[HN Gopher] Ubisoft's unprecedented "exodus" of developers
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Ubisoft's unprecedented "exodus" of developers
Author : sofixa
Score : 194 points
Date : 2021-12-20 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Good, I hope they learn a lesson.
|
| Anecdote: i know a fintech that fired their last per developer,
| while about 30% of their payment processing systems were written
| in perl. They tries to press a friend of mine into fizing it when
| it broke 'again', and he quit on the spot with 'someone has to
| take reaponsebility for the braindead decisions around here'.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company 's
| standing is comparable to its peers._
|
| Pointing out that everybody else has bad ethics too is not a
| compelling argument. That's like saying "hey, we are as bad as
| the others". Yeah well, okay, but try and improve?
| pm90 wrote:
| Whenever a company's leadership tries to gaslight employees by
| trying to fudge numbers like this, it's loudly saying that
| they're not interested in finding out why employees are really
| leaving.
|
| To be clear, they aren't necessarily lying, just presenting
| facts in a way that doesn't address the problem. While
| attrition overall might be similar to other companies, if their
| most senior developers leave, they're fucked. But they won't
| talk about those numbers.
|
| Anyone still at Ubisoft: better start looking around.
| Statistically it's just gonna get worse.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yep, they're basically using evasive language to admit defeat
| but also try to deflect blame and distract attention to
| another matters. Standard stuff, sadly.
| sbarre wrote:
| To be fair, most large enterprises use 'industry-standard'
| metrics like these because it's all they have.
|
| "Pulse check" survey companies aggregate data across whole
| industries or verticals and then provide their customers with
| comparison numbers so they can get a sense, across their
| industry, on how they are doing, without revealing specific
| numbers for a given company.
|
| There are many factors - shit working conditions and bad pay
| being only some of them - that affect churn, and if you think
| the people in charge of this stuff, HR and people management,
| are smart enough to really parse those factors - let alone
| come up with their own useful metrics - you are giving them
| too much credit.
|
| It's not that they're not interested, it's that they have no
| idea how to figure it out. They would love to know, but have
| no idea where to even start.
|
| So they say "we're doing comparable to the rest of the
| industry" because that's all they know. They're not fudging
| anything, they literally have no other insights to give.
|
| This is of course not ok, but this is a very textbook case of
| "don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to
| incompetence".
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _It 's not that they're not interested, it's that they
| have no idea how to figure it out. They would love to know,
| but have no idea where to even start._
|
| Maybe. I would think the human factor is also involved
| here, namely that it's hard to admit you're doing terrible
| (in this case: losing a lot of good talent) so people kind
| of get into an echo chamber where they and their club pat
| themselves on the back for how well they're doing "despite
| adversity".
|
| It's quite pathetic really but that's Homo Sapiens for ya.
| I've been guilty of the same in the past. To finally
| understand how wrong did you get various factors is
| honestly like traveling to another dimension. Most people
| can't and will not ever do it.
|
| > _This is of course not ok, but this is a very textbook
| case of "don't attribute to malice what can be attributed
| to incompetence"._
|
| 90% of the time I am inclined to agree but not sure about
| this case. There's a lot of money at stake in the gaming
| industry and I'd be inclined to think the higher-ups at
| least are quite aware of what they're doing. They simply
| surround themselves with deluded people that will allow
| them to coast on deflecting blame for as long as possible.
|
| And finally, I could just be paranoid and I am not claiming
| anything for a fact, it's just how I am viewing it.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| Aerroon wrote:
| On the other hand, it shows that they're not outside the norm.
| Perhaps these kinds of problems are endemic to game development
| on a larger scale?
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yeah, unfettered corporate greed is endemic indeed. :(
| beamatronic wrote:
| "Our TPS reports are the same length as everyone else's!"
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's
| standing is comparable to its peers.
|
| I think he's referring to Activision Blizzard.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| And being comparable to any of those big names isn't something
| I would brag about. It's more an insult than a sign of quality.
| tester756 wrote:
| I don't think it's unique to them
|
| "Here" (Eastern EU) almost all software people I know did change
| / are changing / strongly consider changing jobs
|
| various experience level, various industries, various salary
| expectations.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other
| creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company, but very
| few companies actually value them accordingly. This is especially
| true in the gaming industry. Most companies start with great
| talent, but then more and more middle management comes in.
| Managers hire more managers so they can become senior managers.
| Non functional bloat starts coming in the form of sales,
| marketing, "strategy and ops" etc. Not saying they don't add
| value, but they get hired and rewarded way more than the value
| they add and ultimately drown the company.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I always figured the gaming industry gets away with its
| treatment of workers because there's always a new crop of naive
| people whose dream is to make games, so they can burn them out,
| and then just toss them away, and then suck in the new crop.
| Other sectors can't get away with it as easily because no one
| says, "It's been dream since childhood to make auto insurance
| more profitable."
| ethbr0 wrote:
| This is what seems toxic about the entire "enterprise" (i.e.
| not indie) video game industry.
|
| It's figuratively (and sometimes literally) the equivalent of
| someone cruising college bars looking for folks "willing to
| be paid for a few private pictures."
|
| Take someone with hopes, dreams, aspiration, pay them the
| minimum you can get away with (that due to their stage of
| life seems like a lot), dress up the entire experience with
| pomp and fun and free snacks, tell them how they're going to
| change the world, extract every ounce of profit you can from
| them, at the expense of their life, health, and career, and
| then dump them by the side of the road and GOTO 10.
|
| It's a fundamentally exploitive business, and it shows in the
| salaries (especially vs work volume expectations). At least
| MAMAA pay sufficiently well that it's a mutually beneficial
| deal to employee and employer.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Exploitation is prevalent in the indie sphere as well. Lots
| of people with little leadership or business experience
| pulling all sorts of shady stuff and paying worse.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I guess my perspective on the indie sphere is "well,
| that's what happens with random people."
|
| IMHO we should all expect a 50+ headcount company to be
| _better_ though. Like, have a business model that doesn
| 't require screwing people over & have functional HR.
| jabl wrote:
| Yeah, that's my interpretation too from talking to and
| reading about people's experiences in the industry.
| (Disclaimer: I don't work and have never worked in the
| computer games industry myself)
|
| Unfortunately it seems par for the course for many "flashy"
| creative professions. There's a much larger influx of people
| wanting to work in the industry than actual jobs, so
| employers take advantage of the situation to press down wages
| and treat people like shit (say, unpaid internships).
