@@MGrey-qb5xz 1.bad system can reword the incompetant people for doing bad job and make competant people stop trying 2. Toxic work place culture can push people away and more often that not people who remain are a bunch of incompetant fucks.
Bad hiring practices. They often get the cheapest people, not the best. I'm working in software dev and I'm frequently baffled by how people with 20+ years of programming experience can still fail trivial tasks
I think this is a very good example of what's happening across the entire workforce. I see so many people refuse to accept blame or point fingers, and all because the second they do they're fired or don't get a raise. No one's encouraged to make mistakes anymore. People have to make mistakes. It's how we improve.
There's another video on Tim's channel where he talks about exactly this. There was a super bad crash bug in Fallout 1 that took a couple of weeks to find just before launch. After they found and fixed it the management (i.e. Brian Fargo) wanted to know who was responsible, but Tim refused to tell him because he knew the poor guy would probably get fired. As punishment for not ratting out someone who made a simple mistake Tim didn't receive his bonus for the game.
It's the corporate boss management style at fault. They don't fire people that should obviously be fired because they limp in and suck up, and the people that accept blame, focus on accountability, and strive for true excellence rock the boat. Never underestimate people that have made a career out of looking busy, sucking up, and aren't present when real decisions need to be made and accountability is taken. Also important never to underestimate a manager's laziness.
Quickest way to destroy a game company, become a publicly traded business. You start having to please the shareholders by always showing money coming in.
@@HoneyBadgerVideosthis is because it is literally illegal to not make a profit when you are traded publicly, you don't make a profit you are breaking a law
The difference between 10 years ago and today is 10 years ago if they told you they would quit if you wrote their name on the whiteboard you would’ve laughed and then wrote their names on the whiteboard. The minute you gave in and told them you weren’t gonna use the whiteboards you lost control of your company.
@sadp9013 You dont "control" employees like some machiavellian dictator. Your authority stems from your leadership abilities, the federally protected rights of the worker, and company policy. Workers have the right to resign a position at any time. If your employees are threatening to resign their jobs over one of your practice's or behaviors, then that is their lawful right. It really doesn't go deeper than that. Besides possibly bringing your capabilities as a leader in question. Besides Tim provides almost no detail in his story, it's impossible to say who was "at fault". It's all just Tim's biased reporting after-the-fact. He's clearly got his side, but we're not presented with anyone else's perspective. So I'm not sure how you can even assign "blame" in this situation at all. I.e. I can easily forsee the whiteboard becoming a huge issue. Here's how; An employee who has an extremely high workload and is getting tasked jobs by his direct manager comes in to work and suddenly sees he's assigned to a different job that is supposedly "urgent" (tim said he used the whiteboard to assign jobs that need to be done that same day or very soon after). Now the employee has to decide between the tasks on the whiteboard and the ones from his supervisors. This would obviously create a confusing and un-productive environment, as general managers are stepping over the heads of department leads and assigning tasks to specific employees without consultation etc. I've seen experienced guys in my line of work quit a job for far less. Imagine that after not being able to complete the task on the whiteboard( due to high workload or any other reason), you're taken in for a performance evaluation. In the evaluation they use the whiteboard as a weapon against you, denying pay advancement, training, department transfers etc. I could see how something as simple as a white board can become an extremely toxic thing for a workplace. It could be that this style of management is exactly responsible for the culture that Tim is railing again. However is impossible to say either way as Tim gives very little actual information to go off of. You can't just take his story at face value and then make up a story like Drewpost19 and myself just did, that's not reality.
@@daisy9181 sooo right on so many levels, currently doing my last year at university doing a Bsc in game development programming. I could have done a degree in comp sci, economics, accounting or anything else but i decided to do game dev because i've always wanted to be a part of something that will bring joy to people around the world; money is secondary. My degree is mostly group based with us being split into groups of 8-12 people as to try and replicate what a small development team will be. The amount of people the last 2 years that have just done minimum effort, won't meet up because of anxiety and make out they've had the hardest lives is unbelievable. They have a complete lack of social and employability skills and just seem to be at uni just for the sake of it. I have worked almost every week since i was 14, ive worked in teams in sales, wedding catering, bars, and the odd freelance job just to build up employability skills as i know the industry i want to join is competitive and i want every advantage i can get, most the people on my course have never even had a job and seem to take uni just as seriously as secondary school (highschool). I just hope the work i've put in will be enough to land me a job once i graduate.
They are all there for cash. 😂 There's a reason you don't see volunteer game development studios cropping up like you have volunteer fire fighters. But yes, certainly, there's going to be a lot of workers who feel disenfranchised or disillusioned with their situation and it's going to impact their performance. When we have a culture of crunch, mandatory OT, brutal deadlines etc. what we're doing is treating workers like shit and telling them we don't respect them as human people. Even if they're paid handsomely, crunch and OT still fucks a person up. That's going to result in a labor base that resents management, and to some degree resents the projects themselves. I feel like a significant part of the reason we see so many buggy games launching these days is that the devs are pushed to a point of "Okay, whatever, fuck this, fuck you, here take it and let me sleep". We need labor unions to maintain a healthy relationship between management and labor. Without them the product is going to suffer, invariably. You're right people need to have passion for their work, and despite anti labor propaganda you've probably been fed (by asmon himself in the past even), unionized workers do actually perform better, because it's easier for them to love their job when their job isn't trying to consume their soul.
I mean being entirely fair like... Everything involved in games development especially to be hired by a AAA studio requires a VERY high level of skill, and you aren't always going to end up getting hired specifically for games you WANT to work on. You may not care about making the cloth folds prettier in the latest NBA 2K game or making the horse brushing minigame in Barbie Horse Adventure but your rent/house payment and bills are due at the end of the month and you have to keep the lights on and food in the fridge somehow.
Maybe I missed something but the whole part about developers being like "i won't accept having my name marked next to a task when i'm working on it" made absolutely no sense to me. It's not even about accountability like Asmon was trying to say, simpler than that it's basic visibility and tracking. Working on a team where there is no indicator of who is working on what is like... what? twilight zone stuff.
Not yet unfortunately.. I'm 1 year into development, systems are almost complete and then I need to add enough content to show off. I'll set a reminder to comment here when I have something you guys can look at :)@@DioxideCad
@@PanCotzky currently working on a SCI-FI FPS called “Sifera” but other than that I’ve developed several dozen indie games as a freelancer. I’m not in the AAA scene at all
Coding in general is a very weird thing. If you are interested in your craft and have some level of ownership of your code, it feels amazing to beat every challenge that appears and you feel angry at your stupid biology for requiring sleep and rest, like why can't i just keep learning and doing this interesting stuff? But if you don't feel like you have any ownership of the code, and you're just doing some Work Item that got assigned to you, and you don't even know exactly how that will fit in the greater scale of the project, it feels like torture to do 8h/day on something like that. I'd say my productivity is something close to 10% on the latter scenario compared to the former.
I lost a job because I was too efficient. I worked 2 to 3 hours a day and the boss didn't like that. But there was nothing for me to do after that. They hired someone incompetent who take 8 hours to do what I did in 3, and the boss is very happy to see those hours on paper.
That makes no sense. A competent boss would just utilize you to do more, not find someone less efficient. That's the opposite of what bosses do. Most bosses will take a person like you and put everything on your plate which then makes you realize you need to be less efficient unless you want to carry the whole team.
Your efficiency will be appreciated by those who deserve it. Like in the working world, find the workspace where you are appreciated, maybe it is a co-op, a mutual aid group, open source community and it'll be well liked. Online, in this comment thread, you just saved me about 40 minutes of listening to this guy interrupt the developer telling his stories to add nothing of value to the video, mostly just to hear himself talk. I already get the gist of what the developer was saying and through your comments and a few others, I get the point. Thanks for saving me my time.
@@WorldWalker128it's usually along the lines of it only takes a few hours to fix this and this but it breaks a list of 45 things which take for granted the behavior being fixed.
@@ImperialFoolThis is true, I don't know if it was for this bit of code the guy is talking about. But often there are a lot of interconnected parts and by adding something it requires making adjustments in other areas. It's best practice to build in such a way that you minimize these dependencies. But that itself takes time to plan out the implementations properly. If you do it well it makes adding code and making changes pretty fast. You do it poorly and adding or changing things quickly becomes rather nightmarish as the codebase grows and grows.
6 หลายเดือนก่อน +7
@@ImperialFool Another non-rare scenario: function X had a bug and function Y, using X, worked around that bug by adjusting what X returned. If you fix X, of course you need to fix Y, but you don't know that, not before the unit tests of Y crap out after fixing X. Assuming there are unit tests.
I worked in 2 video game studios: 1) studio A - excellent simple games, very good generalist programmers who played and loved games 2) studio B - very good AAA games, excellent programmers, most of which never played video games I stayed 5 1/2 years at Studio A and loved every minute. I stayed only 3 months at Studio B and soon left. If you want to do great things, set objectives, make a plan and do it with like minded people. Great teams with great ideas make great projects.
A game builder is just like a housebuilder. They purposely take as long as they can so they can get paid as much as they can before the project is over. I mean ask anyone who’s had a house built for them the builder will tell them three months at the beginning and then after three months comes, he’ll add another two months and then another two months and he’ll just keep dragging it out because every single month he’s on the books he’s getting paid and he’d rather drag the job out do half assed work, make up fake excuses so that he can keep getting paid a steady paycheck rather than do his best job as fast as he could so he can knock it out and start another job. That’s exactly why these types of people need to be put on a yearly paycheck no matter what and they should not be getting paid by the job, they should be getting paid a base salary every year so that there’s no incentive to go slow.
I was at #1 except the very good generalists programmers that didnt play games and Ive been at the second one where the AAA programmers did play games Its not about the playing or not playing games.
@@nancypotts9877 As someone who has worked in the "House building" industry its usually a company taking as many contract jobs as possible and then send the least amount of workers as possible to finish those jobs. Add to that massive overtime and terrible working conditions and bosses, constant missing of crucial building Material, and staff that gets not trained because they say that those workers might start their own companys and Take away contract work from them. All of that causes badly built expensive houses that take ages to built. The only one who wins is the boss of the building company who keeps bragging unironicaly that he started building his third house now in italy and tries to convince you that overworking clearly is worth it with your minimum wage job. And all of that is the norm and not extreme cases.
Worked as a consultant for a few game companies Theres really two archetypes of companies that exist A close knit team of high performers (sounds like his whiteboard story for fallout) And Adult daycares where its all about being nice not actual skill of employees
I've been lucky to always end up in the first type of companies. But my current job is of the second type. I once got an HR 101 meeting for naming a function `getUserOrDie`. "We don't use such words in this company"
@@CethrisThat isn't a good name because what "die" actually means is unclear (throw an exception? return failure code? What?). But that certainly isn't an HR issue either
I’m a Salesforce consultant and this is true across any tech industry. Small Private sector orgs usually have the high performers vs large orgs/Government/state level projects are usually where we do most of our baby sitting and deal with the most whining.
those exist in other areas of software development too, once when I was a web dev I saw a company I worked for go from the first type to the second in real time, it was really sad it all started with them hiring new HR people to bring "more culture and diversity" to the company
@@Natureboy8383 the worst I've seen was a struggling company was willing to pay for weekly doggy therapy days in office despite bleeding cash. Go to a damn dog park on your lunch lol
There is rule in business that says, competent people will be promoted above their level of competence, and then be doomed to failure. You see this most in big companies. If you refuse the promotion, the company will see you as hostile rather than reasonable. In government you often see people promoted based on seniority rather than skill and results.
I hate to have to tell you this buddy but nine times out of 10 the seniority people have seniority because they're good and have been good for years and it's the the new golden boys who can't do shit and are too busy hiding behind their safe space and I can't do that job I might hurt myself that don't accomplish anything but get paid way more money. If you have someone who's been in the business for 25 years and you're paying them $39 an hour does it make a whole lot of sense to bring in somebody who's 20 years younger only has 8 years experience but it's all new experience and you're going to pay him $30 extra an hour and fire the previous guy. But hey it's okay because he's probably a desiversity hire. 😑🤷♂️
I’ve been a dev for 30+ years. Although I’m not in the gaming industry, I’ve seen the same trend. That said, I must admit my generation had it easy: we used to work at a really low level. Not that many bloated frameworks on which to write our code. Working much closer to the metal allowed us to deal with much less variables. We had much more control. We were also much more “code before, ask questions later”, and that’s probably a big no no today. We worked a lot, but it was passion driven, rarely imposed by management.
I've been a programmer for the last 10 years. Writing new code, especially at lower levels, is usually easier to estimate, and I understand that 20-30 years ago we've had less complex projects with a lot more new code. Today you take some bloated piece of garbage and try to make it work, dealing with legacy crap and questionable design decisions, instead of making your own framework (because it's still more efficient all risks considered). The industry today is much more experienced in architecture in general (e.g. no newest programming language - Rust, Go, Zig - even _has_ inheritance, though it was the norm and the cornerstone in app design 10-20 years ago with C++/C#/Java/Javascript/etc). I'm asked what SOLID is almost at every job interview, even if the team has no idea how to use it. It's like people has so much to consider it's becoming a time sink in itself. The funniest part is that all that experience doesn't help in the slightest, people couldn't do proper architecture 20 years ago and they still have no idea today. But instead, we get unhealthy amounts of caution, meetings and overestimates. It often poisons the top management decisions, one company I've talked with was trying to launch a new project, they wanted a crap ton of backend tech for a basically startup-like product, like bruh, you don't have a single user yet (and your product doesn't look like a next big thing), a simple server app written in Node working on a toaster will serve you for years. You're not Netflix, you're not Discord, you don't need k8s (at least now), your first iteration will be thrown away because of changes in the product anyway, just do the thing now and rewrite and improve later when it's really needed. You cannot do everything perfectly from a first try because today's perfect is tomorrow's legacy pile of trash. The mindset of writing a perfect code, unintuitively, wrecks your codebase up because you don't expect change when you should (e.g. making a Christmas tree of inherited objects instead of highly modular design where you (should) know it's gonna change in a few months). The industry has become a cargo cult.
There's definitely more overhead and bloat now as games get bigger in scope and run on more platforms. If you make the smallest change, did you thoroughly document it, update the entire flow, did you test it on the latest codebase, did you test it on the last latest codebase, are you aware of the six upcoming changes to your dependencies, did you think of what the code could look like two weeks from now, did you submit your change record, did you do a risk analysis, if your manager aware, is his or her manager aware, was it approved by the change group, is the QA team aware, what phase of the moon is it, etc.
I'm not a dev so correct me if im wrong, but don't the layers of abstraction make everything so easy chatgpt can do it. I can code some python for shits and giggles, but if I was trying to allocate ram with machine code I would be fucking lost. The benefit with people like you who have experience with machine code and assembler ist you really understand what actually is going on under the abstraction.
Tim Cain is a master of the craft. I could listen to him speak for hours. I'm not in the industry, but I'd love to have this guy for a boss or colleague.
Tim Cain is the godfather of modern RPGs and one of the best game devs of all time. This video just proves that he still knows his stuff after all these years.
I bought all the games he made, but not enough other people did. They were all massively underdeveloped brilliant games. Had they been more corporate, maybe he is the head of the biggest games company in the world. The guy has swing an missed for 10 years and more.
@@dotapark The demo for Fallout was the first time anything like that had been released. It is difficult to understand if you were not there to experience the release of those games because it brought forth things that are common place now.
As a software dev, we do pad estimates, if we think we need 45min for the code, we might ask for half a day just in case, if I were to ask for 4 weeks I'd probably loose the job.
Every engineer pads estimates just in case, but 4 weeks to implement an aggro list with 'hit' and 'attack' callbacks already implemented... I mean, I'd be embarrassed. I don't think I'd get that much even to learn a whole new language. xD
As a software dev (NOT game dev) I can tell you that your program is only as modular and easy to work with it if it was designed from the ground up properly. This "all inventory load" BS is bad coding plan and simple. They were given the option to do it the right way or the fast/cheap way and they chose cheap and shitty.
That's the problem when some stakeholders suddenly say "I want this". The architects discuss about it for a long time and then some poor fella has to code it. It is really rare that something is planned from start to finish
Totally agree. I deal with this daily. New projects going to production without the required investigation and planning end up being messy and people work (do code) without knowing all the details of the feature they are implementing. You end up with a coding mess and bad optimized systems.
As someone who worked in a collaborative and creative job, this is so real. I would take responsibility for my work and I would put my name on things. What happened was that if anything went wrong even if I had no hand in it, it was put on me. Because everybody else wanted as little responsibility as possible. Even then, I still took responsibility and tried to take on a leadership role even though I was not in that position. I did it because I had a passion for my work and wanted to see good outcomes. Once I was able to rally some motivated people to work together, the upper management got on my case about exceeding my job. So, these environments are created and creativity is snuffed because it's too much of a "risk". They want what is safe, and they want thier workers to do what is safe. I had to quit my job because of these issues and myriad of others, but after years of trying to lift up my co-workers only to see them be pushed back down and all the blame be put on me, I just couldn't deal with it anymore. I feel guilty because I know that place is in a worse spot without me, but my mental health was starting to suffer too much.
I hope you are ok and work at a better place now man. It is super frustrating to see corporations, and some small businesses, push the narrative that quiet quitters, and big projects are the reason we can't have nice things. When they punish people who go above and beyond at the same time. Seems batshit insane, but it is likely malice or corruption from executives/managers.
You don't need to feel guilty for anything, your managers were arseholes and probably saw you as a threat to their authority because you dared to show some initiative, half the reason they kept giving you shit would have been to get rid of you anyway. Just be glad you got out before they broke you.
I think part of the problem is people start their career eager to work and they'll get a lot done... But then they start to get continuously burned by bad managers. I've seen so many bright eyed hard charging people get completely destroyed by toxic management and then they turn into those ultra cautious people who want lots of time and everything documented and signed off on because they feel it's the only way to protect themselves and their career from management.
@@KonradGM Not to mention the fact that managers often feel threatened by up and coming people and will start targeting the competition with beurocracy to stagnate or kill their career.
Realest take in the comments. I've done business studies (have the knowledge base and skill set to set up & run a company) and the average manager in 8/10 companies SHOULDN'T be a manager because they don't have the skill- and mindset for it.
To add what you said, in many cases, managers don't even have a clue about how technical things work, they only know about creating projects and following protocols. So managers don't understand how app/game development actually works. I know this because I'm actually being taught to simplify very technical concepts so that upper management can understand it lol
As an ex-programmer, been there. Spent more time writing notes for the upper echelons than actually programming. I was constantly being pulled off task to explain the task to people wanting to show their management that they understood it. Then it takes time to get back into the headspace. Add to that, that nobody's permitted to revisit previously written common code that becomes ever less fit-for-purpose as the project expands (until much later in the project, if ever.) It all meant that most of the 'good stuff' was written on my own time (unpaid) and had to be 'presented' to clueless suits for me to have what I needed to do the job. That's just the tip of the iceberg - one that I'm, thankfully, not standing on any more. 😀
@@dwinosam I've taken a completely different path now. I spent years doing the full spread of IT jobs but now I do charitable support in a few positions, specialising in helping (representing & empowering) the vulnerable & marginalised. IT-wise, I still occasionally help people study the subject but, mostly, I support people in developing the IT skills they need to connect to family, medical records, or any other quality-of-life activities.
As an engineer I loved that conversation between Scotty and Jordy in engineering where Captain Pickard asks Jordy for a time estimate over coms and Jordy tells the captain 1 hour. Then Scotty asks Jordy how long it will really take and Jordy says 1 hour and Scotty is like, "Dont tell your captain how long it will really take! Tell him 4 hours and when you finish it in an hour you will look like a genius!"
Ha - I just looked up the clip, and it's incredible! Now, I understand wanting to give yourself a little buffer room regarding deadlines. Asking for a month to code something that *should* take a couple hours is pushing it, but having little wiggle room is nice for life's unplanned b.s. (or Scotty pulling out the crystals and asking questions!).
@@ProfessorPolymer In my experience, something always, _always_ happens that extends the timeline. And the majority of the time it's something external or completely impossible to have planned for. (Scotty might have been overdoing it a little lol)
Id love for you to get this guy on your stream for a lengthy interview. I feel like there is a need for more opinions straight from the source, actual devs (that are not currently actively involved in the game/games that are talked about)
@@strahaironscale571work smarter not harder. I don't understand why people criticize Asmon for react videos. He's worked his way up to have a viewer base that enjoys his commentary. He's done a variety of videos and has found his niche - why be butt-hurt over it? Kudos to him. I admire the fact that he can simply talk about a video and he's respected enough that people listen... And he can make a living doing it! He also uses a part of his wealth to invest back into the gaming world to hopefully make an avenue to circumnavigate the very issues being discussed in this video. I would love it if he could have an in-person interview, but honestly, this video covered a lot of what would probably be discussed.
@@ashleybennetts3108 work smarter not harder doesn’t apply here, he adds nothing to the original video, the only reason he does this is for the viewers to see him watch videos. Back in 2015 we were all fighting to get rid of reaction content, because it just really doesn’t need to be here, but it is. I’m just saying what we know already.
Eh, I think its the opposite, there's a certain personality that is good at creating content, and if you're like me, my content most likely wouldn't sell so I think there's no good creators
As a dev, half my fucking job is trying to understand what the fuck some finance bro or nepo baby actually wants me to implement. Project managers, usually at least, tend to be coherent because they've often been devs themselves.
I've been a software dev for large and small companies for over 15 years. He's not wrong, but caution comes from working in larger companies. I HAVE to pad my estimates because I'm CONSTANTLY interrupted by HR meetings, TPS reports, and project managers demanding status updates multiple times a day. How can I possibly get anything done quickly when I rarely have a single day where I have 4 hours of uninterrupted time?
@@ShizlgizlTo be honest. that issue could have been avoided if the dev just said the reason or explained so he could understand instead of walking away. For Tim it is unfathomable for something that he himself knows would take ~45 minutes to do (as he speaks out of experience) and they say it takes me 4 weeks to do. like I understand he would want answers.
Similar situation here. However what we're doing is reducing capacity for each Sprint based on the number of meetings and all other non engineering work stuff. So the tasks are estimated based on how much actual time it needs to be completed but there is smaller number of tasks put in a Sprint.
The fact that the father of Fallout said the truth is shocking and i do love his reasoning, he made one of my favorite series, and he is still here in the trenches, making more great things
Crazy how the fallout games turned from the old world's politics, egos, being something to let go, a warning and a lesson to be learned To the radio station playing songs about Adam bombs and the world being about patriotism and having fun shooting stuff
For an example of how crappy modern gaming programmers have become... In 1997 both Fallout and Diablo launched. Diablo was originally going to be a turn based game. The team had a meeting on a Friday and it was decided that it would be better as an action game (click on skeleton, warrior hits skeleton, etc.). David Brevik wrote ALL THE CODE to convert the game to action based before Monday morning - the devs were playing the first iteration that day.
As a software engineer, I can say this is across the entire field - not just game dev. The "padding" is a real issue but also a necessary one to an extent. 45 minutes of code is just for the coding. That doesn't include the time it takes for those changes to be reviewed by the team, regression tested, sent to QA for testing, etc. Some "small" changes can also have a high likelihood of introducing regressions, meaning those will need more thorough reviewing and testing. Maybe the developers thought he was asking how long for that change to be considered "done". That said, 4 weeks is wild for almost any ticket, let alone a smaller change. I would say max a week for a ticket that size. The accountability issues are a huge problem though. A lot of engineers hide behind the fact that the job is often hybrid or remote work and choose not to take much work on. I work with people who have been with my company for 3 years and still have no idea what the hell they're doing because they only ever agree to take the simplest of tasks and bugs to work on. Others will utilize "pair programming" for every single ticket they work on and essentially wait for a teammate to hand them the solution on a platter. I blame engineering management for not cracking down on this behavior harder.
