also the part about middle management, thats a relatable one for most office situations, (Not to the same extremity) but yeah, middle management protecting middle management and friend cliques is awful.
If your story has taught me anything about game dev, it's that you can always use Blizzard as a comparison to whether you're doing things correctly or not. If it resembles Blizzard, you're doing it wrong. Postupdate: I think I should probably clarify I mean from the business side of things, management, etc. Not the creative, etc.
Learned that one when I asked "What is this salary based on when you say industry standards?" And never got an answer. And when I pushed, low and behold I was on the layoff chopping block lol. Despite having a crucial position they called me for help with months later because they lost access to systems.
One thing I will always remember at one of my ex place work was the ceo of the company telling me that : "Sickness does not exist, it's just an excuse to grab the money of my company without having to work" ; 2 days later he came to work and contaminate all of us with covide
Dude so much this. I took a sick leave because I had high fever and cough recently. HR person kept calling me to document every leave since Jan that I took, while I was bedridden sick. In sheer anger I started going to office sick and contaminated everyone.
I used to do that at Best Buy because they didn't think I was sick. I would come to work half-dead and get customers and employees sick and not accomplish anything. It was very fun in retrospect.
I know a guy who was a QA tester for Obsidian Entertainment working on Neverwinter Nights 2. At the end of development, they invited all the QA testers to the parking lot for a celebration party. There was no party, they disabled all their keys when they got out there, and told them they were all fired. And that was it...
That's very weird considering 4 of the 5 Obsidian founders started off at Interplay in the QA department, and all of them knew what suddenly losing your job feels like.
"Get everything in writing" best piece of advice ever. However, i worked for a company where HR NEVER put anything in writing, even in follow up emails where i would say "hey to go off our meeting earlier, i just wanted to confirm that you requested me to do X, please confirm". My hr manager never responded, when it is near impossible to get anything in writing its time to leave, they are setting you up to be fired with cause. Dont let them.
Yes. Until you have something in writing. DON'T DO IT. Don't move a finger until you have exact description of your job, your responsibilities, your wage, black on white with the company signature on it. If they don't give it to you. Don't do the job. Don't do the task. The job won't be done. And it will be their fault, not yours. Don't let them strong arm you, don't let them gaslight or guilt trip you into anything. It's a job. It's business. You owe them EXACTLY what you signed. Nothing less. Nothing more. There is a lot of people waiting to prey on your weakness, your nativity, your ignorance and your desperation.
The companies that everyone wants to work at end up treating employees the worst because employees are seen as being replaceable, given the competition. It is even worse when they hire fresh out of college and employees don't know that the work culture is abnormal and toxic because it is their first job in the field.
I don't think this comment lands the way you think it does. When Blizzard dev said "you think you do, but you don't", they were very wrong. In your comment, this would suggest that working for Blizzard is good.
I work for a small-ish 30 person game studio. We recently got purchased for a huge sum of money, and our CEO was promoted to the head of development in my country. In an era where every other studio is firing half their staff, massively downsizing, we're recruiting and still insanely profitable. A huge part of why we're able to do that is that we've let our senior talent go into roles where they continue to do what they are good at. Our senior programming staff is all people who've been at the company for 15+ years at this point. Insanely brilliant people, they know everything about the company, and the people too. We go to lunch with our QA people. They are some of the smartest and most engaged people in the company. They know fucking everything about the products, and are our proxy for the customer. We're trying to make them happy with the products.
That's awesome. I hope I can land into an environment like this. I'm doing game dev studies and I'm honestly quite scared about my future since I've so much to learn and about a year left before I am done + internship to catch.
Yeah hearing about how QA gets treated was heartbreaking, although I already knew it. In my company testers are the ones that get laid off when "savings" or "reorganization" takes place. It's such horse shit, so much so that our teams velocity has taken a huge hit because we lost a tester last time around. I absolutely love having good QA so I don't have to worry that the features I develop serve the user and actually work, because someone who KNOWS BETTER has verified it's what it's supposed to be. I absolutely love our tester, the team wouldn't be the same without him.
Enjoy it while it lasts. The bean counters will start paring away "expenses" like QA, writers, and everything else not absolutely necessary to get the game out as quickly as possible.
This reminded me of a story you'd appreciate where I got to (help) make the bad boss leave. I used to work for Autodesk on a small team dedicated to making a piece of software that I think they've since thrown out, but it was a ton of fun. My team was great and high performing, our boss was great, and unfortunately, great enough that he got poached by another company in the city. Instead of promoting from within the team, Autodesk put my team under a remote manager from somewhere else in the company. He was atrocious. "You are not the rockstar" is pretty much the summation of one of my performance reviews with him. My entire team hated him. He tried to pit us against each other to win his favor. Held, not just promotions, but cost of living adjustments over our heads to try to eek out more overtime, he was the worst. Once during a meeting, one of my coworkers and good friends was supposed to be presenting, and he accidentally shared the wrong screen on which he was clearly updating his resume on work time. So, not wanting to lose this great team I loved, I started trying to figure out a way to fix this, and I found one. There was a new team in the building we were in that had just gotten the mandate to grow significantly and was doing similar 3D work to what my team did. I managed to catch their manager in the hallway and basically dragged him into an empty meeting room and told him: Look, you're supposed to be building a new team to do X. I have an already integrated team that could totally do X and I'm pretty sure every single one of them is "secretly" looking for a new job because our manager sucks. Give me a list of positions that you're looking for and I can guarantee you not just applicants but applicants that already work well together. So he pushed my pitch up the chain, and I didn't hear back for a few weeks. Then, one day, our remote manager showed up in the office. He had "sad news": Our product was being shipped to the shanghai office, and our team was being transferred in its entirety to under the guy I'd grabbed in the hallway to join his 2 other reports and we wouldn't be working with shitty boss anymore. He then assured us that he would be in his temporary office for the rest of the day if any of us needed to talk. We all took lunch immediately, went to a bar a few miles down the road and partied like we hadn't for probably a year at that point. Maybe a month later the transfer had gone through, and shitty boss, who suddenly was a manager without a team, was let go.
Not in gaming, but in a corporate environment. When i started, my department Mgr had quarterly "round table" meetings with Baseline/Entry level staff to directly address/ask questions/be asked questions about processes and the like. The intent was to root out bad supervisors that were shielding themselves and/or others from oversight. Fast forward 7 years, that man is the VP of the same department, and TO THIS DAY holds quarterly meetings with the same front-line people (rotating the agents at random). This recently rooted out a Director that was saying 1 thing to him, and doing another that was against company policy. Always Keep In Contact WIth Ground Troops
"Read the entire thing and then perform the task." Someone don't understand Subordination enough to write a proper List. Toss that thing and leave the building. You can file a complaint over convoluted edgelord acts like that forcing you to betray coworkers.
@@R.S.O. for starters it is almost impossible to have a replacement for ANY job within 24 hours (between the hiring process and training) so that is just flat out wrong. Second if you have actual skills its incredibly easy to get hired, so I would bank very heavily on the bet that I could get a new job long before my position got filled in 90% or more circumstances. For reference the minimum time I've seen an employee go from interview to working a shift at my current job (security for a disease lab) is 2.5 months (because of background checks plus 80 hours post training and certifications)
@alanevans5353 you think that quiting your job and then going to apply to another one and start working before the company that already has applicants waiting to fill your spot and start getting paid the second they clock in. Clueless
I love that they talk about the influence of a manager is,. I had a breakdown at work and if it was not for the manager saying go home and see a doctor I would have crashed and lost my job. I went back into the job 7 weeks later a total different person. Thanks J Walters for being that manager who understood.
25:44 exactly what happened at my last job. I got a raise that was less than I expected (I was in an entry position and was going to have the "big boy dev paycheck"). When they ask me what I thought and I explained that is less than I expected, they told me it's the best they can do. With a promise of a new raise next year, and the possibility of having one or two people helping me with my projects. I left a couple of months after the year to get the new raise has passed, and my workload was never not growing. When I told them I was leaving, my boss immediately jumped into the "but my guy, the raise was coming", "you can have a team", etc. Dude if you wanted, you could have give me a better compensation. It's not that they couldn't give me more, they assumed I would not leave because I was just entering the market. Bold of them assuming that after 3 years of being THE Angular guy, THE one automatizing our deployments, THE guy managing our repos, etc, I would be fine with a subpar paycheck. I was not just a entry level dev, I was literally half their infrastructure / rant
some patterns appear whenever you live in the world. They really want you to be a shrewd snake. My last company did that as well, a "significant raise" until the next year" so if you realize in the meantime that raise is bad, well you remember you agreed to it because the HR sweet-talked you into it among other things.
I'm in IT/cyber security. As I was moving out of my entry level position into another role with a company with plans to train and teach others. I asked for a raise. I was told it's coming. This was a smaller locally owned company as well. 3 months later it never came, so I jumped ship and doubled my pay.
Some one once told me; You ask for what you expected to get for a raise every year until they say they cant give you anymore and then you look for a new job cause if they really valued you they would give you what you want/deserve without hesitation.
I had a similar thing where I was hired to be THE javascript guy to take a small company's flagship product from a silverlight app to a modern js app, and the senior dev and the cto fought me every step of the way and I got tired of it. I looked for for a couple years and eventually landed one because by then I had learned so much, and could go into interviews and explain everything I was doing inside and out and explain why I wanted to leave. So I ended up at a new job making 33% more than I was before, 50% more after my 1st raise there, and with a boss who actually liked me.
There are a few things I did as an adult that I wish someone did for me when I joined the workforce, and one of them is that every time I get to talk to any intern, I give them "the talk". Even though I live in a country that has fairly strict labour laws, shit still happens and I make it a point to tell them "don't do any work without a contract, ask for confirmation of all promises in writing, when someone wants you to do something big or complex, ask them for detailed specification of what they want in an email so they can't later say they asked for something else" and one of the things I sometimes hear on that is "well won't that make me not liked by managers?" and my answer is always "The only people who have any problem with that are people who want to screw you over". I'll have to add "HR is there to protect the company, not you" to this list cause that's brilliant.
Oh yes the name is very 1984 and perverse. People read it and they assume oh human resource it's like a resource for me I'm a human. No no no you are the resource lol. You're about to go be the stubborn goat that bothers the herds lady and she is hungry. Trying to pick someone out. She has to justify her job/eat.
@@logicaestrex2278 Take that with a grain of salt, though. At the base of it, it's a power thing. In some industries you are just too replaceable to demand this sort of thing from your "betters". You may find yourself in situations where your choice is limited between walking away or potentially being screwed over. In those cases the question is not how to set things straight so they can't wrong you, but rather how much abuse you are willing to take.
HR is there to protect HR, sometimes that protects the company, vanishingly rarely it might protect you (you probably had to do a bunch of CYA for that to happen)
The "Email Mike" plan is SUCH a good idea if implemented correctly and have the right CEO for it. Everyone's voice should hold the same weight and I respect someone in upper management who will take the time to listen to someone even if they're the janitor.
The thing is tho: The system should not be good for the workers, when they have a good CEO and I think you see this everywhere, that these few morally good people either cant or do not want to treat them well, because the whole system is rotten to the core.
