Fallout Creator Explains Why Modern Games Suck
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- Опубликовано: 27 авг 2024
- Timothy Cain, the creator of Fallout (1997), explains the problem with modern video games and video game journalism.
by @CainOnGames • Game Development Caution
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Channel Editors: Cat͏͏Dany & Daily Dose of A͏sm͏o͏ng͏͏old
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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 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
😑🤷♂️
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
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.
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)
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
“how can you say that it’s all dogshit if you didn’t eat the entire plate of dogshit” had me in tears
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.
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
Game industry became way too glorified and mainstream. And now the passionate people who actually cared got replaced by normies who are just after money
They haven't been replaced, they're just not working at EA or Ubisoft
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 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!
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.
7:11 I also get this manic when I'm deep in some design/scripting work. Freaked out the class once when I suddenly leapt from my seat yelling with joy after fixing a game breaking bug that I had been working on for a week straight. Makes me feel good knowing I have this in common with a game developer I greatly admire.
I always worked with Jira, we always know who works on what and if you break something, you're going to fix it. I think it's more about if a company has or not an engineering culture. Maybe the dev he asked for the estimate was a junior and didn't know anything about the existing APIs. He wasn't vulnerable for sure, he didn't know how to do the story quickly, that's a junior move. Maybe they have a super long pipeline that even if the thing is coded now it won't be in the staging env for 1 week, we don't have the full picture, but for sure the algo he described was indeed a good place holder and quick to do.
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
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 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’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.
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
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
The amount of times asmon steps into the 'Dunning-Kruger effect' is wild
For real - dev says a task will take four weeks. Game designer who the last time he worked on production code was when whiteboards were the backlog says it should take 30 minutes. That immediately raised a flag for me on both ends of that assessment. Either way: the dev is saying “if I do this, I will need four weeks.” Either trust their judgement or escalate, which is what happened. Asmon again being quite ignorant of nuance here again
@@AlexWoodGarbagejust do your job you’re paid to do.
@@AlexWoodGarbage the issue here is the guy in the video KNEW how long it should take for what he was asking, he even said fuck it if you cant do it i'll do it myself and have it done in 45 min.
basically saying what im asking should only take you as someone whos worked on this game extensively with should be able to do what im asking with eas in 60 min.
it would be the same thing as me telling you to cut the grass using a riding mower in a yard thats only 100ft by 100ft and saying go cut the grass it shouldnt take but 20 min and you saying more like 6 hours.
if i know how long something takes and you tell me its going to take 1000 times longer then it should honestly you can get yo stuff and find new employment
@@AlexWoodGarbage the key difference is that the lead actually developed games and knew how to do said task (and did it), so this isn't much of a "clueless boss underestimates X task" situation. Yeah, there can be additional maintenance costs and a bit of extra work to actually make that code scalable, but 4 weeks is ridiculous regardless. Either the codebase is a complete a total mess, their production pipeline is as inefficient as possible, or the coder is uh... of questionable quality. Even worse how the coder didn't even bother to walk him through it, which kinda seals the deal imo.
@@0Heeroyuy01 no, he didn’t. He assumed it could be done within the hour, based on assumptions. When the person with the requirements says it’s an hour of effort and the one getting the requirement says it four weeks of effort, you can safely conclude they’re both wrong. One for making assumptions, the other for being overly defensive. They both should do better here. The dev not wanting to justify his estimation sounds sus, but we don’t have the full context. The lead coming in and backing the dev should tell you a lot here. The actual work having taken two weeks should tell you the rest: the dev wasn’t actually that far off, and from just hearing one side of the story we’re already hearing that this game designer can be difficult to work with.
Going to take the opposite stance here.
Im a software engineer (web dev) and Ive seen what goes on behind the scenes.
Dev gives estimate that is spot on ( couple of days).
Gets into the code, and finds that a terrible dev wrote the code and the architecture is bad and its actually going to take 2 weeks now.
Dev relays info to mgmt and then they get chastised and yelled at and gets fired or bad performance review.
Other devs see this, now all estimates are 5x what they actually think it will take.
Congratulations, bad mgmt has raised the cost of dev by 5x for all future tasks and stories.
Here's another example,
dev, lets call him Bob is and all his teammates are working on "super important feature" for stakeholder Y. A bug is found and stakeholder Z wants it fixed.
Bob and his team now have to serve two masters. And have to try to sneak in feature Z while still trying to hit the release date target for feature Y.
This is why they give a large estimate for something that should be trivial. Cause they have other shit to do.
I hate this, "people are lazy" take, cause its the same sort of lies that get circulated everywhere. Even though people are just busy or covering their ass or both.