I've spent ~15 years doing software development (both developer + manager) at both startups & big companies. There's another side to what Timothy is saying: 1) Padding estimates: Devs often have to work with shitty spaghetti codebases, which means it takes a *lot* longer to do an intuitively simple fix. Instead of changing the code in 1 place, they'd have to change it in 5 places. If they forget one place then they introduce a new hard-to-find bug, which itself takes tons of time to find and fix. Truth is, most devs like to work with clean code. Senior devs like to spend time refactoring, which basically means detangling spaghetti code and making everything nice, neat and compartmentalized. So, why do you have shitty spaghetti codebases? Higher-ups will set some bonus-driven deadline, try to "push the team" super hard, resulting in devs taking shortcuts and neglecting their sleep and mental health which causes them to make more even mistakes. That's how we get large shitty spaghetti codebases. 2) Greed. There's a saying in software development: Pick 2 of 3, fast, cheap, and good. Big corporations churn out AAA titles quickly by hiring shitloads of people. More people means more meetings, more "alignment", more egos and politics. This explains why their games have no soul. But it also explains why Baldur's Gate 3 took six years to develop, three of which were in open beta. There's a saying in our field: Pick 2 of 3 -- fast, cheap and good. And it turns out that buggy and poorly-written AAA titles still rake in billions. So if you want to get better games, have some self-restraint and don't buy it if it's crap.
"Truth is, most devs like to work with clean code. Senior devs like to spend time refactoring, which basically means detangling spaghetti code and making everything nice, neat and compartmentalized. So, why do you have shitty spaghetti codebases? Higher-ups will set some bonus-driven deadline, try to "push the team" super hard, resulting in devs taking shortcuts and neglecting their sleep and mental health which causes them to make more even mistakes. That's how we get large shitty spaghetti codebases." Def true. There's also the case of arrogant assholes who say that an app thats maintained by 8000 devs and has 20million lines of code could be cleaned up by 50 engineers and maintained by them. Which is what happened at Twitter. It's basically a way of rationalizing a way of saying "I'm so smart I could do this by myself", even though if they were a junior there's no way that they could refactor 20m/50=400,000 lines of code. That seems like quite the task to me. And honestly changing the code in 5 different area's is usually around a quadratic increase in difficulty, so its more like 20 times more difficult something than 5 times more difficult.
Pick 2 is my favourite saying for nearly everything. Because it nearly always fits. And I only buy crap when it's on sale. And I haven't bought a triple-A title on release for nearly two decades. I always wait until the Beta Phase is over and the full game is released. .. which for modern games means buying the GoTY package including DLC's.
i just learned my lesson dipping my toe back into pc gaming and bought the new cyberpunk update bullshit(on sale) what a piece of shit game, still, its just bad all around, bad acting, bad writing, the game never shuts the fuck up
Additionally on point 1 from another dev (Web, Desktop, DBA): Sales and Marketing not making up their damned minds, You just spent your work-day to jam in a new feature we wanted? Great, now change it, flip it on it's head. Takes a week to declutter the old feature and put in the new feature... Sales and Marketing strike again "Y'know what, we want it to be integrated with this whole new third party feature, and change it around to be more dynamic and reactive, you can do it right?"... three more weeks of gutting the second new feature, jamming in this new integration, working with API keys and making S&M's new ephemeral changes put in place... and suddenly you have the head of marketing demanding your neck because the project's now out of scope by five weeks. Every time... EVERY TIME... you engage with the customer, never give your first estimate on the spot based on memory alone, if put on the spot, go long and say I'll need to review the requirements, but it could take X time, follow up in the next few hours or the next day in the latest with a revised timeline after reviewing the code. So, that guy saying 4 weeks, sure they could have been snow-jobbing, or, they could be dealing with several other projects in their pipeline and four weeks was when he could get a fairly inconsequential dev item through their pipeline, or, it could have been an extension of what I've experienced when it becomes shifting goalposts, and the dev is one-burned-twice-shy. I don't think it was the last item, (Give a long number then revise after review if forced to give a time) given that the team leader had to step in, but I also feel like we're getting only a portion of the puzzle here, he's approaching it from an old-dog perspective. "We did this back in our heyday! Why can't you?" meanwhile security, coding standards, hell graphical codecs have changed dramatically since FO2, also, anyone who's modded games before Skyrim, they would know that the older the game is, the greater nightmare of spaghetti code and black-box systems exist within it. If memory serves Fallout 2 had two notable mods: The cat launcher which replaced the sprite for the rocket from a rocket launcher with a running cat, and the FO2 "MMO" Russian mod which... while funny as a proof of concept... was little better than everyone just grabbing the nearest SMG and obliterating any player they saw in Shady Sands.
Thank you for your insight. You deserve more of a platform than Asmond haha. I'm about to graduate in school and hoping to break into this field at some point soon
Most of my favorite games are now indie games. The best ones have more intriguing mechanics, better story, or a more polished experience than AAA games.
At a big AAA company, if you have a really talented and motivated gameplay programmer who wants to implement a really cool feature that is outside of the scope of the game or wasn't planned, it will almost certainly be shot down in favor of the tried and tested formula (aka, similarity to previous games from that company). This is simply how it will always work at these companies, shareholders don't care about innovating and they certainly do not want to take risks, they want you to churn out games that are moneymakers first and foremost. At a small indie studio, if one developer gets a cool idea they can simply run it by the other coders and get to work. There is a lot more trust placed in individual workers than at a big company.
still when it takes over 5yrs to make any game..thats too long in my view..previous eras they claimed similar things but managed to speed up development ,this era has so many excuses and games taking 7-8yrs should be deemed unacceptable..
@@jackstraw4222 You’re not gonna get innovation if you don’t have long development times. You need to make up your mind do you want quick games or great games. I’ll be honest I’m fed up of reskins of the same game for every genre. While they can bring COD out yearly and charge people £100 for skins and expansion pass or spend a decade or two making something that could last a decade or two but people cry and they bring broken early access that goes bust
shorter games would be better, cut the time down to 7-10hrs and have good graphics and game-play...to many major games single player drags on the middle and then i dont bother coming back to finish it..
@@handleOfThyyeah, they are soo innovative that they had to add smooth locomotion to half life alyx at the last minute despite it being an established standard over a year prior to it releasing lol. I'll always hold that game against em,not becuase it was that bad, but becuase of their unwillingness to think outside of their tiny little bubble and ruined what could have been the next great vr fps.
If my boss gives me a job to do at work that should take about 45 minutes, I have about 45 minutes before I have to answer why that job isn't done. That's why it's called work.
Well mostly Fallout 1 though, but yeah he is a Legend. He didn't want to make Fallout 2 and left the team very early in the process, also while disapproving with a number of choices they took (like the temple at the beginning of the game).
I work at one of Swedens biggest companies and we do almost exactly like he described in the beginning of the video. You get assigned tasks on a timeline and each week we have a big meeting going through it all to see what each person has done, what he/she needs help with etc. And I think it works really good and there’s no toxicity about it, but good conversation revolving issues that arise.
Oh man, as someone who works in an office, i can tell Tim is one of the real ones. Its the same everywhere; if the leadership doesnt define and live the work culture, their employees will
There's cogs in the machine that move and get those where they need to, and then there's those that don't do much and just clog the machine. Tim was the one that kept everything running smooth.
Yeah it's so annoying seeing people just blaming the actual dev grunts who build the game as if they're the ones at fault. Management is responsible for everything they do. It is their fault if things are not operating well. In a lot of companies the upper management is full of out of touch morons who barely understand how to run a studio.
Software dev POV: That aggression priority target list; yah. 30-45 minutes should be plenty of time to implement in C or C++, which I guess the original Fallout would have been made with. That said, I've had times with a 4 month backlog of 30 minutes to 16-hour tasks, so sometimes there's miscommunication of how long it will take to make versus when it will be done. Had 3 bosses that kept shuffling what was prioritized and couldn't agree on which tasks should be focused on. Double the estimate of focused development work because you get disrupted and there will be as much overhead as development time, and you have to include your testing time. This just makes management planning easier and more accurate. If you don't know how to tackle a task, it may take significantly longer. If you run into some undocumented issues - yes, well, there goes the planning. Borland c++ Builder 3.5 (I think) had a memory leak. It took us months to find out what the problem was, and it was only fixed by upgrading our compiler.
Absolutely. Almost all games people have been praising recently are INDEPENDANT studios or straight up non-American. The only developer from America that is drenched in corporatism, but produces high quality games is Rockstar Games. Baldur's Gate 3 is NOT American and INDEPENDANT. There is no corporate board telling devs what to do. The corporate boards have no idea what fun gameplay is, but they sure do know how to make an item shop.
@@VGZTeaTime i kinda sorta agree to this, but i kinda chalk that up to their decision. I think whatever FromSoft makes, the publishers they work under understand that they're a company that you take a hands-off approach with and something wonderful gets made. Even if FromSoft decided it though, yeah, open world format sucks way harder than the painstakingly designed and intricate mazes that are the Dark Souls 1 and 2's worlds. Elden Ring and all other open world just-for-the-sake of it games just have so much dead space between major locations, its a dumb gimmick that the public has latched onto.
@@VGZTeaTimecan’t say if they were following trends or not. I’d like to imagine they really just wanted to shake things up a little considering all previous iterations were not open world.
@@VGZTeaTime Their take on open world has their creative stamp all over it though. Take a dozen random open world games and all feel like slight variations of each other in terms of the world design...ie cookie cutter. From's version of Open world in no way look like the others its a game instantly recognizable as standing out different like Zelda is with its version of Open world. I think that is the key differece...there are no shortcuts, it's their vision from start to finish.
Tim is awesome. Not only does he give great insight into game development but he’s also a great story teller. Probably the best channel I’ve seen on TH-cam in years.
Not just game development, it's a company issue across the board, I've worked at companies where they have meetings to plan the next meeting, it's disgusting
This is a major problem with team bloat that often gets ignored. There’s so many people being hired that you can’t possibly train them all. And you can’t even assign them meaningful work that will teach them skills because there isn’t enough to go around. The tech industry has this the worst because they have gotten in the practice of hiring people not for how they can use them, but to prevent anyone else from using them
"So many people hired that you can't train them all". This isn't exactly a true statement. You can train everyone correctly if you hired correctly. Look at a music symposium of over 100 musicians simply picking up a brand new sheet of music they've never seen before and ALL of them playing it perfectly as if they mastered it years ago.
@@TalZadios you're 100% correct. the issue isn't that it's impossible to train people, it's that whoever is managing the onboarding process is doing a shitty job as well as people who are in a position to train people after that point when they see they aren't doing what they should/don't know as much as they could.
@@TalZadiosWhat a bizarre comparison, sightreading music is a very specific skill that they trained at for years, from high school all the way to post-grad. The software world doesn’t have anything like that
I started working for a very large company once (came in as a senior developer) and was handed a program (a very SIMPLE one) to do a change to it. The program had about 2000 LOC (lines of code). Blew my mind. I asked the senior developer, "Who wrote this?" "He doesn't work here any more." "Good. Because this program should be about 100 LOC." We kind of got in an argument because he didn't want me to re-write it. "It took that guy a month to write that program. Don't touch it!" By the end of that day, I handed him a new program, with his changes in it... in about 100 LOC. Within my first year there I had re-written every program that joker wrote. LMAO
As a former QA tester, it annoyed the hell out of me that certain pieces of the code base were unnecessarily large and seemed to have no standards whatsoever. If it can be more concise, make it so - if for no other reason than eliminating potential failure points off the top.
6 หลายเดือนก่อน +40
@@RighteousJ Don't make it *too* concise, because overly concise and "clever" can win you code golf contests, but will never be readable. How to tell one from the other is what experience brings.
Man, this hits hard. I am not involved in this industry at all, and am just a lowly warehouse manager, but i've had the kind of mentality from the second story for every job I've had recently. So many times I've overperformed, or my team overperformed and suddenly we are short staffed and struggling. I've gotten into the habit of complaining on behalf of my team, and pushing back, and trying to slow things down to save jobs and my sanity, when all our jobs could have been done fast rather easily. You just cant trust companies or owners to see that without thinking of dollar signs.
Oh yeah. Capitalist companies will always be driven by the profit motive. Short term profit before anything else. The health, well-being and efficiancy of the workers doesn't matter to them. If they can squeeze just a tiny bit more money out of you they will. The workers know their work much better than some suit who only sits on his ass all day counting his money, which is why we need workplace democracy.
it's always been popular, you're just young and it appears to you that it got popular right when you first got into it. I had multiple classmates in elementary school emulating japanese pokemon gold&silver before they came out in the US, and i'm sure it was a thing well before I found out about it
@@Kowalskithegreat i'm having trouble believing that a bunch of elementary kids know what emulation is. we're talking about kids that are 5-10 years old here lol. maybe kids were just smarter back then but idk.
@@GreatRusio Nope. Nowadays it's either AAA no risk Boring crap or Good indie games that could be even better with enough funding. Another difference is games didn't require as large of teams or millions of dollars to make then either.
As a senior software dev in a large corporation I've been pulled aside and scolded by managers for undercutting their estimates - when I should realistically be the authority on what actually needs done to complete the task. It really takes the wind out your sails, to the point that I'm now I'm very much the "fuck it I guess it'll take 4 weeks" sort of developer for now.
glad someone is pointing this out, I need to hear from his employees as well for counter perspective. This sounds a bit like the manager/the boss imagined something and how they want it and its just a pie in the sky or are lying. Had that happen, bosses lie all the time
I swear 90% of app/software dev's saw that Star Trek episode with Scotty saying you should double your estimates to always "over deliver" and went "oh my gods that genius" rather then realising it's toxic behaviour that fucks over your entire team. But yeah I've had to swallow the same pill in my office and always add an extra arbitrary amount of time to anything I'm asked to estimate in order to "play the game".
@@loopinglouie9709 My product owner is great and never tries to overestimate, have people nothing to do or make them do additional hours to finish exactly on time. It's not black or white.
As a software dev, the 2nd story is something that manifests in many teams, many times. There is almost always a senior dev that can do things 5-10x faster than anyone else, and that person is always the busiest on the team. The problem is when that senior dev is working on a large enough product, they simply cannot do everything, and they are forced to delegate to new hires or other junior members that cannot perform at that level.
true, but honestly what he asked for was one of the most basic requests I have ever heard. I am still in my fourth year of university, and I think I could probably do it in an hour or two. The absolute worst-case scenario is that it takes less than 3 and definitely not 2-4 weeks. I can see how this can happen tho. throughout my university education, I have encountered a lot of people who cheat the system. they will end up copying assignments, working in groups when it's an individual project, etc. I even got offered a deal with one of these guys to do every assignment in a course for $500 per assignment(there were like 8 in that class). so imagine what happens to a person who has gone through their entire university journey paying for assignments when they get to the stage of going into career fields. this is why it is important that you properly give them technical interviews when you are looking at potential hires.
@@toshibiswas3115 i doesn't matter how basic a request is. teams plan their work for a given period in advance with tasks that may have dependencies. you want something done fast, introduce it into the planning not pester some dev individually. It's also not about how long the task itself takes, but when it can be done. If I have one hour of time to do your one hour task in two weeks from now, it will be finished in two weeks. that doesn't mean i'm working on it for two weeks.
Ah yes, the infamous curse of the competent. The people who invest the most in become good professionals and good at their career always get asked to do the hard stuff while the tier of people below does what they need to do to skate by with mediocre work that isn't challenging. It's a rich get richer situation for her. The most knowledge heavy employees continue to gain more knowledge while the employees that keep getting assigned first week of work type projects stay the same skill level for years. The problem is exacerbated by project managers who just want to push work out the door and they invest no time in challenging their team members who need it the most.
@@velorama-xyou're assuming that's the situation that's happened in the story the dev in this video told, but you don't know that, you're just speculating
This is what happens in every industry. The first generations are always those who have extreme passion, talent and willpower all together. Because if they didn't, they'd either be in other industries instead of this uncertain one, or fail in pushing through the difficult and unknown path. They're the vanguard, and they will take the hardships head on. Then the industry takes form, investments are poured in, and things become relatively more safe and reliable. Jobs become just jobs, instead of and expression of love and passion, and therefor it attracts those who just want to do a job. The desire to create something outstanding diminishes over time and generations (at least the fraction of total people) and most of employees would be content by just getting payed, no matter what kind/quality of product they end up producing. In the end, it becomes much rarer to see a collective strong will to create something genuinely great.
It's why Indie games in EA seem to get so much traction and hype behind them. Look at Ark Survival Evolved, Valheim, and even Dark and Darker. Passion projects that MANY people piled behind. Valheim is the weakest of them, but just looking at steam charts, they still get over 20k concurrent players some days. Ark is about to be sunset for their new version, and their servers are still getting 20k-60k concurrent depending on the time of day. I really wish we could get back the AAA studios grind of passion. Morrowind is a prime example. Bethesda was going to go under if the game failed, and so they went hard with different mechanics and ideas, and it paid off. Every single game after Morrowind has been a downgrade from the previous entry.
Towards the end of the video when he was talking about managers and about having job specific knowledge. I’m very glad someone else is talking about this. In the past the way things kinda worked was those who went to college would become the ‘manager class’ they would be educated about the world and be able to teach themselves things effectively. This is parallel to the military where enlisted members are uneducated while officers are college educated. Essentially, anyone with a college degree could learn the job in an appropriate amount of time and be able to effectively manage it. This is simply not the case anymore ESPECIALLY with technology related jobs. I have personally experienced having a manager that knows absolutely nothing about how to actually do the job of the people they are managing. I have even been told that managers don’t need any experience with what they are managing at all. I’m fully confident that this is the root cause of many work place issues. If a person cannot understand the problem at hand, because they do not know what is involved in resolving it, that person has no place leading the people who do have that knowledge. For a person to be in that position, I would not consider that a manger, I would consider that nothing more than a middle man. Especially in environments where the workers are highly educated like engineering. The engineering manager might not be an engineer themselves and thus will not fully understand the nature of the happenings of their team. If someone is in that position it is their DUTY to try their hardest to learn the job that their subordinates do in an attempt to effectively and efficiently make the decisions for that team of people. This is also why many teams have a “manager” and a technical lead, effectively taking away absolute power, which naturally works better.
Estimate padding is very much an unintended consequence of KPI driven production. KPIs are supposed to be used to indicate that there is a failure or bottleneck, which then needs to be fixed. Eventually, this often becomes not about fixing the root of the problem but about meeting the metrics. Therefore, people engage in estimate padding: treating the symptom rather than the disease.
Regarding the 2nd story, there's a huge problem in the software development industry as a whole where devs grossly overestimate how long a coding task will take. A couple reasons why is that large software projects are complex, which makes underestimating the task really easy, so to counter act that they double or triple what they think it will take. Which most of the time is way too much but the devs would rather be safe than sorry. Most managers in software development don't know how to code at all. Tthey don't know how long things take, so they just have to take the devs word for it. Also agile (scrum) makes it worse by demanding consistency over productivity. So in agile (scrum) you're suppose to plan out the entire sprint ahead of time, so scrum masters encourage you to overestimate tasks to ensure everything gets done by the end of the sprint. That way the scrum masters can look good in front of their boss by saying "see we got 100% of our tasks done, look how good we are". Meanwhile the team was only working at 50% capacity.
Yup, learned real quick in the industry that "under promise, over deliver" way better than "over promise, under deliver". Especially since there's very little incentive to finishing my work faster.
It was the same when I worked in manufacturing. If a part was on back order and I literally couldn't complete something until the part got delivered, it was still somehow my fault for not meeting the deadline. You've gotta cover your ass, and that means vastly overestimating time requirements just in case.
id rather have people work at half capacity every now and then, then push people to work overtime until they burn out. companies like blizzard, bethesda etc. can easily afford to employ double the devs to get the work done. when shit hits the fan its always because the plans are made with everyone working at 100%, no unforseen problems, noone getting sick etc. over the course of years and many projects you probably do much better by having people chill most of the time and only work at 100% when its absolutely needed.
I am always a software developer and that is future. But I would overestimate a timeline especially if I have never done it before but if someone can explain it to me. I will just try to do as quickly as possible. So overestimate to then over delivery if you don't know what to do but if I am speaking to someone who is a programmer and willing to guide me I will just do it and see what happens
Padding work time is how the entire corporate system operates. Task going to take you 2 hours? Give me a week. Task going to require multiple days of work? I’ll have it ready a month out. This is one of the huge disparities between blue and white collar jobs. An hourly worker is literally doing their job the entire shift. White collar worker does 2 hours of work in a 9 hour day.
I think ultimately it's an issue of mandatory 40 hour work week. If what you're assigned to do can be done in 10 hours but you're stuck in the office for 40 hours a week anyway where's the incentive to do your job in a timely manner?
@@Moonmi747 You hit the nail on the head there. I remember being baffled by this when I got out of school and first started working. Now I am doing just like everybody else.
They work in bi-weekly sprints = 80h. 4h sprint planning. 2h hours story point voting 4h backlog refinement 4h sprint review 2h sprint retrospective 10x 30 min = 5h dailys 21h Just for the overhead of the sprint. Many other meetings I ommit here, like team meetings, brainstorming, demos, discussions in delivery metrics, etc... The rest of the time is for unit testing, merge reviews or simply mangling stuff on the Jira board, documentation, etc... There is hardly any time to develop anything.
As someone working outside of game dev I can say this responsibility avoidance is quite common. Part of the problem is that a lot of the time people are working on a bunch extra work that's not part of their normal responsibilities so people get trained to avoid responsibility. Like you get assigned a simple configuration or coding task and in the middle of it you find out there's 5 things that were broken so now ya got to do 6 tasks.
True. The further down the design chain a job is, the more crap rolls downhill; never to be rolled back uphill as the offenders are working on (and breaking) something else.
It's the same in all sectors, American corporate culture is about middle manager bloat and insufficient staffing for the actual work, along with EXTREME witchhunts whenever anything goes wrong (because it CANT be the fault of management, see CDPR's failures). This guy doesn't get it, even as he acknowledges that corporations treat games like nothing but pure projects with no passion or art acceptable, and blames the guys in the trenches for that. It's hair-pulling
Need an upper management that understands the capabilities of the project and constraints, and is willing to keep problems down-low&private, away from boiling off in the head of the coder or dev that has already enough in his head to worry about. A difference in what Frian Bargo would have done and what modern girlboss execs do where the blame is still on the devs, while the execs only get the praise. (not easy to do in todays social media climate) There is more pretense put in protecting your social image and keeping up appearances as a company than in actually finding passion, pride and focus in your work. Keep the novel quantity rolling while delivering the "same game everytime" &reviews are not out yet- don''t be a fool to look in the distance or trying to impress with quality.
As a developer it's really disappointing that he put the blame on developers, and my fear is people who don't know anything about coding will pile up on us. 99 times out of 100 when a manager tells me it only takes 30 minutes, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Changing a stable version can have effects in so many unexpected ways and you have to check for all that. Logic problems aren't the ones that take time, it's the technology problem. Sometimes what they want takes a lot of reading and research.
I work in industrial controls and the same lack of accountability is rampant here too. At this point, being accountable, having a good work ethic, and being competent in your field is essentially a super power.
@@TheGoodColonelNo, it is not. I’ve worked non-stop since I was 13 years old (40 now) when I got my first job shoveling snow, mowing grass, and emptying trash cans for a group of churches. Any worker that shows competency, reliability, and ambition always rises. Maybe not at the job they have now, but the next one. Maybe not in the career field they have now, but the next one. Always, every time. Now as a business owner myself with 46 employees, you can bet your ass I do whatever is in my power to keep good employees. I’ve had employees come into my office and say they are putting in their two weeks because they can’t work the hours they have now, and they left my office with new hours and a raise. I’ve given employees who have a long commute vouchers for apartments, gas cards, or a company vehicle. I’ve created positions to promote good workers who ask for more responsibility, and find them more challenging work. By the same token, if you’re not here to work hard, the exit is right over there. When someone is a good worker, it shines through the haze of bullshit and lies. It’s obvious to anyone who even spends a day with a good worker. They’re going to succeed, somewhere, somehow.