It's obscene how often going out of your way to do a good job is punished with little to no reward and just. More work. That's why i just gave up on trying in school for the last 4 years, it just feels like such a waste of time and mental effort. So much worse when your life depends on a job.
not even just dev, I get torn into at my Walmart job (I rebuild parts of the store for new products) all the time for taking too long because I want to make sure it's done right, and the alternative is just leaving things the horrific mess the stockers always turn it into.
@@Verchiel_ School is not work, dimwit. If you don't learn and improve yourself, you're just fucking yourself over. It is not the same as the dynamics in a job.
Worked for Ubisoft over a decade ago and we were told similar things when a group of us complained about work condition (I don't remember EXACTLY, but it was something like "You should be glad, because there are plenty of people out there who would be happy to take your job"). Left a few months later, best decision EVER.
@@wkdpaul The thing is, they are not wrong. The artist community hypes these low end shitty jobs up as something really valuable to have and live for, so there will be plenty of idiots standing in line to take your job with horrible conditions and celebrate it as some big achievement. Companies happily maintain this kind of culture, it's not unique to Ubisoft.
The thing is, there are NO rockstars. Sure there are good developers, but this rockstar shit in software development has to die. Also, have they looked at their past couple of games? Is this the pinnacle of what rockstars are capable of?
Fun Fact: The QA department at my work is probably considered the most important. If a mistake is found in a project, the QA Lead goes *hard* on *everyone* involved in the process - The engineer, the checker, the manager. Anyone with a hand gets in trouble if the project isn't spotless. The dude isn't evil, though, he won't fire someone for a few mistakes, but he'll still tell people *to their face* that the work was unacceptable and they need to redo it. I'm both terrified and in awe of him. Like, talk about dedication to quality! *That's* how a QA team should be treated. They _should_ be the rockstars because if they aren't there to catch the mistakes, then the entire project suffers. Edit: QA personnel *are* engineers. Anyone who says otherwise is a moron.
To your edit, I've worked QA for multiple years without being an engineer. I knew the engineering process, as it was important to QA, but I never did Engineering work.
In my short time in Customer Support at Blizzard (2008 to 2011) the managers never had to say things like "you are all replaceable." They communicated that through their actions, which was far clearer than anything they ever said out loud.
@@dragonicmonkey7 Without going into too much detail, rules would get changed, exceptions would be made for some and not others, and we would be expected to deal with any consequences of the devs without a loss in productivity or survey score. They also would change how we were evaluated as game masters, but in hindsight that was to give them reason to let people go before a major layoff. My guess it was to cut back on severance costs.
The "no upgrade path" has been a common problem not only for QA. When I still worked in France, if you were a programmer or an artists and needed a raise (because of house, kids, whatever...) the only possibility was to switch to a management position, which means indeed that you lose a talented technician and you get a shitty (in most cases) manager. Dumb dumb dumb system.
Same for me. Anything that isn't management is capped way lower than it should be. What's funny is, 10 years ago, we had an external review and the very top finding was that we had way too many people in managing positions not doing actual work and too few people in key sections. Their recommendation was to cut management positions almost in half and hire more technicians to fulfill the contracts. However, that section only made it until version 0.9 of that final document. By 1.0, the one that everyone got to read, it was mysteriously missing. (Government job btw.)
@@Daihatskifortunately I moved to another country (Norway) where they don't have that mentality, assuming nothing bad happen in this economy (crossing fingers) I should be able to continue working as a programmer/architect until I retire, with regular pay raises and bonuses, without having to move to a management track.
It’s a major problem specifically in France, management is overvalued and technical expertise is undervalued across the board. Not only with compensation but also with decision making. IMO it’s why France is not competitive at all in dev and most dev companies exclusively develop for french clients.
These two guys became my favorite content creators as of lately. I was listening to this while walking my dogs and I couldn't help but to imagine how great it would be to have a podcast with ThePrimeagen, Pirate Software and Low Level Learning. I could listen to them discussing programming, hacking, technology in general for hours!
"Don't quit the work, quit the job." That rings so true with me. In my early 20's I ran a small business doing tech support and electronics repair. When I left I said "I'm never doing IT or related work again. I hate it, I'm done." Now, in my 30's, I've realized I never hated the work. The work was my passion. I hated the job of small business management.
The comment on managers is SO damn true. Most people who quit a company (aside from people amicably leaving for more pay) quit the manager not the actual job.
Funny thing I was interviewed by Blizzard and passed, they took a while to actually talk about the offer only VERBALLY said I passed. Then a month goes by and the recruiter out of the blue when I had forgotten about it reach out to me to ask if I'm interested. I ask him that my only concerns is "quality of life" since I'm Canada based as of right now and I would have to move to US, and comparing Irvine to where I live it would kinda suck. He said, with the most broken look I've seen a recruiter "no your quality of life will very likely become a lot worse". Thanks recruiter, you made me dodge a bullet. The project I was hired for was cancelled weeks ago and the entire team let go.
Hearing the sentence: "QA tested things before they were developed" is just.......how i expect every manager do act these days. No idea wtf they are doing but they sure as shit want to show how great they are!
I mean, there is stuff like writing test plans, and reviewing requirements, so QA can (and should) be involved in development projects before they get to the point of being ready to test... But obviously you can't do any actual testing if the thing you're testing doesn't exist yet.
I worked as a programmer in a small team at an insurance company, making a new in-house system so they didn't have to pay for 3rd party. The owner and VP asked us to make the front end firdt and show them that before we do anything else. We told them over and over again that's not how this works. We need to see how you have things structured first. We eventually caved and made some BS UI screens, they loved em, then we just did our jobs from there and made new UI screens. They never noticed... IT jobs are fun lol
@@rmeyer0120 IT jobs is catering to people who think they are geniuses while also having 0 understanding about what they are doing. My favorite explanation is "Because the business side needs it".
The problem here is twofold: Bad manager who wants to implement a bad idea based on upper management pressures to get the job done as quickly as possible. Giving QA the least amount of time to solve problems and push a product out before it's ready is why you get managers rationalizing testing before the product is ready for QA.
The amount of low IQ managers out there is soul crushing. The worst part is to work with someone like that... these 'people' make themselves unhappy by asking you to 'do your job' when they have no idea what your job inhales.
I was not expecting insane words of wisdom, "your not used to a normal human Pace so you think your underperforming"(i wish I'd heard that 2 years ago when i was putting 90 hours a week into my end of year project and i still try to put as much of my day including weekends into my work)
I managed a team of 3 devs and 2 QA people (in network infra, not games) . Embedded QA is where it's at. You make the devs and QA be a team themselves, and the team is organized around just making the best product. Instead of a confrontational aspect, devs THANKED QA for finding things.
"your not the rockstars" is what many companies wont say but will actually feel. Companies think that qa is who to blame when something goes wrong rather than the ones that make your product good
yeah the only times you hear about the qa team sometimes is when there is a bug in production and someone is complaining about how qa didn't catch it. Or sometimes you have to go through a non-dev middleman just to talk to your qa team. devs and qa should be collaborating shoulder to shoulder to ensure success
You can't "test quality into the product", quality has to be part of the whole process. From writing a user story until writing the release note.
9 месяцев назад+111
I was part of one of the last "layoff waves" that happened across the tech industry and I feel SOOO lucky to have been in the UK side of the company when it happened. We had a 30 days paid period to look for alternative positions within and outside the company and a settlement package just by law + whatever the company wanted to add to that. Our US colleagues got to work one morning and within the hour they were removed from all systems without enough time to even say bye to the rest of the team. There are some pretty terrifying stories about some colleagues is pretty dire situations when this happened like a woman 8 months pregnant only a few days away from going into maternity leave and now she was suddenly without a job, without maternity pay, etc... Really shocking how work law really lets down the employees in the US.
Most businesses can't afford the kind of severance package you're describing. Even half of that would kill at least half of the businesses in the US if they had to do it ONCE. Companies like Blizzard, billion dollar companies that make a fortune every second from lootboxes, can survive it... but if the law forced all businesses to do that every time they let an employee go, then very quickly the only businesses left would be the megacorporations... and that will make things MUCH worse for everyone, both employees and consumers. That's the reason why megacorporations support policies like higher corporate taxes and tons of more expensive regulations: because it kills off their smaller competition because they can't afford the massive expenses to reach new compliance and pay new taxes and cover more packages for workers. They use the government to destroy the competition, and they do it in the false name of Progressivism, while they themselves treat workers like garbage and launder their pay and take bogus bonuses. Sure, it helped a group of employees be able to take their time getting new jobs instead of stressing and panicking... but it does far more harm to far more people than that number if you require all businesses to do it. And before you say "the UK does it and they're fine," research the UK economic and small business health before and after those policies: great damage to all, in the name of potentially helping a few.
9 месяцев назад
@@stevealford230 you don't really have to do it every time you let someone go, you have to do it if you are letting them go as part of a "redundancy" or "restructuring". It is to protect employees from getting hired, not getting paid and being let go from small garbage companies too. All in all I see it as a way to incentivise companies to grow at a steady rate rather than taking big gambles and signalling to stockholders
@@stevealford230 if a business can't afford proper employment and employees, the business either chooses to go under or abuse it's employees. Surviving as a business is not a given, people who will do ANYTHING to survive and thrive as a business will do disgusting shit and act like it's not a choice, but it is and it always has been. Whether the business chose to employ a near birth women or not was a choice. Choosing to fire her days before she stopped being "productive" was a choice. Nothing in this world is particularly amazing, and there are downsides and costs to everything. But i will take whatever prevents an acceptance of gaslighting new parents into dumping them into poverty
@@stevealford230that's a ridiculous assertion, if a company can't afford to make staff redundant why were they hired in the first place?? A business that bad at making money and managing themselves they deserve to fail
@@Vihara2 "A business that bad at making money" ... the majority of businesses don't make enough margin to hire one more employee than they currently have. So paying a bunch of them to not work would end them. You know nothing about Economics or Business, Jon Snow. You have been brainwashed by the Marxist narrative that running a business with a million dollars worth of revenue means that the company has a million dollars of cashflow and that the owners are millionaires in actuality. Only megacorporations can afford big severance packages, and they rely on government subsidies to do it. You don't know what you're talking about.
As a person who works in QA (worked on Torchlight 3, Nioh 2, New World, Weird West, Song of Nunu among others), all this resonates deeply with me. QA is treated like trash both by management and gamers. I'm so glad I test software instead of games now.
I appreciate QA SO much! I would rather something be done right the first time, because trying to fix those issues on top of the work that comes after just means more issues. It spirals out of control. Much respect to good QA!
35:00 line manager is a standard corporate term. It simply means the person next up in the hierarchy - the person you report to. Your line manager is responsible for approving your leave, doing your KPIs, etc
I wonder if part of it is UK vs. US English. In the UK (where the person being discussed lives/lived), "line manager" is very widely used as the specific term for that type of manager - HR policies, the law, etc. all use the term.
Same stuff that happened to Sayers happened to one of my friends, was basically told "hey if you do all of this extra work that isn't part of your job you'll get a promotion in x time" and when x time came the manager acted like he didn't know what he was on about. He now puts in the bare minimum to maintain his job.