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Unpaid internships should be illegal. Not only are they
| exploitive, but they also classist.
|
| The ability to ensure you get "the right kind of person" is
| the probably real reason for them. It's no different that
| legacy admissions really.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm not hyper capitalist but I do think that employees will be
| valued as much as they need to be. This unprecedented exodus
| will illustrate that: they will either be replaced with or
| without raising compensation and working conditions. We'll have
| to wait and see.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's probably not quite that black and white.
|
| You need business smarts too if you want to succeed. Ion Storm
| is a good example as it was everything contemporary Ubisoft is
| not. It was a very developer-run shop that out of one office
| produced critically acclaimed Deus Ex, but at the same time
| produced flop-of-the-ages Daikatana.
|
| It's a tricky balancing act. You can definitely have too much
| business influence over the creative process. Ubisoft would
| never produce a flop like Daikatana, but neither would it
| produce a gem like Deus Ex.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Some extra context: those two games were made by entirely
| different teams. Daikatana was built by John Romero's team,
| and Deus Ex was made by Warren Spector's team. I don't think
| there was much collaboration or even communication between
| the teams. Romero just bankrolled Spector, who happened to
| have quite a bit more experience, and was likely much better
| suited to the director role.
| speeder wrote:
| https://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/imagine-wedding-designer
| disagrees with you :P
|
| Ubisoft is actually good at making crap games. For example
| they bought a Brazillian studio that was often contracted to
| do some cool hunting games. Then they forced the studio to
| pump low-score after low-score NDS games (Wedding Designer
| was one of them), there was tons of executive meddling, then
| they said the studio that was crap and closed it down.
|
| Thing is, at the time it was literally the best studio in
| Brazil, and this incident caused some damage to Brazillian
| games industry :(
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Ubisoft crap is another kind of crap compared to Daikatana
| crap. Ubisoft essentially produces shovelware, from their
| flagship AAA-titles down to their obscure NDS titles.
|
| It's all sure bets with low creative risk, which makes
| every sense if you are primarily pandering to shareholders.
| polote wrote:
| > It is embarrassing that developers [also designers and other
| creatives in gaming] are the core of any tech company
|
| Clearly not true, especially in b2b enterprise where you can
| sell even if you don't have a product
| willcipriano wrote:
| Finally a company with no cost centers, just idea men
| generating pure profit and making deals with other idea men.
| viraptor wrote:
| That's called running a scam and that's not really
| comparable...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There are loads of criminals, but only the dumb ones are in
| jail
| zdragnar wrote:
| I always thought this was an overhyped myth until I watched a
| relatively innovation-oriented enterprise purchase a database
| company... So many hilariously bad powerpoint slides, so much
| money on the table.
|
| When we were instructed to use it, we discovered that the
| "database" (really just a custom prolog engine + storage
| container) couldn't support paginated queries. Would have to
| fetch millions of rows on the server, then pick only the 20
| we were interested in to send to the front-end.
|
| Most of the dev team spent the next few months doing little
| but dreaming up powerpoint presentations we could use to get
| millions, as every schema change required recompiling the
| entire db from source, so we had lots of sitting around time
| until management figured out how badly they screwed up.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| That's incredible. Did they just... not involve any actual
| developers in evaluating the product of the company they
| were about to buy?
| datavirtue wrote:
| That sounds a little worse than the first database engine I
| wrote.
| ayngg wrote:
| It is almost the natural progression I would say. Steve Jobs
| talked about it with regards to Xerox in a famous interview
| where technology gets you to a dominant position, but marketing
| monetizes that position so there will be a natural progression
| in leadership favoring marketers who become responsible for
| much of the growth after a certain point over developers.
|
| Just looking at video games, the most profitable games now
| aren't AAA games with super immersive graphics, worlds, stories
| and so on, it is the mobile gacha games with simple graphics
| and simple mechanics that are basically predatory in how they
| are able to ingrain and establish themselves into a routine
| while they siphon money away from a certain demographic of
| their user base. These days AAA games are mostly AAA in their
| cost to produce, few are innovative, or produce better gameplay
| or tell better stories than what is being made by smaller indie
| studios. Most are just pretty to look at if you have a beefy
| video card that can crank the settings up.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Enough people seem to want to work on gaming, even under the
| extreme conditions, for devs to not be very valuable in that
| context.
|
| Passions projects as a job can be very expensive.
| aspaceman wrote:
| If you're unable to retain the people with the necessary
| skills, it doesn't matter how high the demand for the field
| is.
|
| There are very few people with relevant graphics programming
| skills. Who cares if 10000 undergrads wanting to be game devs
| if none of them know C++, and even fewer know what a pointer
| is.
|
| You may think I'm joking, but even undergrads coming out of
| the most elite institutions have no knowledge of these
| things.
|
| How the hell you gonna explain compute shaders to a guy like
| that? You can only license out these problems to third party
| tools so much. Epic isn't going to come in and save you when
| you fuck up the release.
| spamizbad wrote:
| While there are lots of people trying to break into the
| industry, the real question is how _good_ are they? Building
| games is hard work.
|
| It's just an anecdote, but one dev told me at the studio he
| worked on, his project had 22 engineers assigned, but just 3
| devs ultimately contributed 90% of the code written. And
| while those 3 devs were very skilled developers, he claimed
| they weren't so-called "10x" engineers. They've all since
| moved on to greener pastures doing work outside the industry
| making substantially more money.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Oh yeah, 10x engineers. The kind of people who create an
| hostile and exclusionary club where only they can move
| around the mental maze they created. Personally I just call
| them 'complexity bubbles' and just like the real estate
| bubbles it's never those responsible who suffer the
| consequences.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| >he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers
|
| Well, sounds like they were more like 7x engineers /s
| jabl wrote:
| Or maybe the other 19 were 0.1x engineers? ;)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Actually since it was the gaming industry, they were
| probably 4X engineers. Which would also explain whey they
| went to a different industry, because that genre
| frequently seems to be on the brink of dying out.
| ljm wrote:
| Mythical Man Month in a nutshell no? He could have dropped
| 19 engineers and paid 3 engineers more money to make it
| work.
| alkonaut wrote:
| It has to become a workforce that skews young and
| inexperienced, if older and/or more experienced developers
| (such as those with families) have options to go to the
| studios that don't do permanent crunch time?
|
| I'm getting the feeling from some recent AAA games (looking
| at you EA/DICE) that quality is going down with each released
| game while spin-off studios pop up indicating to an outsider
| that some "core" competence has left.
| smolder wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of big studios are struggling to produce
| quality games. Gameplay is recycled, graphics and effects
| feel tacked-on and too expensive for what they are. Ray-
| traced puddle reflections and 80GB of assets aren't a
| surefire way to an immersive experience.
|
| All that seems symptomatic of under-investing in
| development, especially the exploratory & creative type of
| development, i.e. R&D. At least Epic has spent some of that
| Fortnite money on building great tech for UE5, it seems,
| and that will get proliferated through use of their engine
| and matched by competitors in time.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| That's poor reasoning - there are several million people
| willing to be president, but 99.999% of them (possibly 100%)
| aren't capable of doing the job
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| This is a major problem with the "one guy is in charge" model
| of running a business. All these employees care about how the
| company treats people but this one guy is willing to be a jerk
| and not apologize and now all these employees have little
| recourse but to quit.
|
| Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical
| purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting rights
| for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or demote
| them as needed. Instead we get the mess that is Ubisoft.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Union. If you can set wages and benefits you can also set
| business direction and other working conditions that effect
| company health. The history of business regulation is strewn
| with arbitrary policies examples set by "the guy in charge."