@@XOmniverse being an absolutely mediocre person with no blame to your name will save you more times than having your name everywhere on some wins and some losses.
@@TheSpicyLeg ok but that does not translate at all in a corporate environnement unless you're in sales. And even then, the good salesmen in corp usually stay at one place 2 years before moving on to a better pay somewhere else. Corporations reward mediocrity now. Putting your name out makes you a target, even if you do good.
Nearly all your hot takes are pretty damn spot on and I've been a Manufacturing Engineer and Project Engineer in Aerospace for most of my 20 year career. The most toxic part of work is often your reaction to embarrassment, admitting inability or skill gaps and pointing out others to simply try and move the bar and do your job. In the most toxic companies, your most talented go getters that are getting things done, being real and serious, can and will be pulled down by others and stacked on by bosses bc they know who to go to. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And if you are actually just working hard and don't add fluff to the way you talk and add super personable conversation to some of these lazy people that seemingly have a ton of extra time on their hands, you are now the toxic person... . Enter Layoff and contractor culture is here to stay.
Yep, I became an expert in my embedded communications engineering job in 2 years. Now I'm laid off and I have to leave my global team without the knowledge I provided. But the fluffer that barely worked is staying. Hm.
I ross d my engineering degree in the trash and walked out when I found the custodians made more money per hour and had medical insurance (i didn't) Engineering is a dead profession in the USA. Offshoring, outsourcing, h1b cheap indentured labor. Constant layoffs, no job security, crazy long hours, absurdly low pay. I told my boss I made more delivering pizza in college than I did as an Engineer!
The most toxic part of work is people embarrassing coworkers, harassing them for perceived shortcomings or "skill gaps," etc. That's why people don't want accountability. Employees have learned, over time, that "accountability" means that the employees take 100% of the blame, while managers take 100% of the praise and rewards.
If you want to learn engineering great, if you want a job , good luck!.. less than %10 of US born engineers work in engineering!!! wages for engineers in the USA have declined steadily for 50 years! @@origanev1986
In a small team I can definitely give estimates on a simple feature like "will be done before lunch". But working in a big team/company I definitely never give estimates like "just a couple hours" and I multiply everything by 1.5 because I know there will be obstacle along the way, e.g. someone else fucking up, someone else actively interfering with what I'm doing, or the CI going down. That's just the reality
I also experience the same thing he mentions in his 3rd story all the time. People think any sort of excited conversation is frightening or creating an uncomfortable scene. God forbid there's a friendly debate or everyone needs to go on stress leave for the next week.
The fact that they literally said it's scary cuz it sounds like mommy and daddy are having a fight is hysterical. That's the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from someone trying to make fun of them, FFS 😂
@@LeXofLeviafan Very childish to not see the adult truth behind the statement. If you're sounding like mommy and daddy arguing, you shouldnt be worried about who amongst the staff thinks you're mommy or who thinks you're daddy. Holy shit what a bad leader. The truth is most likely that those people were so tired of hearing 2 grown men argue like children about a simple topic that they tried to say something that would stop the annoying shit while also not causing much more tension. But people breathe and live off their ego and cant think outside of their own illusions for 2 seconds.
@@FainTMako …You're talking about yourself, right? Because you're the one with an illusion you're projecting on others "because you have an adult truth to tell". (And projecting _hard_ , considering how you're ignoring the actual account of events entirely… or maybe you're simply one of those guys and are being defensive here - that's hardly any better though.) The man in the video was pretty clear about it being simply a case of a discussion getting slightly louder than casual talk, and those snowflakes being unable to tolerate existence of that much sound in their general presence - note how _absolutely no one else_ had any issue with it for _three decades_ before those wusses started complaining (and others _still_ having no issue with it, it's only the new guys who were getting "triggered" at those discussions… and the "mommy-daddy" thing was their own words, which makes it pretty clear they've been coddled so much throughout their lives that their parents' marital arguments were literally their only exposure to humans talking louder than one would speak in a nursery).
But he doesn't get it, he identifies the problem that corporations have become hyper-profit-focused to the expense of all else, and . Yeah it's game developers fault that venture capitalists expect a 2:1 return minimum or they consider everything a failure. Give me a break.
@@davidace7514 4 Weeks for basic code is too much. Yes, companies treat their workers like trash, but being unable to make simple code in at least a week is just sad. There needs to be a balance to it.
@@oscargonzalez347 Working conditions drastically affect people no matter how skilled they are. How do you think cyberpunk flopped? Rushed to meet the deadline and crunched on the last few weeks before release thus resulting in the shit game we have now (drastically better than launch but still not what was promised)
@@oscargonzalez347 Not being able to fix a bug from hell is not sad. Try it yourself. Let me present you with a codebase of 100k lines, fix it. Some bugs are easy, some are not. If the company motto is "We don't do comments" and "Fail fast", then basically you'll want to be an absolute veteran and you better know the tooling in and out. I did years of my own coding, then suffered through other people's code. It was not quite as bad as I initially felt, but it was pretty bad nonetheless. Weird stuff that made no sense, even tho I understood the functionality of the software in-depth. Strange variable names, strange function names. I would fix a bug in 5 min, 5 days or never. Several people were just trying to prevent total disaster. There was one particular bug that was just not easy to fix. There are so many layers of code, 4 weeks is not necessarily unrealistic. At some point, It's like hacking a nuclear bomb to implode instead of explode. I mean, if the underlying code is all shit, total garbage, then you better have an AMAZING mind to fix anything at any time within 24 hours. But yea, if you write your OWN codebase from scratch, you will know the ins and outs, including any limitations of the libraries you picked, etc. But for someone else to master your codebase to the same extent as yourself, could take months and may be far harder. Esp. if you didn't write any goddamn comments. Just be glad it runs at all, it's a surprise anything runs.
For those interested, Scorpia and Desslock were legendary computer game reviewers in the Golden Age of CGW and PC Gamer in the 1980s thru 90s. respectively. Scorpia was especially admired/feared - her review of Ultima 8 (Pagan) was one of the most brutal ever published about a major title up to that point in any magazine.
Miss reading those two reviewers...peak gaming journalism at its finest back then. Plus Tim Cain is still amazing..Fallout 1 and 2 to this day destroy the new Fallout games on just pure comedic writing, easter eggs, and depth.
@@vjmtzBethesda Fallout games were all sub par Fallout games that were more like parodies than sequels. I liked Fallout 3, but it always bothered me that after 200 years no one bothered to sweep up broken glass. Actually, kind of sounds like modern game devs.
@@vjmtz I was surprised when I learned that majority of the people genuinely enjoyed Fallout 3. I thought it was a mediocre game, didn't know much about international gaming communities back then. When I first played Fallout 3, I thought it was an Oblivion mod. FO1 and 2 are far more superior in term of writing and players freedom. With the rise of BG3 and Pathfinder I hope we can get a true cRPG Fallout game again.
I’m a game programmer who has been working on games for 20 years. Modern programmers in the AAA games industry are all the spawn of bad teaching when programmers are taught by those who can’t for generation after generation. Programmers who are actually competent don’t get interviews because they refuse to pay to get a degree from a program taught by people like that. Myself, I’ve worked on my own games and lived that way for the last decade because of that rather than go work for a company filled with these programmers.
Padding estimates is always smart. I've worked as an entrepreneur and maybe estimated that I can d something in 1 month. I would always say 2 months. Because first of all Im usually only getting paid for the time I proposed as an estimate. Unforeseen circumstances can always show up and if I finish the project earlier than my estimate they will only be happy and we have time to work on improvements.
Its mostly that 'easy' changes look easy on your side, but as the game is SO big and SO frankensteined together you can never be sure that what you're doing won't mess with someone elses code, break a plot line or add a bug. And that causes fear and uncertainty, so people want to be more and more careful. In a competent well run team with good planning and communication its usually not a problem, but if you have several Devs, each coding in their own dumbass way you get problems. add in stupid time constraints and people rushing and not talking and stuff goes sideways far too easily
That is a great reason of why to implement testing. Some people find writing them boring, but they are essential for large scale development. Agree a lot with your view on strict time constraints on the end product is also not smart. As potential backlash of brand name might “have a higher cost” than “adding two months to development”. Having time constraints during development (as long as they are ok and don’t only result in stress) is nice to be able to follow a plan and boost moral
@@iTzHuGzz Too many publishers want to just rush the alpha or pre-alpha release out the door to get the money in and then 'fix it in patch 1' , ignoring the damage it'll do to the game studios reputation
@@ZannNewman my thought as well. It's a general problem in echonomy meets development. There must be a balance. You can't spend 10 years fine tuning, but making a game you're releasing playable and enjoyable is essential for brand name, and even long term success for the product.
He's talking about creating a modular structure, there isn't going to be so much interface that you have no idea what's going to happen unless your team is full of brain dead partial art asset devs who can't actually program but rely on premade systems
"No-one want's to take accountability anymore" In my experience, this has to do, with people, especially bosses, not being able (or willing) anymore, to differentiate between things someone could have changed and things outside of your grasp. If you take the responsibility to many people feel invited to dump all blame onto you, regardless of whether it's actually your doing or not! In this toxic environment, of course no one will ever step forward an their own accord!
more worst. project manager will tell you implement it's stupid idea that we knew won't works in the first place. and we have wasting time to testing out it's stupid solution that we all knew it's gonna fail 100%.
B.S. Bosses have not changed. But a whole lot of software devs are not actually good at their job and look for every possible excuse to hide that fact and do less
I experience the younger generation as being heavily avoidant of personal responsibility. As someone who has done men’s work for the past 6 years, accountability is hard for everyone.
I am a more recent software engineer (graduated in 2019, started working professionally in 2020). In this video Tim Cain just described what I've been frustrated about in both of my jobs. Anytime I make a mistake or didn't think about an estimate correctly I'm always up front about the idea I have, how to execute it, and feel very comfortable saying "Yah that bug/mistake is on me". However, if you try to ask 90-95% developers just what their though process was or why something happened it's immediately "We shouldn't be blaming each other, we shouldn't me asking how we're executing, every idea is a good idea". In the industry people are encouraged to avoid accountability and accept the idea of "even if the code is horrible, as long as nobody notices when they're quickly testing it - it's good to go".
My advice if you make a mistake, ask to fix it as soon as you learn about it. Be proactive. If someone think there's a problem with your changes/codes, verify it asap. Good project managers and your good programmer peers will notice it: that guy cares. Making mistakes/bugs in itself it not a big deal, the best do them, but you need to deal with them fast. Otherwise it just means you are lazy, careless and untrustworthy.
@@madjoe8622 Funny enough, that's what I do. Since I know my code, once a bug is pointed out I fix it very fast. The problem is the other way around - the other devs can't fix it as sometimes the code is just a barely surviving cob web. Then the tech lead/project manager assigns me to fix their mistakes as "mistakes happen, since it's too complex for them to fix, we'll need you to fix this". Sometimes transforming 500+ lines of code to 10 lines.
You're pretty much describing human nature, it's hard to take accountability for most people, especially if you're expected to be right 100% of the time with no bugs or mistakes (or get scolded or worse if you're not). Not every work environment allows people to make mistakes, or has propper testing in place. If you feel you're able to take accountability for mistakes I'd say you landed a pretty decent job, at least on that front. I've been developping for a decade now, and I've had both situations, trust me it's hard to see people who make a mistake not own up or even pass blame not getting any repercussion whilst people who do hold themselves accountable get scolded (even for small issues that can be solved in an hour or so). I still hold myself accountable, buying cake for the team when I break builds, even though I'm usually the one code reviewing and it's easy for me to hide that shit but I do so because of decent management who doesn't scold people for making a mistake, and has adequate testing in place.
We do the same in my team. We are a small team of 5 people but we feel responsible as a whole. I just come up front to say what i did wrong and ussualy we joke about it. And just get it fixed. I have been programming for 14 years from which 3 in a company, after i graduated in IT. Anyways we know each other skills its not like we do it on purpose. And to be honest, right now in our country its really hard to find developers that are good.
You hit some solid points but the real cause is methodology. What I mean is when a company goes public, that is to say they are now on NASDAQ, there is a well-established road-map of how to deal with all things via committee. Procedures are written, dissidents are "removed", and power becomes absolute at the positions closest to the investors. It happened to my company, it happens to all companies not privately owned, and even then it's up to the morals of the owner (Gabe being a great example of the sane side).
The problem is vast, but here's something I noticed. A lot of times in legacy systems, a single person or a small team will write most of the code. More often than not, it was terrible to look at, disorganized and nasty, but it worked. When something went wrong, the developer, who has an intimate understanding of the system, would know where to go and add more crappy code. These days, there's less disorganized code, but also less comprehension and responsibility. Now, you have leads, which could be the same type of people who made the messy but functional code, who are building teams of developers lists of requirements based on their understanding of building systems. The problem with that is that it is difficult to know what kind of issues you're going to face without writing the code yourself. So when a behavior occurs that is not expected, but the requirements are met... well it's not the programmer's fault and someone will have to figure out how to fix it later. Depending on the team, this may not be a problem. Bugs can be gathered and kept track of and fixed later. But it helps if your developers notice flaws and work to improve the existing requirements. If that doesn't happen, you get more organized but less functional code.
I think this is the most level-headed take. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that games nowadays are way more complex than they used to be, so bugs are often the fault of multiple systems not working well together and not just the fault of a single person. Outside of that, most beloved games are incredibly slapdash and buggy, but the core gameplay is decent enough people are willing to overlook them.
i dont know how much that particularly contributes to the issues in games, but its very noticable even to me as a CNC programmer. Its a type of programming which requires 100% perfection, as you can ruin thousands of dollars of material and work hours, but its not a technically difficult programming language at all. Its actually extremely simple BECAUSE of how important it is to get right, and i still sometimes struggle when reading others work. Depending on what im working on my handwritten programs can look very ugly, but i know what every single line does, and can get it perfect. If someone else tried to read it, even though it worked, they might struggle just because its so unrefined. This could lead to them not understand what the program does, and makes adding to it a mess. I hate to think how exponentially difficult that is in software and gaming development, where the programming languages are 1000x more complicated. Id be interested in seeing the owner of larian discuss things like this, about the work environment for the programming and decision making in their games. They seem to only employ people who genuinely love the development process and who love games, something that seems to be lacking in other companies.
@@declancampbell1277 Ah yeah that makes sense. For what it's worth, software often doesn't need to consider the physical aspects of how code executes so you have that on software devs. That said operating environment matters a lot for code execution too, which is why a lot of industrial devices run embedded OSes and have specific hardware requirements. The most stable video games I own are on imported modern arcade cabinets, which run on embedded windows and all cabinets running this game have the exact same CPU, GPU, motherboard, PSU, sound card, and I/O card. One of them expects to run at a very specific framerate 3 decimal digits out, but you don't have to worry about OS variants or stray services introducing a bit of lag like with normal consumer installs so I have the game on for 6 days straight at times.
I'm responsible for between 50 and 100% of the codebase for multiple projects at my company, as a senior I try to spend as much downtime refactoring stuff as possible, commenting key points so if a junior needs to touch or use something they can understand it, and just in general improving the messes that I've had to write to cater to the whims of management, POs, customers and higher ups. Every feature that I've worked on without external "input" works great and exactly as needed, is extensible, documented and easy to implement. Every feature that I've had to do following the whims of non-technical people is a mess, it's buggy, full of patches, spaghetti and worse. Why? Because "requirements" change constantly, delivery dates are not respected, complexity is ignored and unless I staunchly say no directly they try to cram more and more crap to every delivery. As things are more bloated and messed, they become harder to untangle and refactor later on. What takes me 15 to 30 minutes to add to one of the systems I've built from the ground up on my own, can take hours or days on systems that have had multiple passes of changes. Rewriting something three times in its entirety in the last three months pissed me off, now I pad estimates, do the bare minimum and only really put effort into things that I've doing on my own. There is no point it trying to write clean, maintainable code if I will be forced to shit it up to cram some feature or change to it at the last minute. When higher ups tell you "just patch it now and we'll fix it later" routinely, and it never gets fixed because "it already works don't touch it" and then it becomes "this is such a simple, minor change, why does it takes days and is buggy" you end up with the fuck it mindset. Not my problem. Ask for crap, get crap. This happens at most places, most senior developers I know, especially those more senior than me are even more cynical. There's a reason why, and it's not lazyness.
IMO, a lot of what Tim mentions in the first part of the video is a symptom of Agile development as implemented in a corporate environment. Meetings all day every day, and padded estimates (because if you end up going over your "estimate" you are absolutely crucified) are all endemic to poorly implemented Agile, which is unfortunately the norm in most development houses today.
We were forced to adopt scrum at work. My team isn't co-located, and we're not all developers, so we're working on different things all the time. But a middle manager a few steps up the ladder went to an agile conference, and read a book about how it makes teams more efficient. So now we have planning sessions, retros, and daily standups in our team, talking about tasks that are actionable by only 1/4 to 1/3 of the team. It's an insane waste of time that breaks us out of the flow every single day. We've even asked if we can split the team into "sub-teams" with our own stand-ups so that we don't waste the time of the people who are not devs, and so that we can actually go into some detail discussing the tasks we're working on, but they won't let us. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure scrum can work really well in the correct setting. But the way our team is organised is NOT the correct setting.
@@timothyblazer1749 To be fair, I think at least my job does Agile decently. I have a scrum meeting every morning with specifically the more experienced dev I work with, just a minute of updates followed by however long we need to discuss practical issues. Big team estimation meeting at the start of every sprint, put the estimation results up on Jira. I honestly can't imagine what the hell everyone else is doing to mess up something this basic. The senior devs (I'm pretty fresh out of college) usually estimate longer than me, but they're also always right, so.
@@SeventhSolar It's not Agile unless the teams themselves control the pace of the work. That's where it always fails. You end up with management insisting on certain deadlines ( ignoring the costs voted on by the teams), or on certain work being prioritized, or on injecting work against the team's wishes. In real Agile, management only can vote on the business objectives. They can't interfere with the technical work. At all. That includes PMs. And POs.
it's fundamentally a management problem, it exists in every industry, global wise, doesn't matter if you are in third-world country or first-world country, doesn't matter if your company is small or big, as long as you're running a company you're gonna face this "people issue". Unfortunately, after running a company myself for 8 years now, i've learnt the hard way that firing people alone won't solve the problem at all, the management style has to change, company culture has to change, rules and regulations have to change, hiring policy has to change, as well as incentive and punishment policy, the list goes on, in short you gonna hire more 'wolf' instead of 'sheep', people say 'nah, this whole generation is like this,' which i don't agree at all, because there's always hard working people out there
I've honestly seen more passion in games put up by small indie developers than any AAA company running 2k+ developers for the last decade now, with games it really feels like quality of devs over quantity of devs
@@xxCrimsonSpiritxx The devs (not management) have no say in the final product. They're passionate and highly skilled at what they do for the overwhelming majority. To think otherwise is foolish.
@@johnjackson9767 Then I don't think you watched the video honestly, yes management has the final say, but believe it or not more often than not the management give a fairly flexible freedom to developers but on the condition that they add their microtransactions for example, and there are objectively speaking dozens of examples of bad developers butchering their games because they're simply not passionate enough about said project
@@xxCrimsonSpiritxx This is true, though there were plenty of butchered games back in the 90s when Fallout came out too. The scale is bigger because the industry is bigger. There doesn't seem to be budget numbers out there for Outer Worlds but considering the original fallout was just roughly a $3 million budget certainly Outer Worlds was a much bigger more ambitious game and with that comes trade offs. You can't expect indie like teams and dedication with a bigger scale IMHO, not without some serious leadership behind it that understand how that works (and even then it's not gauranteed).
As a professional software developer, there are absolutely jobs you need to pad estimates - and its the majority. Because 3/4 of your job in many large organizations is dealing with absolute bullshit spreadsheets thrown at you by management, dealing with bizarre requests that aren't captured as effort, scope changes for no fucking reason and awful tickets you need to go back and forth with the reporter before you actually understand the problem space. I've had jobs where by the end of it, I only got to *start* coding every day at around 3-4pm and finished up 7-8pm, because between meetings and random admin duties, you don't get time to code until everyone else clocks off and stops bugging you with "must have" bollocks. So pad your estimates. Otherwise you won't get your sprint items done. If you don't pad estimates, you end up working 80 hour weeks or don't hit your sprint goals, and who gets blamed then? And if you work the 80 hours, you don't get paid extra. And you don't own the game like early game dev or indies, you get paid a straight salary, so what incentive do you have to kill yourself over a game that gets you nothing more? Bad management leads to bad workers. Smaller orgs you just talk directly to people and have way less need to do this, or smaller teams with a protective manager it works better.
Small companies too. I was working with (not for) a smaller company one time. This small company was in a business that made a lot of money with a staff in the dozens. The only overhead was machinery. Point being funding and salaries wasn't a major issue as their profit margins were extremely high. They had an IT staff of three people, and all of them were management, essentially project managers without a PEMBOK as masquerading as developers. They had an issue. They needed sequential labels (1, 2, 3, etc). They refused to buy them, and I get it. For some reason printed media like that can almost make you sour what people charge. And it's so simple, why pay for it when you have devs? Well, they had issues. They would open excel, type a number in a cell, drag it down 10,000 rows, and then print from there using the print address label functionality. Unsurprisingly, the print spooler in windows would die every time. These labels needed tracking, too. Knowing what number was tied to what item was extremely, extremely important. They'd try to print 10,000, it would crash at random amounts, like 3,741, every single time, and they'd have to look at the reel, find the last number printed, write it down, reboot the PC, and repeat the process. Obviously, this was extremely inefficient and caused all kinds of things like duplicates both for a single site and duplicates across multiple sites. I'll also point out these were reels of 1,000 labels. They'd also have to replace the reel in the middle of printing when a reel finished, which caused even more issues, and it often resulted in a lot of loss of labels. With my system you clicked a button, it spat out 1,000, you replaced the reel, then clicked a button. My solution was simple - I wrote a tool in JS and SQL that would do 1k at a time. It would log the last label printed, the site, auto fill in the last number printed+1, save what site the user selected last, etc, etc. Yes, tech can always crash so I still wrote ways to force override while blocking things like cross site duplications. It wasn't perfect, but I wrote it in 20 minutes and I printed 10k labels in 1k batches in under an hour while their system was giving them only a couple thousand every hour - and they needed 10s of thousands a day. They would assign an available staff member to do this 8 hours a day 5 days a week. "Why can't we print 10k at a time? Our current system lets us do that. We can't click a button 10 times a day, we need to print these and be done." I of course pointed out you don't have any tracking, you have duplicates, you're attempting to print dozens of times a day, etc. They never ended up using it. Corporations have bloat, and you're dead on about larger companies dragging you into meetings to talk instead of work, but people are people.
I'm a dev, I do have some feedback here (only 15 mins in). Estimates are estimates for you and your team, but leadership treat them as promises, and build everything around it. This makes a vague estimate into something you are now responsible for. Then when your estimate falls short, you get slapped (overtime, crunches, worst case fired/witholding raises). Especially for videogames, where there is a lot of R&d (emphasys on R, so a lot more unknowns). Having crunches for months due to a bad estimate is what leads to this stupid level of padding. It's trauma enforced by the industry. While each dev also need to be able to get above that and give proper estimates, some junior devs with less faith in their abilities will naturally pad the shit out of their work to be sure they are not stuck in another crunch time. So really the industry created that problem. The best way to break this pattern of over padding stories/tasks is to encourage failure within your teams (obviously within reason). Failures are useful as they help pinpoint your limits as a team and narrow down your velocity (For simplicity, velocity is how quick and easily you can finish a task). When failure is punished, you get that type of shitshow as described in the video.