Just one of the reasons that nobody should do work that they're not contracted for, if there's no legally enforced reward then there's no reward at all.
@@Voltaic_Fireyep that's true. If people start doing it, the managers raise the bar for success citing people who were able to do it but don't bother checking to see if they need to work out of hours to get things done
Get. it. in. writing. Verbal promises hold little-to-no weight and these stories are a dime a dozen. Lots of different flavors too. For example - I know people who were promised “fast promotions” during their interview process only to have it disappear at review time. Don’t even consider a verbal promise a “carrot.” It’s not. It’s nothing. If they’re serious they will formally write it up *at least* and at best it needs to be incorporated into your employment contract.
This podcast made me really emotional because it mirrored how I felt at my job and made me realize everything you were saying was true. HR isn’t looking out for you, and I don’t know why I never realized that before. I was a high school English teacher btw.
Welcome to the world of Thor, he just... does that. Unless you ask him to elaborate and tell that specific story he'll sometimes just slide shit in and leave you going "Wait, what?"
My first job was as game developer. One of the seniors told me in my first 3 months "testers have no name". He was joking, as he was friends with a lot of the guys, but even so, the culture was there.
"Can't believe they did that to the guy that created Roller Coaster Tycoon" LMAO Had to do a double take as well verifying it wasn't THE ACTUAL Chris Sawyer name
I love listening to this. Despite it being in the video game industry, this conversation teaches good leadership and provides examples of terrible leadership/management. Yall also cover how to create a positive environment in the workspace. Yall's experience and advice has inspired me to ensure that my work environment follows your teachings.
I hear companies looking to hire SDETs (Software Development Engineers in Test) or Automation QA and complain they have a hard time finding anyone. Yes, because all those who are skilled to do that are also skilled enough to be Software Developers. And guess which class of developer gets paid more.
I kind of want to expand on thor saying, "highschool never ends." It sounds like a lot of the kids who had bad social experiences in high school ended up getting some form of power within blizzard and the corporate world enabled them further because they could squeeze employees dry. I mean some of the literal games blizzard management plays with employees where the punishment is getting fired in some dramatic fashion SCREAMS revenge fantasy.
I worked in the aerospace industry for a bit (just a tad under 5 years) and the thing is, that separation of departments started happening where I worked too. When we were an expanding company, fabricators (like me) were encouraged to talk to the engineers and machinists to discuss how things could work better. A person who makes the parts is also generally part of QA in that industry, because if you screw up, you need to know how not to do it again. The process is simple on the surface, but complicated the more you work with the materials and parts. At the end there, we were strongly discouraged from talking to the engineers, and the most hilarious thing to me was when simple parts that they would request would have obviously been easy to make in a certain way had they just talked to the people making the parts who were knowledgeable about how they could be made. And the same kinda language was used, like they were afraid that people would switch sides somehow if they were exposed to the grunts making the parts or, visa versa, the grunts were exposed to the ivory tower engineers. It created a pretty toxic work environment.
The same thing was happening at my aerospace machining shop. Production wasn't allowed to "bother" QA or engineering. The 3 years I was there as QA, I would find so many issues and get them fixed because I'd actually talk to production about what might have caused the issue. They blamed an out of tolerance pin hole on our deburring team, and after months of saying we need to monitor the machining process, I finally went out on the floor and grabbed a part that was getting machined. Turned out our drill was too long and would blow the hole out every couple of parts
This was super fun to watch. It's crazy that he lives in Bozeman. I ran into him in public and was so confused. I used to live in Helena. Miss that place. Glad I stumbled upon you! Can't wait for more content.
That simple bit of advice to confirm verbal agreements with a short email is one I try to give to young workers. You have 3 bosses, and one wants you to work on project X right now. Simple email to them and cc the other two to confirm the new work is the priority.
Dude, I worked in QA for major publishers for more than a decade and so much of what you say rings true here and much nostalgia is being triggered! Both good time mixed extremely stressful underpaid high pressure environments. Amazing what you say about Amazon, my old manager at MS setup most of those processes and he is a massive G!
Yup that's what Valve has always done. Testing internally. Testing as much as possible. It's one of the secrets to their sauce. Both to get opinions for development and to QA test.
This is a bizarro world being described here. Back in the 1980's when I worked on avionics, think Fly By Wire, the devs and the QA were all in the same boat. We all had to understand the same system and specs. One side to implement it, the other to verify it. And I thought old UK was rife with class divisions.
Dude! I've had a few companies attempt to "promote" me with more work and less pay, and I've literally vomited from the revelation. Get shit on paper. I've held crumbling businesses together until the weight was too much, but their mentality was still that I was replaceable... and then they fold. Others Iv'e work at won't fold soon, but if I am replaceable, so are they. Stick to your guns fam. You're a hero
Makes so much sense that Q&A was the first thing to get cut as a company standard when you look at the state of games being released over the last 10 years.
QA in gamedev is hell. On top of games being extremely complex and hardware-dependent software people often disregard it because most see games as unimportant entertainment.
Walmart ALSO treats its employees that way. "You're worth nothing and could be replaced in an instant and nobody would care except the children you can't feed anymore." was a real quote that came out of a store managers mouth to the overnight crew at Walmart #5260 on one of his daily rants where he would assemble the overnight employees at the front of the store and berate them until he told them they could go home.
It's interesting that they don't mind paying people for standing and listening to this kind of bull. Imagine having to pay an hour of overtime to your entire shift so the manager can berate them.
I hate some bosses so much. I was laid off within 2 weeks of the coof starting. I finally got to go back after 3 years. The small business was in complete disarray. My once coworker was now my manager and would shout and lie and go back on what he said and accuse me of doing "make work" when I was trying to fix the 3 years of damage. The boss didn't care. I had to leave. I can't deal with people like that. I would have ended up with a heart attack or something. There are other jobs out there.
When I worked at EA in QA in 2007, I made 11 Canadian dollar an hour. It was like 2 dollars more than minimum wage. Rent for a studio was probably 1200-1500 a month.
Non competes are unenforceable in the UK. If you wish to enforce it you need to pay what is called "garden leave". California also banned non competes from 1 Jan, 2024.
I can't even imagine how it's remotely legal anywhere at all to have a non-compete for all industries like that...like, I just can't imagine how that doesn't get laughed out of court that Blizzard has a legitimate course of action against someone working construction or fast food or something...just, what world does this even make any sense at all in?
Several states within the US also don't allow non-competes or at least require proof of necessity, which most companies simply don't want to bother following through with, and thus, it becomes an empty threat.
i m from germany and a lot of the problems you described are solved by having better labor laws AND having worker's councils with participation in a lot of decision making and as a control mechanism
@@RisenOswald Many bosses are shitting on labor laws in germany too and minimum wage is to much to die and to less to live. you end up around 9,70€ net per hour, have fun paying a 1000€+ apartment if you are one of those unlucky souls.
Companies own American politics it's called lobbying..... except I don't see many new lobbies being built lol but yeah thats why the American workers give 0 shit about quality in their job also we have shit managers who stay in their positions too long.... it's exactly like the politics 😂😂😂
I'm glad you've learned from your own experiences and provided a way for others to reach out to you outside the "noraml chaing of command". Transparency incompanies is rare anymoore. It's nice to see "the higher ups" migling and checking in with teh lowly ones, keeping lines of communication open, and just checking up on how their company is doing at all levels. Dont' get boxed into one "caste"
I work as a dev in AAA and I work with QA all the time. I always treat them with respect and understand we all have different skills/needs and they are an important defense against us publishing bad code, but this helps me see that sometimes others don't see QA that way.
In the UK, companies have no ability to restrict your work without pay, and no additional things can be added to your contract, including the asking you to further restrict your employment options. When you go to leave and someone asks you to sign something, refuse. Your job is over, and so is their ability to get your to sign... ANYTHING. You're not being an asshole, even if fake-emotion speak people try to make it feel like a betrayal.
actually they do especially in games. A non compete is designed to stop someone working at a studio and taking said information/ trade secrets and doing their own spin on something a company is already doing. I know people in startups who were CEO's of other companies who had to wait 12 months before they could start their new studios. I have never seen it enforced on an artist before.
@higgsbonbon I have been in the games industry for over 20 years, I have worked in the UK, US and Canada. when I was working for EA, they did the same thing with Patrick soderland ( in sweden), casey hudson, even with the heads of Nightingale had to do non compete in North America. As mentioned I have seen this imposed on CEO/big wigs of the industry, never seen this imposed on an Artist before.
As a professional Game Dev, QA testers are godsend. They do half the work. As a dev Ive always said 50% of the solution is finding the problem, because as a dev, I cant fix what I cant see. So finding problems for me is such a relief always !
Quick input on leadership being a "lateral move" (especially in regard to pay): For the **vast majority** of companies, Senior Engineers/Developers make more than Engineering Managers. However, Lead Engineers generally make more than Senior Engineers. Companies can and will abuse this with ambiguous responsibilities vs. title analogues.
That's exactly what I do for the company I work for, I handle all automation for QA, including building the frameworks for web, mobile, and API testing, along with a few smaller projects to improve quality of life. Before I took over the API automation, the team was using Katalon, which required a paid subscription and took around 2 hours to run over 2000 tests. I developed a custom framework that replicates all of Katalon's features and runs the same tests in under 10 minutes. My system generates a report and emails everyone on the API team a link to view the full report, yet I still get treated like trash. QA life is rough.
What a great conversation about real world stuff in corporate culture. In a lot of these scenarios people are treated as commodities, and interchangeable. Its sad but its all too common.
Gotta comment on this and tell you how much I agree. I've worked as a consultant for 8 years with fortune 50 companies and the public sector and I've seen so much bullying and hazing from the line of business and leadership towards those building everything, it's sickening honestly. I had a guy legitimately tell me I was going to be strangled if a deadline was missed that I had nothing to do with lol
19:00 man, good bosses feel like angels, I swear. I wish I wasn't a loser so I could try and achieve a position of being a boss. Not for the power, but I would love to be the good boss, they're like healers in this world. Bad managers are like thorn in your side that doesn't even go away when you're away from work. Like a leash smothering you constantly...
I've been on both sides and being the boss isn't always as easy as it seems. There are a lot of difficult people in the world and when you go in with the instinct to be loved you often wind up being the most hated manager in the end. It's sad but true. People can be fickle and, most dangerously, insecure. They need support, care, empowerment, but they also need clear rules, expectations, incentives, and discipline. They will often consider the former efforts patronizing, the latter tyrannical and if you do neither to motivate many will just goof off. I think people forget that as a manager you don't just have 8 star performers, you have maybe 5 star performers, 2 subpar people to mentor who know they're pretty bad and, worst of all and always most difficult, 1 subpar person who "knows" they're amazing but sadly what they "know" just ain't so, and managing the delicate act of keeping everyone happy with that backdrop can be a very difficult thing indeed, especially when often the people who need training the most are also the most insecure and most readily insulted when you try to get them support. If you don't get them that support, the rest of the team will grow resentful about the resulting extra workload, as well, so you can't even always just not force the issue or go along to get along. To say nothing of the fact that often you do not have the ability to get everyone the raise you want, let alone the raise they want. I much prefer not managing people these days - I personally prefer to just do the work - while it pays less, it's more fun, and you're spared a lot of drama because managing a relationship with one boss is WAY less drama than managing 8-10 direct reports. You're not a loser though, dude, the fact your big motivation is just a desire to treat people right shows that you are not a loser and you will go far in the end. I hope if you encounter jerks you never let it embitter you - so many people lose your attitude by the time they make it to the top and end up putting on the same boot they were kicked with and the world needs people who will pay it forward rather than subconsciously mimic their own past bosses or think it's now "their turn".
