Darkened Software

Had a situation recently were someone at work needed to leave early and someone else had to pick up their bug.  The person picking up the bug complained that he was taking over a bug just so someone could go off and do something they deemed unimportant.  This does point out a common mistake in reasoning that employers and other people make.

You have to ask yourself:

If someone needs to leave early one day a week to go LARP’ing is it any different than someone else leaving early to drive his kid to Chemotherapy treatment?

In both cases them being able to leave early makes the employee happy which I suggest you do any time you can because if they have any loyalty at all they will then help the company out when it needs it the most.  And that time will come.  As a lead do not let people ever bitch about why other people are not at work.  It really should be a “don’t ask don’t tell situation” and people should never feel pressured to explain or come up with excuses as to why they need to leave.

Now in the case when it is not just an occasional event:

As an employer you really do not care if someone chronically leaves work early to donate time at a hospital or drink themselves to death while raving.  The end effect in either case is they might not be getting enough work done for you to be on your payroll.  In the chronically missing in action case the reason for is does become a little important.  If you think the reason is fixable you can decide if they are worth trying to wait it out.

I really dislike the double standards at a lot of these work places, some people can send out an email every day about how they are leaving early to take their kid to some event and no one thinks twice about it.  But if some 18 year old sent out an email ever day about leaving early to skateboard at the park before the sun goes down they would be on probation in a hell of a hurry.

Bare min Programming Lead Schedule:

8 hour day ( not really but lets dream )

- 2 hours of meetings

- 1 hour of play game, assign bugs, verify features, code reviews check-ins, track schedule

- 1 hour of debug broke builds and peoples crashes, shoot down feature requests

= 4 hours left

• Average intern requires 1 hour a day just for checking in to ensure they are not spinning their wheels or off track ( 20 min 3 times a day )
• 1 hour a day if significant tech discussion is needed such as the case of starting a new task they have not done before which is most of them.

- ( 1 hour * 3 + 1 hour )

= 0 hour left

At best you can put 3 interns under a lead before they have zero time to do anything preventative or any duties beyond the min a lead should be doing to keep things from falling apart.

So unless you have senior programmers that can offload the mentoring and monitoring of the interns having a whole bunch of “free labor” is not all that free.  You will quickly reach the point were the whole team will suffer from a lack of lead attention just so you can get a some of questionable quality free intern coding.

Nothing is really free…

That was the quickest I have ever been put off by a game.  Don’t make me commit suicide in a game, that is not something I would do so it just turns me off.  Once you turn the controller over to me there should not be any cut scenes or anything that are not just story telling and informational.  If you force me to make choices that I would not normally make then you have just tore down the 4th wall and I might as well be watching a movie.

And that is what this crappy cut scene felt like, a writer that should have been starving in Hollywood took a game job to make some quick money and is writing game stories that are trying to pull emotions out of me with a crow bar while trying to get nominated for an Oscar.  This is games, the choices should all be made in the gameplay itself, cut scenes are just to move the story alone.  I am trying to put myself into the character so do not make me do anything that a normal person would not do.  You want drama then make the secondary characters do it and leave me out of it.

Ten years later I started re-playing Diablo II again as a way to slow down my outrage of still waiting for Diablo III to come out.  What blew my mind was over the course of said 10 years and who knows who many patches all the pain and suffering is still in there.  They fixed some exploits and other things.  But the 2 biggest bugs that leaves the Barbarian class in that frustrating situation of doing the naked body run are still there.

Super WTF Barbarian bugs:

1. Whirlwind just stays in one spot if your destination is over an dropped object or just outside anything considered a wall.  100’s of monsters closing in on your location and you want to cut your way out of the crowd.  Opps if your escape destination happens to be a dropped blue Mana bottle you will still there twirling like a ballerina until 50 monsters beat you to death.  So much fun…
2. Related is your jump attack just goes straight up and down if your destination is over an dropped object or outside anything considered a wall.  Need to jump out of the fray and into a door way so you can control the crowd.  Oh shit if you killed anything in that doorway on your way in then chances are there are a bunch of dropped things so instead you jump high into the sky and every monster is taking aim on you as you gracefully fall back to earth.  Nothing better than waiting for your eventual death…

Since both of these moves are considered attacks for the barbarian class how is it possible this is not considered a bug and fixed yet.  You can drop kick fallen angles trying to enslave the human race but if a ring is below you then can not jump there and are just going to do jumping jacks instead.  Any other class if your attack target is an inanimate object it does not care and just fires away.  Not so lucky for the barbarians…

For the love of all gods that I do not believe in, please blizzard fix this in the next version, my sanity can not take any more of this…

The Peter Principle states that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence”, and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.

Which brings us to The Game Developers Dilemma:

Do you do someone else’s work to try to keep the project going or do you let the person fail so things will reset and not harm the company long term.

We have all worked our asses off to cover for someones incompetence only to see that incompetent person get promoted to a position were they can and quite often do take down the entire company.  It has happened so often I now cringe when I get introduced to someone and they say “this is bob, he just got promoted to position of high importance“.  There is a 65% chance they do not even have close to enough training to be in that position and will likely fail within 1 project.  The game industry is notoriously bad at mentoring people and often does promotions strictly based on time at the company instead of proven skill sets.

Once upon a time my answered to the game developers dilemma is that the project was the most important thing and everyone should step up to do whatever work is needed to make sure it never fails.  I would kill myself to make sure it succeed.  But most of the time it only prolonged the inevitable crash from too many bad process, scheduling and money decisions.  I now realize that learning is the most important thing and every time you stop someone from failing you stop them from learning as well.   Very few people learn enough from close calls but everyone learns from failing so let the people fail.  Far fewer projects get canceled than management would lead you to believe.  If the right people are held responsible they will learn their lessons and the company will be orders of magnitude stronger in the long term.

Not taking the high road here, for every person I have helped prop up in the past I know someone has helped prop me up when I made bad decisions.  I am also not saying we should never try to help people avoid making bad decisions.  Anyone willing to learn should be taught everything they can so they can avoid as many mistakes as possible and get to a higher level of productivity.  All I am saying is after someone makes a bad decision they need to experience the consequences of it even if it means failing.

You can not make a sword without a lot of hard blows.