To add to this great point a lot of companies see failure to reach estimate as something they will replace you for or even make you first in line for lay-offs. (i've had plenty of managers say to pad it so we look extra productive so when lay-offs come around they are not looking at the extremely productive team!)
Would that also be attributes to ways of working? If you find you are under estimating as the complexity is more than thought. Should you look to do more refinement to break them down into smaller stories and give a more clearer indication?
@@Azpep as a rule of thumb, when using Fibonachi to point stories, anything above 8 (even 8 can be broken down) should be exploded into smaller stories (IMHO). If nothing else, a spike should be done to investigate the unknowns, which are pretty much always present in any 8-12 pointers.
As a developer big teams are a nightmare. Especially when junior developers are moved into a team to 'help' and then leave. All they do is break shit and introduce more bugs that need to be fixed.
In regards to story 2 the only reasonable explanation of why something simple like that would take longer is if they're workload is already full up. But they should be able to easily explain that when asked. I deal with this as an HVAC engineer, architects will send in a request that should only take 2 or 3 hours to complete and then complain when we tell them to expect it in two weeks. And the reason isn't because we want to make them wait two weeks, it's because if our schedule is fully booked up then if we do their request then something else we've already promised a completion date on falls behind. This reason is almost always accepted because it makes sense. They should definitely be able to explain why it'll take 4 weeks.
This guy didn't even write his spec down til queried. I wouldn't be surprised if he also didn't listen when they said that, surprisingly, they have stuff to do already scheduled.
@@centerfield6339Exactly my thought. It seems like he came up with an idea, but instead of discussing it, he went straight to pull a random developer and asked them to implement that in the next several hours. I mean, the Team Lead came AFTER the dev, which means he did it over the TL's head. Imagine in the middle of a Sprint, someone butts in and demands to drop everything and implement his cool new idea he came up with several hours ago.
Also even without considering the existing workload the time required to do the task could be much bigger than the 45 minutes required for the actual source code change. The change should be tested by the dev which requires a build plus deployment, plus the time for testing. They might have a policy of always writing unit and automation tests (possibly by different team member), code reviews by several team members plus an architect. Even merging the code into the main branch could take a while if it requires successfull build and automation run, and the build and/or automation queues are slow. If might additionally require manual testing after a release build is ready. So 45 minutes code change could easily grow into several days of work by different team members. But I've never worked on a game, I am developing drivers :)
My hubby works for a small game dev company down here in South Africa and I showed him the first few minutes of this. He is absolutely flabbergasted at the fact that either the ToDo lists or the small coding segment would raise any concerns even with the small dev team like the one he works with.
@@ystconnectionRight, so I'm a dev in the west. Task lists and taking responsibility for the implementation of a feature is an industry standard. I don't know what kind of kindergarten Timothy Cain works at.
@@P4INKiller As a tradesman, i look at that as a blueprint. They are standard anywhere you go. However what is not standard, is setting unrealistic deadlines and using bunk product (or code bases) to build your foundation and then bitching when it falls apart. No insult intended towards you on the last remark, thats mean't for the shitty bosses who don't know shit and think they are experts even though they are hiring cause they can't do it.
I've worked in a corporate setting, and I saw many coworkers just act docile and almost motionless. Everyone had to act "nice" all the time. They don't like it when people are yelling. They also don't like it if you make a fuss at lazy coworkers who are not even working. They fire people for insane reasons. My boss got mad when I was 2 minutes late. You can get in trouble for talking back and it's perceived the wrong way.
It’s better to give a generous time estimate on how long it will take because more often than not in software development something won’t go according to plan, and even things that might seem simple initially might actually be more complicated once you begin understand all of the components at play. It’s better to deliver earlier than expected than to deliver later because it allows for better planning. Generally along with the feature itself you’re also adding unit tests to cover each edge case which can sometimes take even more time than writing the feature itself. The bottom line is that there’s a lot more to it than most people know.
Yes, it's very crazy! I have been working as a concept artist in video games for 10 years for big names and sometimes one cannot work because of a lot of meetings, many of which are useless and which take a long time and which can be summarized in a short email. It completely takes away the rhythm of our work.
As a DBA and coder coming up, I was told to always set time frames out as far as possible so you could look like a rock star when you delivered your deliverables early. I would watch people literally B.S. for entire weeks and code something out in hours. It's obsurd.
Work is like gas - it occupies all the space given to it. Better alternative is to set relatively short delivery date and then keep stakeholders posted daily on how delays you've encountered are pushing the deadline back. Then you'll look like a rockstar of taking accountability and providing communication early. If they don't like it - fuck them, quit.
Flipside of that is if you deliver too quick all the time it becomes expected - but I have also seen it in every job I have been in, whether it's in magazine publishing (advert deadlines) or IT (length of time to do x)- most people inflate it - but they get caught out if the person they do it to knows how long x takes as in Tim's example about the dev asking for 4 weeks.
As a Senior Software Engineer at one of the largest food delivery companies in the world, leading one of the top priority projects of my pillar I am of two minds with this. I totally agree with the lack of accountability. At my company we use Jira and every single developer is assigned a ticket. That ticket has the developer's face on it from start to completion, not so we know who to blame but so leadership can have a better idea of how resources are being allocated and in the event of a failure we know who to contact for insights that might be useful for debugging. I don't see any reason why you wouldn't have your name associated with your work, it's just being professional. As to the second point, I think it's almost an inevitability to have slower development speeds in large corporations for three main reasons, one of which he mentioned in the video: 1 - Money. Big corporations have big stakeholders that aren't necessarily interested in the product. They want profits. If what you're doing won't result in money made or saved that can be sold to an exec, it won't get done. Last year a 15 min outage at my company lost millions of dollars. Ever since the processes got stricter, the security measures increased and our estimations extended with it as part of management requests. 2 - This also plays a part in 1 but processes, bureaucracy and politics. Large corporations make complex products. Complex products require multiple teams. No single person/team has time to work on the entirety of World of Warcraft by themselves. So they divide in teams. Each team is vying for a slice of that corporation budget to work on their quarterly plans and create good features that will increase their budget next quarter. Now, lack of speed can lower a team's budget but you know what can harm it even more? Losing money. Outages, crashes. Not only the team, but developers can lose jobs over things like that. So while startups and indie companies have a lot more maneuverability when it comes to that sort of thing, large corporations do not. 3 - Complexity. When the scope of your project is small you can afford many shortcuts and techniques to speed up your development process. This is also not the case in large corporations because they have many more concerns that smaller companies do lot. Legal department asking for logs of operations saved, stored and accessible, security department requesting a tighter control of vulnerabilities, a very large codebase often times very intertwined because it was created originally as a smaller company with no concern for scalability, security and maintainbility and every code change in a place can affect code in a completely different component. I once had a project manager that asked for a button. I told him It would take a week. He said he could do it in html and javascript in 2 hours. I answered: Neat. So can I. This isn't developed in justJavaScript and html though, it needs to not only perform its button action but also needs to send campaign information to marketing, logs to sentry, the request needs to go through a proxy and then through an API which does not have a method to support it. Then we need to apply database migration to correct data and finally thoroughly test it because if it fails and users get their app crashing, we might lose funding for our next project by upper management looking unfavorably at our lack of professionalism and you still won't get your button. In short, TLDR: Large corporations will always be much slower because of stakeholders, project scope and simply how little maneuverability they have as companies. If we're looking for risks and daring decisions, we need to look at indies.
I think it's unfortunate that it's the reality of working within a larger corporation. If every (or most at least) AAA games came out super polished I think it could kind of justify the long development cycle. In reality though we get big games that cost $200 million and then still are buggy as hell and unoptimized at launch along with having little creativity. Bright side is this does give a big opening for smaller studios to come in and deliver a great experience.
No, but the manager wrote you pseudocode on his whiteboard though. In-between yelling matches with another manager. And the crashes would only add charm to your app, anyway. He's made his share of buttons back in '97, you know!
Basically what can be concluded from this is that most gaming studios have become to big to function in a way that is beneficial for us gamers and are better off crumbling to make room for others.
When he mentioned game journalism, listening, all I can think of is how I miss TB. I know he wasn't perfect but he said the good and bad things about games and you can judge yourself if you want to play it. Haven't found a suitable reliable person whose main job was gaming. RIP
I'm a systems architect, and I've been writing code since the 1980s. I heed the Scotty Principal and pad my all timelines now because more often than not, when I have to go into code I haven't seen before, I find the previous developer wrote crap spaghetti code with no test coverage, and it takes me a lot of extra time to rework things the way it should have been just so I can get what I needed to do done. Like others here, I'm amazed at the number of devs who have no clue about what they are doing. The bigger problem, though, is artificial timelines and pressure by the management causing mediocre devs to write the absolute shittiest code as fast as possible so they don't get in trouble. And it's not even mostly their fault, because (at least here in the US), the pressure to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of developers by management is the reason you see massive amounts of tech debt and asymptotic cyclomatic complexity graph lines, all of which never get addressed. That dev that quoted 4 weeks might have only taken 45 minutes to do the needful if the code he had to modify was okay, but he was probably hedging on the target system being a rats nest of vomit code when he got into where he needed to make the changes.
As a game and enterprise dev, I'll also add that it's EXTREMELY DECEPTIVE how "clean" looking and "functional programming style" based code (or some such thing) ends up being a rats nest of seniors programming like juniors even though you've spent a 3-4 months looking at it, or other code close to it and you think "ok, looks managable". It looks clean, like your colleagues know what they are doing, until you get hit with a 2000 line config file for the project, and to even understand what's happening you would need to grok a 700 line .js file parsing it written in "functional" style. Just a nope at that point, you revert to CTRL-F(word searching) your way to a solution or stumble through it somewhere in the 10 errors per second errors log that starts the server.
As someone who worked in leadership for years, you should be asking why people don't want their names attached to something. If people are literally threatening to quite because they've been assigned a specific task, you have significant issues to deal with throughout your organization and your leadership. These employees don't feel confident or secure in their jobs to take on more. I worked in leadership environments that were oppressive and demoralizing, this was the result. Disengaged, scared and defensive employees. I've worked in other leadership environments where we were stepping over each other to take on new responsibilities because everyone felt secure, supported and ready for growth. That doesn't mean it was a free ride, far from it. Setting clear expectations and ensuring a job done well is critical with consequences attached. The difference is are you engaged as a leader, involved in the process, clearing obstacles for your people and encouraging growth and development? If the answer is "I'm the boss, I tell you what to do and you do it", the results will not be what you hopped for.
The problem I find is people spend more time worrying about the idea rather than just doing it to see if it works. Time is the resource here. That is the direct correspondence with money. Being scared to make something out of fear that it might not work, stops you from actually learning if it works. Try it. I once had someone spend over an hour talking about the type of coat to use in a character design. They had not even started on the concept design or even had a mood board. It caused me to take on the mantra of do it and see the results. Doing this does lead to failed ideas. But I know what ideas won't work as a result from it. Experiment, practice, try things out. Being a little bitch does not get you results.
I love that you mentioned the Peter principal. I live by things like that in self analysis. My last two promotions happened because I said I was ready. I turned one of them twice when they came to before I put my name in the hat. I had to explain it to two C suite suits before they accepted why I was willing bit, hadn't been before. Everyone has been happy with my level of competency because I prepare a bit before stepping into a new role.
One of the best game reviewers on TH-cam is Worth A Buy.. He does not give a shit about getting black flagged by publishers he just tells it as it is and he is spot on most of the time. Even if sometimes the reviews come a bit late as he does not get review copies..
Because he shares your opinion? I looked at a couple videos from this channel and it's literally just copy paste opinions from r/games. I don't blame him, if I wanted to farm easy subs I would do the same thing.
@@johngrizzle He has spent a long time building up his sub base and its not like he has millions.. So yea heh is not farming easy subs, he just reviews games and is honest about what they are like... yup and some times brutally honest but thats a good thing.
I’m a dev for one of the largest software companies in the world. And one of the biggest problems in my job has NOTHING to do with developing. It’s the amount of no technical management that feels they can change or delete my work at whim meanwhile putting me in the target at c suite level management for not making certain deadlines. This is not only why development in general is suffering, but why there is very little PASSION left. Hence why the games are sucking.
@@johnjackson9767yep. Even seen this from asmon before, he was basically crying like a baby throwing a tantrum over not being given candy when Blizzard (or some big studio) went on strike. It's really funny how guys like this will do that and then go and say people are acting too "entitled", especially to say such about game devs who have insane work schedules when his ass sits in a chair at home and just talks about shit and plays games for a living 😂
"oh no the customer has demands, and is a pro streamer, i deserve a better quality of customer who never expects anything playing my games and has a job I respect" Everyone who doesn't stream for a living thinks it's easy, but forget that people who aren't entertaining, don't get the views. "Insane work schedules"🤔Are you paid? Are you in jail? How did you come to such a personal position of failure? Imagine acting like writing code is harder than entertaining a crowd of thousands every week. Let's see you do it😂Or better yet, lets see you make your own game! Many have done it.... If development is so hard and not worth it for you, just become a streamer, no? If it's that easy, should be no problem for you to make a cool mill in no time brah😂😂 So, If you don't respect other peoples work, don't expect anyone to gaf about your personal hell coding for corpos🤷♂️
@TrevanDotCom Not enough information on why your work is being changed, you frame it as if it's on a managers whim, and expect people to take it at face value. Sob stories are what they are, but really, you need to be clearer with examples, if you want empathy/sympathy.
Frankly, the guy this video about doesn't seem to understand why developers do these things he's talking about, and doesn't seem curious about figuring out why. He's just shitting on all developers from the rooftops, despite the fact that corporate upper management are unrealistic, HATE risk taking, etc. He doesn't seem to get it, this is a complete failure in management
Many decades ago, game development was something people got into because they loved games. They had a vision they wanted to see come to fruition, and they and all the people who gathered around them weren't afraid to put their noses to the grindstone in order to make it happen. Now, the culture has shifted. Now, game companies are no longer a gathering of passionate nerds, but factories where people come to punch in, do their 9-5 and go home. It's no longer about "what do we have do to in order to make our games even better?" But rather, "what do we have to do in order to make sure we keep our jobs?" It's terribly sad.
To be fair, the games come off as super basic. There is a lack of polish that tells me the director or producer has passion, but no one else. I don't think they want to make the game they are working on, and they do it for 5 years minimum.
No, Devs are overworked and get paid terribly, they do more than just the minimum, its the game directors who orchestrate what the game is going to be. the Devs are just the painters and builders not the Architects.@@Mats1050
@@furyberserk Well, most devs work on bits and pieces of the game and they generally don't have a say in what they work on. It's up to the director and producers to assign them the correct work, or list the things that need to be worked on. They've got the masterplans afterall. A dev doing something other than the things that need to be addressed can throw a wrench into the system as that might not have been accounted for in the overall plans, and plans and other workflows might have to change to accommodate one dev's obsession. That's how you get disjointed feeling games with mechanics that don't mesh well. Communication is key. And of course most people don't wanna work on the games they're working on. Ubisoft employs like half the industry, I doubt most devs wanna be making their trash. Nothing a single dev can really do about a game with thousands of people working on their own individual pieces of the game.
As a senior software dev, my team has a solid two months of work. I fixed a one-liner bug, but it snowballed into four more "quick favors." Giving an inch turned into a mile. ETA: 4 weeks.
Starfield getting a 10/10 from journalist was fucking hilarious to see. IGN with their 7 was the most accurate rating for that game, it was fun to read other journalists try to flame them for giving it a 7 instead of an 8-10.
@@Jack_PliskinI've seen quite a few comment sections praising Starfield, and it's just so disappointing to see. My hopes for Elder Scrolls 6 fades more and more when I see so many people satisfied with being fed the shit that is Starfield. I find it hard to believe that Bethesda is going to deliver a good product ever again when their fans are so happy eating feces.
@@femboyroxas yeah, please don't have any hope for es6 because it's going to hurt when it finally releases. just be glad we'll always have modded skyrim
Seems to me one of the biggest problems with modern game development is the studio size. All the classics, all the genre-defining moments, were made by teams a fraction of the size of modern developments. And to this day, some of the greatest games are actually coming from the smaller studios (Deep Rock Galactic for example). It strikes me that there is an optimal size for a game's development - under this size, development time increases, but over this size? Development quality decreases drastically. And I think the root of it is a sense of ownership over the project. When you have a small team, that project is directly the work of everyone involved; it's their baby, collectively. But past a certain team size, you'll find that people are just doing a job; they're not creating the project... they're completing tasks, and meeting contractual obligations.
I'm wondering why these big companies don't create subgroups that focus on a specific IP. Why is Bethesda not creating a Fallout focused group of guys who love the IP and want to make the best game possible. Same with Elder Scrolls. We'd have more games by now and they'd probably be better than what Starfield looks like.
"It strikes me that there is an optimal size for a game's development - under this size, development time increases, but over this size? Development quality decreases drastically." I self studdied dev a decade ago and this is like the first chapter of software developlment for a company. Though it was written by a software dev, so lets just assume the new "software company's" are not operated by the good old boys anymore but rather by idiotic jack rabbit money men.
@@michaelnuttall5896 I'm sure the older developers with the actual talent and experience have been muscled out on the basis that they're "outdated"... and a lot of them have been replaced by the kind of business school graduates who think that the product isn't the game, but money itself.
@@J.B.1982 For sure, that would make sense. But that would imply that the people with the power to make such decisions actually know and care about the product. All evidence now seems to point to the contrary.
As a software dev, it's shocking how many devs have no idea what they are doing.
But why, bad management?
@@MGrey-qb5xz
1.bad system can reword the incompetant people for doing bad job and make competant people stop trying
2. Toxic work place culture can push people away and more often that not people who remain are a bunch of incompetant fucks.
@@MGrey-qb5xz and no trust in management, if you fear to get fired if you produce errors or fail, it's just natural not to risk anything
As a software dev, it's shocking how many devs have no idea what they are doing.
Bad hiring practices.
They often get the cheapest people, not the best.
I'm working in software dev and I'm frequently baffled by how people with 20+ years of programming experience can still fail trivial tasks
I think this is a very good example of what's happening across the entire workforce.
I see so many people refuse to accept blame or point fingers, and all because the second they do they're fired or don't get a raise.
No one's encouraged to make mistakes anymore.
People have to make mistakes. It's how we improve.
There's another video on Tim's channel where he talks about exactly this. There was a super bad crash bug in Fallout 1 that took a couple of weeks to find just before launch. After they found and fixed it the management (i.e. Brian Fargo) wanted to know who was responsible, but Tim refused to tell him because he knew the poor guy would probably get fired. As punishment for not ratting out someone who made a simple mistake Tim didn't receive his bonus for the game.
Exactly
Making video games isn't brain surgery. It shouldnt take 7 years to make a video game 😂😂😂😂😂
@@kennypowerz1267 If a brain surgery takes 7 years something is seriously wrong.
It's the corporate boss management style at fault. They don't fire people that should obviously be fired because they limp in and suck up, and the people that accept blame, focus on accountability, and strive for true excellence rock the boat. Never underestimate people that have made a career out of looking busy, sucking up, and aren't present when real decisions need to be made and accountability is taken. Also important never to underestimate a manager's laziness.
Quickest way to destroy a game company, become a publicly traded business. You start having to please the shareholders by always showing money coming in.
this pretty much always kills the soul of any company.
From then on the only thing that matters is profit without compromise
@@HoneyBadgerVideosthis is because it is literally illegal to not make a profit when you are traded publicly, you don't make a profit you are breaking a law
@@Reefizerno it's not
@@cqpzg He's misunderstanding "fiduciary duty."
@@Reefizeryou break the law when you promise something you can’t produce and trade money for something you never could have done
The difference between 10 years ago and today is 10 years ago if they told you they would quit if you wrote their name on the whiteboard you would’ve laughed and then wrote their names on the whiteboard. The minute you gave in and told them you weren’t gonna use the whiteboards you lost control of your company.
Love reading psychoanalysis from people who are educated by TH-cam University ™️
@@ДушманКакдела where is he wrong?
@sadp9013 You dont "control" employees like some machiavellian dictator. Your authority stems from your leadership abilities, the federally protected rights of the worker, and company policy. Workers have the right to resign a position at any time. If your employees are threatening to resign their jobs over one of your practice's or behaviors, then that is their lawful right. It really doesn't go deeper than that. Besides possibly bringing your capabilities as a leader in question.
Besides Tim provides almost no detail in his story, it's impossible to say who was "at fault". It's all just Tim's biased reporting after-the-fact. He's clearly got his side, but we're not presented with anyone else's perspective. So I'm not sure how you can even assign "blame" in this situation at all.
I.e. I can easily forsee the whiteboard becoming a huge issue. Here's how; An employee who has an extremely high workload and is getting tasked jobs by his direct manager comes in to work and suddenly sees he's assigned to a different job that is supposedly "urgent" (tim said he used the whiteboard to assign jobs that need to be done that same day or very soon after). Now the employee has to decide between the tasks on the whiteboard and the ones from his supervisors. This would obviously create a confusing and un-productive environment, as general managers are stepping over the heads of department leads and assigning tasks to specific employees without consultation etc. I've seen experienced guys in my line of work quit a job for far less.
Imagine that after not being able to complete the task on the whiteboard( due to high workload or any other reason), you're taken in for a performance evaluation. In the evaluation they use the whiteboard as a weapon against you, denying pay advancement, training, department transfers etc.
I could see how something as simple as a white board can become an extremely toxic thing for a workplace.
It could be that this style of management is exactly responsible for the culture that Tim is railing again. However is impossible to say either way as Tim gives very little actual information to go off of. You can't just take his story at face value and then make up a story like Drewpost19 and myself just did, that's not reality.
This is wayyyy too true. You have to treat these people like children because they mentally are. Children who are trying to squeeze and easy paycheck
The difference between a dev who WANTS to be working on a project and a dev who is there for cash is absolutely massive.
@@daisy9181 stay strong dude
@@daisy9181 FUCKING FACTS
@@daisy9181 sooo right on so many levels, currently doing my last year at university doing a Bsc in game development programming. I could have done a degree in comp sci, economics, accounting or anything else but i decided to do game dev because i've always wanted to be a part of something that will bring joy to people around the world; money is secondary. My degree is mostly group based with us being split into groups of 8-12 people as to try and replicate what a small development team will be. The amount of people the last 2 years that have just done minimum effort, won't meet up because of anxiety and make out they've had the hardest lives is unbelievable. They have a complete lack of social and employability skills and just seem to be at uni just for the sake of it. I have worked almost every week since i was 14, ive worked in teams in sales, wedding catering, bars, and the odd freelance job just to build up employability skills as i know the industry i want to join is competitive and i want every advantage i can get, most the people on my course have never even had a job and seem to take uni just as seriously as secondary school (highschool). I just hope the work i've put in will be enough to land me a job once i graduate.
They are all there for cash. 😂
There's a reason you don't see volunteer game development studios cropping up like you have volunteer fire fighters.
But yes, certainly, there's going to be a lot of workers who feel disenfranchised or disillusioned with their situation and it's going to impact their performance. When we have a culture of crunch, mandatory OT, brutal deadlines etc. what we're doing is treating workers like shit and telling them we don't respect them as human people. Even if they're paid handsomely, crunch and OT still fucks a person up. That's going to result in a labor base that resents management, and to some degree resents the projects themselves. I feel like a significant part of the reason we see so many buggy games launching these days is that the devs are pushed to a point of "Okay, whatever, fuck this, fuck you, here take it and let me sleep".
We need labor unions to maintain a healthy relationship between management and labor. Without them the product is going to suffer, invariably. You're right people need to have passion for their work, and despite anti labor propaganda you've probably been fed (by asmon himself in the past even), unionized workers do actually perform better, because it's easier for them to love their job when their job isn't trying to consume their soul.