@@ComplainingIsRecreation Well no, I didn't say it's easy. Every job has it's problems, just that being a boss puts people in power. And you can use that power for evil or for good. When people use that power for good, it kinda feels magical.
I've only ever had toxic management and unsupportive work environments until I got my current job. My current boss is amazing. Because he doesn't see his primary duty as overseeing and surveilling and double checking his employee's work. He spends his day removing obstacles and fixing problems that stand in the way of us doing our jobs. He trusts us to be competent and do our jobs and in turn we know we can go to him with issues and he will get them taken care of, or find someone who can. Of course he does also manage the department as any manager should, but he's extremely involved in the day to day work of the people on the factory floor and understands what issues we're facing and how to help us do our jobs best, instead of sitting in his office all day playing petty king.
The read-the-whole thing gimmick is literally a middle/high school tactic for either substitute teachers or bored gym-coaches required to have that one "teaching class they have to sit for. Combine with middle-mgmt approach of cut the "bottom" 10% and you've got toxic gold.
This is pretty good and to think I only started watching Prime about 2-3 weeks and Thor a month before. I these realistic takes on Tech that even junior engineers can follow and relate to, THANKS MAN.
This was an incredibly important thing to hear. The foundations of a business is here. This discussion is what everyone needs to hear about. Great upload. Bigger organization is an entirely different beast. But either way big or small business, passion is still what you need to keep going. Being bigger than the whole sum.
I totally enjoyed playing WarCraft II, StarCraft, WarCraft III, and StarCraft 2. It was shocking to discover just how horribly the company treated most of the people who worked so hard on games I loved.
This is amazing perspective from inside (and out). I really enjoyed listening to this even though it's the length of a movie. Fantastic insight. Thanks to both of you for this!
Here's what happened when I became a supervisor: My work day is filled with meetings, After they're all done I start my actual work leading me to work like 12 hours. I have to plan, distribute work, and instructions to the team. I have to relay feedback from higher ups who are always late leading to a stressed out team I have to rally when they don't meet their deadline. To explain revisions better I tend to open a zoom call and go over it. Everyone is in different time zones so I have to do individual ones especially for people struggling. I have to still do my normal non-supervisor work and meet quota. I barely got a raise.
When I was in college back in 2004-2010 Blizzard was rumored/known to give very low starting salary for developer roles. One of many reason why I stopped caring about going into video game development especially so from "AAA" companies and time crunch development cycles.
I think we're entering a new era of indie games. With so many powerful tools, and engines like Unreal and Unity and Godot it's easier than ever to start a game company. A new generation of devs are in training as we speak.
What did you end up doing instead? I personally feel stuck because I've completed half a BA in 3D Game Art but I really don't want to work in the video game industry because of ridiculous corporate crap. I don't know whether I should complete my degree or cut my losses and look into something else that wont destroy my soul. I'm turning 26 and not getting any younger here.
@@BillyOnRUclips If you're close to getting the degree, it's probably best to get it. A degree like that could probably get you a job in IT. Any kind of job in IT except for the specialized ones. Most likely.
I will never forget Kil Jaeden during the Legion Expansion, who the devs promised was totally working and they could totally kill it easily with their in-house raid team led by the game director at the time Ion Hazzikostas, only to watch the boss despawn every time it was supposed to change phases because they had no QA on team 2 and kept breaking the entire game on a weekly basis.
You could see the clash of Thor's more pro worker stance vs prime's more rugged individualist pro corporate pick yourself up by your bootstraps leaning.
Whenever I hear someone say "HR is there to protect the company from you", I just feel like Rorschach in prison. "None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. YOU'RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH ME!"
Meanwhile I am a QAE at a local hosting and e-commerce company, been with them for 7 years, and I am treated with utmost respect and being paid well. Couldn't be happier. I feel sorry for everyone who had to go through the shit like the story told in this vid.
I've worked with QA and I really loved. Unfortunately I don't want to work with it for all the mentioned reasons here. People think that we are there to fix the problems that they already know about and expect us to let it pass. I learned the hard way that HR is not there for the employees.
@@david7384 pretty sure the people signing up for the role in that situation would be the labor union reps, and I'd be cheering them on, and the HR folks might be somewhere in the scene, too
Dude, i have no idea who you are and I'm discovering your channel with this video. As of less than 3 minutes in the video I can tell you're already great at explaining/elaborating on stuff that is american-specific, for those who don't have the context. It's really good :) thanks
Well after listening to this, No Fucking Wonder most games suck these days. Indie market is the future. This is Valuable insight and nothing but praise for bringing this to light.
This kind of shit happens everywhere, it's not only blizzard or gaming. It's businessman mentality where making money is the only thing that they care, and the rest is none of their concern. Most people can't leave the job because they are held hostage due to the financial commitment they need to meet.
Being an Ex-Blizzard employee from the customer service side, hearing this hit's home. So many things that happened in Cali happened in the Texas location too.
this is exactly what these big corps live on... the dreams and happiness and young men thinking that they can achieve great things where in reality the push these young men into a meat grinder and squeeze everything off of them. This is EXACTLY how Bobby and his ilk made their money... they took all that good work you did and payed you less then the bare minimum.
I have 2 managers, because my work is done in two different places, and yes, it absolutely makes the difference whether your manager is good or bad. One of my managers is off hands, which means our work is made more difficult because they are absent, they don't know what's going on and they don't seem to take in our feedback. The other manager is so so good. Makes it super easy for us, has our side when needed, and understands our situations and values our work.
![BRASIL vs. URUGUAY [1-1] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-hWBAuxF1eY/mqdefault.jpg)
Always happy to chat.
Keep kicking ass, dude!
your just good for bussiness advice in office situations dude! also just cool af.
Big ups dude!
also the part about middle management, thats a relatable one for most office situations, (Not to the same extremity) but yeah, middle management protecting middle management and friend cliques is awful.
@@imirikso much so I think I'm drafting on greatness.
My man
If your story has taught me anything about game dev, it's that you can always use Blizzard as a comparison to whether you're doing things correctly or not. If it resembles Blizzard, you're doing it wrong.
Postupdate: I think I should probably clarify I mean from the business side of things, management, etc. Not the creative, etc.
"Get that shit in writing and don't trust HR" should really be printed on every diploma to any graduate in the world.
Never trust someone else wants the best for you. Make yourself want the best for you.
lets make that a middleschool thing!
HR is there to protect the company, Not you, just like they said. I lived it
I wanted, 10 years ago. They never got back to me. I became an tattoo artist, and today I am an game developer in my free-time.
Learned that one when I asked "What is this salary based on when you say industry standards?" And never got an answer. And when I pushed, low and behold I was on the layoff chopping block lol. Despite having a crucial position they called me for help with months later because they lost access to systems.
One thing I will always remember at one of my ex place work was the ceo of the company telling me that : "Sickness does not exist, it's just an excuse to grab the money of my company without having to work" ; 2 days later he came to work and contaminate all of us with covide
In a sane world, he would have been charged with reckless endangerment
Now that's a leader.....😂 Wtf...
Dude so much this. I took a sick leave because I had high fever and cough recently. HR person kept calling me to document every leave since Jan that I took, while I was bedridden sick. In sheer anger I started going to office sick and contaminated everyone.
I used to do that at Best Buy because they didn't think I was sick. I would come to work half-dead and get customers and employees sick and not accomplish anything. It was very fun in retrospect.
I know a guy who was a QA tester for Obsidian Entertainment working on Neverwinter Nights 2. At the end of development, they invited all the QA testers to the parking lot for a celebration party. There was no party, they disabled all their keys when they got out there, and told them they were all fired. And that was it...
that's mob worthy
WTF....
Jesus.. such an terrible feeling it must have be.. imagine coming back to your wife and just be broken while you were suppose to provide..😢
no fucking way
That's very weird considering 4 of the 5 Obsidian founders started off at Interplay in the QA department, and all of them knew what suddenly losing your job feels like.
"Get everything in writing" best piece of advice ever. However, i worked for a company where HR NEVER put anything in writing, even in follow up emails where i would say "hey to go off our meeting earlier, i just wanted to confirm that you requested me to do X, please confirm". My hr manager never responded, when it is near impossible to get anything in writing its time to leave, they are setting you up to be fired with cause. Dont let them.
Were ypu polite or rude
@@purples2765 Does it matter? Was HR following procedures or not?
Yes. Until you have something in writing. DON'T DO IT. Don't move a finger until you have exact description of your job, your responsibilities, your wage, black on white with the company signature on it.
If they don't give it to you.
Don't do the job.
Don't do the task.
The job won't be done.
And it will be their fault, not yours.
Don't let them strong arm you, don't let them gaslight or guilt trip you into anything.
It's a job. It's business. You owe them EXACTLY what you signed.
Nothing less. Nothing more.
There is a lot of people waiting to prey on your weakness, your nativity, your ignorance and your desperation.
And keep everything they send you in writing. Every email. Every voice mail. Every memo.
Perks of a 1 party recording state. Get it on audio recording.
"I want to work at Blizzard!"
Blizzard: "You think you do, but you don't"
I want to like this comment but it's currently at 666 likes which is just too perfect.
Blizzard: Hold my beer!
The companies that everyone wants to work at end up treating employees the worst because employees are seen as being replaceable, given the competition. It is even worse when they hire fresh out of college and employees don't know that the work culture is abnormal and toxic because it is their first job in the field.
I don't think this comment lands the way you think it does. When Blizzard dev said "you think you do, but you don't", they were very wrong. In your comment, this would suggest that working for Blizzard is good.
I work for a small-ish 30 person game studio. We recently got purchased for a huge sum of money, and our CEO was promoted to the head of development in my country. In an era where every other studio is firing half their staff, massively downsizing, we're recruiting and still insanely profitable. A huge part of why we're able to do that is that we've let our senior talent go into roles where they continue to do what they are good at. Our senior programming staff is all people who've been at the company for 15+ years at this point. Insanely brilliant people, they know everything about the company, and the people too. We go to lunch with our QA people. They are some of the smartest and most engaged people in the company. They know fucking everything about the products, and are our proxy for the customer. We're trying to make them happy with the products.
That's awesome. I hope I can land into an environment like this. I'm doing game dev studies and I'm honestly quite scared about my future since I've so much to learn and about a year left before I am done + internship to catch.
That last part, omg! QA ARE customer standins and making them happy should be the interim goal. What a fantastic mindset.