It's also worth pointing out that the developer from the video Asmongold is watching is notorious for being project lead of super buggy games. Most famous example is Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, which is pretty much unplayable without fan patches 😅
He even mentioned in another video of his that for original Fallout they had a critical crash bug that was discovered just a few weeks before launch and delayed the game a bit, and because of this this crash he got a cut to his bonus despite releasing such an awesome game (and the reason he left the company).
And that was with his own project that he started from scratch. I can't even imagine how much more chaotic it is with using legacy code left by some other people.
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.
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.
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.
Having worked with dev teams for over a decade, my first guess is that this Fallout Creator may likely have a history of introducing scope creep without adjusting timelines and then holding devs accountable for it when those deadlines are missed. This is not always the case, but I have seen it so many times, and every single time the devs respond with more and more cautious estimates as a means of basic survival inside the company.
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
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.
Early days of gaming:
"I've programmed 2 squares to move up and down and deflect another square. It kinda resembles a game of ping pong."
Golden era of gaming:
"Dude, I've had this story floating around in my head for YEARS. Look at this concept art. Check out these systems. I call it ________, and want to make it a reality. I'm a gamer, so I want to make games that I'd enjoy because I think others would too."
Shit era of gaming:
"OK, we've hired a market research team to find out what is currently trending... and by the time we've turned that into a saleable idea, and spoke to our investors, yadda yadda yadda... Hopefully it'll be due to release some time in 2025... _Completely missing the 1 month window of opportunity where Extraction Shooters/Asymmetric 4v1 Horror Games/Fall Guys/Among Us were actually popular on streaming sites."_
I always loved the whiteboard approach, it let me know what i needed to do without needing to ask and made me feel some sort of agency in what i was doing, instead of showing up and waiting for someone to explain it to me. It felt like i didnt need my hand to be held
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.
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
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.
I've been a game developer for 20 years and can tell you with certainty that, if the programmers can't explain to the designer why something can't be done or is difficult to do, they have no idea what they are doing, which spells incompetency.
In my whole game development career, I've never had an argument with any designer (or QA, for that matter) since I could explain to them in the comprehensible human language why what they are requesting might not be possible or too much time-consuming to do.
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.
This is a problem in tons of different industries not just game development. My brother works at a company that does audiobooks and you should hear some of the horror stories he tells me about recent college grads who get hired in. It's like they wait to find the most petty things to complain and go to HR about. It's actually shocking the things he's told me that they complain about.
Tell yoyr brother to go to HR to ask for a meeting about people who complain about everything 💀
And that's exactly why I don't believe any of the allegations at Activision. I hate that company but look at the people who are complaining.
@@Lostouille People think an HR is some safety net thing but really they only their to make sure no one is breaking any company rules or laws. Little do people know, every time you report something to them, they file that and keep it. In the end, you're going to find people trying to get out of work and get paid. At my dad job, they were digging and hit a natural gas which had a funny smell. They called the inspector and it was a sulfur deposit and told everyone it was fine since in open air and it wont harm you. People kept complaining, so they said fine. Shut the job down, brought in the rubber suit with oxygen tanks and told them to get back to work. Now those guys were wearing rubber suits in the heat sweating their asses off all day.
this is what happens when you have overly feminized a workplace. over 40 years of working I've seen it go from non-existent to getting so bad company's collapse. it's not in every industry.
@@johndodo2062women?
Now imagine this is happening in every single industry and you'll get an idea of how absolutely screwed we are
Firing somebody can be extremely expensive, take a ton of time, and be disruptive as hell. You are better off to promote them into a side project and when you have a dozen or so failed devs in that side project, shut it down and let them all go.
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..
@@SuperWeedPoweryeah, 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.
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.
"Why does it take 4 weeks?"
I'm almost questioning Tim's experience by claiming the work can be done in only 45 minutes and expecting that timeframe. Think about it. The coder has to verify and test the change. It could take longer than one hour just to build the game once. It's probably not something you can just unit test either; You might need to try it manually under to get a feel how it will appear to a user. You're not done until the assignment works as intended. Maybe, Tim skipped those steps which would explain the hilarity of the bugs Fallout is notorious for.
I don't have experience in game development, but I'm working on a application that takes a minimum of half a day to build, deploy, run tests, etc. That doesn't include code reviews, other processes, or the actual change.. You can blow one day on the simplest of one line changes. A video game should be more complex.
That's something I was wondering too as a dev. In our case, to make even the smallest change to our codebase, we have to first commit the change to our private branch and verify that all tests pass on cruise control on all targeted platforms (OSX, Windows, and multiple Linux distros). That process, even without any errors, tends to take at least two hours, and multiplied by every platform-specific error. Yet that's just to verify it in our private branch. Then we have to merge our changes to the main branch and that takes just as long, often longer since we have to resolve any merge conflicts.