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| I've always wondered why worker co-ops aren't more common in
| software. It seems like the industry would be particularly
| well-suited for it.
| friedman23 wrote:
| The two primary motivations for building a startup are
| money and independence/freedom. Why would someone with that
| priority go and constrain themselves with the whims of
| others?
| akomtu wrote:
| Dont forget ego: "why would I give control over _my_
| idea, over _my_ company that _I_ created to simpletons
| without ideas, without ability or will to execute?" This
| ego is also why software devs are allergic to unions.
| foverzar wrote:
| > Even if you think the hierarchy is useful for practical
| purposes, a cooperatively owned business can give voting
| rights for everyone so they elect a manager and can fire or
| demote them as needed.
|
| So, when has that ever worked, apart maybe a small startup
| between friends?
| friedman23 wrote:
| And then those friends are in charge and the new employees
| are just grunts.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Not saying they don't add value, but they get hired and
| rewarded way more than the value they add and ultimately drown
| the company
|
| I thought similarly when I was younger, but then I became a
| manager and realized it's not so black and white.
|
| Going back to IC developer (for a while) was a surprising
| relief from the stresses of managing people.
|
| I know some companies let managers run wild and make devs do
| all the work, but most successful tech companies actually have
| very high demands of managers. A decent manager will be good at
| hiding all of the behind-the-scenes issues from the team, but I
| didn't truly understand the volume of problems managers quietly
| deal with until I was in the role.
| mylons wrote:
| "hiding all the behind-the-scenes issues" that COME from the
| management/ops/marketing/sales layer. it's kinda like a snake
| eating it's tail.
| Shorel wrote:
| True, but I don't think it's the same for second and third
| level managers.
|
| Basically, you as a manager do all the hard work.
|
| The boss of your boss... he can do some hard work, or he can
| just rely on you and the other direct managers, and simply
| get the benefits.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Sorry dude, that's not true, and is very naive.
|
| When you're an IC, you have no idea what your manager does.
| You have even less of an idea of what your manager's
| manager does.
|
| I know I was naive about direct management until I tried it
| and realized just how much they do that I never was aware
| of. And as I became a more senior IC, now working directly
| with senior managers (managers of mangers), I found out
| just how much they're involved with.
|
| At high-intensity high-output companies (including gaming
| ones), it's very rare that senior managers end up just
| resting on their laurels and letting the line managers do
| all the work.
|
| First of all, it's an all-encompassing job. You are
| effectively oncall for various escalations, personnel
| issues, priority/project issues, conflicting incentives -
| you are responsible for all the people underneath you, and
| all the conflicts that might occur that direct managers
| don't handle - they escalate to you. At that level, there
| is no expectation of work-life balance, you might get
| called in the evening/weekend to deal with something. While
| you're detached from the depth, you are responsible for way
| more breadth.
|
| Secondly, line managers are still expected to be primarily
| focused on their technical projects and their people.
| Senior managers have to start dealing with Legal,
| Marketing, Sales, Facilities, office issues, christmas
| party organization, press release, etc. Sure, some of it is
| just coordination and delegation, but the point is that you
| have to organize all sorts of disparate considerations that
| frankly are not in technical people's forte. This arguably
| becomes 50% or more of the job, and this is where things
| get really tough. Do you want someone technical for this
| that will be MISERABLE spending time on 50% of their job,
| and not doing an amazing job at it? Or do you want some MBA
| type that will be great, but then have no credibility with
| their team, no ability to influence the techncial
| direction, because their people will sniff out their
| technical weaknesses and not respect them for it.
|
| Naturally none of this is universal. There are exceptions
| of exactly what you're imagining - someone that just steps
| back, lets everyone else do the work, and they
| aggregate/summarize and take all the credit. But I don't
| think those are actually the majority.
| Jach wrote:
| > frankly are not in technical people's forte
|
| Amusing to see this attitude on HN in the 21st century.
| Have not the last 20 years of startup successes having
| very technical founders successfully transition to more
| managerial roles more than demonstrated otherwise?
| jwagenet wrote:
| It would seem to me founders, technical or not, would be
| well suited to management positions with a lot of
| control/freedom since that is likely not so different
| from starting a business, except scaled up.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Have you been a manager of managers? This sounds like the
| same problem the GP described (the problems are invisible
| until you are in the role).
|
| An upper level management job can be very stressful. You
| have very little visibility into progress or issues, but
| are responsible for setting direction and making decisions
| with many consequences. If you get involved, you're called
| a micromanager. If you don't, you're out of touch.
|
| Cross-organizational pushes become harder, with more
| inertia, and more perverse incentives dragging things down.
| You spend all your time debugging the mess of an
| organization, not on the things that brought you to the
| industry.
|
| It can be a very stressful, unpleasant job. I am not trying
| to claim it's _harder_ , or that the pay is proportionate
| or whatever. But the idea that they can rely on the work of
| others, coast by, and get the benefits is not at all true
| from what I have seen.
|
| I worked mostly in startups and FAANG, maybe other sectors
| are different.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| This. Debugging the organization is a great way to
| describe it.
| ksec wrote:
| Oh I like this I am going to steal it from now on. I use
| Debugging human to describe it. But Debugging
| organisation is just so much better. This also follows
| Conway's law.
|
| >Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly)
| will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the
| organization's communication structure.
| sonofhans wrote:
| I've worked in and with hundreds of enterprises, and
| literally never seen this in practice. As one gets further
| into management the work has longer-term deliverables, and
| many of those deliverables are invisible to managers and
| individuals below them. Put another way, the work product
| of a good executive is effective long-term decision-making.
| Of course it's harder to see the effects of this day-to-
| day.
|
| The daily work of a senior leader is mostly communication,
| alignment, and politics (i.e., resource allocation). From
| the outside (and sometimes the inside!) this looks like
| "lots of bullshit meetings." Coasting at this level simply
| means that your priorities aren't fulfilled, your
| initiatives fail, you're cut out of important decisions.
| linspace wrote:
| I think management simply has way more variance, and maybe,
| I'm not sure, more expected returns.
| antiterra wrote:
| OK.
|
| - you manage managers of three teams globally with 6
| employees each.
|
| - you know that your best IC is about to go on parental
| leave
|
| - three others are either leaving or moving to another team
| in the next year
|
| - your european team's manager is not meshing at all and
| there's pressure from all directions to fix it
|
| - after shuffling or firing the european manager (who you
| genuinely like personally,) you suddenly have 8 direct
| reports you need to meet with weekly and support
|
| - new teams form with overlapping responsibilities and you
| have to create a relationship with that team and its
| leadership so no one steps on the other's foot and there
| isn't confusing ownership
|
| - you hire a new european manager and now you have to fly
| overseas and train them, while at the same time handling
| issues for your home team and your own personal
| responsibilities
|
| - in the middle of all this and while your schedule is
| peppered with interviews to conduct, some random high-
| visibility initiative with no owner and outside your area
| of expertise gets assigned to you.
|
| I've seen directors suddenly get 30 new ICs three levels
| below them and have to somehow write their reviews. It
| ain't all pretty.
| Jach wrote:
| I'm generally supportive of the idea that managers (and
| managers' managers' managers..) are in many places a
| value-add and it's hard to get to such roles by coasting,
| however I also am sympathetic with many of the cynical
| takes and think there's a lot out there in the world of
| open source and startups and small businesses supportive
| of less management. One take is I think management
| frequently create unnecessary problems for themselves
| that of course can only be solved with more management.