I mean being entirely fair like... Everything involved in games development especially to be hired by a AAA studio requires a VERY high level of skill, and you aren't always going to end up getting hired specifically for games you WANT to work on. You may not care about making the cloth folds prettier in the latest NBA 2K game or making the horse brushing minigame in Barbie Horse Adventure but your rent/house payment and bills are due at the end of the month and you have to keep the lights on and food in the fridge somehow.
As a solo dev, I watch this guy every day. His talks are always interesting and inspirational. Glad to see him getting some publicity here.
I have found a lot of his videos worthwhile, enternaining and informative.
During working time in between meetings right ?
Maybe I missed something but the whole part about developers being like "i won't accept having my name marked next to a task when i'm working on it" made absolutely no sense to me. It's not even about accountability like Asmon was trying to say, simpler than that it's basic visibility and tracking. Working on a team where there is no indicator of who is working on what is like... what? twilight zone stuff.
Hell yeah! Do you have any games we can play now?
Not yet unfortunately.. I'm 1 year into development, systems are almost complete and then I need to add enough content to show off. I'll set a reminder to comment here when I have something you guys can look at :)@@DioxideCad
as a Dev, it blows my mind how much a small indie team can accomplish with less funding and manpower. There's no excuse really
What have you developed?
@@PanCotzky currently working on a SCI-FI FPS called “Sifera” but other than that I’ve developed several dozen indie games as a freelancer. I’m not in the AAA scene at all
Because it's concentrated talent. 10 very good Devs can perform much more then 1000 bad devs.
Coding in general is a very weird thing. If you are interested in your craft and have some level of ownership of your code, it feels amazing to beat every challenge that appears and you feel angry at your stupid biology for requiring sleep and rest, like why can't i just keep learning and doing this interesting stuff? But if you don't feel like you have any ownership of the code, and you're just doing some Work Item that got assigned to you, and you don't even know exactly how that will fit in the greater scale of the project, it feels like torture to do 8h/day on something like that. I'd say my productivity is something close to 10% on the latter scenario compared to the former.
passion
I lost a job because I was too efficient. I worked 2 to 3 hours a day and the boss didn't like that. But there was nothing for me to do after that. They hired someone incompetent who take 8 hours to do what I did in 3, and the boss is very happy to see those hours on paper.
rookie mistake.
That makes no sense. A competent boss would just utilize you to do more, not find someone less efficient. That's the opposite of what bosses do.
Most bosses will take a person like you and put everything on your plate which then makes you realize you need to be less efficient unless you want to carry the whole team.
you didn't let them know that you got nothing on your plate to load your time with more work, that's why you were fired
Damn, then you lost cozy job. 5 hours of slacking, 3 of working... You were hired and paid for hour? Or day of work?
Your efficiency will be appreciated by those who deserve it. Like in the working world, find the workspace where you are appreciated, maybe it is a co-op, a mutual aid group, open source community and it'll be well liked.
Online, in this comment thread, you just saved me about 40 minutes of listening to this guy interrupt the developer telling his stories to add nothing of value to the video, mostly just to hear himself talk. I already get the gist of what the developer was saying and through your comments and a few others, I get the point. Thanks for saving me my time.
“Why does it take 4 weeks?”
Destiny developer - “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain”
"And yet you want 4 weeks for what should take a few hours."
😂 so accurate
@@WorldWalker128it's usually along the lines of it only takes a few hours to fix this and this but it breaks a list of 45 things which take for granted the behavior being fixed.
@@ImperialFoolThis is true, I don't know if it was for this bit of code the guy is talking about. But often there are a lot of interconnected parts and by adding something it requires making adjustments in other areas. It's best practice to build in such a way that you minimize these dependencies. But that itself takes time to plan out the implementations properly. If you do it well it makes adding code and making changes pretty fast. You do it poorly and adding or changing things quickly becomes rather nightmarish as the codebase grows and grows.
@@ImperialFool Another non-rare scenario: function X had a bug and function Y, using X, worked around that bug by adjusting what X returned. If you fix X, of course you need to fix Y, but you don't know that, not before the unit tests of Y crap out after fixing X. Assuming there are unit tests.
I worked in 2 video game studios:
1) studio A - excellent simple games, very good generalist programmers who played and loved games
2) studio B - very good AAA games, excellent programmers, most of which never played video games
I stayed 5 1/2 years at Studio A and loved every minute.
I stayed only 3 months at Studio B and soon left.
If you want to do great things, set objectives, make a plan and do it with like minded people.
Great teams with great ideas make great projects.
A game builder is just like a housebuilder. They purposely take as long as they can so they can get paid as much as they can before the project is over. I mean ask anyone who’s had a house built for them the builder will tell them three months at the beginning and then after three months comes, he’ll add another two months and then another two months and he’ll just keep dragging it out because every single month he’s on the books he’s getting paid and he’d rather drag the job out do half assed work, make up fake excuses so that he can keep getting paid a steady paycheck rather than do his best job as fast as he could so he can knock it out and start another job. That’s exactly why these types of people need to be put on a yearly paycheck no matter what and they should not be getting paid by the job, they should be getting paid a base salary every year so that there’s no incentive to go slow.
I was at #1 except the very good generalists programmers that didnt play games and Ive been at the second one where the AAA programmers did play games
Its not about the playing or not playing games.
And similarly, stayed at #1 as long as I could, and left the second quickly
@@nancypotts9877
As someone who has worked in the "House building" industry its usually a company taking as many contract jobs as possible and then send the least amount of workers as possible to finish those jobs. Add to that massive overtime and terrible working conditions and bosses, constant missing of crucial building Material, and staff that gets not trained because they say that those workers might start their own companys and Take away contract work from them. All of that causes badly built expensive houses that take ages to built.
The only one who wins is the boss of the building company who keeps bragging unironicaly that he started building his third house now in italy and tries to convince you that overworking clearly is worth it with your minimum wage job.
And all of that is the norm and not extreme cases.
ha! I KNEW they were CRAWP! if you know your stuff, it shouldn't be THAT bad!
Worked as a consultant for a few game companies
Theres really two archetypes of companies that exist
A close knit team of high performers (sounds like his whiteboard story for fallout)
And
Adult daycares where its all about being nice not actual skill of employees
I've been lucky to always end up in the first type of companies. But my current job is of the second type. I once got an HR 101 meeting for naming a function `getUserOrDie`. "We don't use such words in this company"
@@CethrisThat isn't a good name because what "die" actually means is unclear (throw an exception? return failure code? What?). But that certainly isn't an HR issue either
I’m a Salesforce consultant and this is true across any tech industry. Small Private sector orgs usually have the high performers vs large orgs/Government/state level projects are usually where we do most of our baby sitting and deal with the most whining.
those exist in other areas of software development too, once when I was a web dev I saw a company I worked for go from the first type to the second in real time, it was really sad
it all started with them hiring new HR people to bring "more culture and diversity" to the company
@@Natureboy8383 the worst I've seen was a struggling company was willing to pay for weekly doggy therapy days in office despite bleeding cash.
Go to a damn dog park on your lunch lol
There is rule in business that says, competent people will be promoted above their level of competence, and then be doomed to failure. You see this most in big companies. If you refuse the promotion, the company will see you as hostile rather than reasonable. In government you often see people promoted based on seniority rather than skill and results.
Its why Anakin became Darth Vader
Hah. Or you will never be promoted ever and be forced to take more responsibilities for same pay meanwhile you gonna see all that nepotism around you.
The Peter Principle
Literally Secret Service president
I hate to have to tell you this buddy but nine times out of 10 the seniority people have seniority because they're good and have been good for years and it's the the new golden boys who can't do shit and are too busy hiding behind their safe space and I can't do that job I might hurt myself that don't accomplish anything but get paid way more money.
If you have someone who's been in the business for 25 years and you're paying them $39 an hour does it make a whole lot of sense to bring in somebody who's 20 years younger only has 8 years experience but it's all new experience and you're going to pay him $30 extra an hour and fire the previous guy.
But hey it's okay because he's probably a desiversity hire.
😑🤷♂️
I’ve been a dev for 30+ years. Although I’m not in the gaming industry, I’ve seen the same trend. That said, I must admit my generation had it easy: we used to work at a really low level. Not that many bloated frameworks on which to write our code. Working much closer to the metal allowed us to deal with much less variables. We had much more control. We were also much more “code before, ask questions later”, and that’s probably a big no no today. We worked a lot, but it was passion driven, rarely imposed by management.
Nowadays we have some overly intrusive frameworks that make simple code difficult
I've been a programmer for the last 10 years. Writing new code, especially at lower levels, is usually easier to estimate, and I understand that 20-30 years ago we've had less complex projects with a lot more new code. Today you take some bloated piece of garbage and try to make it work, dealing with legacy crap and questionable design decisions, instead of making your own framework (because it's still more efficient all risks considered).
The industry today is much more experienced in architecture in general (e.g. no newest programming language - Rust, Go, Zig - even _has_ inheritance, though it was the norm and the cornerstone in app design 10-20 years ago with C++/C#/Java/Javascript/etc). I'm asked what SOLID is almost at every job interview, even if the team has no idea how to use it. It's like people has so much to consider it's becoming a time sink in itself.
The funniest part is that all that experience doesn't help in the slightest, people couldn't do proper architecture 20 years ago and they still have no idea today. But instead, we get unhealthy amounts of caution, meetings and overestimates. It often poisons the top management decisions, one company I've talked with was trying to launch a new project, they wanted a crap ton of backend tech for a basically startup-like product, like bruh, you don't have a single user yet (and your product doesn't look like a next big thing), a simple server app written in Node working on a toaster will serve you for years. You're not Netflix, you're not Discord, you don't need k8s (at least now), your first iteration will be thrown away because of changes in the product anyway, just do the thing now and rewrite and improve later when it's really needed. You cannot do everything perfectly from a first try because today's perfect is tomorrow's legacy pile of trash. The mindset of writing a perfect code, unintuitively, wrecks your codebase up because you don't expect change when you should (e.g. making a Christmas tree of inherited objects instead of highly modular design where you (should) know it's gonna change in a few months).
The industry has become a cargo cult.
There's definitely more overhead and bloat now as games get bigger in scope and run on more platforms. If you make the smallest change, did you thoroughly document it, update the entire flow, did you test it on the latest codebase, did you test it on the last latest codebase, are you aware of the six upcoming changes to your dependencies, did you think of what the code could look like two weeks from now, did you submit your change record, did you do a risk analysis, if your manager aware, is his or her manager aware, was it approved by the change group, is the QA team aware, what phase of the moon is it, etc.
@@basicfacekick it has become kinda impossible to know for 100% what a single change is doing all the way down to bare-metal
I'm not a dev so correct me if im wrong, but don't the layers of abstraction make everything so easy chatgpt can do it. I can code some python for shits and giggles, but if I was trying to allocate ram with machine code I would be fucking lost. The benefit with people like you who have experience with machine code and assembler ist you really understand what actually is going on under the abstraction.
Tim Cain is a master of the craft. I could listen to him speak for hours. I'm not in the industry, but I'd love to have this guy for a boss or colleague.
Tim Cain is the godfather of modern RPGs and one of the best game devs of all time. This video just proves that he still knows his stuff after all these years.
@bhbh9939 uh, what?
I bought all the games he made, but not enough other people did. They were all massively underdeveloped brilliant games. Had they been more corporate, maybe he is the head of the biggest games company in the world. The guy has swing an missed for 10 years and more.
@@dotapark The demo for Fallout was the first time anything like that had been released. It is difficult to understand if you were not there to experience the release of those games because it brought forth things that are common place now.
@@emptyempty8310 I think you commented to wrong person maybe?
@@dotapark Oh I see, my mistake! I thought you posted "uh what?" to thorsday121s comment but you were instead replying to a deleted comment.
As a software dev, we do pad estimates, if we think we need 45min for the code, we might ask for half a day just in case, if I were to ask for 4 weeks I'd probably loose the job.
Same thing here with cars, the manufacturer has a specified time for removing and installing parts but they're rarely accurate so we have to add time
Every engineer pads estimates just in case, but 4 weeks to implement an aggro list with 'hit' and 'attack' callbacks already implemented... I mean, I'd be embarrassed. I don't think I'd get that much even to learn a whole new language. xD
As a software dev (NOT game dev) I can tell you that your program is only as modular and easy to work with it if it was designed from the ground up properly. This "all inventory load" BS is bad coding plan and simple. They were given the option to do it the right way or the fast/cheap way and they chose cheap and shitty.
So abandoning your in-house game engines with unreal 5 would be bad right?
tech debt
Basic triple constraint problem. Fast, cheap, or good. Pick two.
That's the problem when some stakeholders suddenly say "I want this". The architects discuss about it for a long time and then some poor fella has to code it. It is really rare that something is planned from start to finish
Totally agree. I deal with this daily. New projects going to production without the required investigation and planning end up being messy and people work (do code) without knowing all the details of the feature they are implementing. You end up with a coding mess and bad optimized systems.
As someone who worked in a collaborative and creative job, this is so real. I would take responsibility for my work and I would put my name on things. What happened was that if anything went wrong even if I had no hand in it, it was put on me. Because everybody else wanted as little responsibility as possible.
Even then, I still took responsibility and tried to take on a leadership role even though I was not in that position. I did it because I had a passion for my work and wanted to see good outcomes. Once I was able to rally some motivated people to work together, the upper management got on my case about exceeding my job. So, these environments are created and creativity is snuffed because it's too much of a "risk". They want what is safe, and they want thier workers to do what is safe.
I had to quit my job because of these issues and myriad of others, but after years of trying to lift up my co-workers only to see them be pushed back down and all the blame be put on me, I just couldn't deal with it anymore. I feel guilty because I know that place is in a worse spot without me, but my mental health was starting to suffer too much.
I hope you are ok and work at a better place now man.
It is super frustrating to see corporations, and some small businesses, push the narrative that quiet quitters, and big projects are the reason we can't have nice things. When they punish people who go above and beyond at the same time.
Seems batshit insane, but it is likely malice or corruption from executives/managers.
The rot starts at the head. It's like how group projects at (public) school are always finished by one person (me)
Management is poison to creatives.
You don't need to feel guilty for anything, your managers were arseholes and probably saw you as a threat to their authority because you dared to show some initiative, half the reason they kept giving you shit would have been to get rid of you anyway. Just be glad you got out before they broke you.
"Got on my case for exceeding my job"
If you hear that from any industry or company you are in it will die. I'm glad my company encourages initiative.
I think part of the problem is people start their career eager to work and they'll get a lot done... But then they start to get continuously burned by bad managers. I've seen so many bright eyed hard charging people get completely destroyed by toxic management and then they turn into those ultra cautious people who want lots of time and everything documented and signed off on because they feel it's the only way to protect themselves and their career from management.
100% how this shit works.
@@KonradGM Not to mention the fact that managers often feel threatened by up and coming people and will start targeting the competition with beurocracy to stagnate or kill their career.
Realest take in the comments. I've done business studies (have the knowledge base and skill set to set up & run a company) and the average manager in 8/10 companies SHOULDN'T be a manager because they don't have the skill- and mindset for it.
To add what you said, in many cases, managers don't even have a clue about how technical things work, they only know about creating projects and following protocols. So managers don't understand how app/game development actually works. I know this because I'm actually being taught to simplify very technical concepts so that upper management can understand it lol
Hmm
As an ex-programmer, been there. Spent more time writing notes for the upper echelons than actually programming.
I was constantly being pulled off task to explain the task to people wanting to show their management that they understood it. Then it takes time to get back into the headspace.
Add to that, that nobody's permitted to revisit previously written common code that becomes ever less fit-for-purpose as the project expands (until much later in the project, if ever.)
It all meant that most of the 'good stuff' was written on my own time (unpaid) and had to be 'presented' to clueless suits for me to have what I needed to do the job.
That's just the tip of the iceberg - one that I'm, thankfully, not standing on any more. 😀
What do you do mowadays? Lol
@@dwinosam I've taken a completely different path now. I spent years doing the full spread of IT jobs but now I do charitable support in a few positions, specialising in helping (representing & empowering) the vulnerable & marginalised. IT-wise, I still occasionally help people study the subject but, mostly, I support people in developing the IT skills they need to connect to family, medical records, or any other quality-of-life activities.
As an engineer I loved that conversation between Scotty and Jordy in engineering where Captain Pickard asks Jordy for a time estimate over coms and Jordy tells the captain 1 hour. Then Scotty asks Jordy how long it will really take and Jordy says 1 hour and Scotty is like, "Dont tell your captain how long it will really take! Tell him 4 hours and when you finish it in an hour you will look like a genius!"
Jordy was a professional and on point.
One of my favorite scenes in TV history.
Always be a Geordi LaForge.
Geordi LaForge didn't work for modern corporate management where venture capitalists run everything@@Mahoney20x6
Ha - I just looked up the clip, and it's incredible! Now, I understand wanting to give yourself a little buffer room regarding deadlines. Asking for a month to code something that *should* take a couple hours is pushing it, but having little wiggle room is nice for life's unplanned b.s. (or Scotty pulling out the crystals and asking questions!).
@@ProfessorPolymer In my experience, something always, _always_ happens that extends the timeline. And the majority of the time it's something external or completely impossible to have planned for. (Scotty might have been overdoing it a little lol)
Id love for you to get this guy on your stream for a lengthy interview. I feel like there is a need for more opinions straight from the source, actual devs (that are not currently actively involved in the game/games that are talked about)
This comment needs an upvote.
lol what? thats not what he does! Actual content that takes effort? Why when he can just react to what others made...Forget about it
@@strahaironscale571work smarter not harder.
I don't understand why people criticize Asmon for react videos. He's worked his way up to have a viewer base that enjoys his commentary. He's done a variety of videos and has found his niche - why be butt-hurt over it? Kudos to him. I admire the fact that he can simply talk about a video and he's respected enough that people listen... And he can make a living doing it! He also uses a part of his wealth to invest back into the gaming world to hopefully make an avenue to circumnavigate the very issues being discussed in this video.
I would love it if he could have an in-person interview, but honestly, this video covered a lot of what would probably be discussed.
@@ashleybennetts3108misersble ppl just want to cry about anything
@@ashleybennetts3108 work smarter not harder doesn’t apply here, he adds nothing to the original video, the only reason he does this is for the viewers to see him watch videos.
Back in 2015 we were all fighting to get rid of reaction content, because it just really doesn’t need to be here, but it is.
I’m just saying what we know already.
Game developers used to be gamers. They aren't anymore.
@smerchh915 gay mers rise up
Eh, I think its the opposite, there's a certain personality that is good at creating content, and if you're like me, my content most likely wouldn't sell
so I think there's no good creators
it used to be like 30 people making it, not 3000.
It was literally Interplay's motto by gamers for gamers
Very rarely is that true. AAA development is just broken.
As a dev, half my fucking job is trying to understand what the fuck some finance bro or nepo baby actually wants me to implement. Project managers, usually at least, tend to be coherent because they've often been devs themselves.
I've been a software dev for large and small companies for over 15 years. He's not wrong, but caution comes from working in larger companies. I HAVE to pad my estimates because I'm CONSTANTLY interrupted by HR meetings, TPS reports, and project managers demanding status updates multiple times a day. How can I possibly get anything done quickly when I rarely have a single day where I have 4 hours of uninterrupted time?
@@Shizlgizl2 min question leading to 30mins of getting back on track lmao. Edit that out, sounds bad
@@ShizlgizlTo be honest. that issue could have been avoided if the dev just said the reason or explained so he could understand instead of walking away. For Tim it is unfathomable for something that he himself knows would take ~45 minutes to do (as he speaks out of experience) and they say it takes me 4 weeks to do. like I understand he would want answers.
but here the thing if you had that white bord and did what it say will you still need thos reports?
Similar situation here. However what we're doing is reducing capacity for each Sprint based on the number of meetings and all other non engineering work stuff. So the tasks are estimated based on how much actual time it needs to be completed but there is smaller number of tasks put in a Sprint.
Are you sure about that
Tim Cain has a wonderful channel. It’s like a proper course on how to make games in
the right way.
Just found it tonight. Gonna go through his catalog tomorrow!
Tim is wonderful, and I hope this brings him more subscribers.
The fact that the father of Fallout said the truth is shocking and i do love his reasoning, he made one of my favorite series, and he is still here in the trenches, making more great things
What's shocking about a father telling how it is, bud?
If nobody want to work why would it be a surprise, Asmon would be homeless without streaming.
Crazy how the fallout games turned from the old world's politics, egos, being something to let go, a warning and a lesson to be learned
To the radio station playing songs about Adam bombs and the world being about patriotism and having fun shooting stuff
@@Plight_ It's because the worst possible thing happened to the franchise, it got bought by bethesda
For an example of how crappy modern gaming programmers have become...
In 1997 both Fallout and Diablo launched.
Diablo was originally going to be a turn based game. The team had a meeting on a Friday and it was decided that it would be better as an action game (click on skeleton, warrior hits skeleton, etc.).
David Brevik wrote ALL THE CODE to convert the game to action based before Monday morning - the devs were playing the first iteration that day.
As a software engineer, I can say this is across the entire field - not just game dev. The "padding" is a real issue but also a necessary one to an extent. 45 minutes of code is just for the coding. That doesn't include the time it takes for those changes to be reviewed by the team, regression tested, sent to QA for testing, etc. Some "small" changes can also have a high likelihood of introducing regressions, meaning those will need more thorough reviewing and testing. Maybe the developers thought he was asking how long for that change to be considered "done". That said, 4 weeks is wild for almost any ticket, let alone a smaller change. I would say max a week for a ticket that size. The accountability issues are a huge problem though. A lot of engineers hide behind the fact that the job is often hybrid or remote work and choose not to take much work on. I work with people who have been with my company for 3 years and still have no idea what the hell they're doing because they only ever agree to take the simplest of tasks and bugs to work on. Others will utilize "pair programming" for every single ticket they work on and essentially wait for a teammate to hand them the solution on a platter. I blame engineering management for not cracking down on this behavior harder.
I've spent ~15 years doing software development (both developer + manager) at both startups & big companies. There's another side to what Timothy is saying:
1) Padding estimates: Devs often have to work with shitty spaghetti codebases, which means it takes a *lot* longer to do an intuitively simple fix. Instead of changing the code in 1 place, they'd have to change it in 5 places. If they forget one place then they introduce a new hard-to-find bug, which itself takes tons of time to find and fix.
Truth is, most devs like to work with clean code. Senior devs like to spend time refactoring, which basically means detangling spaghetti code and making everything nice, neat and compartmentalized. So, why do you have shitty spaghetti codebases? Higher-ups will set some bonus-driven deadline, try to "push the team" super hard, resulting in devs taking shortcuts and neglecting their sleep and mental health which causes them to make more even mistakes. That's how we get large shitty spaghetti codebases.
2) Greed. There's a saying in software development: Pick 2 of 3, fast, cheap, and good. Big corporations churn out AAA titles quickly by hiring shitloads of people. More people means more meetings, more "alignment", more egos and politics. This explains why their games have no soul. But it also explains why Baldur's Gate 3 took six years to develop, three of which were in open beta.
There's a saying in our field: Pick 2 of 3 -- fast, cheap and good. And it turns out that buggy and poorly-written AAA titles still rake in billions. So if you want to get better games, have some self-restraint and don't buy it if it's crap.
"Truth is, most devs like to work with clean code. Senior devs like to spend time refactoring, which basically means detangling spaghetti code and making everything nice, neat and compartmentalized. So, why do you have shitty spaghetti codebases? Higher-ups will set some bonus-driven deadline, try to "push the team" super hard, resulting in devs taking shortcuts and neglecting their sleep and mental health which causes them to make more even mistakes. That's how we get large shitty spaghetti codebases."