Yeah hearing about how QA gets treated was heartbreaking, although I already knew it. In my company testers are the ones that get laid off when "savings" or "reorganization" takes place. It's such horse shit, so much so that our teams velocity has taken a huge hit because we lost a tester last time around. I absolutely love having good QA so I don't have to worry that the features I develop serve the user and actually work, because someone who KNOWS BETTER has verified it's what it's supposed to be.
I absolutely love our tester, the team wouldn't be the same without him.
Enjoy it while it lasts. The bean counters will start paring away "expenses" like QA, writers, and everything else not absolutely necessary to get the game out as quickly as possible.
Sounds like a healthy environment, you guys keep up the good work!
This collab needs to be a regular segment
this was the best in a long time
make it a podcast.
Loved this collaboration. Hoping to see more of this
@@RevMirraneabsolutly not
This whole story reminds me of something I learned the hard way. People don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad bosses.
This reminded me of a story you'd appreciate where I got to (help) make the bad boss leave.
I used to work for Autodesk on a small team dedicated to making a piece of software that I think they've since thrown out, but it was a ton of fun. My team was great and high performing, our boss was great, and unfortunately, great enough that he got poached by another company in the city. Instead of promoting from within the team, Autodesk put my team under a remote manager from somewhere else in the company. He was atrocious. "You are not the rockstar" is pretty much the summation of one of my performance reviews with him. My entire team hated him. He tried to pit us against each other to win his favor. Held, not just promotions, but cost of living adjustments over our heads to try to eek out more overtime, he was the worst. Once during a meeting, one of my coworkers and good friends was supposed to be presenting, and he accidentally shared the wrong screen on which he was clearly updating his resume on work time.
So, not wanting to lose this great team I loved, I started trying to figure out a way to fix this, and I found one. There was a new team in the building we were in that had just gotten the mandate to grow significantly and was doing similar 3D work to what my team did. I managed to catch their manager in the hallway and basically dragged him into an empty meeting room and told him: Look, you're supposed to be building a new team to do X. I have an already integrated team that could totally do X and I'm pretty sure every single one of them is "secretly" looking for a new job because our manager sucks. Give me a list of positions that you're looking for and I can guarantee you not just applicants but applicants that already work well together.
So he pushed my pitch up the chain, and I didn't hear back for a few weeks. Then, one day, our remote manager showed up in the office. He had "sad news": Our product was being shipped to the shanghai office, and our team was being transferred in its entirety to under the guy I'd grabbed in the hallway to join his 2 other reports and we wouldn't be working with shitty boss anymore. He then assured us that he would be in his temporary office for the rest of the day if any of us needed to talk. We all took lunch immediately, went to a bar a few miles down the road and partied like we hadn't for probably a year at that point. Maybe a month later the transfer had gone through, and shitty boss, who suddenly was a manager without a team, was let go.
Dude I WOULD agree with you, but this story is just rotten system from top to bottom
@@thecompanioncube4211 apparently it was rotten from one notch away from top all the way to bottom. Mike sounds like an absolute baller
People ruin everything they touch, the human greed will always take over someone that has even a little bit of power
Not in gaming, but in a corporate environment.
When i started, my department Mgr had quarterly "round table" meetings with Baseline/Entry level staff to directly address/ask questions/be asked questions about processes and the like.
The intent was to root out bad supervisors that were shielding themselves and/or others from oversight.
Fast forward 7 years, that man is the VP of the same department, and TO THIS DAY holds quarterly meetings with the same front-line people (rotating the agents at random). This recently rooted out a Director that was saying 1 thing to him, and doing another that was against company policy.
Always Keep In Contact WIth Ground Troops
That's great. So many times the higher-ups are completely out of touch.
Effective communication is only possible amongst equals.
Not in corporate environment. In the whole capitalism. This is an Earth and People destroyer system. Their profit is our blood.
if my boss said "you can be replaced at any time" I would have been among the first people to walk out. kudos to the team for doing just that.
"Read the entire thing and then perform the task." Someone don't understand Subordination enough to write a proper List. Toss that thing and leave the building. You can file a complaint over convoluted edgelord acts like that forcing you to betray coworkers.
They replace you the next day. How long till you get another job?
@@R.S.O. for starters it is almost impossible to have a replacement for ANY job within 24 hours (between the hiring process and training) so that is just flat out wrong. Second if you have actual skills its incredibly easy to get hired, so I would bank very heavily on the bet that I could get a new job long before my position got filled in 90% or more circumstances. For reference the minimum time I've seen an employee go from interview to working a shift at my current job (security for a disease lab) is 2.5 months (because of background checks plus 80 hours post training and certifications)
@alanevans5353 wow. Tell me you know nothing about the management levels of a properly ran company without actually telling me
@alanevans5353 you think that quiting your job and then going to apply to another one and start working before the company that already has applicants waiting to fill your spot and start getting paid the second they clock in. Clueless
I love that they talk about the influence of a manager is,. I had a breakdown at work and if it was not for the manager saying go home and see a doctor I would have crashed and lost my job. I went back into the job 7 weeks later a total different person. Thanks J Walters for being that manager who understood.
25:44 exactly what happened at my last job. I got a raise that was less than I expected (I was in an entry position and was going to have the "big boy dev paycheck"). When they ask me what I thought and I explained that is less than I expected, they told me it's the best they can do. With a promise of a new raise next year, and the possibility of having one or two people helping me with my projects.
I left a couple of months after the year to get the new raise has passed, and my workload was never not growing. When I told them I was leaving, my boss immediately jumped into the "but my guy, the raise was coming", "you can have a team", etc. Dude if you wanted, you could have give me a better compensation. It's not that they couldn't give me more, they assumed I would not leave because I was just entering the market. Bold of them assuming that after 3 years of being THE Angular guy, THE one automatizing our deployments, THE guy managing our repos, etc, I would be fine with a subpar paycheck. I was not just a entry level dev, I was literally half their infrastructure
/ rant
some patterns appear whenever you live in the world. They really want you to be a shrewd snake. My last company did that as well, a "significant raise" until the next year" so if you realize in the meantime that raise is bad, well you remember you agreed to it because the HR sweet-talked you into it among other things.
I'm in IT/cyber security. As I was moving out of my entry level position into another role with a company with plans to train and teach others. I asked for a raise. I was told it's coming. This was a smaller locally owned company as well. 3 months later it never came, so I jumped ship and doubled my pay.
Some one once told me; You ask for what you expected to get for a raise every year until they say they cant give you anymore and then you look for a new job cause if they really valued you they would give you what you want/deserve without hesitation.
You'd be surprised how many people slave away for cheap for YEARs and all the companies get away with it.
I had a similar thing where I was hired to be THE javascript guy to take a small company's flagship product from a silverlight app to a modern js app, and the senior dev and the cto fought me every step of the way and I got tired of it. I looked for for a couple years and eventually landed one because by then I had learned so much, and could go into interviews and explain everything I was doing inside and out and explain why I wanted to leave. So I ended up at a new job making 33% more than I was before, 50% more after my 1st raise there, and with a boss who actually liked me.
There are a few things I did as an adult that I wish someone did for me when I joined the workforce, and one of them is that every time I get to talk to any intern, I give them "the talk". Even though I live in a country that has fairly strict labour laws, shit still happens and I make it a point to tell them "don't do any work without a contract, ask for confirmation of all promises in writing, when someone wants you to do something big or complex, ask them for detailed specification of what they want in an email so they can't later say they asked for something else" and one of the things I sometimes hear on that is "well won't that make me not liked by managers?" and my answer is always "The only people who have any problem with that are people who want to screw you over". I'll have to add "HR is there to protect the company, not you" to this list cause that's brilliant.
Thanks for this man, appreciate it. From a hopefully soon to be intern trying not to die out here lol
Oh yes the name is very 1984 and perverse. People read it and they assume oh human resource it's like a resource for me I'm a human. No no no you are the resource lol. You're about to go be the stubborn goat that bothers the herds lady and she is hungry. Trying to pick someone out. She has to justify her job/eat.
@@logicaestrex2278 Take that with a grain of salt, though. At the base of it, it's a power thing. In some industries you are just too replaceable to demand this sort of thing from your "betters". You may find yourself in situations where your choice is limited between walking away or potentially being screwed over. In those cases the question is not how to set things straight so they can't wrong you, but rather how much abuse you are willing to take.
Occasionally, HR will protect you because it happens to be in the company's best interest. It's rare, but it does happen!
HR is there to protect HR, sometimes that protects the company, vanishingly rarely it might protect you (you probably had to do a bunch of CYA for that to happen)
The "Email Mike" plan is SUCH a good idea if implemented correctly and have the right CEO for it. Everyone's voice should hold the same weight and I respect someone in upper management who will take the time to listen to someone even if they're the janitor.
The thing is tho: The system should not be good for the workers, when they have a good CEO and I think you see this everywhere, that these few morally good people either cant or do not want to treat them well, because the whole system is rotten to the core.
Mike's Maphacks
@@scatt3r1why is it not good for the worker's?
“Imagine getting fired for being meticulous.” That happens all the time
It's obscene how often going out of your way to do a good job is punished with little to no reward and just. More work.
That's why i just gave up on trying in school for the last 4 years, it just feels like such a waste of time and mental effort. So much worse when your life depends on a job.
not even just dev, I get torn into at my Walmart job (I rebuild parts of the store for new products) all the time for taking too long because I want to make sure it's done right, and the alternative is just leaving things the horrific mess the stockers always turn it into.
Can confirm.
@@Verchiel_ "That's why I gave up on trying in school". My brother in Christ just learn to say no to classmates asking for help.
@@Verchiel_ School is not work, dimwit. If you don't learn and improve yourself, you're just fucking yourself over. It is not the same as the dynamics in a job.
It blows my mind that saying "you're not the rockstars." actually came across someone's mind as an appropriate thing to say. twice.
Worked for Ubisoft over a decade ago and we were told similar things when a group of us complained about work condition (I don't remember EXACTLY, but it was something like "You should be glad, because there are plenty of people out there who would be happy to take your job"). Left a few months later, best decision EVER.
@@wkdpaul The thing is, they are not wrong. The artist community hypes these low end shitty jobs up as something really valuable to have and live for, so there will be plenty of idiots standing in line to take your job with horrible conditions and celebrate it as some big achievement. Companies happily maintain this kind of culture, it's not unique to Ubisoft.
Turns out "being out of touch" is not a buff that wears off in 24 hours.
The thing is, there are NO rockstars. Sure there are good developers, but this rockstar shit in software development has to die. Also, have they looked at their past couple of games? Is this the pinnacle of what rockstars are capable of?
Given who owns Ubisoft, this is a pretty typical attitude across that society. @@wkdpaul
Fun Fact: The QA department at my work is probably considered the most important. If a mistake is found in a project, the QA Lead goes *hard* on *everyone* involved in the process - The engineer, the checker, the manager. Anyone with a hand gets in trouble if the project isn't spotless.
The dude isn't evil, though, he won't fire someone for a few mistakes, but he'll still tell people *to their face* that the work was unacceptable and they need to redo it. I'm both terrified and in awe of him. Like, talk about dedication to quality!
*That's* how a QA team should be treated. They _should_ be the rockstars because if they aren't there to catch the mistakes, then the entire project suffers.