| Take for instance:
|
| > you suddenly have 8 direct reports you need to meet
| with weekly and support
|
| You really, really don't need to meet each of them
| weekly. Not even necessarily monthly. Depending on the
| individual, some you might need to meet more than others,
| but the idea that you _need to_ meet each one weekly is a
| self-imposed problem that of course robs you of at least
| a full work day, and past a certain scale requires more
| managers to handle. This is ignoring the content of the
| meetings, which if you get into make the case even worse
| for management, because so often a short email exchange
| or even a short Slack exchange suffice for what otherwise
| would have been 30 mins to an hour. (One of my managers
| was rather skilled at digging out of me over the course
| of our 1-on-1s some of the minor problems /issues I felt
| were present with the team/company that I otherwise
| wouldn't have brought up in an email/IM (and if I did not
| more than once), but given that they never changed or
| went away in 6 years, and that I had already made peace
| with them, what was the point?)
|
| Same thing with conducting a ton of interviews --
| delegate to ICs of the team the candidate is likely to
| join! It's your own doing that you insist on having a
| screening chat with every candidate, or that you have
| this many candidates you're considering at once, or that
| you hire into a general "pool" where team
| selection/assignment happens later.
|
| Same thing with the needing to suddenly write the reviews
| for 30 people -- the need for those reviews is entirely a
| self-imposed problem, and could be done away with or
| altered. (e.g. relying on ICs reviewing each other, or
| using objective metrics, or having an easier firing
| process than long PIP dramas, or just bumping everyone's
| pay regardless to keep up with inflation, or...)
|
| Unfortunately system problems can typically only be done
| away with (rather than 'solved' with management work /
| more management) by someone at a higher level than you,
| whose higher role is in part supported by the problems
| existing in the first place.
| ksec wrote:
| Exactly. All of a sudden debugging human problem is 10x
| harder than trying to debug your codebase. Multiply that
| by the number of direct report. Not to mention managers
| that may not have actual power or have their own politics
| to battle with.
| ksec wrote:
| Google may not have "started" the whole get rid of middle
| management idea, but they have certainly popularised it. Only
| to learn later ( much like 99.9% what Google does ) that you
| do need middle manager. But then they have zero idea how it
| should work. ( much like 99.9% of their product ) May be A/B
| testing?
|
| Middle Management is hard. Constantly being torn apart by top
| and bottom. You either have decent manager that gets your
| team a huge boost of productivity but stressed to burn out.
| Or they run wild and becomes the villain themselves. I guess
| this is either you die being a hero or do it long enough to
| become the villain.
| q-big wrote:
| > Middle Management is hard. Constantly being torn apart by
| top and bottom. You either have decent manager that gets
| your team a huge boost of productivity but stressed to burn
| out.
|
| Because of this, managers are (intended to be) paid so
| well.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Good middle management is hard. Bad middle management (as
| popularized by the pointy-haired boss of Dilbert) is easy.
| user123456780 wrote:
| As a former middle manager I completely agree with this.
| It can be a very difficult role. I called it the the
| A-symmetry of knowledge. As a tech person on tools you
| have such a small view of the company at large and all of
| the other issues that are going on. Most of which you as
| a manager cannot/should not share with your team.
|
| I have had tech leads come to me with solid solutions for
| their little slice of the world except it would be
| detrimental to another team or project that you can't
| talk about yet.
|
| So you have to delicately tip to about your tech team
| with out upsetting them. Which is difficult because they
| largely see you as useless middle management. All this
| while doing the dance with the senior managers/execs
| justifying why your team deserves bonuses and pay rises,
| or taking their half baked ideas and 180 flips in
| directions and trying to calm them and figure out what
| problem it is they actually want solved.
| slgeorge wrote:
| Actually ...
|
| It's equally hard to do good or bad management, since
| most of the time you have no idea if you're achieving
| either outcome - and neither does anyone else.
|
| The problem with all forms of management is that it's
| completely unscientific. The main resource you're working
| with is a "human" which has emotions and who will respond
| to inputs in very different ways depending on all sorts
| of factors you as a manager don't know about.
|
| And, when you put a group of "humans" together you might
| expect a direct increase in productivity - 6 humans
| should be 6x more productive right - you'd be wrong.
| Also, for whatever reasons the dynamics of the individual
| humans change in groups! They are differently productive
| depending on what other humans they work with! And, since
| there's no scientifically proven way of categorising them
| - you can't even tell which ones will work well with
| other ones.
|
| Oh and the big joke, even if you get that working,
| sometimes they *change* and then some part of the group
| is broken for some unknown reason.
|
| Then there's the problem of measurement, and I don't mean
| the team members. As a manager trying to measure the
| outcome of your own efforts is difficult, bordering on
| impossible - maybe something you did changed something,
| on the other hand it might be some other factor you know
| nothing about.
|
| Finally, you might expect that the individual "humans"
| might know what makes them individually more productive.
| But, nope - most humans have no idea what makes them
| individually more productive, and then throw in a team
| setting and you're in a whole world of pain. Some of them
| think they're "analytical" and can't tell that they're
| dragged around by their emotions, love life, caffeine,
| commute or sunshine quota. There's a variety of 'received
| wisdom' stories they tell themselves, but it's often just
| a random walk.
|
| So actually ALL management is hard, and you often have a
| equal chance of doing it "well" or "badly" on pretty much
| a daily basis. It's as hard to do it badly, as it is to
| do it well since most of time you're not sure if either
| is happening.
| ljm wrote:
| A decent manager isn't so different from a scrum master in
| the agile world. A good manager is an intentional bottleneck;
| they are careful about what gets through the pipeline.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Any chance you can provide some examples for issues you've
| encountered "behind the scenes"?
| tibbar wrote:
| Not GP, but one example is protecting developers from
| pressure from higher up. When you're a manager, you're
| going to get lots of explicit or implicit questions like
| "you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this
| project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is
| he just goofing off?" And you know that the new dev has
| been on boarding and that docs aren't so good and that his
| velocity is actually reasonable, and you basically stand in
| the gap between your engineers and the sharks in upper
| management.
|
| That's what it was like for me, anyway. I'm an IC again
| now...
| scotty79 wrote:
| > "you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this
| project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is
| he just goofing off?"
|
| Is it protecting developers though? Or rather protecting
| higher ups from direct consequences of their crassness
| and cluelessness?
|
| If in absence of middle manager, the upper manager said
| something like that to me he would have my resignation
| next day on his desk, along with a request for a raise
| and strongly worded demand to accept one of those
| documents.
| woofcat wrote:
| Maybe you're a super in demand developer in a super hot
| job market. However for lots of people they don't have
| the option of quitting on the spot over someone asking a
| very direct question.
|
| So yes the Manager is protecting them, and helping set
| expectations for the higher ups.