Def true. There's also the case of arrogant assholes who say that an app thats maintained by 8000 devs and has 20million lines of code could be cleaned up by 50 engineers and maintained by them. Which is what happened at Twitter. It's basically a way of rationalizing a way of saying "I'm so smart I could do this by myself", even though if they were a junior there's no way that they could refactor 20m/50=400,000 lines of code. That seems like quite the task to me.
And honestly changing the code in 5 different area's is usually around a quadratic increase in difficulty, so its more like 20 times more difficult something than 5 times more difficult.
Pick 2 is my favourite saying for nearly everything. Because it nearly always fits. And I only buy crap when it's on sale.
And I haven't bought a triple-A title on release for nearly two decades.
I always wait until the Beta Phase is over and the full game is released. .. which for modern games means buying the GoTY package including DLC's.
i just learned my lesson dipping my toe back into pc gaming and bought the new cyberpunk update bullshit(on sale) what a piece of shit game, still, its just bad all around, bad acting, bad writing, the game never shuts the fuck up
Additionally on point 1 from another dev (Web, Desktop, DBA): Sales and Marketing not making up their damned minds, You just spent your work-day to jam in a new feature we wanted? Great, now change it, flip it on it's head. Takes a week to declutter the old feature and put in the new feature... Sales and Marketing strike again "Y'know what, we want it to be integrated with this whole new third party feature, and change it around to be more dynamic and reactive, you can do it right?"... three more weeks of gutting the second new feature, jamming in this new integration, working with API keys and making S&M's new ephemeral changes put in place... and suddenly you have the head of marketing demanding your neck because the project's now out of scope by five weeks.
Every time... EVERY TIME... you engage with the customer, never give your first estimate on the spot based on memory alone, if put on the spot, go long and say I'll need to review the requirements, but it could take X time, follow up in the next few hours or the next day in the latest with a revised timeline after reviewing the code.
So, that guy saying 4 weeks, sure they could have been snow-jobbing, or, they could be dealing with several other projects in their pipeline and four weeks was when he could get a fairly inconsequential dev item through their pipeline, or, it could have been an extension of what I've experienced when it becomes shifting goalposts, and the dev is one-burned-twice-shy.
I don't think it was the last item, (Give a long number then revise after review if forced to give a time) given that the team leader had to step in, but I also feel like we're getting only a portion of the puzzle here, he's approaching it from an old-dog perspective. "We did this back in our heyday! Why can't you?" meanwhile security, coding standards, hell graphical codecs have changed dramatically since FO2, also, anyone who's modded games before Skyrim, they would know that the older the game is, the greater nightmare of spaghetti code and black-box systems exist within it.
If memory serves Fallout 2 had two notable mods: The cat launcher which replaced the sprite for the rocket from a rocket launcher with a running cat, and the FO2 "MMO" Russian mod which... while funny as a proof of concept... was little better than everyone just grabbing the nearest SMG and obliterating any player they saw in Shady Sands.
Thank you for your insight. You deserve more of a platform than Asmond haha. I'm about to graduate in school and hoping to break into this field at some point soon
Honestly alot of my fav games are from smaller or indie devs now, this helps me further understand why
*a lot
Most of my favorite games are now indie games. The best ones have more intriguing mechanics, better story, or a more polished experience than AAA games.
@@MrBuns-yi2hkoften not a more polished experience, no. But everything else yes. Biggest pro: not made solely for profit
At a big AAA company, if you have a really talented and motivated gameplay programmer who wants to implement a really cool feature that is outside of the scope of the game or wasn't planned, it will almost certainly be shot down in favor of the tried and tested formula (aka, similarity to previous games from that company). This is simply how it will always work at these companies, shareholders don't care about innovating and they certainly do not want to take risks, they want you to churn out games that are moneymakers first and foremost.
At a small indie studio, if one developer gets a cool idea they can simply run it by the other coders and get to work. There is a lot more trust placed in individual workers than at a big company.
thats why I like Valve, AAA private company doing their thing on their time and with steam keeping the money flowing
still when it takes over 5yrs to make any game..thats too long in my view..previous eras they claimed similar things but managed to speed up development ,this era has so many excuses and games taking 7-8yrs should be deemed unacceptable..
@@jackstraw4222 You’re not gonna get innovation if you don’t have long development times. You need to make up your mind do you want quick games or great games. I’ll be honest I’m fed up of reskins of the same game for every genre. While they can bring COD out yearly and charge people £100 for skins and expansion pass or spend a decade or two making something that could last a decade or two but people cry and they bring broken early access that goes bust
shorter games would be better, cut the time down to 7-10hrs and have good graphics and game-play...to many major games single player drags on the middle and then i dont bother coming back to finish it..
@@handleOfThyyeah, they are soo innovative that they had to add smooth locomotion to half life alyx at the last minute despite it being an established standard over a year prior to it releasing lol.
I'll always hold that game against em,not becuase it was that bad, but becuase of their unwillingness to think outside of their tiny little bubble and ruined what could have been the next great vr fps.
If my boss gives me a job to do at work that should take about 45 minutes, I have about 45 minutes before I have to answer why that job isn't done. That's why it's called work.
Tim's a legend. Created the game that most marked me as a gamer. Fallout 1 and 2.
Well mostly Fallout 1 though, but yeah he is a Legend.
He didn't want to make Fallout 2 and left the team very early in the process, also while disapproving with a number of choices they took (like the temple at the beginning of the game).
Eh, for me it's Arcanum... had no idea he was behind it until now :) ... but yeah. some great great games have something to do with mr. Cain.
@@SloulDesTucs I mean, the temple is probably the worst part of fallout 2
Never even played those and fallout 2 has my favorite game story of all time. It's definitely up there.
Definitely a G amongst gamers
I work at one of Swedens biggest companies and we do almost exactly like he described in the beginning of the video. You get assigned tasks on a timeline and each week we have a big meeting going through it all to see what each person has done, what he/she needs help with etc. And I think it works really good and there’s no toxicity about it, but good conversation revolving issues that arise.
"I work at one of Sweden's biggest companies-"
Bro, say no more, I am so sorry. F.
Really? Then how come there haven’t been any memorable games except maybe Witcher 3 in the past 5 years
So you fucked up Battlefield? Yeah that format is not working mate
Sounds like the structure of the Scandinavian countries, we do just do a debate in a different way.
Owning a task or issue is so fulfilling, especially when you know you have others to help if you need it.
Oh man, as someone who works in an office, i can tell Tim is one of the real ones.
Its the same everywhere; if the leadership doesnt define and live the work culture, their employees will
There's cogs in the machine that move and get those where they need to, and then there's those that don't do much and just clog the machine. Tim was the one that kept everything running smooth.
@@Klouneworks 10/10 going to use this on "as a" posts lmao
Yeah it's so annoying seeing people just blaming the actual dev grunts who build the game as if they're the ones at fault. Management is responsible for everything they do. It is their fault if things are not operating well. In a lot of companies the upper management is full of out of touch morons who barely understand how to run a studio.
Software dev POV: That aggression priority target list; yah. 30-45 minutes should be plenty of time to implement in C or C++, which I guess the original Fallout would have been made with. That said, I've had times with a 4 month backlog of 30 minutes to 16-hour tasks, so sometimes there's miscommunication of how long it will take to make versus when it will be done. Had 3 bosses that kept shuffling what was prioritized and couldn't agree on which tasks should be focused on.
Double the estimate of focused development work because you get disrupted and there will be as much overhead as development time, and you have to include your testing time. This just makes management planning easier and more accurate.
If you don't know how to tackle a task, it may take significantly longer. If you run into some undocumented issues - yes, well, there goes the planning. Borland c++ Builder 3.5 (I think) had a memory leak. It took us months to find out what the problem was, and it was only fixed by upgrading our compiler.
As a software dev, I can confirm most developers in big companies just dont wanna work more than 2h a day
@Sh1ft3r1 "its a generation issue" said literally every generation in recorded human history, not exaggerating
@Sh1ft3r1if it's a generational issue each generation, then it's a human issue
if you are an exec in the company you get labelled as a grapist if you push the developers
6h for me, unless it's extremally boring, not fulfilling task then you are right.
@@plastered_crab if its a generational issue each generation, then it might not be an issue at all
Not bending the knee to corporatism is a big reason Fromsoft games are doing so well. They are chock full of artistic vision and story.
Absolutely. Almost all games people have been praising recently are INDEPENDANT studios or straight up non-American. The only developer from America that is drenched in corporatism, but produces high quality games is Rockstar Games.
Baldur's Gate 3 is NOT American and INDEPENDANT. There is no corporate board telling devs what to do. The corporate boards have no idea what fun gameplay is, but they sure do know how to make an item shop.
I like fromsoft as much as the next guy but it was pretty clear that Elden Ring being open world was them pretty blatantly following AAA trends
@@VGZTeaTime i kinda sorta agree to this, but i kinda chalk that up to their decision. I think whatever FromSoft makes, the publishers they work under understand that they're a company that you take a hands-off approach with and something wonderful gets made. Even if FromSoft decided it though, yeah, open world format sucks way harder than the painstakingly designed and intricate mazes that are the Dark Souls 1 and 2's worlds. Elden Ring and all other open world just-for-the-sake of it games just have so much dead space between major locations, its a dumb gimmick that the public has latched onto.
@@VGZTeaTimecan’t say if they were following trends or not. I’d like to imagine they really just wanted to shake things up a little considering all previous iterations were not open world.
@@VGZTeaTime Their take on open world has their creative stamp all over it though. Take a dozen random open world games and all feel like slight variations of each other in terms of the world design...ie cookie cutter. From's version of Open world in no way look like the others its a game instantly recognizable as standing out different like Zelda is with its version of Open world. I think that is the key differece...there are no shortcuts, it's their vision from start to finish.
Tim is awesome. Not only does he give great insight into game development but he’s also a great story teller. Probably the best channel I’ve seen on TH-cam in years.
Not to mention he made some of the best video games ever to be made!
makes sense, most of the games he spearheaded had amazing stories
The "too many meetings" issue plagues the entire software development industry, not just the game dev sector.
Not just game development, it's a company issue across the board, I've worked at companies where they have meetings to plan the next meeting, it's disgusting
This is a major problem with team bloat that often gets ignored. There’s so many people being hired that you can’t possibly train them all. And you can’t even assign them meaningful work that will teach them skills because there isn’t enough to go around.
The tech industry has this the worst because they have gotten in the practice of hiring people not for how they can use them, but to prevent anyone else from using them
"So many people hired that you can't train them all". This isn't exactly a true statement. You can train everyone correctly if you hired correctly.
Look at a music symposium of over 100 musicians simply picking up a brand new sheet of music they've never seen before and ALL of them playing it perfectly as if they mastered it years ago.
The management sees all resource as equal. They don't realise that some systems take months if not years to be comfortable with.
@@TalZadios you're 100% correct. the issue isn't that it's impossible to train people, it's that whoever is managing the onboarding process is doing a shitty job as well as people who are in a position to train people after that point when they see they aren't doing what they should/don't know as much as they could.
@@TalZadiosWhat a bizarre comparison, sightreading music is a very specific skill that they trained at for years, from high school all the way to post-grad. The software world doesn’t have anything like that
for a project manager it takes one woman to grow a kid in their womb 9 months and 3 women 3 months.
I started working for a very large company once (came in as a senior developer) and was handed a program (a very SIMPLE one) to do a change to it.
The program had about 2000 LOC (lines of code). Blew my mind.
I asked the senior developer, "Who wrote this?" "He doesn't work here any more."
"Good. Because this program should be about 100 LOC." We kind of got in an argument because he didn't want me to re-write it.
"It took that guy a month to write that program. Don't touch it!"
By the end of that day, I handed him a new program, with his changes in it... in about 100 LOC.
Within my first year there I had re-written every program that joker wrote. LMAO
As a former QA tester, it annoyed the hell out of me that certain pieces of the code base were unnecessarily large and seemed to have no standards whatsoever.
If it can be more concise, make it so - if for no other reason than eliminating potential failure points off the top.
@@RighteousJ Don't make it *too* concise, because overly concise and "clever" can win you code golf contests, but will never be readable. How to tell one from the other is what experience brings.
Love ya bud, keep it up.
I don't know much about programming, but I know that if I was making that big of a mistake, I would want to be show how to make it concise and better.
@@MrBuns-yi2hk you'd think.
Man, this hits hard. I am not involved in this industry at all, and am just a lowly warehouse manager, but i've had the kind of mentality from the second story for every job I've had recently. So many times I've overperformed, or my team overperformed and suddenly we are short staffed and struggling. I've gotten into the habit of complaining on behalf of my team, and pushing back, and trying to slow things down to save jobs and my sanity, when all our jobs could have been done fast rather easily. You just cant trust companies or owners to see that without thinking of dollar signs.
Oh yeah. Capitalist companies will always be driven by the profit motive. Short term profit before anything else. The health, well-being and efficiancy of the workers doesn't matter to them. If they can squeeze just a tiny bit more money out of you they will. The workers know their work much better than some suit who only sits on his ass all day counting his money, which is why we need workplace democracy.
Now imagine this is happening in every single industry and you'll get an idea of how absolutely screwed we are
Nice to see Timothy reacted by you, hope this push up his channel. He's a really good guy and has a lot of really interesting videos
There's a reason retro gaming and game emulation have been getting more popular over the last few years.
Say hello to my little Pentium 2.
It's because games today have no soul. They are just money grabs
Quest for Glory VGA edition is a better game than Starfield. Change my mind.
it's always been popular, you're just young and it appears to you that it got popular right when you first got into it. I had multiple classmates in elementary school emulating japanese pokemon gold&silver before they came out in the US, and i'm sure it was a thing well before I found out about it
@@Kowalskithegreat i'm having trouble believing that a bunch of elementary kids know what emulation is. we're talking about kids that are 5-10 years old here lol. maybe kids were just smarter back then but idk.
Big thing I miss about 90s early 2000s gaming is companies took big risks and made all sorts of game no matter how weird they were.
I mean they still do pretty much, you are the one who forced himself to follow the same few old companies bro
@@GreatRusio Nope. Nowadays it's either AAA no risk Boring crap or Good indie games that could be even better with enough funding. Another difference is games didn't require as large of teams or millions of dollars to make then either.
@@GreatRusio Cap. Big Cap
@@GreatRusio My face when I mostly play indie games
Check out itch
Devs "give us feedback, but anything negative we won't consider"
As a senior software dev in a large corporation I've been pulled aside and scolded by managers for undercutting their estimates - when I should realistically be the authority on what actually needs done to complete the task. It really takes the wind out your sails, to the point that I'm now I'm very much the "fuck it I guess it'll take 4 weeks" sort of developer for now.
glad someone is pointing this out, I need to hear from his employees as well for counter perspective. This sounds a bit like the manager/the boss imagined something and how they want it and its just a pie in the sky or are lying.
Had that happen, bosses lie all the time
Why do they care? Is it job security or what?
I swear 90% of app/software dev's saw that Star Trek episode with Scotty saying you should double your estimates to always "over deliver" and went "oh my gods that genius" rather then realising it's toxic behaviour that fucks over your entire team. But yeah I've had to swallow the same pill in my office and always add an extra arbitrary amount of time to anything I'm asked to estimate in order to "play the game".
As a product owner, I'm sorry you have to experience this. It's the job of the PO to protect the developers, and work on time estimates.
@@loopinglouie9709 My product owner is great and never tries to overestimate, have people nothing to do or make them do additional hours to finish exactly on time. It's not black or white.
As a software dev, the 2nd story is something that manifests in many teams, many times. There is almost always a senior dev that can do things 5-10x faster than anyone else, and that person is always the busiest on the team. The problem is when that senior dev is working on a large enough product, they simply cannot do everything, and they are forced to delegate to new hires or other junior members that cannot perform at that level.
true, but honestly what he asked for was one of the most basic requests I have ever heard. I am still in my fourth year of university, and I think I could probably do it in an hour or two. The absolute worst-case scenario is that it takes less than 3 and definitely not 2-4 weeks. I can see how this can happen tho. throughout my university education, I have encountered a lot of people who cheat the system. they will end up copying assignments, working in groups when it's an individual project, etc. I even got offered a deal with one of these guys to do every assignment in a course for $500 per assignment(there were like 8 in that class). so imagine what happens to a person who has gone through their entire university journey paying for assignments when they get to the stage of going into career fields. this is why it is important that you properly give them technical interviews when you are looking at potential hires.
@@toshibiswas3115 i doesn't matter how basic a request is. teams plan their work for a given period in advance with tasks that may have dependencies. you want something done fast, introduce it into the planning not pester some dev individually. It's also not about how long the task itself takes, but when it can be done. If I have one hour of time to do your one hour task in two weeks from now, it will be finished in two weeks. that doesn't mean i'm working on it for two weeks.
Ah yes, the infamous curse of the competent.
The people who invest the most in become good professionals and good at their career always get asked to do the hard stuff while the tier of people below does what they need to do to skate by with mediocre work that isn't challenging.
It's a rich get richer situation for her. The most knowledge heavy employees continue to gain more knowledge while the employees that keep getting assigned first week of work type projects stay the same skill level for years.
The problem is exacerbated by project managers who just want to push work out the door and they invest no time in challenging their team members who need it the most.
@@velorama-xyou're assuming that's the situation that's happened in the story the dev in this video told, but you don't know that, you're just speculating
As a senior dev I think I've developed a PTSD response to MS Teams ringtone.
This is what happens in every industry. The first generations are always those who have extreme passion, talent and willpower all together. Because if they didn't, they'd either be in other industries instead of this uncertain one, or fail in pushing through the difficult and unknown path. They're the vanguard, and they will take the hardships head on.
Then the industry takes form, investments are poured in, and things become relatively more safe and reliable. Jobs become just jobs, instead of and expression of love and passion, and therefor it attracts those who just want to do a job. The desire to create something outstanding diminishes over time and generations (at least the fraction of total people) and most of employees would be content by just getting payed, no matter what kind/quality of product they end up producing. In the end, it becomes much rarer to see a collective strong will to create something genuinely great.
God i will miss kojima and Nintendo legends, not everyone lives forever but I wish some people could 😢
Best comment
100% correct most people work today because it pays well not because they love the job
It's why Indie games in EA seem to get so much traction and hype behind them.
Look at Ark Survival Evolved, Valheim, and even Dark and Darker.
Passion projects that MANY people piled behind. Valheim is the weakest of them, but just looking at steam charts, they still get over 20k concurrent players some days.
Ark is about to be sunset for their new version, and their servers are still getting 20k-60k concurrent depending on the time of day.
I really wish we could get back the AAA studios grind of passion. Morrowind is a prime example. Bethesda was going to go under if the game failed, and so they went hard with different mechanics and ideas, and it paid off. Every single game after Morrowind has been a downgrade from the previous entry.
@@MGrey-qb5xz kojima is overrated af, if your game has more hours of cutscenes than of gameplay you need to start asking questions
Towards the end of the video when he was talking about managers and about having job specific knowledge. I’m very glad someone else is talking about this. In the past the way things kinda worked was those who went to college would become the ‘manager class’ they would be educated about the world and be able to teach themselves things effectively. This is parallel to the military where enlisted members are uneducated while officers are college educated. Essentially, anyone with a college degree could learn the job in an appropriate amount of time and be able to effectively manage it. This is simply not the case anymore ESPECIALLY with technology related jobs. I have personally experienced having a manager that knows absolutely nothing about how to actually do the job of the people they are managing. I have even been told that managers don’t need any experience with what they are managing at all. I’m fully confident that this is the root cause of many work place issues. If a person cannot understand the problem at hand, because they do not know what is involved in resolving it, that person has no place leading the people who do have that knowledge. For a person to be in that position, I would not consider that a manger, I would consider that nothing more than a middle man. Especially in environments where the workers are highly educated like engineering. The engineering manager might not be an engineer themselves and thus will not fully understand the nature of the happenings of their team. If someone is in that position it is their DUTY to try their hardest to learn the job that their subordinates do in an attempt to effectively and efficiently make the decisions for that team of people. This is also why many teams have a “manager” and a technical lead, effectively taking away absolute power, which naturally works better.
Estimate padding is very much an unintended consequence of KPI driven production. KPIs are supposed to be used to indicate that there is a failure or bottleneck, which then needs to be fixed. Eventually, this often becomes not about fixing the root of the problem but about meeting the metrics. Therefore, people engage in estimate padding: treating the symptom rather than the disease.
The rats are ALWAYS good with metrics.
Absolutely, that's precisely the problem
KPIs are death
@@krakca they aren't necessarily bad. They are a tool. If management does not understand how to use that tool, it does harm.
@@highadmiralbittenfield9689 bad indicators create wrong incentives and thats been pretty much the majority of what ive seen.
Regarding the 2nd story, there's a huge problem in the software development industry as a whole where devs grossly overestimate how long a coding task will take. A couple reasons why is that large software projects are complex, which makes underestimating the task really easy, so to counter act that they double or triple what they think it will take. Which most of the time is way too much but the devs would rather be safe than sorry.
Most managers in software development don't know how to code at all. Tthey don't know how long things take, so they just have to take the devs word for it. Also agile (scrum) makes it worse by demanding consistency over productivity. So in agile (scrum) you're suppose to plan out the entire sprint ahead of time, so scrum masters encourage you to overestimate tasks to ensure everything gets done by the end of the sprint. That way the scrum masters can look good in front of their boss by saying "see we got 100% of our tasks done, look how good we are". Meanwhile the team was only working at 50% capacity.
Yup, learned real quick in the industry that "under promise, over deliver" way better than "over promise, under deliver". Especially since there's very little incentive to finishing my work faster.
It was the same when I worked in manufacturing. If a part was on back order and I literally couldn't complete something until the part got delivered, it was still somehow my fault for not meeting the deadline. You've gotta cover your ass, and that means vastly overestimating time requirements just in case.
Sounds like these people dont know what scrum is at all. Your descriptions sounds like the Waterfall approach
id rather have people work at half capacity every now and then, then push people to work overtime until they burn out.
companies like blizzard, bethesda etc. can easily afford to employ double the devs to get the work done.
when shit hits the fan its always because the plans are made with everyone working at 100%, no unforseen problems, noone getting sick etc.
over the course of years and many projects you probably do much better by having people chill most of the time and only work at 100% when its absolutely needed.
I am always a software developer and that is future. But I would overestimate a timeline especially if I have never done it before but if someone can explain it to me. I will just try to do as quickly as possible. So overestimate to then over delivery if you don't know what to do but if I am speaking to someone who is a programmer and willing to guide me I will just do it and see what happens
Padding work time is how the entire corporate system operates. Task going to take you 2 hours? Give me a week. Task going to require multiple days of work? I’ll have it ready a month out. This is one of the huge disparities between blue and white collar jobs. An hourly worker is literally doing their job the entire shift. White collar worker does 2 hours of work in a 9 hour day.
You nailed it.
Almost like they pointed this out decades ago with a little known indie movie…Office Space 😂
I think ultimately it's an issue of mandatory 40 hour work week. If what you're assigned to do can be done in 10 hours but you're stuck in the office for 40 hours a week anyway where's the incentive to do your job in a timely manner?
@@Moonmi747 You hit the nail on the head there. I remember being baffled by this when I got out of school and first started working. Now I am doing just like everybody else.
Me, the hourly paid engineer 😅. Honestly I like it more, I work the same hours but I get paid OT or can bank OT for vacation.
They work in bi-weekly sprints = 80h.
4h sprint planning.
2h hours story point voting
4h backlog refinement
4h sprint review
2h sprint retrospective
10x 30 min = 5h dailys
21h Just for the overhead of the sprint.
Many other meetings I ommit here, like team meetings, brainstorming, demos, discussions in delivery metrics, etc...
The rest of the time is for unit testing, merge reviews or simply mangling stuff on the Jira board, documentation, etc...