Edit: QA personnel *are* engineers. Anyone who says otherwise is a moron.
Agreed until the last part... I worked tech QA and I am not an engineer. Gonna differ by company and location etc
Hate to be that guy, but "Engineer" is an overused word in software to make developers feel more impressive. I say that as an "Engineer"
i know a qa lead in biotech, they try to make him signed papers even if the cold chain (for storage of medical supplies) is broken....
What kind of engineer?
To your edit, I've worked QA for multiple years without being an engineer. I knew the engineering process, as it was important to QA, but I never did Engineering work.
In my short time in Customer Support at Blizzard (2008 to 2011) the managers never had to say things like "you are all replaceable." They communicated that through their actions, which was far clearer than anything they ever said out loud.
You never have to be told you're hated if you're being beaten down every day.
what sort of actions?
@@dragonicmonkey7 Without going into too much detail, rules would get changed, exceptions would be made for some and not others, and we would be expected to deal with any consequences of the devs without a loss in productivity or survey score. They also would change how we were evaluated as game masters, but in hindsight that was to give them reason to let people go before a major layoff. My guess it was to cut back on severance costs.
The "no upgrade path" has been a common problem not only for QA.
When I still worked in France, if you were a programmer or an artists and needed a raise (because of house, kids, whatever...) the only possibility was to switch to a management position, which means indeed that you lose a talented technician and you get a shitty (in most cases) manager.
Dumb dumb dumb system.
It's an example of the Peter principle.
A lot of places just don't have a good IC track
That's a major reason why a little company called Nokia collapsed.
Same for me. Anything that isn't management is capped way lower than it should be. What's funny is, 10 years ago, we had an external review and the very top finding was that we had way too many people in managing positions not doing actual work and too few people in key sections. Their recommendation was to cut management positions almost in half and hire more technicians to fulfill the contracts. However, that section only made it until version 0.9 of that final document. By 1.0, the one that everyone got to read, it was mysteriously missing. (Government job btw.)
@@Daihatskifortunately I moved to another country (Norway) where they don't have that mentality, assuming nothing bad happen in this economy (crossing fingers) I should be able to continue working as a programmer/architect until I retire, with regular pay raises and bonuses, without having to move to a management track.
It’s a major problem specifically in France, management is overvalued and technical expertise is undervalued across the board. Not only with compensation but also with decision making. IMO it’s why France is not competitive at all in dev and most dev companies exclusively develop for french clients.
These two guys became my favorite content creators as of lately. I was listening to this while walking my dogs and I couldn't help but to imagine how great it would be to have a podcast with ThePrimeagen, Pirate Software and Low Level Learning. I could listen to them discussing programming, hacking, technology in general for hours!
Same. I'm learning to code and these guys were recommended to me, and it's been amazing!
Thor's faceless voice makes it feel like Prime is talking to God.
Well, Thor may as well be a God
He is 😂
How could we tell otherwise.
He is, he's the son of Odin
God of Goblins
"Don't quit the work, quit the job."
That rings so true with me. In my early 20's I ran a small business doing tech support and electronics repair. When I left I said "I'm never doing IT or related work again. I hate it, I'm done."
Now, in my 30's, I've realized I never hated the work. The work was my passion. I hated the job of small business management.
The comment on managers is SO damn true. Most people who quit a company (aside from people amicably leaving for more pay) quit the manager not the actual job.
Funny thing I was interviewed by Blizzard and passed, they took a while to actually talk about the offer only VERBALLY said I passed. Then a month goes by and the recruiter out of the blue when I had forgotten about it reach out to me to ask if I'm interested. I ask him that my only concerns is "quality of life" since I'm Canada based as of right now and I would have to move to US, and comparing Irvine to where I live it would kinda suck. He said, with the most broken look I've seen a recruiter "no your quality of life will very likely become a lot worse". Thanks recruiter, you made me dodge a bullet. The project I was hired for was cancelled weeks ago and the entire team let go.
The Survival game?
Hearing the sentence: "QA tested things before they were developed" is just.......how i expect every manager do act these days. No idea wtf they are doing but they sure as shit want to show how great they are!
I mean, there is stuff like writing test plans, and reviewing requirements, so QA can (and should) be involved in development projects before they get to the point of being ready to test...
But obviously you can't do any actual testing if the thing you're testing doesn't exist yet.
I worked as a programmer in a small team at an insurance company, making a new in-house system so they didn't have to pay for 3rd party. The owner and VP asked us to make the front end firdt and show them that before we do anything else. We told them over and over again that's not how this works. We need to see how you have things structured first. We eventually caved and made some BS UI screens, they loved em, then we just did our jobs from there and made new UI screens. They never noticed... IT jobs are fun lol
@@rmeyer0120 IT jobs is catering to people who think they are geniuses while also having 0 understanding about what they are doing.
My favorite explanation is "Because the business side needs it".
The problem here is twofold: Bad manager who wants to implement a bad idea based on upper management pressures to get the job done as quickly as possible. Giving QA the least amount of time to solve problems and push a product out before it's ready is why you get managers rationalizing testing before the product is ready for QA.
The amount of low IQ managers out there is soul crushing. The worst part is to work with someone like that... these 'people' make themselves unhappy by asking you to 'do your job' when they have no idea what your job inhales.
I was not expecting insane words of wisdom, "your not used to a normal human Pace so you think your underperforming"(i wish I'd heard that 2 years ago when i was putting 90 hours a week into my end of year project and i still try to put as much of my day including weekends into my work)
"I can see you're frustrated" is the HR equivalent of "Thoughts and prayers"
Or "you bring up valid points.....but"
And they hope you done give a free lead injection
@@TOAOM123 "I hear what you're saying."
@@TOAOM123”look I don’t give a shit but come vent your cycle of problems “
It's not same. One is sometimes all you can do in the face of tragedy.
I managed a team of 3 devs and 2 QA people (in network infra, not games) . Embedded QA is where it's at. You make the devs and QA be a team themselves, and the team is organized around just making the best product. Instead of a confrontational aspect, devs THANKED QA for finding things.
Thank you for sharing your insights. Hearing these stories helps everyone find their voice to advocate for themselves, whatever their job may be.
"your not the rockstars" is what many companies wont say but will actually feel. Companies think that qa is who to blame when something goes wrong rather than the ones that make your product good
and sometimes the devs are not the rockstars, but the "bussiness department" are.
@@RenXZen I felt that at my last job 😆
And that's why I would prefer to beg for food on the street than to work as test engineer ever again.
yeah the only times you hear about the qa team sometimes is when there is a bug in production and someone is complaining about how qa didn't catch it. Or sometimes you have to go through a non-dev middleman just to talk to your qa team. devs and qa should be collaborating shoulder to shoulder to ensure success
You can't "test quality into the product", quality has to be part of the whole process. From writing a user story until writing the release note.
I was part of one of the last "layoff waves" that happened across the tech industry and I feel SOOO lucky to have been in the UK side of the company when it happened. We had a 30 days paid period to look for alternative positions within and outside the company and a settlement package just by law + whatever the company wanted to add to that.
Our US colleagues got to work one morning and within the hour they were removed from all systems without enough time to even say bye to the rest of the team. There are some pretty terrifying stories about some colleagues is pretty dire situations when this happened like a woman 8 months pregnant only a few days away from going into maternity leave and now she was suddenly without a job, without maternity pay, etc...
Really shocking how work law really lets down the employees in the US.
Most businesses can't afford the kind of severance package you're describing. Even half of that would kill at least half of the businesses in the US if they had to do it ONCE. Companies like Blizzard, billion dollar companies that make a fortune every second from lootboxes, can survive it... but if the law forced all businesses to do that every time they let an employee go, then very quickly the only businesses left would be the megacorporations... and that will make things MUCH worse for everyone, both employees and consumers. That's the reason why megacorporations support policies like higher corporate taxes and tons of more expensive regulations: because it kills off their smaller competition because they can't afford the massive expenses to reach new compliance and pay new taxes and cover more packages for workers. They use the government to destroy the competition, and they do it in the false name of Progressivism, while they themselves treat workers like garbage and launder their pay and take bogus bonuses. Sure, it helped a group of employees be able to take their time getting new jobs instead of stressing and panicking... but it does far more harm to far more people than that number if you require all businesses to do it. And before you say "the UK does it and they're fine," research the UK economic and small business health before and after those policies: great damage to all, in the name of potentially helping a few.
@@stevealford230 you don't really have to do it every time you let someone go, you have to do it if you are letting them go as part of a "redundancy" or "restructuring". It is to protect employees from getting hired, not getting paid and being let go from small garbage companies too. All in all I see it as a way to incentivise companies to grow at a steady rate rather than taking big gambles and signalling to stockholders
@@stevealford230 if a business can't afford proper employment and employees, the business either chooses to go under or abuse it's employees. Surviving as a business is not a given, people who will do ANYTHING to survive and thrive as a business will do disgusting shit and act like it's not a choice, but it is and it always has been. Whether the business chose to employ a near birth women or not was a choice. Choosing to fire her days before she stopped being "productive" was a choice. Nothing in this world is particularly amazing, and there are downsides and costs to everything. But i will take whatever prevents an acceptance of gaslighting new parents into dumping them into poverty
@@stevealford230that's a ridiculous assertion, if a company can't afford to make staff redundant why were they hired in the first place?? A business that bad at making money and managing themselves they deserve to fail
@@Vihara2 "A business that bad at making money" ... the majority of businesses don't make enough margin to hire one more employee than they currently have. So paying a bunch of them to not work would end them. You know nothing about Economics or Business, Jon Snow. You have been brainwashed by the Marxist narrative that running a business with a million dollars worth of revenue means that the company has a million dollars of cashflow and that the owners are millionaires in actuality. Only megacorporations can afford big severance packages, and they rely on government subsidies to do it. You don't know what you're talking about.
As a person who works in QA (worked on Torchlight 3, Nioh 2, New World, Weird West, Song of Nunu among others), all this resonates deeply with me. QA is treated like trash both by management and gamers. I'm so glad I test software instead of games now.
I appreciate QA SO much! I would rather something be done right the first time, because trying to fix those issues on top of the work that comes after just means more issues. It spirals out of control. Much respect to good QA!
just an FYI if someone didn't mention it; a line manager in the UK is your direct manager. so you can be a manager and still have a line manager.
Also known as "reporting line" everywhere else.
You both literally just jumped on my radar in the last two months, and here comes a long collab lol. Love it.
Same thing for me!
So have you switched to neovim?
@@vikingthedudeI did XD
@@vikingthedudewhat's neovim
35:00 line manager is a standard corporate term. It simply means the person next up in the hierarchy - the person you report to. Your line manager is responsible for approving your leave, doing your KPIs, etc
I wonder if part of it is UK vs. US English. In the UK (where the person being discussed lives/lived), "line manager" is very widely used as the specific term for that type of manager - HR policies, the law, etc. all use the term.
Prime is like the rest of us. He just wants to hear Thor speak.