|
| Replace higher up with Customer and you get the same
| system. Customer demands something unreasonable, that
| doesn't get filtered to the team that is working on that
| feature as it's just a distraction to them. Let them do
| the job and execute on the roadmap as planned.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I was just directly told that I was specifically hired to
| do this project that is behind schedule and important and
| they have no idea how to make it go faster (because they
| are bugging me) so they don't have another person that
| could do my job and they can't afford delay it even
| further to look for a person to replace me.
|
| If there's a better moment to negotiate, I don't know
| what it might be.
|
| Would hearing this be distracting for me? Sure it would
| be. But it's not me who would get to pay for my
| distractions. So it's 100% of protecting higher ups not
| developers.
| tibbar wrote:
| And that's the point: It's much more efficient to have
| one person to run interference for a team of 5+
| developers rather than having them all fight with the CTO
| directly. They are paying, in part, to avoid have to deal
| with you directly.
| delusional wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what the OP is saying though. That's
| all fake work that's only done because the even higher
| ups are demanding it. It's not that the manager is bad
| because he's an idiot. It's that what the system asks of
| the manager doesn't actually make anything better.
| extr wrote:
| The point is it's not fake work. In fact these types of
| problems just become harder the further up you go. When
| you're upper management, now you have the problem of
| wondering if managers are doing their job
| correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage
| and plan for. Imagine handing someone several million
| dollars in labor budget and just having to trust them
| that they're building the right things...I would be
| asking questions too. Coordination problems are tough.
| q-big wrote:
| > When you're upper management, now you have the problem
| of wondering if managers are doing their job
| correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage
| and plan for.
|
| If this becomes a problem, I would rather assume this as
| a strong sign that there are simply too many management
| levels in the organization, which makes managing the
| multitude of management levels difficult.
| [deleted]
| mylons wrote:
| i totally agree with you. i think if you were a small
| product focused company, you could conceivably have
| engineers with a PM, and cut it off at that. why a PM?
| because talking to the customer and getting that feedback
| is a must, and potentially offloading that to someone
| specifically as their role sounds like a good separation
| of labor.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| ...sort of. I'm in this role myself, and I think a lot of
| middle management positions could at least in theory be
| eliminated. But it would require 'Developer Z' from the
| above example to have those uncomfortable conversations
| with management himself. Would that be a stressful
| distraction from the work he needs to accomplish? Almost
| certainly. Could it be a net savings for the company?
| Yes, iff the right processes/culture were in place.
|
| Since taking this position I've started to think of
| middle managers as human lubrication on the gears of
| bureaucracy. The better the gears fit together, the fewer
| of us are needed. Unfortunately, we're not really
| incentivised to make ourselves useless, so designing
| better gears isn't something a lot of us spend time on.
| And I don't know how one could properly incentivise a
| whole class of mid-seniority people to work themselves
| out of a job.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| If you've ever worked as a software developer in a small
| company you might have found yourself being both a
| developer and directly reporting to what constitutes
| upper management at a small company, often the owner or
| president of the company. I was in this situation early
| on in my career and managing the business side absolutely
| becomes a whole job, but also I think I did my best work
| and had a bigger impact of any job I had after because I
| was directly owning the outcomes of software I was
| writing. (Of course doing both well is incredibly
| challenging and often ends up resulting in poor software
| quality, or poor engagement with management) But it's
| pretty exhilarating if you can pull it off and maintain a
| high standard of quality.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's not so much the middle management
| that's the problem, but as you get higher and higher up a
| large company, and more abstracted from the actual work
| being done, there are a lot of demands for leadership.
| But our culture (at least in the US) kind of assumes that
| founders are special, ultra-people on the basis of them
| founding a company and providing jobs for everyone. In my
| actual experience, most of them are just characters
| ranging from the eccentric to the idiotic.
|
| It does take a lot of vision and leadership to
| successfully run a large company. Unfortunately, I would
| argue, we tolerate a lot of unsuccessful companies.
| cle wrote:
| No it's not fake work, someone has to watch the
| organizational health, to make sure business goals can be
| met. Managers report up to other managers because one
| person can only do so much, and can't feasibly track the
| complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I just moved back to IC from manager.
|
| Communication between teams on feature alignment (read:
| tons of meetings), planning my team's sprint workload,
| dealing with other manager's politics/bullshit, dealing
| with Directors political bullshit, etc. It's a huge time
| sink away from actual engineering.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Budget cuts / pressure. Justifying headcount. Justifying
| value of the team. VIP requests for stupid reports /
| features / meetings. Questions about schedule, scope, etc.
| Politics. Stupid meetings. Stupid emails. Good managers
| will shield you from all of this. A good manager will let
| you work and create the perception that everything is ok
| above him, when in reality its a series of constant battles
| and high stakes poker.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Endless negotiations with higher ups, customers,... Finding
| a way to fill the gap when the guy who everyone relies on
| just left. Find some work to do when things are slow, and
| make rushes more manageable. Take estimates from different
| people, all unreliable, the availability for their teams,
| and make a somewhat realistic planning. Convert developer
| time into money and plan a budget. Find the correct
| methodology and customize it (doing things "by the book"
| never works).
|
| The more I work as a developer, the more I appreciate the
| work of good managers, and the less I want to do it.
| fouric wrote:
| > good managers
|
| And that's the key - _good_ managers.
|
| Now, I think that it's pretty hard for most people to
| identify good vs bad managers, and that's why a lot of
| people who aren't sensitive to the difference get into
| the mindset of "management is a bunch of toxic leeches
| who don't add any value to the company".
|
| Interestingly enough, it's also pretty hard for most
| people to identify good an bad developers - but most
| people aren't developers. It's far easier for those that
| are.
|
| This raises an interesting question - is it harder for
| managers to identify bad managers than it is for
| developers to identify bad developers? What about the
| ease of developers identifying bad managers vs managers
| identifying bad developers?
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if it's harder to recognize
| good/bad managers - management is all about abstracting
| away the stuff under you for the next level up, after
| all.
|
| But, I also wouldn't be surprised if the problem comes
| down to something else other than identification - maybe
| bad managers are more prone to keep bad managers around
| than bad programmers are to keep other bad programmers
| around...
|
| It's at times like this that I wish that I had _more_
| experience in the corporate world...
| pengaru wrote:
| https://mipmip.org/tidbits/boat-race.html
| rileymat2 wrote:
| How are you measuring value added? A great product with no
| sales adds very little value.
| willis936 wrote:
| And marketing with no product has no value.
| ecf wrote:
| A great product sells itself.
| friedman23 wrote:
| This is just not true.
| reificator wrote:
| > > _A great product sells itself._
|
| > _This is just not true._
|
| Minecraft is the best selling game of all time[0] and
| while it's been marketed more since Microsoft purchased
| it, the first million sales happened within 7 months of
| charging for the game. Just over a year after commercial
| release it hit 10 million sales.
|
| This was not a period of Minecraft marketing. Most sales
| were due to people simply seeing others _(friends,
| YouTubers)_ playing the game and wanting to try it
| themselves.
|
| [0]: Wikipedia claims 238 million sales, vs GTA V in
| second place with 155 million.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
| selling_video_gam...
| friedman23 wrote:
| Notch was posting about his game on 4chan and on various
| places on the internet. It didn't just go viral out of
| nowhere. He also gave it away for free until he started
| charging for it so calling those downloads sales is
| disingenuous.
|
| Anyway sure, maybe there are apps that instantly go viral
| with minimal marketing but if you build an amazing tool,
| put it on the internet and don't talk about it to anyone
| I guarantee you it will get 0 sales.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Given extremes of "a great product sells itself" vs
| "well-marketed vaporware is successful," the former is
| more true.
| z3t4 wrote:
| You could start giving away gold for free, but noone will
| come unless you tell at least one guy about it, but likely
| he will not believe you. So you need to tell several
| people, maybe hundreds if it's not easily accessed. But
| likely you just have a great product, and you are not
| willing to give it away for free, so it will take much more
| to attract people! And there is also timing, if for example
| Google or Facebook would launch today (in their original
| form) they would have a very hard time acquiring users.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| That argument works both ways though. What are they marketing
| and selling when all the devs leave?