So even the teeniest change that takes 5 secs can still take an entire day or longer to vet through our version control and automated build system. We tend to juggle a lot more tasks as a result to compensate for those delays.
That said, I do think the process of building and testing is overly managed, especially in the early stages of development. The general mindset of a more gung-ho approach with a smaller team of like-minded people willing to absorb each other's risks and costs (including delays from build failures) is one I'm wholeheartedly behind for greater productivity. I've been a dev since the 90s and I would love to go back to that era of development. Yet it's not necessarily as simple as accountability or competence that causes something that should hypothetically take less than an hour to take many, many times longer with the types of dev processes involved today.
Sure there are other processes which will eat up the time, but it's still crazy - let's consider that the base coding really could be done in 45 minutes.. Just the base idea.. Even if you take the rest of the day to fully integrate the code. It's one day of coding.. So what it the rest of the month for?! If a small idea takes a month - how much for major one? I mean what he described was pretty basic mechanism, which would probably be iterated upon to fine tune it. It probably didn't need to be 100% code proof and he seemed to know the code base, to have an idea how to do it. The main point is - IF it's a one month thing - you should be able to give some really good explanation for it. And imho it's a bit different when you're updating existing production systems on several platforms, compared to a game under developement.
He mentions in another video that the code wasn't going to be used in final game. He just needed the code for testing.
Padding estimates is a cancer. "Say it will take 4 hours, do it 2 and you'll look great!"
Nope. Nobody is impressed. They just think you have literally no clue how long anything takes in your chosen career.
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.
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.
the classic reasons: dumbing down and making everything easy for the mass market. That's why the souls games were so popular they were actually difficult.
As a software developer I can just say that working with software just gets more complicated over time. The bar keeps getting higher for entry level and “emergent” technologies just forces the hand of many companies to be continuously shuffling projects and redesigns.
In the past you could do an html page with some JavaScript and PHP to handle APIs while now you gotta setup NPM, do a “vendor install” which loads hundreds of megabytes even for the simplest application, and these dependencies make the app stop building entirely after a few months if you don’t keep upgrading it and making it compatible with newer stuff that works the same literally.
Software developers creating software have made it so complex and interconnected that it’s like a pyramid scheme where you must keep paying for courses and licenses to just run a website.
It’s become normalized that everything is so complicated that it requires a full team of varying developers with a QA team since things break so often and a PM with a whip for when estimates go over of deadlines aren’t met.
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
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.
4 weeks for a 10 lines of code is absolutely unhinged
4:12 - It depends a heck of a lot on the internals of the software. It might be trivial. It might require re-writing the entire thing. It's hard to know. And, as a software designer, you try to design things to be flexible in the ways that you anticipate they will need to change in the future. But predicting that is really hard, and the danger is that by making it flexible in some ways you make it less flexible in others which greatly increases the cost of you being wrong.
The most dangerous people are those who know a little about programming because they think they know how hard something will be. And they're almost always wrong.
The other problem is that you often don't know how long something will take when you start doing it. If the change isn't of a kind that was anticipated and designed for, there might be a whole lot of threads to pull.
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.
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
That story about the guy with down syndrome working hard, while everyone else laughs and does nothing, broke my heart. I hope he's doing well in life.
There's something more going on with the lack of accountability argument mentioned here. People don't want to accept accountability because almost every process is a clusterfuck where people have to pick up slack because of a lack of integration and understanding from older counterparts(not entirely the older counterparts fault). The training is often nonexistent, and older disconnected authority wants to enforce relatively draconian punitive measures that don't match the ever newly established process of risk and reward required for efficiency. The landscape is changing faster and faster, which requires a growing level of tolerance for mistakes geared toward discovering the newest ways of efficiency. This is not a "bitch" generation. They're just smart enough to recognize that accepting full responsibility for a process that has too many moving pieces, some of which are entirely outside their control, is a stupid way to get fired or punished. It's not the younger people failing to step up to the challenge. It's that everything is moving so fast now that the challenge redefines itself before we can grasp all of the tenets of the previous challenge. Older authority don't recognize this because they didn't grow up with these systems, and they don't understand them. In a way, younger generations are having to fight on both fronts. Against the ever newly represented challenges and against the lack of understanding from older generations who think they see insubordination instead of an attempt to match the challenges where they pop up while covering our own ass at the same time. It's a shitty place to be, and we're not happy about it. So forgive us if we're a little cranky and reluctant to step up to your meaningless chopping block during a time when rent prices are at an all time high and no one seems to give a fuck.
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.
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.