There is hardly any time to develop anything.
As someone working outside of game dev I can say this responsibility avoidance is quite common. Part of the problem is that a lot of the time people are working on a bunch extra work that's not part of their normal responsibilities so people get trained to avoid responsibility. Like you get assigned a simple configuration or coding task and in the middle of it you find out there's 5 things that were broken so now ya got to do 6 tasks.
True. The further down the design chain a job is, the more crap rolls downhill; never to be rolled back uphill as the offenders are working on (and breaking) something else.
It's the same in all sectors, American corporate culture is about middle manager bloat and insufficient staffing for the actual work, along with EXTREME witchhunts whenever anything goes wrong (because it CANT be the fault of management, see CDPR's failures). This guy doesn't get it, even as he acknowledges that corporations treat games like nothing but pure projects with no passion or art acceptable, and blames the guys in the trenches for that. It's hair-pulling
Then the one guy that willing takes the blame or had it pinned on him gets canned.
And that was the only guy working.
Need an upper management that understands the capabilities of the project and constraints, and is willing to keep problems down-low&private, away from boiling off in the head of the coder or dev that has already enough in his head to worry about. A difference in what Frian Bargo would have done and what modern girlboss execs do where the blame is still on the devs, while the execs only get the praise. (not easy to do in todays social media climate)
There is more pretense put in protecting your social image and keeping up appearances as a company than in actually finding passion, pride and focus in your work.
Keep the novel quantity rolling while delivering the "same game everytime" &reviews are not out yet- don''t be a fool to look in the distance or trying to impress with quality.
As a developer it's really disappointing that he put the blame on developers, and my fear is people who don't know anything about coding will pile up on us. 99 times out of 100 when a manager tells me it only takes 30 minutes, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Changing a stable version can have effects in so many unexpected ways and you have to check for all that. Logic problems aren't the ones that take time, it's the technology problem. Sometimes what they want takes a lot of reading and research.
I work in industrial controls and the same lack of accountability is rampant here too. At this point, being accountable, having a good work ethic, and being competent in your field is essentially a super power.
It's also a massive liability if you don't have any access to management, and you're in an industry known for job purges on a cycle.
@@TheGoodColonelNo, it is not. I’ve worked non-stop since I was 13 years old (40 now) when I got my first job shoveling snow, mowing grass, and emptying trash cans for a group of churches.
Any worker that shows competency, reliability, and ambition always rises. Maybe not at the job they have now, but the next one. Maybe not in the career field they have now, but the next one. Always, every time.
Now as a business owner myself with 46 employees, you can bet your ass I do whatever is in my power to keep good employees. I’ve had employees come into my office and say they are putting in their two weeks because they can’t work the hours they have now, and they left my office with new hours and a raise. I’ve given employees who have a long commute vouchers for apartments, gas cards, or a company vehicle. I’ve created positions to promote good workers who ask for more responsibility, and find them more challenging work.
By the same token, if you’re not here to work hard, the exit is right over there.
When someone is a good worker, it shines through the haze of bullshit and lies. It’s obvious to anyone who even spends a day with a good worker. They’re going to succeed, somewhere, somehow.
@@TheGoodColonel Being bad at your job is WAAAAAAY more of a liability during layoff season than being good at it.
@@XOmniverse being an absolutely mediocre person with no blame to your name will save you more times than having your name everywhere on some wins and some losses.
@@TheSpicyLeg ok but that does not translate at all in a corporate environnement unless you're in sales. And even then, the good salesmen in corp usually stay at one place 2 years before moving on to a better pay somewhere else. Corporations reward mediocrity now. Putting your name out makes you a target, even if you do good.
Nearly all your hot takes are pretty damn spot on and I've been a Manufacturing Engineer and Project Engineer in Aerospace for most of my 20 year career. The most toxic part of work is often your reaction to embarrassment, admitting inability or skill gaps and pointing out others to simply try and move the bar and do your job. In the most toxic companies, your most talented go getters that are getting things done, being real and serious, can and will be pulled down by others and stacked on by bosses bc they know who to go to. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And if you are actually just working hard and don't add fluff to the way you talk and add super personable conversation to some of these lazy people that seemingly have a ton of extra time on their hands, you are now the toxic person... . Enter Layoff and contractor culture is here to stay.
Yep, I became an expert in my embedded communications engineering job in 2 years. Now I'm laid off and I have to leave my global team without the knowledge I provided. But the fluffer that barely worked is staying. Hm.
I ross d my engineering degree in the trash and walked out when I found the custodians made more money per hour and had medical insurance (i didn't)
Engineering is a dead profession in the USA. Offshoring, outsourcing, h1b cheap indentured labor.
Constant layoffs, no job security, crazy long hours, absurdly low pay.
I told my boss I made more delivering pizza in college than I did as an Engineer!
The most toxic part of work is people embarrassing coworkers, harassing them for perceived shortcomings or "skill gaps," etc.
That's why people don't want accountability. Employees have learned, over time, that "accountability" means that the employees take 100% of the blame, while managers take 100% of the praise and rewards.
@@DeadCat-42 so you would say no way get an engineering degree?
If you want to learn engineering great, if you want a job , good luck!..
less than %10 of US born engineers work in engineering!!!
wages for engineers in the USA have declined steadily for 50 years! @@origanev1986
In a small team I can definitely give estimates on a simple feature like "will be done before lunch". But working in a big team/company I definitely never give estimates like "just a couple hours" and I multiply everything by 1.5 because I know there will be obstacle along the way, e.g. someone else fucking up, someone else actively interfering with what I'm doing, or the CI going down. That's just the reality
I also experience the same thing he mentions in his 3rd story all the time. People think any sort of excited conversation is frightening or creating an uncomfortable scene. God forbid there's a friendly debate or everyone needs to go on stress leave for the next week.
The fact that they literally said it's scary cuz it sounds like mommy and daddy are having a fight is hysterical. That's the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from someone trying to make fun of them, FFS 😂
@@LeXofLeviafan Very childish to not see the adult truth behind the statement. If you're sounding like mommy and daddy arguing, you shouldnt be worried about who amongst the staff thinks you're mommy or who thinks you're daddy. Holy shit what a bad leader.
The truth is most likely that those people were so tired of hearing 2 grown men argue like children about a simple topic that they tried to say something that would stop the annoying shit while also not causing much more tension. But people breathe and live off their ego and cant think outside of their own illusions for 2 seconds.
@@FainTMako …You're talking about yourself, right? Because you're the one with an illusion you're projecting on others "because you have an adult truth to tell". (And projecting _hard_ , considering how you're ignoring the actual account of events entirely… or maybe you're simply one of those guys and are being defensive here - that's hardly any better though.)
The man in the video was pretty clear about it being simply a case of a discussion getting slightly louder than casual talk, and those snowflakes being unable to tolerate existence of that much sound in their general presence - note how _absolutely no one else_ had any issue with it for _three decades_ before those wusses started complaining (and others _still_ having no issue with it, it's only the new guys who were getting "triggered" at those discussions… and the "mommy-daddy" thing was their own words, which makes it pretty clear they've been coddled so much throughout their lives that their parents' marital arguments were literally their only exposure to humans talking louder than one would speak in a nursery).
@@FainTMako What's so tiring about hearing people talking about their *job* at *their* workplace?
@@FainTMakoGod forbid someone being passionate about something
This guy totally gets it. It feels good to hear this from someone who knows what it's like to make a game
But he doesn't get it, he identifies the problem that corporations have become hyper-profit-focused to the expense of all else, and . Yeah it's game developers fault that venture capitalists expect a 2:1 return minimum or they consider everything a failure. Give me a break.
@@davidace7514 4 Weeks for basic code is too much. Yes, companies treat their workers like trash, but being unable to make simple code in at least a week is just sad. There needs to be a balance to it.
@@davidace7514 VC's are more like 10:1 kinda people. No, that's not hyperbole.
@@oscargonzalez347 Working conditions drastically affect people no matter how skilled they are. How do you think cyberpunk flopped? Rushed to meet the deadline and crunched on the last few weeks before release thus resulting in the shit game we have now (drastically better than launch but still not what was promised)
@@oscargonzalez347 Not being able to fix a bug from hell is not sad. Try it yourself. Let me present you with a codebase of 100k lines, fix it.
Some bugs are easy, some are not.
If the company motto is "We don't do comments" and "Fail fast", then basically you'll want to be an absolute veteran and you better know the tooling in and out.
I did years of my own coding, then suffered through other people's code. It was not quite as bad as I initially felt, but it was pretty bad nonetheless. Weird stuff that made no sense, even tho I understood the functionality of the software in-depth. Strange variable names, strange function names.
I would fix a bug in 5 min, 5 days or never. Several people were just trying to prevent total disaster.
There was one particular bug that was just not easy to fix.
There are so many layers of code, 4 weeks is not necessarily unrealistic.
At some point, It's like hacking a nuclear bomb to implode instead of explode.
I mean, if the underlying code is all shit, total garbage, then you better have an AMAZING mind to fix anything at any time within 24 hours.
But yea, if you write your OWN codebase from scratch, you will know the ins and outs, including any limitations of the libraries you picked, etc. But for someone else to master your codebase to the same extent as yourself, could take months and may be far harder. Esp. if you didn't write any goddamn comments.
Just be glad it runs at all, it's a surprise anything runs.
For those interested, Scorpia and Desslock were legendary computer game reviewers in the Golden Age of CGW and PC Gamer in the 1980s thru 90s. respectively. Scorpia was especially admired/feared - her review of Ultima 8 (Pagan) was one of the most brutal ever published about a major title up to that point in any magazine.
Miss reading those two reviewers...peak gaming journalism at its finest back then. Plus Tim Cain is still amazing..Fallout 1 and 2 to this day destroy the new Fallout games on just pure comedic writing, easter eggs, and depth.
@@vjmtzBethesda Fallout games were all sub par Fallout games that were more like parodies than sequels. I liked Fallout 3, but it always bothered me that after 200 years no one bothered to sweep up broken glass. Actually, kind of sounds like modern game devs.
@@vjmtz I was surprised when I learned that majority of the people genuinely enjoyed Fallout 3. I thought it was a mediocre game, didn't know much about international gaming communities back then.
When I first played Fallout 3, I thought it was an Oblivion mod. FO1 and 2 are far more superior in term of writing and players freedom. With the rise of BG3 and Pathfinder I hope we can get a true cRPG Fallout game again.
Huh
I’m a game programmer who has been working on games for 20 years. Modern programmers in the AAA games industry are all the spawn of bad teaching when programmers are taught by those who can’t for generation after generation. Programmers who are actually competent don’t get interviews because they refuse to pay to get a degree from a program taught by people like that. Myself, I’ve worked on my own games and lived that way for the last decade because of that rather than go work for a company filled with these programmers.
Tim has some fantastic videos, "The True Purpose of Vaults in Fallout" is a great one.
The enclave spaceship thing was crazy
Tim Cain has the best channel on youtube. The guy is an encyclopedia on game design.
Imagine going to work and be expected to do some actual work.
Padding estimates is always smart.
I've worked as an entrepreneur and maybe estimated that I can d something in 1 month. I would always say 2 months. Because first of all Im usually only getting paid for the time I proposed as an estimate. Unforeseen circumstances can always show up and if I finish the project earlier than my estimate they will only be happy and we have time to work on improvements.
Its mostly that 'easy' changes look easy on your side, but as the game is SO big and SO frankensteined together you can never be sure that what you're doing won't mess with someone elses code, break a plot line or add a bug. And that causes fear and uncertainty, so people want to be more and more careful. In a competent well run team with good planning and communication its usually not a problem, but if you have several Devs, each coding in their own dumbass way you get problems. add in stupid time constraints and people rushing and not talking and stuff goes sideways far too easily
That is a great reason of why to implement testing. Some people find writing them boring, but they are essential for large scale development.
Agree a lot with your view on strict time constraints on the end product is also not smart. As potential backlash of brand name might “have a higher cost” than “adding two months to development”.
Having time constraints during development (as long as they are ok and don’t only result in stress) is nice to be able to follow a plan and boost moral
@@iTzHuGzz Too many publishers want to just rush the alpha or pre-alpha release out the door to get the money in and then 'fix it in patch 1' , ignoring the damage it'll do to the game studios reputation
@@ZannNewman my thought as well. It's a general problem in echonomy meets development. There must be a balance. You can't spend 10 years fine tuning, but making a game you're releasing playable and enjoyable is essential for brand name, and even long term success for the product.
He's talking about creating a modular structure, there isn't going to be so much interface that you have no idea what's going to happen unless your team is full of brain dead partial art asset devs who can't actually program but rely on premade systems
@@Nikotheleepic see, the problem is more people who CAN program enough to be dangerous as they can add/change stuff the script users cant
"No-one want's to take accountability anymore" In my experience, this has to do, with people, especially bosses, not being able (or willing) anymore, to differentiate between things someone could have changed and things outside of your grasp. If you take the responsibility to many people feel invited to dump all blame onto you, regardless of whether it's actually your doing or not! In this toxic environment, of course no one will ever step forward an their own accord!
more worst. project manager will tell you implement it's stupid idea that we knew won't works in the first place. and we have wasting time to testing out it's stupid solution that we all knew it's gonna fail 100%.
Those commas, brah. 😂
B.S. Bosses have not changed. But a whole lot of software devs are not actually good at their job and look for every possible excuse to hide that fact and do less
I experience the younger generation as being heavily avoidant of personal responsibility.
As someone who has done men’s work for the past 6 years, accountability is hard for everyone.
@@J.B.1982 "men's work" wtf is that? Accountability is not a gendered trait, accountability applies to everyone.
I am a more recent software engineer (graduated in 2019, started working professionally in 2020). In this video Tim Cain just described what I've been frustrated about in both of my jobs. Anytime I make a mistake or didn't think about an estimate correctly I'm always up front about the idea I have, how to execute it, and feel very comfortable saying "Yah that bug/mistake is on me". However, if you try to ask 90-95% developers just what their though process was or why something happened it's immediately "We shouldn't be blaming each other, we shouldn't me asking how we're executing, every idea is a good idea". In the industry people are encouraged to avoid accountability and accept the idea of "even if the code is horrible, as long as nobody notices when they're quickly testing it - it's good to go".
My advice if you make a mistake, ask to fix it as soon as you learn about it. Be proactive. If someone think there's a problem with your changes/codes, verify it asap. Good project managers and your good programmer peers will notice it: that guy cares. Making mistakes/bugs in itself it not a big deal, the best do them, but you need to deal with them fast. Otherwise it just means you are lazy, careless and untrustworthy.
@@madjoe8622 Funny enough, that's what I do. Since I know my code, once a bug is pointed out I fix it very fast. The problem is the other way around - the other devs can't fix it as sometimes the code is just a barely surviving cob web. Then the tech lead/project manager assigns me to fix their mistakes as "mistakes happen, since it's too complex for them to fix, we'll need you to fix this". Sometimes transforming 500+ lines of code to 10 lines.
You're pretty much describing human nature, it's hard to take accountability for most people, especially if you're expected to be right 100% of the time with no bugs or mistakes (or get scolded or worse if you're not).
Not every work environment allows people to make mistakes, or has propper testing in place. If you feel you're able to take accountability for mistakes I'd say you landed a pretty decent job, at least on that front. I've been developping for a decade now, and I've had both situations, trust me it's hard to see people who make a mistake not own up or even pass blame not getting any repercussion whilst people who do hold themselves accountable get scolded (even for small issues that can be solved in an hour or so). I still hold myself accountable, buying cake for the team when I break builds, even though I'm usually the one code reviewing and it's easy for me to hide that shit but I do so because of decent management who doesn't scold people for making a mistake, and has adequate testing in place.
😊
We do the same in my team. We are a small team of 5 people but we feel responsible as a whole. I just come up front to say what i did wrong and ussualy we joke about it. And just get it fixed. I have been programming for 14 years from which 3 in a company, after i graduated in IT. Anyways we know each other skills its not like we do it on purpose. And to be honest, right now in our country its really hard to find developers that are good.
You hit some solid points but the real cause is methodology. What I mean is when a company goes public, that is to say they are now on NASDAQ, there is a well-established road-map of how to deal with all things via committee. Procedures are written, dissidents are "removed", and power becomes absolute at the positions closest to the investors. It happened to my company, it happens to all companies not privately owned, and even then it's up to the morals of the owner (Gabe being a great example of the sane side).
The problem is vast, but here's something I noticed. A lot of times in legacy systems, a single person or a small team will write most of the code. More often than not, it was terrible to look at, disorganized and nasty, but it worked. When something went wrong, the developer, who has an intimate understanding of the system, would know where to go and add more crappy code. These days, there's less disorganized code, but also less comprehension and responsibility. Now, you have leads, which could be the same type of people who made the messy but functional code, who are building teams of developers lists of requirements based on their understanding of building systems. The problem with that is that it is difficult to know what kind of issues you're going to face without writing the code yourself. So when a behavior occurs that is not expected, but the requirements are met... well it's not the programmer's fault and someone will have to figure out how to fix it later. Depending on the team, this may not be a problem. Bugs can be gathered and kept track of and fixed later. But it helps if your developers notice flaws and work to improve the existing requirements. If that doesn't happen, you get more organized but less functional code.
I think this is the most level-headed take. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that games nowadays are way more complex than they used to be, so bugs are often the fault of multiple systems not working well together and not just the fault of a single person. Outside of that, most beloved games are incredibly slapdash and buggy, but the core gameplay is decent enough people are willing to overlook them.
i dont know how much that particularly contributes to the issues in games, but its very noticable even to me as a CNC programmer. Its a type of programming which requires 100% perfection, as you can ruin thousands of dollars of material and work hours, but its not a technically difficult programming language at all. Its actually extremely simple BECAUSE of how important it is to get right, and i still sometimes struggle when reading others work. Depending on what im working on my handwritten programs can look very ugly, but i know what every single line does, and can get it perfect. If someone else tried to read it, even though it worked, they might struggle just because its so unrefined. This could lead to them not understand what the program does, and makes adding to it a mess.
I hate to think how exponentially difficult that is in software and gaming development, where the programming languages are 1000x more complicated. Id be interested in seeing the owner of larian discuss things like this, about the work environment for the programming and decision making in their games. They seem to only employ people who genuinely love the development process and who love games, something that seems to be lacking in other companies.
@@declancampbell1277 Ah yeah that makes sense. For what it's worth, software often doesn't need to consider the physical aspects of how code executes so you have that on software devs.
That said operating environment matters a lot for code execution too, which is why a lot of industrial devices run embedded OSes and have specific hardware requirements. The most stable video games I own are on imported modern arcade cabinets, which run on embedded windows and all cabinets running this game have the exact same CPU, GPU, motherboard, PSU, sound card, and I/O card. One of them expects to run at a very specific framerate 3 decimal digits out, but you don't have to worry about OS variants or stray services introducing a bit of lag like with normal consumer installs so I have the game on for 6 days straight at times.
I'm responsible for between 50 and 100% of the codebase for multiple projects at my company, as a senior I try to spend as much downtime refactoring stuff as possible, commenting key points so if a junior needs to touch or use something they can understand it, and just in general improving the messes that I've had to write to cater to the whims of management, POs, customers and higher ups.
Every feature that I've worked on without external "input" works great and exactly as needed, is extensible, documented and easy to implement. Every feature that I've had to do following the whims of non-technical people is a mess, it's buggy, full of patches, spaghetti and worse. Why? Because "requirements" change constantly, delivery dates are not respected, complexity is ignored and unless I staunchly say no directly they try to cram more and more crap to every delivery.
As things are more bloated and messed, they become harder to untangle and refactor later on.
What takes me 15 to 30 minutes to add to one of the systems I've built from the ground up on my own, can take hours or days on systems that have had multiple passes of changes.
Rewriting something three times in its entirety in the last three months pissed me off, now I pad estimates, do the bare minimum and only really put effort into things that I've doing on my own. There is no point it trying to write clean, maintainable code if I will be forced to shit it up to cram some feature or change to it at the last minute.
When higher ups tell you "just patch it now and we'll fix it later" routinely, and it never gets fixed because "it already works don't touch it" and then it becomes "this is such a simple, minor change, why does it takes days and is buggy" you end up with the fuck it mindset.
Not my problem. Ask for crap, get crap.
This happens at most places, most senior developers I know, especially those more senior than me are even more cynical.
There's a reason why, and it's not lazyness.
IMO, a lot of what Tim mentions in the first part of the video is a symptom of Agile development as implemented in a corporate environment. Meetings all day every day, and padded estimates (because if you end up going over your "estimate" you are absolutely crucified) are all endemic to poorly implemented Agile, which is unfortunately the norm in most development houses today.
We were forced to adopt scrum at work. My team isn't co-located, and we're not all developers, so we're working on different things all the time. But a middle manager a few steps up the ladder went to an agile conference, and read a book about how it makes teams more efficient. So now we have planning sessions, retros, and daily standups in our team, talking about tasks that are actionable by only 1/4 to 1/3 of the team. It's an insane waste of time that breaks us out of the flow every single day. We've even asked if we can split the team into "sub-teams" with our own stand-ups so that we don't waste the time of the people who are not devs, and so that we can actually go into some detail discussing the tasks we're working on, but they won't let us.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure scrum can work really well in the correct setting. But the way our team is organised is NOT the correct setting.
This is the joke. "Everybody USES Agile. Nobody DOES Agile."
@@timothyblazer1749 To be fair, I think at least my job does Agile decently. I have a scrum meeting every morning with specifically the more experienced dev I work with, just a minute of updates followed by however long we need to discuss practical issues. Big team estimation meeting at the start of every sprint, put the estimation results up on Jira. I honestly can't imagine what the hell everyone else is doing to mess up something this basic. The senior devs (I'm pretty fresh out of college) usually estimate longer than me, but they're also always right, so.
@@SeventhSolar It's not Agile unless the teams themselves control the pace of the work. That's where it always fails. You end up with management insisting on certain deadlines ( ignoring the costs voted on by the teams), or on certain work being prioritized, or on injecting work against the team's wishes.
In real Agile, management only can vote on the business objectives. They can't interfere with the technical work. At all. That includes PMs. And POs.
I agree with this for the most part. Agile is cancer, but there's not a better alternative for large teams that need to do iterative work.
it's fundamentally a management problem, it exists in every industry, global wise, doesn't matter if you are in third-world country or first-world country, doesn't matter if your company is small or big, as long as you're running a company you're gonna face this "people issue". Unfortunately, after running a company myself for 8 years now, i've learnt the hard way that firing people alone won't solve the problem at all, the management style has to change, company culture has to change, rules and regulations have to change, hiring policy has to change, as well as incentive and punishment policy, the list goes on, in short you gonna hire more 'wolf' instead of 'sheep', people say 'nah, this whole generation is like this,' which i don't agree at all, because there's always hard working people out there
I've honestly seen more passion in games put up by small indie developers than any AAA company running 2k+ developers for the last decade now, with games it really feels like quality of devs over quantity of devs
Word!
@@xxCrimsonSpiritxx The devs (not management) have no say in the final product. They're passionate and highly skilled at what they do for the overwhelming majority. To think otherwise is foolish.
@@johnjackson9767 Then I don't think you watched the video honestly, yes management has the final say, but believe it or not more often than not the management give a fairly flexible freedom to developers but on the condition that they add their microtransactions for example, and there are objectively speaking dozens of examples of bad developers butchering their games because they're simply not passionate enough about said project
@@xxCrimsonSpiritxx This is true, though there were plenty of butchered games back in the 90s when Fallout came out too. The scale is bigger because the industry is bigger. There doesn't seem to be budget numbers out there for Outer Worlds but considering the original fallout was just roughly a $3 million budget certainly Outer Worlds was a much bigger more ambitious game and with that comes trade offs. You can't expect indie like teams and dedication with a bigger scale IMHO, not without some serious leadership behind it that understand how that works (and even then it's not gauranteed).