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Yeah, I am a developer, I believe I add value, but the
| question is about a pretty bold statement to other roles.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I read the OP as the situation when other departments
| balloon and more resources are not spent on dev. I've
| been there before: I reported to more managers than devs.
| And the company just tried to sell the same thing in new
| ways because they were incapable of making things better
| or building something new.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Large game companies make a significant percentage of their
| revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely
| people with an addiction control problem.
|
| Most developers want to make games like they would want to play
| them. That means no grinding, no pay to win, no taking
| advantage of your players. But if you run your studio that way,
| you're way less profitable than the competition which is
| managed by greedy sharks and fully "monetizes" (=exploits)
| anyone who's willing to touch microtransactions. For stock
| market companies, having competitive numbers is a big deal or
| else you'll pay through the nose for borrowing the $200 mio
| that a AAA game will cost.
|
| In short, "the market" makes sure that game companies become
| exploitative, and true believers leave to fund their own indie
| studio.
|
| But that means I disagree with you that senior management adds
| no value. They do precisely what they were hired for, which is
| to make sure the studio has a good stock price and, hence,
| enough money to finance future games. It's just that most
| developers hate em, and for good reason.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > Large game companies make a significant percentage of their
| revenue from the so-called "whales", which tend to be lonely
| people with an addiction control problem.
|
| Yes but those companies are freemium or in-app purchases
| "games" which is AFAIK a completely different model than
| Ubisoft which sells $60 games once like FarCry or Assassins
| Creed.
| vvanders wrote:
| From my experience there's a bit more dynamics in there. In
| particular the publishing agreements(I've been privy to a few)
| are structured in ways that the developer takes a substantial
| amount of risk and very rarely gains the reward of a breakout
| hit. Things like the first royalty doesn't come in until all
| development + marketing costs(which can be as much as dev) are
| paid back. Caps on payouts for companies or individual
| employees, etc.
|
| The structure is much closer to what you see in the recording
| industry contracts , there's even been cases in the past of
| publishers denying milestone payments during peak burn to put
| the company into bankruptcy to gain the IP + source and then
| re-hire the dev-team back at 70% salary. Combine that with an
| robust supply of fresh faces trying to "break-in" it's not
| really a surprise the industry is the way it is.
|
| If you're on the dev side of the industry you've got quite a
| few options to exit, if you're in art there's less options
| since a lot of adjacent industries have similar conditions(I've
| heard from past co-workers that the animation industry is even
| more brutal).
|
| It's really a shame since there's some really fun technical
| problems to be solved and a lot of creativity but that
| ultimately gets exploited into the state it is today. It could
| be a better industry but it isn't. For those that want to build
| games I usually recommend doing it as a side project, there's a
| high probability that you can work on a genre you like(I never
| did during my time in industry) and you aren't subject to the
| state of the industry.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This is especially true in the gaming industry. Most
| companies start with great talent, but then more and more
| middle management comes in. Managers hire more managers so they
| can become senior managers. Non functional bloat starts coming
| in the form of sales, marketing, "strategy and ops" etc.
|
| Once again, I have to refer to the excellent work "Bullshit
| Jobs"...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| ... and inevitably, the C-suite is replaced by people with a
| management or finance background, and no game creation
| experience, who proceed to drive the company into the ground.
| Has been the story of game studios since forever.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| The share prices and revenue numbers of these allegedly
| driven-into-the-ground companies seems to tell the opposite
| story.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Marvel movies are the top of the line financially, but they
| are all the same basic formula, and they're effectively
| film versions of old comic storylines.
|
| When was the last time you saw actually original (as in,
| not based on last year's surprisingly successful novel),
| creative, non-"mainstream" movies at your city's cinema?
| Interstellar or (to a certain extent, given that the plot
| was more or less copied from Pocahontas) Avatar, likely.
|
| Anything else is moved off to niche/arthouse cinema or
| straight to DVD/Netflix.
|
| With games, it's the same. Innovation has been sorely
| lacking in many genres from racing to shooters - it's all
| remasters, microtransactions, free to play and advertising
| _bullshit_ these days or the atrocity that Rockstar made
| out of GTA 3 /VC/SA. Last actually innovative game in the
| shooter genre probably was Borderlands.
| vkou wrote:
| > ...who proceed to drive the company into the ground. Has
| been the story of game studios since forever.
|
| Has it?
|
| Everyone loves to dunk on EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Blizzard-
| Activision, etc, for producing mountains of AAA
| shovelware[1], but the big players in the industry seem to
| undergo a pretty normal rate of growth, death, and merger for
| large companies.
|
| It's entirely possible (Likely, even!) that under better
| management[2], they'd be more successful, but I wouldn't say
| that gaming firms are driven into the ground by managers any
| more frequently than they are in any other industry.
|
| There's certainly a high rate of bankruptcy and death in
| small and medium-sized gaming companies, but I feel that has
| more to do with the incredibly speculative and inconsistent
| nature of cashflow, and the high cost of securing funding in
| the industry.
|
| [1] Given that people have been dunking on these firms for
| that reason for the past decade, they sure are taking a long
| time to be driven into the ground...
|
| [2] The bar for 'better management' is pretty damn low for
| some of the firms I've mentioned.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd argue that modern day EUSB etc. _are_ what we see,
| precisely because they 've eaten the corpses of the
| referenced failures.
|
| EA today isn't EA of the late-80s / early-90s. It's
| essentially something named "EA" that managed to smartly
| buy assets of failed companies.
|
| The funding difficulties and cyclical nature of revenue is
| real, but I guess that's why you see a similar model evolve
| in movie production.
|
| Take a look through the developers during the early part of
| EA's history (for example): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /List_of_Electronic_Arts_game...
|
| There were none that I could find that hadn't gone through
| this exact pattern: (1) be bought by larger publisher, (2)
| lose key creative talent, (3) close as an entity and have
| remaining employees folded into larger corporate teams.
|
| You'd think if average "big game publisher-developer"
| management were beneficial to developers, you wouldn't get
| subsequent failure so reliably.
| vkou wrote:
| The reason they were bought by a larger publisher is
| either because the owners got their exit, or, more
| frequently, because when you live publisher-paycheck-to-
| publisher-paycheck, all it takes is one flop to sink your
| development studio. Your publisher then buys your
| carcass, and its IP and team for a song.
