[TRENCHES] Thursday, November 21, 2013 - Leading The Maligned

Geth

Leading The Maligned
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/leading-the-maligned

Love you brother, mean it.

Anonymous

I don’t work in the games industry, nor am I a ‘tester’.  However, my brother is an award winning developer of non-game software.  Why am I writing, because he showed the dev vs. tester problem.  He is the dev manager on software used by large customers to control a vital business process - which I will not name.  He liked to have events at his house that he invited both family and coworkers.  He and his co-workers liked to sit around and bitch about testers and joke about how much fun it was to fire them.  Big bullies.

One Monday, before one of those parties, my boss told me I needed to implement this new system, which was the software my brother writes. Small world.

The piece of shit was so buggy it was ridiculous.  The support staff of the vendor was crap because they couldn’t get anything fixed on their side.  Event rolls around and I overheard my brother and his coworkers joking about the testers they bully, mentioning this stupid idiot that listed a bug that didn’t exist.  It was the bug we were having problems with.

I walked up and opened with, ‘Hey motherfuckers, don’t you guys test? We are production down with that fucking bug.  If you listen to that tester, we wouldn’t be in the mess you’re in.  You’re all assholes that need to be fired.’

Love you brother, mean it.

Devs take it out on testers. Customers take it out on support.

Robust Laser

And then everybody in the room stood up and began to clap.

Shakes999

Ok, trenches finally made me laugh out loud. Great start to the season.

Aegeri

Sucks to be you Isaac.

zepherin

Q used the bathroom in Isaac's "home" in the second frame.

JackdawGin

Liking this season so far. The art is good, but the writing is levels beyond what it was in the first two, just a lot more quality dialogue.

Gaslight

New season with the new writer and artist at the helm off to a strong start!

Stormwatcher

The strip does look like a bit weird, in terms of being downscaled wrong, I dunno how to explain. The art is amazing, tho.

YoungFrey

Stormwatcher wrote: »

The strip does look like a bit weird, in terms of being downscaled wrong, I dunno how to explain. The art is amazing, tho.

Everything looks just a tad hazy is how I'd describe it. Still looks great.

RatherDashing89

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what Isaac's horrifying expressions remind me of. I finally got it:

Ori Klein

Re: Story.
I honestly don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

Aegeri

Wait? It's a new writer as well? How does anyone even know this stuff?

A duck!

It was announced at PAX.

Sterica

It is weird that they didn't ever announce it on the site, although I did like going a few days without knowing just to see if we could guess the new artists.

Aegeri

It isn't Cube Watermelon doing the art either?

I am so confused, but either way I am liking the direction this is going so far and I hope the reception Isaac gets to his "promotion" is suitably hilarious.

Gaslight

Aegeri wrote: »

It isn't Cube Watermelon doing the art either?

No, even at the end of the last season it wasn't.

It is ridiculous how bad the communication about Trenches is.

Amaryl

It was announced on the PA homepage that they'd changed artist and writer, months ago when season 3 ended hidden halfway through the newspost.

'http://penny-arcade.com/2013/09/06 wrote:

'- As we have said on many, many occasions, the ultimate victory scenario is to make things, and then push them off the dock to have their own adventures. The Trenches just wrapped up its third season, which brings the archive there to over two hundred comics, each of which includes various gruesome True Tales of industry life. I really, really like it. This is what we have accomplished with Scott Kurtz, and when time got tight for him we brought on Mary C from Kiwi Blitz to handle the art. Time has tightened for him again, fairly significantly, with the success of Table Titans to the point where it’s not something we can do together anymore. Plus, Mary C is heading to Japan, which necessitated a stratagem. You might have noticed an art change in the last couple strips; those are the exquisite lines of Monica Ray, from Strip Search but also, you know, from Earth. That was Phase One of the Trenches Longevity Initiative (TLI). The second was to bring on Ty Halley, also of Strip Search fame, to write the shit out of it. This is an interesting juncture, for us and for Trenches, and I’d be curious where else this model could work

That said; the lack of shading on the characters in a shaded background irks me.

YoungFrey

It would be somewhat appropriate if The Trenches continued to rotate it's creative team perpetually. Making somebody else's property probably isn't the goal for most aspiring artists. So it makes sense as a launching platform. When an artist is ready to go off to a better opportunity, some new aspiring creative is brought on to cut their teeth or what have you.

Gosling

YoungFrey wrote: »

It would be somewhat appropriate if The Trenches continued to rotate it's creative team perpetually. Making somebody else's property probably isn't the goal for most aspiring artists. So it makes sense as a launching platform. When an artist is ready to go off to a better opportunity, some new aspiring creative is brought on to cut their teeth or what have you.

