers, and producers. I go out of my way to try and be polite and professional because my job is, essentially, to tell people that they fucked something up. I work the same hellacious hours at crunch time and do it for far less money and no benefits, might I add. All I ask in return is to be treated as an equal, as a coworker, not as if my department is nothing more than a nameless bunch of automatons.
As a note, most of the devs I’ve worked with are awesome but there’s a reason that the stereotype exists of the negitive Dev-QA relations.
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He's still an asshole though.
I think the phrase 'you people' is insulting in almost any context, because it isn't personal. It's a way of saying that in the speakers mind, you don't really count.
It's like people who say 'no offence meant', rather than take the effort not to cause offence in the first place.
I'm sure that's it, but yeah. You don't be a dick and say to the person's face "you are insignificant so I don't bother knowing you." At the very least say something like "Oh, I don't get over to that section very often" or something less dick-ish.
The best way to fix that is stop hiring disposable QA. When people cycle through that department constantly it really deprioritises getting to know them. Another good way is to assign individual testers to departments, or individuals. I had a QA guy assigned to me over one particularly problematic level and it helped motivate and incentivise me.
Any workplace that has, for lack of a better word, 'tiers' of employees will potentially see this problem.
I see it at my job, where we're supported by a lot of staff doing various things. Some of my colleagues are less than pleasant in how they refer to those not doing our particular job, which is always a bit grating. Especially because I know we couldn’t do our job, and collect our lovely paychecks, if other people weren’t working just as hard to make it possible.
That story is a somewhat extreme example of it, but that basic problem is common.
There's plenty of jobs where you don't give a shit about a tier of worker.
You don't fucking tell them that at a social event, though. They're still human beings, and you never know who might magically be your boss five years from now.
Ha, that would be fantastic karma
That's how the story is presented, but I agree. It's about a guy who's a dick.