|
| I don't think you can blame the management, as much as
| you can blame the funding model. (And the funding model
| is such because banks aren't interested in lending money
| for speculative creative projects, and neither are VCs.)
|
| > You'd think if average "big game publisher-developer"
| management were beneficial to developers, you wouldn't
| get subsequent failure so reliably.
|
| I wouldn't say it's beneficial, but it's the _only_ way
| that most of them can get the money to fund their
| projects.
| it_does_follow wrote:
| > very few companies actually value them accordingly
|
| This is something that has definitely gone through waves a few
| time during my life time.
|
| In particular I remember the early startup era (~2010)
| developers were treated very well (though I don't think they
| were ever treated that great in the games industry). Ironically
| they weren't paid as ridiculously as today, but they tended to
| play a much larger role in the company, and their time was
| treated as very valuable.
|
| Back then startups would be a team of engineers, a designer, a
| marketer with all of the product vision coming from CEO or
| maybe as very senior product role (typically cofounder). The
| contemporary world filled with PMs would have seemed (and still
| does to some of us) foreign to anyone at the time.
|
| The truth is industry tends to despise a "monopoly on talent",
| and so we've seen the bureaucratization of the industry. The
| rise of boot camps has worked to devalued the skills of a
| talented engineer (though it might be harder now than before to
| hire talent), interviews are formalized into a robotic
| screening processes, and the current structure of teams,
| largely driven by PMs/product owners, has radically devalued
| the input form engineers in the way the product is developed.
|
| If you have been in the industry less that 10 years you'd be
| surprised how much say engineers used to get in at the start of
| the most recent tech boom, as well as how different the hiring
| process was. In 2011 the two biggest signals for interviews
| were a strong github page and especially OSS contribution.
| Passionate, curious software engineers were the most sought
| after people and they were considered very much a part of the
| leadership of a company, driving it's culture and success.
|
| Today engineers have been more or less reduced to hot-swappable
| drones across the industry.
| syntheweave wrote:
| I think the industry has foiled itself recently through sheer
| scale. The number of niche roles has exploded and with it, so
| too the depth of the software stack. The good talent in any
| subsection ends up going deeper than they can be trained or
| evaluated for. The rest tread water and add noise to the
| pipeline. As a result there is an increasing sense of nobody
| knowing what's going on and compensation being poorly
| correlated with talent, meaning many orgs can't handle their
| technical challenges and don't know it until it blows up.
|
| The actual solution would be to be suspicious of software as
| an end and relinquish more control of it to the open-source
| commons so that they can optimize their core business. But
| that can't happen if your core business is "being a
| platform," and as we know, platforms are where the big
| profits lie anyway. So it's going to go on like this until we
| cycle out of the current software stacks and move into ones
| with different social arrangements at their core.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Interesting post. I think what happened was that there used
| to be an idea that good tech was an important competitive
| advantage. Therefore, highly competent developers were
| listened to. But the industry came to realize that it's not
| better tech that wins, but underhanded, addictive, and
| deceptive tech. Engineers in my experience aren't motivated
| to use their engineering power to deceive, so if your goal is
| to use software to monetize users by violating their privacy,
| you need someone else at the helm of that ship.
| TOMDM wrote:
| > Ubisoft brass argues that, for all its tumult, the company's
| standing is comparable to its peers.
|
| The brass has realized they don't need to be good, just
| competitive.
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| Between the sexual misconduct scandal, the more recent NFT Quartz
| PR nightmare from both the outside and inside, as well as a
| general shake in the AAA industry due to similar sexual
| misconducts, allegations of racism and discrimination of
| minorities, physical abuse, toxic working environments, crunch
| culture above and beyond what is standard for other industries,
| mass layoffs after record profit years every year... It is no
| wonder that people are tired, or that we see more and more big
| names devs leave and form their own studio alongside with friends
| every other month. (An example being Activision-Blizzard who
| keeps bleeding big names and new studios keep forming).
|
| There's no apparent effort from the leadership of the industry to
| change all the above, as well as a continuous push by publisher
| for more monetization methods on top of pre-existing ones at the
| cost of the studio's PR (NFTs being the most recent). Combine
| this with a general lack of care for the quality of releases at
| launch or guaranteed long term support for the titles, which
| leads to animosity and lack of trust from consumers.
|
| There's also the fact, that all of this leads to developers and
| staff, being harassed on social media by people who don't and
| don't want to understand and simply want someone to blame.
|
| Also worth mentioning that there's a on-going pandemic for the
| past 2 years, that has left people both mentally and physically
| exhausted. So... that probably doesn't help at all when paired
| with the above.
|
| EDIT: Also worth adding, is the fact that CEOs are earning multi-
| million dollar bonuses on top of very large salaries (especially
| when compared to CEOs from other industries) when people are
| getting paid so poorly that they can't afford to eat
| (https://www.gamerzunite.com/activision-blizzard-underpays-em...)
| or get layoff during a record profit year.
| mottosso wrote:
| > An example being Activision-Blizzard who keeps bleeding big
| names and new studios keep forming
|
| If there's anything good coming out of all of this, it's this.
| We need less consolidation overall, and new studios emerging
| with this level of experience can only be a net-positive for
| the world.
| izacus wrote:
| The numbers quoted look in line with the rest of the "Great
| Exodus" in the IT industry... Is there any special proof that
| there's something more going on than the post covid resignation
| spike (following record high retention 2020) we're seeing across
| the rest of the industry?
| siva7 wrote:
| It's a great exodus to greener pastures because developers are
| a pretty scarce resource in those wild times we're living
| lampe3 wrote:
| Sorry but what exodus in the it industry?
|
| Here in Germany if you can code "hello world". You will get a
| job.
|
| Also all of my peers and friends around Europe are still
| working in the industry.
|
| So I'm just wondering.
|
| Can you point to any source? Is this maybe something that
| happens in the US?
| grumple wrote:
| It's also about about techies jumping jobs for more money,
| not just leaving the industry entirely. It is US-centric and
| not limited to tech.
|
| https://www.recruiter.com/i/no-post-pandemic-the-great-
| job-e...
|
| But I'd also say the common wisdom in US tech is to jump jobs
| every couple of years for a raise anyway, so losing 1/4 of
| engineers per year seems in line with expectations.
| lampe3 wrote:
| But isn't it normal to change you work place every X years?
|
| Even here in Europe. If I ask my current boss that I want
| like a raise of 1/3 of my salary he laughs but when I leave
| to a new company I laugh.
|
| I worked in Germany, Lithuania and Norway.
|
| Basically you are forced to change your job if you are a
| good developer and want to get more money.
|
| And for me a lot of gaming studios which I loved in the
| 90's and 00's have lost all the glory. Just look at
| Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft.
|
| It really worth looking at the history of EA and why it
| even exists.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Americans have always done it in larger numbers though,
| because in times of economic slowdown they don't try and
| prop up existing business employment using furlough
| schemes, and it has been extremely easy to move and get a
| new job throughout the history of the country. (EU
| freedom of movement was inspired by the US which has
| always had it at a continental scale, and it's a lot more
| practical since nearly everyone's first language is also
| the US's lingua franca.)