This may be a poor post to follow up with by mentioning that Monica just announced she got a storyboarding job in LA and will be re-relocating next month.

Quothz

Gaslight wrote: »

New season with the new writer and artist at the helm off to a strong start!

Does that mean Child's Play doesn't get their hundred bucks for "rung" instead of "wrung"?

Centurion13

Not only do they not get their hundred bucks for mis-spelling 'wrung', they have to pay fifty to get the 'k' back in Holkin's name in the credits.

RedPaintedHouses

Wow, really? Still with the "Jerry Holins" as co-creator? Twice is really pushing it. I think Jerry might as well just change his name now.

Ori Klein

Quothz wrote: »

Gaslight wrote: »

New season with the new writer and artist at the helm off to a strong start!

Does that mean Child's Play doesn't get their hundred bucks for "rung" instead of "wrung"?

I'm new to the joke. What's the shebang about?

Tofystedeth

Apparently Tycho donates $100 to Child's Play whenever a Tychpo appears in the main PA strip.

RedPaintedHouses

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Apparently Tycho donates $100 to Child's Play whenever a Tychpo appears in the main PA strip.

They should certainly start something like this with The Trenches then, since he/new artist has typo'd Jerry's name twice already in the strip copyright. That's money for kids, that is.

Smrtnik

No strip/post today?

Gaslight

There was a Tale today I think.

marsilies

No new comic today, but a new tale:

115 hours a week, still paid hourly
11/26/2013 - Anonymous
-
Back in the Oughts I was working QA for a big publisher who had a number of PS2/Xbox/PC games in the pipe. A good number of us were conscripted to move down to SoCal for a couple of months working on a game. Everyone got their own Extended Stay hotel room complete with continental breakfast. The soda machine’s Pepsi didn’t have the proper amount of fizz, but it worked perfectly for whatever random ham and cheese and onion omelette and hash browns you wanted that day.

That part was okay. Plus I had my PS2 plugged into the hotel room’s TV and ruined Jak 3.

But there was also work. And that work took place in a scarily small room clearly not designed to hold the amount of electronics that were in those four walls. 20 people in a 20x10 room, each with an Xbox, PS2, and PC. In Southern California. In July. And we had to build our own fan.

Yes, we had one fan. And it was pointed out of the room, If Jesus was an electrician, he would have fainted if he saw this setup.

And if that wasn’t enough, we regularly showed up at work at 8 in the morning and didn’t leave until 2 the morning. There is a concept of “Drop Dead Time” where you are given 8 hours plus travel time plus 30 minutes to clean the filth out of your various holes. That whole concept went out the window at some point.

The Apex of this entire endeavor leads up to near the Publish Ready date. QA gets paid per hour, and this final week, we worked One Hundred and Fifteen Hours. Let me break that down quickly One standard human week equal 178 Hours. Subtracting 8 hours for sleep, that equals one (1) hour of not working time. You have to force a beer down to keep up with this schedule, let alone four to cleanse your mental palate.

And then the game was delayed another couple months, so I had that time to hone my skills in setting people on fire via my mind.

I think the math is wrong. One week is 7 days with 24 hours per day; 7 x 24 = 168 hours. 8 hours of sleep a night is 8 x 7 = 56 hours a week. 168 - 56 = 112 hours left over, which is less than the 115 hours he claimed to work. Which means he was getting less than 8 hours of sleep a night, on average.

Also, working from 8am to 2am the next day would be 18 hours, leaving only 6 hours a day for anything else, meaning he'd be getting less than 6 hours of sleep a night, and potentially working up to 126 hours a week.

ArbitraryDescriptor

Arithmetic errors are bound to happen when you work one hundred and I-don't-even-fucking-know-anymore hours a week.

Shakes999

ArbitraryDescriptor wrote: »

Arithmetic errors are bound to happen when you work one hundred and I-don't-even-fucking-know-anymore hours a week.

Hear hear. I did 92 hrs a week in construction and it was horrible. When you start having dreams of your job when you go home, its time to take a step back. Maybe use a sick day.

Smrtnik

My last week as undergrad I was up for 105 hours straight to finish a project as I found out my groupmate was 100% worthless and hadnt done anything.

astronautcowboy3

Do testers usually get overtime? Or have they figured out a loophole to cheat them out of that? With 70+ hours of it, there wages would almost not suck!

Commander Zoom

I have a vision of the rest of the cast standing over Isaac in that last panel:

"You have been weighed."
"You have been measured."
"And you absolutely...
"... have been found wanting."
"Welcome to the new world. God save you, if it is right that He should do so."

forty

Smrtnik wrote: »

My last week as undergrad I was up for 105 hours straight to finish a project as I found out my groupmate was 100% worthless and hadnt done anything.

"Undergrad group project partner" and "worthless" are redundant.