My experience as a developer reflects this. When you compartmentalize individual programmers to specific parts of the code, they have no idea how their code is going to affect other people's work. One developer changes a database table and totally screws up another developer's code. Bug reports point to the symptoms of a problem rather than the root cause of a problem. Hence the reluctance to push code quickly. Testing, optimizing, debugging takes a lot of time. Then you have management imposing arbitrary deadlines on what they want and then blaming the developers when things fall apart.
While I believe aversion to risk is a problem, particularly in the AAA space, I think he took the wrong lessons from those three stories.
Story 1. The lesson isn’t caution, it’s that no one wants to accept personal responsibility for anything. If it fails, some nebulous group of people are at fault.
Story 2. The lesson isn’t caution. It’s the game devs want to set their own schedules and slack off.
Story 3. The lesson isn’t caution. It’s the younger generations have such fragile states of mind that raised voices cause them PTSD.
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-tkknyou'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.
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.
Employee: You do that, I’ll quit.
Employer: You are the weakest link, goodbye!
Right?!
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.
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.
Asmon acting like he knows more about game development than this man is pure asmon brain rot.
Not for nothing but “ no one wants to take accountability” is a bit fresh from the grown man who doesn’t clean his house.
He doesn’t get paid to clean his house it’s still his responsibility but since he lives alone you can’t even begin to compare neglecting your houses to neglecting your career
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.
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
He's not wrong games have been going downhill for years!
This is why indie or games made by small teams are what we need. People who loves games do their best to make a great game, people who love money do their best to lie, delay and milk a game. Undertale, Hollow Knight, Minecraft, Omori, Hades and more is better than almost any triple A games I have seen the last few years. Exception most Nintendo games and Persona those are absolutely goated. Mostly because japanese devs seem much more passionate and hardworking.
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 RUclips 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 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.
There is nothing wrong with putting peoples names next to bugs. It doesn’t mean “this bug is your fault”, rather, it means “this bug is your responsibility to find a solution to”.
My company does it all the time. We come in, meet to discuss the work in progress, bugs, and things that will get started. If a bug happens, it is generally assigned to somebody who then is responsible to figuring it out. If they can’t for whatever reason (sick, in manager’s meetings, etc), we talk about who can help figure it out.
Then there is the problem of management - ever since Fortnite came out, every management group froths at the mouth over live-service. They’re more concerned about pushing a live-service game with a shop than they are concerned about putting out a good, complete game
I’m designing a VR game
- I’ve also spend 4,500 hours playing VR games like the one I want to design
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
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
THIS. THIS IS WHY GAMES TAKE 10 YEARS TO MAKE AND REQUIRE 100s OF PEOPLE! Every person on these teams takes 1 month to do 1 hour of work. Like actually. If you're thinking about getting into the gaming industry and you don't think you have what it takes. If you can 3D model and texture a barrel in a day, you need to slow it down in your job interview.. Don't set expectations too high. That barrel's gonna take a week. And another 2 days to implement.
As a working game developer, its amazing how many people have a assumption that programmers are all genius level code savants. It's tough to explain how unpredictable working in a large code base is. It's constantly changing. And every change you make has potentially multiple effects that ripple out into other code in unforeseen ways. As Gandalf says, "Even the wisest cannot know all ends". And let me tell you how much trouble you're in if you miss a deadline. You're basically scarlet letter'd as an engineer. Early in my career, i underestimated a feature by A LOT, and I worked on it for weeks after the deadline "heads down". During that time, my name came up in every meeting. I was now on the chopping block. This happens to EVERY engineer. The common practice from director level engineers is to instruct their engineers to pad estimates by 2x. This hopefully accounts for all the unknown issues that are bound to arise. Weather forecasts are more predictable than large code changes or feature adds in a mature code base. And it also depends on what stage you're in. If it's a new game production, you can move faster because theres less overlap and bugs are not a big deal since they'll be fixed eventually (hopefully) but toward the end of production, the code base is massive and not always architected in a scalable way so you end up having to refactor large portions of code just so you can do your new additions safely.
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
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.
17:00 The fashion industry and journalism is in the exact same situation where a bad review, removes access to fashion shows events, free clothes that are unreleased, and etc.
That first story makes me feel so good as a dev knowing I'm nothing like those children.
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.
Imagine going to work and be expected to do some actual work.
“I don’t know what he meant by mom” 😂😂😂😂😂😂 caught me off guard 7:45
1:43 sounds like devs these days are avoiding responsibility and accountability
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.
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.
This is why I'm now focusing on becoming an indie dev instead of aiming for a AAA company
As a software engineer who has been in the industry for a while, Asmon's view is not really grounded well in reality.