I didn’t know who thor was until a few months ago why is he so cool and wise but also looks like he’s 25
That's the power of a shaved face on some people. Myself included. lol
@@Zaf9670 same here, the problem is im 26 so upon shaving my face i look 17
@@trentirvin2008 Never let them know your next move. When they ask you who's son you are, you reply with "I'm your manager".
@@thedungeoneer101 this is the best reply Ive gotten in months
Same stuff that happened to Sayers happened to one of my friends, was basically told "hey if you do all of this extra work that isn't part of your job you'll get a promotion in x time" and when x time came the manager acted like he didn't know what he was on about. He now puts in the bare minimum to maintain his job.
Just one of the reasons that nobody should do work that they're not contracted for, if there's no legally enforced reward then there's no reward at all.
@@Voltaic_Fireyep that's true. If people start doing it, the managers raise the bar for success citing people who were able to do it but don't bother checking to see if they need to work out of hours to get things done
Get. it. in. writing.
Verbal promises hold little-to-no weight and these stories are a dime a dozen. Lots of different flavors too. For example - I know people who were promised “fast promotions” during their interview process only to have it disappear at review time. Don’t even consider a verbal promise a “carrot.” It’s not.
It’s nothing.
If they’re serious they will formally write it up *at least* and at best it needs to be incorporated into your employment contract.
This podcast made me really emotional because it mirrored how I felt at my job and made me realize everything you were saying was true. HR isn’t looking out for you, and I don’t know why I never realized that before. I was a high school English teacher btw.
You built what? that Bifrost anecdote for testing diablo on console alone is worth an entire interview
Welcome to the world of Thor, he just... does that. Unless you ask him to elaborate and tell that specific story he'll sometimes just slide shit in and leave you going "Wait, what?"
My first job was as game developer. One of the seniors told me in my first 3 months "testers have no name". He was joking, as he was friends with a lot of the guys, but even so, the culture was there.
9:50: "Yeah we had differntly coloured badges and lots of department discrimination.." me as a german: "you say what?" o.o
"Can't believe they did that to the guy that created Roller Coaster Tycoon" LMAO
Had to do a double take as well verifying it wasn't THE ACTUAL Chris Sawyer name
What timestamp?
@@kamikaz1k a chatter at 1:08:34
Haha I was like “the name seems familiar” 😂
Bob ross of programming meets Dr Disrespect of programming. What a time to be alive
Don't diss Thor by comparing him to that 6 foot something narcissistic asshat
Better crossover event than infinity war tbh
Who is who?
This did not age well lol 😅
Reading this months later, and im like "...Wait, one of them is a creep?"
I love listening to this. Despite it being in the video game industry, this conversation teaches good leadership and provides examples of terrible leadership/management. Yall also cover how to create a positive environment in the workspace. Yall's experience and advice has inspired me to ensure that my work environment follows your teachings.
I hear companies looking to hire SDETs (Software Development Engineers in Test) or Automation QA and complain they have a hard time finding anyone. Yes, because all those who are skilled to do that are also skilled enough to be Software Developers. And guess which class of developer gets paid more.
I kind of want to expand on thor saying, "highschool never ends."
It sounds like a lot of the kids who had bad social experiences in high school ended up getting some form of power within blizzard and the corporate world enabled them further because they could squeeze employees dry. I mean some of the literal games blizzard management plays with employees where the punishment is getting fired in some dramatic fashion SCREAMS revenge fantasy.
'HR are human beings as well'
I duuuuuunno. Just like we all know lawyers aren't human beings, I think HR are just around that same ball park.
two goats are in one video omg
J.cole and Drake moment
Can I get the timestamp wherein these two goats are? I must have missed those. But let's talk about Primeagen and Thor in one video!
/s
@@coltonaallenboomer
I saw the thumbnail and man even 2 hot blondes wouldnt get me to click that fast lel
Ong best crossover
I worked in the aerospace industry for a bit (just a tad under 5 years) and the thing is, that separation of departments started happening where I worked too. When we were an expanding company, fabricators (like me) were encouraged to talk to the engineers and machinists to discuss how things could work better. A person who makes the parts is also generally part of QA in that industry, because if you screw up, you need to know how not to do it again. The process is simple on the surface, but complicated the more you work with the materials and parts.
At the end there, we were strongly discouraged from talking to the engineers, and the most hilarious thing to me was when simple parts that they would request would have obviously been easy to make in a certain way had they just talked to the people making the parts who were knowledgeable about how they could be made. And the same kinda language was used, like they were afraid that people would switch sides somehow if they were exposed to the grunts making the parts or, visa versa, the grunts were exposed to the ivory tower engineers. It created a pretty toxic work environment.
The same thing was happening at my aerospace machining shop. Production wasn't allowed to "bother" QA or engineering. The 3 years I was there as QA, I would find so many issues and get them fixed because I'd actually talk to production about what might have caused the issue. They blamed an out of tolerance pin hole on our deburring team, and after months of saying we need to monitor the machining process, I finally went out on the floor and grabbed a part that was getting machined. Turned out our drill was too long and would blow the hole out every couple of parts
Lots of wisdom and experience being shared here. Thank you for using your platforms to raise awareness and teach people to value themselves more
This was super fun to watch. It's crazy that he lives in Bozeman. I ran into him in public and was so confused. I used to live in Helena. Miss that place. Glad I stumbled upon you! Can't wait for more content.
hah! that is awesome you are in bozeman!
That simple bit of advice to confirm verbal agreements with a short email is one I try to give to young workers. You have 3 bosses, and one wants you to work on project X right now. Simple email to them and cc the other two to confirm the new work is the priority.
Dude, I worked in QA for major publishers for more than a decade and so much of what you say rings true here and much nostalgia is being triggered!
Both good time mixed extremely stressful underpaid high pressure environments.
Amazing what you say about Amazon, my old manager at MS setup most of those processes and he is a massive G!
QA is critical. I worked in game Dev for a decade. I depended on testers to find and reproduce bugs for me.
Yup that's what Valve has always done. Testing internally. Testing as much as possible. It's one of the secrets to their sauce. Both to get opinions for development and to QA test.
@@hobosnake1 yep, their excellent testing is why I stopped being a customer of theirs over a decade ago.
This is a bizarro world being described here. Back in the 1980's when I worked on avionics, think Fly By Wire, the devs and the QA were all in the same boat. We all had to understand the same system and specs. One side to implement it, the other to verify it. And I thought old UK was rife with class divisions.
That's how it works at a functional company.
They don't want the workers to unionize and demand better conditions so they keep teams compartmentalized.
@@Vanity0666 That is exactly the entire purpose
Dude! I've had a few companies attempt to "promote" me with more work and less pay, and I've literally vomited from the revelation. Get shit on paper. I've held crumbling businesses together until the weight was too much, but their mentality was still that I was replaceable... and then they fold. Others Iv'e work at won't fold soon, but if I am replaceable, so are they. Stick to your guns fam. You're a hero
Makes so much sense that Q&A was the first thing to get cut as a company standard when you look at the state of games being released over the last 10 years.
Look at the state of amazon games where he said the qa was treated well.
QA in gamedev is hell. On top of games being extremely complex and hardware-dependent software people often disregard it because most see games as unimportant entertainment.
Well, you can’t fix bad game design, that isn’t QA’s problem
Walmart ALSO treats its employees that way. "You're worth nothing and could be replaced in an instant and nobody would care except the children you can't feed anymore." was a real quote that came out of a store managers mouth to the overnight crew at Walmart #5260 on one of his daily rants where he would assemble the overnight employees at the front of the store and berate them until he told them they could go home.
It's interesting that they don't mind paying people for standing and listening to this kind of bull. Imagine having to pay an hour of overtime to your entire shift so the manager can berate them.
I hate some bosses so much. I was laid off within 2 weeks of the coof starting. I finally got to go back after 3 years. The small business was in complete disarray. My once coworker was now my manager and would shout and lie and go back on what he said and accuse me of doing "make work" when I was trying to fix the 3 years of damage. The boss didn't care. I had to leave. I can't deal with people like that. I would have ended up with a heart attack or something. There are other jobs out there.
When I worked at EA in QA in 2007, I made 11 Canadian dollar an hour. It was like 2 dollars more than minimum wage. Rent for a studio was probably 1200-1500 a month.
slavery paid
wage slave
Non competes are unenforceable in the UK. If you wish to enforce it you need to pay what is called "garden leave". California also banned non competes from 1 Jan, 2024.
I can't even imagine how it's remotely legal anywhere at all to have a non-compete for all industries like that...like, I just can't imagine how that doesn't get laughed out of court that Blizzard has a legitimate course of action against someone working construction or fast food or something...just, what world does this even make any sense at all in?
Yep, not legal in the UK
Several states within the US also don't allow non-competes or at least require proof of necessity, which most companies simply don't want to bother following through with, and thus, it becomes an empty threat.
This is not true
@@ChrisRLoweryFeudal Lords don't like it when their serfs serve another master
i m from germany and a lot of the problems you described are solved by having better labor laws AND having worker's councils with participation in a lot of decision making and as a control mechanism
Sir, this is America.
@@robdAK he knows, which is why he said you need that😂
@@RisenOswald Many bosses are shitting on labor laws in germany too and minimum wage is to much to die and to less to live. you end up around 9,70€ net per hour, have fun paying a 1000€+ apartment if you are one of those unlucky souls.
@@robdAK well, ACTUALLY the story from the video is from the uk xD
Companies own American politics it's called lobbying..... except I don't see many new lobbies being built lol but yeah thats why the American workers give 0 shit about quality in their job also we have shit managers who stay in their positions too long.... it's exactly like the politics 😂😂😂
I'm glad you've learned from your own experiences and provided a way for others to reach out to you outside the "noraml chaing of command". Transparency incompanies is rare anymoore. It's nice to see "the higher ups" migling and checking in with teh lowly ones, keeping lines of communication open, and just checking up on how their company is doing at all levels. Dont' get boxed into one "caste"
I work as a dev in AAA and I work with QA all the time. I always treat them with respect and understand we all have different skills/needs and they are an important defense against us publishing bad code, but this helps me see that sometimes others don't see QA that way.
In the UK, companies have no ability to restrict your work without pay, and no additional things can be added to your contract, including the asking you to further restrict your employment options. When you go to leave and someone asks you to sign something, refuse. Your job is over, and so is their ability to get your to sign... ANYTHING.
You're not being an asshole, even if fake-emotion speak people try to make it feel like a betrayal.
actually they do especially in games. A non compete is designed to stop someone working at a studio and taking said information/ trade secrets and doing their own spin on something a company is already doing. I know people in startups who were CEO's of other companies who had to wait 12 months before they could start their new studios. I have never seen it enforced on an artist before.
@higgsbonbon I have been in the games industry for over 20 years, I have worked in the UK, US and Canada. when I was working for EA, they did the same thing with Patrick soderland ( in sweden), casey hudson, even with the heads of Nightingale had to do non compete in North America. As mentioned I have seen this imposed on CEO/big wigs of the industry, never seen this imposed on an Artist before.
As a professional Game Dev, QA testers are godsend. They do half the work. As a dev Ive always said 50% of the solution is finding the problem, because as a dev, I cant fix what I cant see. So finding problems for me is such a relief always !