This is an amazing video. It explain everything about why cost go up, prices goes up but the consummer get less and less for their buck.
As a professional software developer, there are absolutely jobs you need to pad estimates - and its the majority.
Because 3/4 of your job in many large organizations is dealing with absolute bullshit spreadsheets thrown at you by management, dealing with bizarre requests that aren't captured as effort, scope changes for no fucking reason and awful tickets you need to go back and forth with the reporter before you actually understand the problem space.
I've had jobs where by the end of it, I only got to *start* coding every day at around 3-4pm and finished up 7-8pm, because between meetings and random admin duties, you don't get time to code until everyone else clocks off and stops bugging you with "must have" bollocks.
So pad your estimates. Otherwise you won't get your sprint items done.
If you don't pad estimates, you end up working 80 hour weeks or don't hit your sprint goals, and who gets blamed then?
And if you work the 80 hours, you don't get paid extra.
And you don't own the game like early game dev or indies, you get paid a straight salary, so what incentive do you have to kill yourself over a game that gets you nothing more?
Bad management leads to bad workers. Smaller orgs you just talk directly to people and have way less need to do this, or smaller teams with a protective manager it works better.
Small companies too. I was working with (not for) a smaller company one time. This small company was in a business that made a lot of money with a staff in the dozens. The only overhead was machinery. Point being funding and salaries wasn't a major issue as their profit margins were extremely high.
They had an IT staff of three people, and all of them were management, essentially project managers without a PEMBOK as masquerading as developers. They had an issue. They needed sequential labels (1, 2, 3, etc). They refused to buy them, and I get it. For some reason printed media like that can almost make you sour what people charge. And it's so simple, why pay for it when you have devs?
Well, they had issues. They would open excel, type a number in a cell, drag it down 10,000 rows, and then print from there using the print address label functionality. Unsurprisingly, the print spooler in windows would die every time. These labels needed tracking, too. Knowing what number was tied to what item was extremely, extremely important. They'd try to print 10,000, it would crash at random amounts, like 3,741, every single time, and they'd have to look at the reel, find the last number printed, write it down, reboot the PC, and repeat the process. Obviously, this was extremely inefficient and caused all kinds of things like duplicates both for a single site and duplicates across multiple sites. I'll also point out these were reels of 1,000 labels. They'd also have to replace the reel in the middle of printing when a reel finished, which caused even more issues, and it often resulted in a lot of loss of labels.
With my system you clicked a button, it spat out 1,000, you replaced the reel, then clicked a button.
My solution was simple - I wrote a tool in JS and SQL that would do 1k at a time. It would log the last label printed, the site, auto fill in the last number printed+1, save what site the user selected last, etc, etc. Yes, tech can always crash so I still wrote ways to force override while blocking things like cross site duplications. It wasn't perfect, but I wrote it in 20 minutes and I printed 10k labels in 1k batches in under an hour while their system was giving them only a couple thousand every hour - and they needed 10s of thousands a day. They would assign an available staff member to do this 8 hours a day 5 days a week.
"Why can't we print 10k at a time? Our current system lets us do that. We can't click a button 10 times a day, we need to print these and be done." I of course pointed out you don't have any tracking, you have duplicates, you're attempting to print dozens of times a day, etc. They never ended up using it.
Corporations have bloat, and you're dead on about larger companies dragging you into meetings to talk instead of work, but people are people.
Precisely.
I'm a dev, I do have some feedback here (only 15 mins in). Estimates are estimates for you and your team, but leadership treat them as promises, and build everything around it. This makes a vague estimate into something you are now responsible for. Then when your estimate falls short, you get slapped (overtime, crunches, worst case fired/witholding raises). Especially for videogames, where there is a lot of R&d (emphasys on R, so a lot more unknowns). Having crunches for months due to a bad estimate is what leads to this stupid level of padding. It's trauma enforced by the industry. While each dev also need to be able to get above that and give proper estimates, some junior devs with less faith in their abilities will naturally pad the shit out of their work to be sure they are not stuck in another crunch time.
So really the industry created that problem. The best way to break this pattern of over padding stories/tasks is to encourage failure within your teams (obviously within reason). Failures are useful as they help pinpoint your limits as a team and narrow down your velocity (For simplicity, velocity is how quick and easily you can finish a task). When failure is punished, you get that type of shitshow as described in the video.
It's exactly this.
To add to this great point a lot of companies see failure to reach estimate as something they will replace you for or even make you first in line for lay-offs. (i've had plenty of managers say to pad it so we look extra productive so when lay-offs come around they are not looking at the extremely productive team!)
Hmm
Would that also be attributes to ways of working? If you find you are under estimating as the complexity is more than thought. Should you look to do more refinement to break them down into smaller stories and give a more clearer indication?
@@Azpep as a rule of thumb, when using Fibonachi to point stories, anything above 8 (even 8 can be broken down) should be exploded into smaller stories (IMHO).
If nothing else, a spike should be done to investigate the unknowns, which are pretty much always present in any 8-12 pointers.
As a developer big teams are a nightmare. Especially when junior developers are moved into a team to 'help' and then leave. All they do is break shit and introduce more bugs that need to be fixed.
Employee: You do that, I’ll quit.
Employer: You are the weakest link, goodbye!
Right?!
In regards to story 2 the only reasonable explanation of why something simple like that would take longer is if they're workload is already full up. But they should be able to easily explain that when asked. I deal with this as an HVAC engineer, architects will send in a request that should only take 2 or 3 hours to complete and then complain when we tell them to expect it in two weeks. And the reason isn't because we want to make them wait two weeks, it's because if our schedule is fully booked up then if we do their request then something else we've already promised a completion date on falls behind. This reason is almost always accepted because it makes sense. They should definitely be able to explain why it'll take 4 weeks.
This guy didn't even write his spec down til queried. I wouldn't be surprised if he also didn't listen when they said that, surprisingly, they have stuff to do already scheduled.
@@centerfield6339Exactly my thought. It seems like he came up with an idea, but instead of discussing it, he went straight to pull a random developer and asked them to implement that in the next several hours. I mean, the Team Lead came AFTER the dev, which means he did it over the TL's head. Imagine in the middle of a Sprint, someone butts in and demands to drop everything and implement his cool new idea he came up with several hours ago.
The solution to a full schedule is simple. Extend the schedule. Work 6am to 8pm every day.
@@millirabbit4331 If you do that, Asmongold won’t be able to call you lazy. He’s a customer, we have to keep him satisfied. 🤦♂️
Also even without considering the existing workload the time required to do the task could be much bigger than the 45 minutes required for the actual source code change. The change should be tested by the dev which requires a build plus deployment, plus the time for testing. They might have a policy of always writing unit and automation tests (possibly by different team member), code reviews by several team members plus an architect. Even merging the code into the main branch could take a while if it requires successfull build and automation run, and the build and/or automation queues are slow. If might additionally require manual testing after a release build is ready. So 45 minutes code change could easily grow into several days of work by different team members. But I've never worked on a game, I am developing drivers :)
My hubby works for a small game dev company down here in South Africa and I showed him the first few minutes of this.
He is absolutely flabbergasted at the fact that either the ToDo lists or the small coding segment would raise any concerns even with the small dev team like the one he works with.
I imagine because it gets “real” in South Africa and the people are tougher and not coddled like the West.
@@ystconnectionRight, so I'm a dev in the west.
Task lists and taking responsibility for the implementation of a feature is an industry standard.
I don't know what kind of kindergarten Timothy Cain works at.
@@P4INKiller As a tradesman, i look at that as a blueprint. They are standard anywhere you go. However what is not standard, is setting unrealistic deadlines and using bunk product (or code bases) to build your foundation and then bitching when it falls apart. No insult intended towards you on the last remark, thats mean't for the shitty bosses who don't know shit and think they are experts even though they are hiring cause they can't do it.
@@ystconnection Ah, that must be why all the best software comes out of SA. When they have electricity that is.
@@domerame5913 Well, the able once go to USA, like that guy who established multiple billions worth companies
I've worked in a corporate setting, and I saw many coworkers just act docile and almost motionless. Everyone had to act "nice" all the time. They don't like it when people are yelling. They also don't like it if you make a fuss at lazy coworkers who are not even working. They fire people for insane reasons. My boss got mad when I was 2 minutes late. You can get in trouble for talking back and it's perceived the wrong way.
Gotta be careful not to have any "microaggression" incidents. Corpo world is adult daycare.
How angry they will get at you is directly tied to if you can make it a woke backlash at them or not
2 minutes what.
It’s better to give a generous time estimate on how long it will take because more often than not in software development something won’t go according to plan, and even things that might seem simple initially might actually be more complicated once you begin understand all of the components at play. It’s better to deliver earlier than expected than to deliver later because it allows for better planning. Generally along with the feature itself you’re also adding unit tests to cover each edge case which can sometimes take even more time than writing the feature itself. The bottom line is that there’s a lot more to it than most people know.
Yes, it's very crazy! I have been working as a concept artist in video games for 10 years for big names and sometimes one cannot work because of a lot of meetings, many of which are useless and which take a long time and which can be summarized in a short email. It completely takes away the rhythm of our work.
Yep.
sounds like my old hardware store job
As a DBA and coder coming up, I was told to always set time frames out as far as possible so you could look like a rock star when you delivered your deliverables early. I would watch people literally B.S. for entire weeks and code something out in hours. It's obsurd.
Work is like gas - it occupies all the space given to it. Better alternative is to set relatively short delivery date and then keep stakeholders posted daily on how delays you've encountered are pushing the deadline back. Then you'll look like a rockstar of taking accountability and providing communication early. If they don't like it - fuck them, quit.
i would hope as a coder you would know how to spell absurd
Flipside of that is if you deliver too quick all the time it becomes expected - but I have also seen it in every job I have been in, whether it's in magazine publishing (advert deadlines) or IT (length of time to do x)- most people inflate it - but they get caught out if the person they do it to knows how long x takes as in Tim's example about the dev asking for 4 weeks.
@@TheBliepbliep if your spelling is inconsistent then good luck finding all the spelling errors in your code
@@Blox117 Nice comeback changing the goalpost. You must be great to work with!
As a Senior Software Engineer at one of the largest food delivery companies in the world, leading one of the top priority projects of my pillar I am of two minds with this.
I totally agree with the lack of accountability. At my company we use Jira and every single developer is assigned a ticket. That ticket has the developer's face on it from start to completion, not so we know who to blame but so leadership can have a better idea of how resources are being allocated and in the event of a failure we know who to contact for insights that might be useful for debugging. I don't see any reason why you wouldn't have your name associated with your work, it's just being professional.
As to the second point, I think it's almost an inevitability to have slower development speeds in large corporations for three main reasons, one of which he mentioned in the video:
1 - Money. Big corporations have big stakeholders that aren't necessarily interested in the product. They want profits. If what you're doing won't result in money made or saved that can be sold to an exec, it won't get done. Last year a 15 min outage at my company lost millions of dollars. Ever since the processes got stricter, the security measures increased and our estimations extended with it as part of management requests.
2 - This also plays a part in 1 but processes, bureaucracy and politics. Large corporations make complex products. Complex products require multiple teams. No single person/team has time to work on the entirety of World of Warcraft by themselves. So they divide in teams. Each team is vying for a slice of that corporation budget to work on their quarterly plans and create good features that will increase their budget next quarter. Now, lack of speed can lower a team's budget but you know what can harm it even more? Losing money. Outages, crashes. Not only the team, but developers can lose jobs over things like that. So while startups and indie companies have a lot more maneuverability when it comes to that sort of thing, large corporations do not.
3 - Complexity. When the scope of your project is small you can afford many shortcuts and techniques to speed up your development process. This is also not the case in large corporations because they have many more concerns that smaller companies do lot. Legal department asking for logs of operations saved, stored and accessible, security department requesting a tighter control of vulnerabilities, a very large codebase often times very intertwined because it was created originally as a smaller company with no concern for scalability, security and maintainbility and every code change in a place can affect code in a completely different component.
I once had a project manager that asked for a button. I told him It would take a week. He said he could do it in html and javascript in 2 hours. I answered: Neat. So can I. This isn't developed in justJavaScript and html though, it needs to not only perform its button action but also needs to send campaign information to marketing, logs to sentry, the request needs to go through a proxy and then through an API which does not have a method to support it. Then we need to apply database migration to correct data and finally thoroughly test it because if it fails and users get their app crashing, we might lose funding for our next project by upper management looking unfavorably at our lack of professionalism and you still won't get your button.
In short, TLDR: Large corporations will always be much slower because of stakeholders, project scope and simply how little maneuverability they have as companies. If we're looking for risks and daring decisions, we need to look at indies.
I think it's unfortunate that it's the reality of working within a larger corporation. If every (or most at least) AAA games came out super polished I think it could kind of justify the long development cycle. In reality though we get big games that cost $200 million and then still are buggy as hell and unoptimized at launch along with having little creativity. Bright side is this does give a big opening for smaller studios to come in and deliver a great experience.
This is the most thorough explanation of this topic. I get the impression from the video that gramps doesn't understand modern IT challenges.
@@TrentTubeSeems like he's selling a narrative.
No, but the manager wrote you pseudocode on his whiteboard though. In-between yelling matches with another manager. And the crashes would only add charm to your app, anyway. He's made his share of buttons back in '97, you know!
Basically what can be concluded from this is that most gaming studios have become to big to function in a way that is beneficial for us gamers and are better off crumbling to make room for others.
When he mentioned game journalism, listening, all I can think of is how I miss TB. I know he wasn't perfect but he said the good and bad things about games and you can judge yourself if you want to play it. Haven't found a suitable reliable person whose main job was gaming. RIP
I'm a systems architect, and I've been writing code since the 1980s. I heed the Scotty Principal and pad my all timelines now because more often than not, when I have to go into code I haven't seen before, I find the previous developer wrote crap spaghetti code with no test coverage, and it takes me a lot of extra time to rework things the way it should have been just so I can get what I needed to do done.
Like others here, I'm amazed at the number of devs who have no clue about what they are doing. The bigger problem, though, is artificial timelines and pressure by the management causing mediocre devs to write the absolute shittiest code as fast as possible so they don't get in trouble. And it's not even mostly their fault, because (at least here in the US), the pressure to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of developers by management is the reason you see massive amounts of tech debt and asymptotic cyclomatic complexity graph lines, all of which never get addressed.
That dev that quoted 4 weeks might have only taken 45 minutes to do the needful if the code he had to modify was okay, but he was probably hedging on the target system being a rats nest of vomit code when he got into where he needed to make the changes.
I'm a game dev with lots of game dev friends. I couldn't have said it better.
As a game and enterprise dev, I'll also add that it's EXTREMELY DECEPTIVE how "clean" looking and "functional programming style" based code (or some such thing) ends up being a rats nest of seniors programming like juniors even though you've spent a 3-4 months looking at it, or other code close to it and you think "ok, looks managable".
It looks clean, like your colleagues know what they are doing, until you get hit with a 2000 line config file for the project, and to even understand what's happening you would need to grok a 700 line .js file parsing it written in "functional" style. Just a nope at that point, you revert to CTRL-F(word searching) your way to a solution or stumble through it somewhere in the 10 errors per second errors log that starts the server.
As someone who worked in leadership for years, you should be asking why people don't want their names attached to something. If people are literally threatening to quite because they've been assigned a specific task, you have significant issues to deal with throughout your organization and your leadership. These employees don't feel confident or secure in their jobs to take on more. I worked in leadership environments that were oppressive and demoralizing, this was the result. Disengaged, scared and defensive employees. I've worked in other leadership environments where we were stepping over each other to take on new responsibilities because everyone felt secure, supported and ready for growth. That doesn't mean it was a free ride, far from it. Setting clear expectations and ensuring a job done well is critical with consequences attached. The difference is are you engaged as a leader, involved in the process, clearing obstacles for your people and encouraging growth and development? If the answer is "I'm the boss, I tell you what to do and you do it", the results will not be what you hopped for.
Agreed.
Why not fire the people who won't do their job?
@@cool2bekeithYou're assuming they're simply "not doing their job" rather than realizing that Tim is most likely misrepresenting what happened.
The problem I find is people spend more time worrying about the idea rather than just doing it to see if it works. Time is the resource here. That is the direct correspondence with money. Being scared to make something out of fear that it might not work, stops you from actually learning if it works. Try it. I once had someone spend over an hour talking about the type of coat to use in a character design. They had not even started on the concept design or even had a mood board. It caused me to take on the mantra of do it and see the results. Doing this does lead to failed ideas. But I know what ideas won't work as a result from it. Experiment, practice, try things out. Being a little bitch does not get you results.
I love that you mentioned the Peter principal. I live by things like that in self analysis. My last two promotions happened because I said I was ready. I turned one of them twice when they came to before I put my name in the hat. I had to explain it to two C suite suits before they accepted why I was willing bit, hadn't been before.
Everyone has been happy with my level of competency because I prepare a bit before stepping into a new role.
One of the best game reviewers on TH-cam is Worth A Buy..
He does not give a shit about getting black flagged by publishers he just tells it as it is and he is spot on most of the time. Even if sometimes the reviews come a bit late as he does not get review copies..
Rule 1 for avoiding wasting money, ALWAYS wait for the WAB review.
Because he shares your opinion? I looked at a couple videos from this channel and it's literally just copy paste opinions from r/games. I don't blame him, if I wanted to farm easy subs I would do the same thing.
@@johngrizzle He has spent a long time building up his sub base and its not like he has millions.. So yea heh is not farming easy subs, he just reviews games and is honest about what they are like... yup and some times brutally honest but thats a good thing.
The words the words
Macks on the ball.
I’m a dev for one of the largest software companies in the world. And one of the biggest problems in my job has NOTHING to do with developing. It’s the amount of no technical management that feels they can change or delete my work at whim meanwhile putting me in the target at c suite level management for not making certain deadlines. This is not only why development in general is suffering, but why there is very little PASSION left. Hence why the games are sucking.
Exactly, and unless you're in industry, you don't see this. Everyone just blames "lAZy dEvS".
@@johnjackson9767yep. Even seen this from asmon before, he was basically crying like a baby throwing a tantrum over not being given candy when Blizzard (or some big studio) went on strike. It's really funny how guys like this will do that and then go and say people are acting too "entitled", especially to say such about game devs who have insane work schedules when his ass sits in a chair at home and just talks about shit and plays games for a living 😂
"oh no the customer has demands, and is a pro streamer, i deserve a better quality of customer who never expects anything playing my games and has a job I respect"
Everyone who doesn't stream for a living thinks it's easy, but forget that people who aren't entertaining, don't get the views.
"Insane work schedules"🤔Are you paid? Are you in jail? How did you come to such a personal position of failure? Imagine acting like writing code is harder than entertaining a crowd of thousands every week. Let's see you do it😂Or better yet, lets see you make your own game! Many have done it....
If development is so hard and not worth it for you, just become a streamer, no? If it's that easy, should be no problem for you to make a cool mill in no time brah😂😂
So, If you don't respect other peoples work, don't expect anyone to gaf about your personal hell coding for corpos🤷♂️
@TrevanDotCom
Not enough information on why your work is being changed, you frame it as if it's on a managers whim, and expect people to take it at face value. Sob stories are what they are, but really, you need to be clearer with examples, if you want empathy/sympathy.
Frankly, the guy this video about doesn't seem to understand why developers do these things he's talking about, and doesn't seem curious about figuring out why. He's just shitting on all developers from the rooftops, despite the fact that corporate upper management are unrealistic, HATE risk taking, etc. He doesn't seem to get it, this is a complete failure in management
Many decades ago, game development was something people got into because they loved games. They had a vision they wanted to see come to fruition, and they and all the people who gathered around them weren't afraid to put their noses to the grindstone in order to make it happen. Now, the culture has shifted. Now, game companies are no longer a gathering of passionate nerds, but factories where people come to punch in, do their 9-5 and go home. It's no longer about "what do we have do to in order to make our games even better?" But rather, "what do we have to do in order to make sure we keep our jobs?" It's terribly sad.
You mean "what is the minimum amount of work we need to do to keep our jobs?"
To be fair, the games come off as super basic. There is a lack of polish that tells me the director or producer has passion, but no one else. I don't think they want to make the game they are working on, and they do it for 5 years minimum.
No, Devs are overworked and get paid terribly, they do more than just the minimum, its the game directors who orchestrate what the game is going to be. the Devs are just the painters and builders not the Architects.@@Mats1050
@@furyberserk Well, most devs work on bits and pieces of the game and they generally don't have a say in what they work on. It's up to the director and producers to assign them the correct work, or list the things that need to be worked on. They've got the masterplans afterall. A dev doing something other than the things that need to be addressed can throw a wrench into the system as that might not have been accounted for in the overall plans, and plans and other workflows might have to change to accommodate one dev's obsession. That's how you get disjointed feeling games with mechanics that don't mesh well. Communication is key.
And of course most people don't wanna work on the games they're working on. Ubisoft employs like half the industry, I doubt most devs wanna be making their trash. Nothing a single dev can really do about a game with thousands of people working on their own individual pieces of the game.
Tell me you don't work in industry without telling me you don't work in industry.
“I don’t know what he meant by mom” 😂😂😂😂😂😂 caught me off guard 7:45
As a senior software dev, my team has a solid two months of work.
I fixed a one-liner bug, but it snowballed into four more "quick favors."
Giving an inch turned into a mile. ETA: 4 weeks.
Starfield getting a 10/10 from journalist was fucking hilarious to see. IGN with their 7 was the most accurate rating for that game, it was fun to read other journalists try to flame them for giving it a 7 instead of an 8-10.
5/10 should be the realistic number , 4/10 if youre not an BGS simp
@@Jack_PliskinI've seen quite a few comment sections praising Starfield, and it's just so disappointing to see. My hopes for Elder Scrolls 6 fades more and more when I see so many people satisfied with being fed the shit that is Starfield. I find it hard to believe that Bethesda is going to deliver a good product ever again when their fans are so happy eating feces.
Games been fun as fuck
@@femboyroxas yeah, please don't have any hope for es6 because it's going to hurt when it finally releases. just be glad we'll always have modded skyrim
Seems to me one of the biggest problems with modern game development is the studio size. All the classics, all the genre-defining moments, were made by teams a fraction of the size of modern developments. And to this day, some of the greatest games are actually coming from the smaller studios (Deep Rock Galactic for example).
It strikes me that there is an optimal size for a game's development - under this size, development time increases, but over this size? Development quality decreases drastically.
And I think the root of it is a sense of ownership over the project. When you have a small team, that project is directly the work of everyone involved; it's their baby, collectively.
But past a certain team size, you'll find that people are just doing a job; they're not creating the project... they're completing tasks, and meeting contractual obligations.
I'm wondering why these big companies don't create subgroups that focus on a specific IP. Why is Bethesda not creating a Fallout focused group of guys who love the IP and want to make the best game possible. Same with Elder Scrolls. We'd have more games by now and they'd probably be better than what Starfield looks like.
"It strikes me that there is an optimal size for a game's development - under this size, development time increases, but over this size? Development quality decreases drastically." I self studdied dev a decade ago and this is like the first chapter of software developlment for a company. Though it was written by a software dev, so lets just assume the new "software company's" are not operated by the good old boys anymore but rather by idiotic jack rabbit money men.
@@michaelnuttall5896 I'm sure the older developers with the actual talent and experience have been muscled out on the basis that they're "outdated"... and a lot of them have been replaced by the kind of business school graduates who think that the product isn't the game, but money itself.
@@J.B.1982 For sure, that would make sense. But that would imply that the people with the power to make such decisions actually know and care about the product. All evidence now seems to point to the contrary.
@@NicholasBrakespear
I agree with that assessment.
I assume there is a level of control they want too, rooted in their own ego
Concord took 8 years to make...