Quick input on leadership being a "lateral move" (especially in regard to pay): For the **vast majority** of companies, Senior Engineers/Developers make more than Engineering Managers. However, Lead Engineers generally make more than Senior Engineers. Companies can and will abuse this with ambiguous responsibilities vs. title analogues.
Bro this needs to be a podcast. I feel like I'm mainlining black tar content rn.
That's exactly what I do for the company I work for, I handle all automation for QA, including building the frameworks for web, mobile, and API testing, along with a few smaller projects to improve quality of life. Before I took over the API automation, the team was using Katalon, which required a paid subscription and took around 2 hours to run over 2000 tests. I developed a custom framework that replicates all of Katalon's features and runs the same tests in under 10 minutes. My system generates a report and emails everyone on the API team a link to view the full report, yet I still get treated like trash. QA life is rough.
I sware I will love and respect every QA people
literally incredible collab content
you can say that again
LITERALLY
glazing like crazy. don't forget to zip it up when u done
@@accountnew7030 So this persons personal opinion of content is glazing? Grow up dude. Get a new hobby.
@@accountnew7030 I'm sorry for u, kid
What a great conversation about real world stuff in corporate culture. In a lot of these scenarios people are treated as commodities, and interchangeable. Its sad but its all too common.
You are treated as you allow.
@senbonzakura662 yeah in many cases we only have the illusion of choice.
Gotta comment on this and tell you how much I agree. I've worked as a consultant for 8 years with fortune 50 companies and the public sector and I've seen so much bullying and hazing from the line of business and leadership towards those building everything, it's sickening honestly. I had a guy legitimately tell me I was going to be strangled if a deadline was missed that I had nothing to do with lol
Read capital by karl marx
Every asterisk I had on what they said was covered before the end of the video, kudos to these incredible guys
19:00 man, good bosses feel like angels, I swear. I wish I wasn't a loser so I could try and achieve a position of being a boss. Not for the power, but I would love to be the good boss, they're like healers in this world.
Bad managers are like thorn in your side that doesn't even go away when you're away from work. Like a leash smothering you constantly...
You can do it - believe in yourself
People like you should become a manager or boss. Without you the bad ones have free way into management.
I've been on both sides and being the boss isn't always as easy as it seems. There are a lot of difficult people in the world and when you go in with the instinct to be loved you often wind up being the most hated manager in the end. It's sad but true. People can be fickle and, most dangerously, insecure. They need support, care, empowerment, but they also need clear rules, expectations, incentives, and discipline. They will often consider the former efforts patronizing, the latter tyrannical and if you do neither to motivate many will just goof off.
I think people forget that as a manager you don't just have 8 star performers, you have maybe 5 star performers, 2 subpar people to mentor who know they're pretty bad and, worst of all and always most difficult, 1 subpar person who "knows" they're amazing but sadly what they "know" just ain't so, and managing the delicate act of keeping everyone happy with that backdrop can be a very difficult thing indeed, especially when often the people who need training the most are also the most insecure and most readily insulted when you try to get them support. If you don't get them that support, the rest of the team will grow resentful about the resulting extra workload, as well, so you can't even always just not force the issue or go along to get along. To say nothing of the fact that often you do not have the ability to get everyone the raise you want, let alone the raise they want.
I much prefer not managing people these days - I personally prefer to just do the work - while it pays less, it's more fun, and you're spared a lot of drama because managing a relationship with one boss is WAY less drama than managing 8-10 direct reports. You're not a loser though, dude, the fact your big motivation is just a desire to treat people right shows that you are not a loser and you will go far in the end. I hope if you encounter jerks you never let it embitter you - so many people lose your attitude by the time they make it to the top and end up putting on the same boot they were kicked with and the world needs people who will pay it forward rather than subconsciously mimic their own past bosses or think it's now "their turn".
@@ComplainingIsRecreation Well no, I didn't say it's easy. Every job has it's problems, just that being a boss puts people in power. And you can use that power for evil or for good. When people use that power for good, it kinda feels magical.
I've only ever had toxic management and unsupportive work environments until I got my current job.
My current boss is amazing. Because he doesn't see his primary duty as overseeing and surveilling and double checking his employee's work. He spends his day removing obstacles and fixing problems that stand in the way of us doing our jobs. He trusts us to be competent and do our jobs and in turn we know we can go to him with issues and he will get them taken care of, or find someone who can.
Of course he does also manage the department as any manager should, but he's extremely involved in the day to day work of the people on the factory floor and understands what issues we're facing and how to help us do our jobs best, instead of sitting in his office all day playing petty king.
The read-the-whole thing gimmick is literally a middle/high school tactic for either substitute teachers or bored gym-coaches required to have that one "teaching class they have to sit for. Combine with middle-mgmt approach of cut the "bottom" 10% and you've got toxic gold.
This is pretty good and to think I only started watching Prime about 2-3 weeks and Thor a month before. I these realistic takes on Tech that even junior engineers can follow and relate to, THANKS MAN.
This was an incredibly important thing to hear. The foundations of a business is here. This discussion is what everyone needs to hear about. Great upload. Bigger organization is an entirely different beast. But either way big or small business, passion is still what you need to keep going. Being bigger than the whole sum.
I totally enjoyed playing WarCraft II, StarCraft, WarCraft III, and StarCraft 2. It was shocking to discover just how horribly the company treated most of the people who worked so hard on games I loved.
and then you learn that the shiny horse for WOW made more money than the whole SC2
@@Qrzychu92 - which is a totally irrelevant detail to anything that I (personally) care about.
@@garanceadrosehn9691 yeah, but it also explains why many games prefer to spit out dozens of skins instead of fixing bugs - it makes way more money
This is amazing perspective from inside (and out). I really enjoyed listening to this even though it's the length of a movie. Fantastic insight. Thanks to both of you for this!
Here's what happened when I became a supervisor:
My work day is filled with meetings, After they're all done I start my actual work leading me to work like 12 hours.
I have to plan, distribute work, and instructions to the team. I have to relay feedback from higher ups who are always late leading to a stressed out team I have to rally when they don't meet their deadline.
To explain revisions better I tend to open a zoom call and go over it. Everyone is in different time zones so I have to do individual ones especially for people struggling.
I have to still do my normal non-supervisor work and meet quota.
I barely got a raise.
When I was in college back in 2004-2010 Blizzard was rumored/known to give very low starting salary for developer roles. One of many reason why I stopped caring about going into video game development especially so from "AAA" companies and time crunch development cycles.
Thank god we have the first AAAA company now then! Eh, Ubisoft! 😂
I think we're entering a new era of indie games. With so many powerful tools, and engines like Unreal and Unity and Godot it's easier than ever to start a game company. A new generation of devs are in training as we speak.
What did you end up doing instead? I personally feel stuck because I've completed half a BA in 3D Game Art but I really don't want to work in the video game industry because of ridiculous corporate crap. I don't know whether I should complete my degree or cut my losses and look into something else that wont destroy my soul. I'm turning 26 and not getting any younger here.
@@BillyOnRUclips
If you're close to getting the degree, it's probably best to get it. A degree like that could probably get you a job in IT. Any kind of job in IT except for the specialized ones. Most likely.
"You get festering pockets"
I think you're describing an abscess. Or possibly a cyst. Which is a pretty apt description of middle-management.
I will never forget Kil Jaeden during the Legion Expansion, who the devs promised was totally working and they could totally kill it easily with their in-house raid team led by the game director at the time Ion Hazzikostas, only to watch the boss despawn every time it was supposed to change phases because they had no QA on team 2 and kept breaking the entire game on a weekly basis.
Just listened to this at Trader Joe’s, and it’s like the best podcast ever. You’re a great interviewer! Hoping for more stuff like this
46:12 "are our cycles aligned?" 😂😂
You could see the clash of Thor's more pro worker stance vs prime's more rugged individualist pro corporate pick yourself up by your bootstraps leaning.
It's funny because the blue hair stereotype is the opposite.
He said he lost a bet the other day.@@disguysn
@@disguysn They lick the boots of corporations until they're the ones on the end of the stick, nimby
Whenever I hear someone say "HR is there to protect the company from you", I just feel like Rorschach in prison.
"None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. YOU'RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH ME!"
Meanwhile I am a QAE at a local hosting and e-commerce company, been with them for 7 years, and I am treated with utmost respect and being paid well. Couldn't be happier. I feel sorry for everyone who had to go through the shit like the story told in this vid.
I've worked with QA and I really loved. Unfortunately I don't want to work with it for all the mentioned reasons here. People think that we are there to fix the problems that they already know about and expect us to let it pass.
I learned the hard way that HR is not there for the employees.
I am convinced, HR is the same people that would sign up for a firing squad in world war cases.
They wouldn't be pulling the trigger because that would require action, but they 100% would hold the clip board with the list of names.
not world War, think communist revolution
@@david7384 pretty sure the people signing up for the role in that situation would be the labor union reps, and I'd be cheering them on, and the HR folks might be somewhere in the scene, too
Yes that's why they are called Hitler'sRifles
Dude, i have no idea who you are and I'm discovering your channel with this video. As of less than 3 minutes in the video I can tell you're already great at explaining/elaborating on stuff that is american-specific, for those who don't have the context. It's really good :) thanks
HR is there to make sure that the humans remain resources, as soon as they think you aren't resourceful anymore, they ditch you.
100% this. HR is there to protect the company, not the workers.
This guy gets it.
HR people also tend to be talent-less nepo babies with overinflated egos.
Well after listening to this, No Fucking Wonder most games suck these days. Indie market is the future. This is Valuable insight and nothing but praise for bringing this to light.
This kind of shit happens everywhere, it's not only blizzard or gaming. It's businessman mentality where making money is the only thing that they care, and the rest is none of their concern. Most people can't leave the job because they are held hostage due to the financial commitment they need to meet.
Being an Ex-Blizzard employee from the customer service side, hearing this hit's home. So many things that happened in Cali happened in the Texas location too.
Having Ubisoft give us a visit during college open my eyes and made me realize this wasn't the dream job I was expecting.
this is exactly what these big corps live on... the dreams and happiness and young men thinking that they can achieve great things where in reality the push these young men into a meat grinder and squeeze everything off of them. This is EXACTLY how Bobby and his ilk made their money... they took all that good work you did and payed you less then the bare minimum.
Also makes sense why california pushes strict gun laws, because if you are pressuring people this hard, one day they are going to snap
Listened to this while fixing a prod support problem & writing up the PR/proof of work from 2-3am on a saturday night
I have 2 managers, because my work is done in two different places, and yes, it absolutely makes the difference whether your manager is good or bad.
One of my managers is off hands, which means our work is made more difficult because they are absent, they don't know what's going on and they don't seem to take in our feedback.
The other manager is so so good. Makes it super easy for us, has our side when needed, and understands our situations and values our work.
2 managers, recipe for disasters
So it varies state-to-state in the US, but non-competes can be thrown out entirely if they're deemed overly restrictive in the court.
They're now banned nationally:
www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes
Imagine being to lazy to read the 30 steps, leaving and then getting congratulated for being the first to leave
Blizzurd Enterteinment Incorporated Corporate Corporation, yes. What they done now?