|
| This leads to upsides and downsides. Generally speaking,
| a lot more people lose jobs during US slowdowns, but the
| US tends to bounce back a lot faster as well since the
| labor market is flexible and responds rapidly to changes.
| One concern with furlough-type schemes is that they keep
| people at "zombie" firms that the economy may be pivoting
| away from.
| seneca wrote:
| I think they mean that devs are leaving companies in higher
| numbers, not leaving the industry as a whole.
| watwut wrote:
| Maybe it is meant to be more people changing companies now? I
| don't see people leaving IT industry either.
| izacus wrote:
| I've used the term because that's what the media uses to talk
| about the spike of people quitting their jobs for new
| positions.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Yeah, the fact that just any amount of basic coding skills
| will get you a job is proof for it, not against it.
|
| Companies are hurting for talent.
| meowtastic wrote:
| > Here in Germany if you can code "hello world". You will get
| a job.
|
| Maybe I need to learn German, because this definitely doesn't
| apply to UK from my experience. You need to invest at least 4
| months full-time before getting a junior role that pays as
| much as retail. Then you need to spend your evenings and
| weekends for the next 1-2 years before earning average
| salary.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Why is that?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| In Europe there is a huge number of open positions for the
| lowest end of qualifications: testers, junior developers, web
| designers etc, but a very small number for senior developers,
| architects. This correlates with salaries, jobs with entry
| level salaries are all over the place, but not the higher
| end. Again, this is in Europe.
| hintymad wrote:
| Oh no! I really enjoy Assassin's Creed, and I wish the quality of
| the game will not deteriorate. Assassin's Creed is especially
| good for a layback gamer like me, who does not like time pressure
| and would like to take their own pace to finish the game. The
| fabulous view and handy tutorials and guides along the way helps
| too.
| beebmam wrote:
| When companies pay "market rates" for their developers, there
| should be no surprise that there's high turnover. They'll easily
| get a better deal going somewhere else simply due to the variance
| in those market rates.
|
| Here's one easy solution: pay the people at your company more so
| they don't want to leave for an offer that will certainly be less
| good than what they have with you.
|
| Good software engineers are hard to find. You should be paying
| them their weight in gold.
| [deleted]
| martinpw wrote:
| I think a significant amount may also be pull from FAANG
| companies which are now getting a lot more into 3d content
| creation. I don't have so much visibility on the games side, but
| at least in film and VFX I am seeing a lot of former colleagues
| at studios moving to those companies for much higher salaries and
| job stability.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| One of my best friends from college days ended up at Ubsioft
| Montreal and he spent around 8 years there. He left last month
| due to changes in management. About 3 months ago they hired some
| new manager and this person had no clue about programming, or
| software development in general, yet she was in charge of the
| whole team. After a whole lot of infighting, my friend decided to
| leave after they refused him a change of a team. He ended up
| leaving for another AAA game publisher. At least 4 other members
| of his previous team also ended up leaving after him.
|
| I'm often reminded of the old adage: people don't leave
| companies, they leave managers.
| tyingq wrote:
| Seems like it will probably have snowball effect. With this many
| leaving, the remainder have more work to do than before. And
| assuming the rumors about game dev are mostly true, the company
| will react by forcing long work hours and other unpleasant new
| policies, etc. Which will make more want to leave. Rinse, repeat.
| mdoms wrote:
| The triple-A gaming industry in general seems to be in a bit of a
| crisis. Quality of releases for the past couple of years has been
| abysmal, and creative direction seems to be now entirely in the
| hands of overpaid, unengaged executives who are totally
| disconnected from the gaming world.
|
| Games are routinely being released in a half-baked state. How
| could a developer with a real love for the medium be happy
| working at organisations like this?
|
| Ubisoft is one of the worst offenders (especially in terms of
| creative direction) so it's no surprise that they are the most
| affected.
| pepemon wrote:
| Red Dead Redemption 2 is an absolute gem in all terms and it
| was released in 2019, not so long ago. Shiny new Halo Infinite
| is very nice too. There were failures like Cyberpunk 2077, but
| such cases were always present in the industry. What abysmal
| quality are you talking about?
| LegitShady wrote:
| >The triple-A gaming industry in general seems to be in a bit
| of a crisis
|
| Aren't they making more money than ever before? Why is that a
| crisis? Imagine you're the most profitable you've ever been
| even with the quality issues - why is that a crisis at all?
|
| The purpose of the companies is to make money and they are. The
| games are just the widget they're selling. If people keep
| buying widgets, whether they're subscription widgets or
| microtransaction widgets, the business is working.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's kind of like saying Hollywood is in crisis because mid-
| budget fresh IP movies are almost extinct because the studios
| only want to make comic book movies that pull in a billion
| dollars at the box office.
|
| From a creative output standpoint it is probably true, but
| the only thing that matters in Hollywood is money and by that
| measure they are doing fine.
| mdoms wrote:
| > Why is that a crisis?
|
| For the exact reasons I stated in the rest of my post? I
| didn't say "AAA companies aren't making money".
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Neither management nor shareholders are in trouble, so
| people in charge don't care, so its not a crisis and
| nothing will be done.
| mdoms wrote:
| That's like saying there's no housing crisis because
| landlords and property developers are making tons of
| money.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Well, i am here understanding that crysis mean immediate
| action needs to be taken. The housing crysis has been
| getting worse for 30 years and no action is being taken.
| dschuetz wrote:
| It is really saying a lot when asked about workers complaining
| the top management starts shoveling numbers instead of facing the
| issues. This is how far removed management is from reality; it's
| all numbers and analytics to them, acting like robots.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| The gaming sector has already been struggling with a (relative)
| lack of AAA content and incomplete releases with quality issues.
|
| I can't help but wonder if we're in for a rough couple of years
| in the market with all of the additional tumult.
|
| Granted much of the tumult is a direct result of the conditions
| that caused quality issues in the first place.
|
| I've often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer
| expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable. (Not that I mean
| to excuse poor management as a leading factor).
|
| Perhaps we'll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset
| to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?
| pfraze wrote:
| I think the shift to "games as a service" or calling a game a
| "platform" is a reflection of what's happening here. To my
| knowledge, Halo Infinite, Roblox, CoD, Battlefield, and
| Fortnight have called their games platforms. Riot is doing
| something kind of similar with funding indie studious to build
| on their tech and IP. What they generally mean is that they're
| moving away from releasing new games/versions every N years and
| instead continuously updating a single release with new
| content, modes, and so on.
|
| From a product perspective, this makes a lot sense to me. We're
| past the era when new releases diverge significantly from their
| past versions. This approach of continuously updating an
| existing game has already been happening for a while with
| Fortnight and CoD, and it's led to a lot of variety with much
| less friction to getting the new experience.
|
| From an economic perspective, I assume it's a lot cheaper to
| develop updates than new releases, and a lot of them can
| monetize with cosmetics.
|
| If we're doing platforms, I'd love to see modding culture make
| a big comeback this way - more of what Roblox is doing, but
| with something aimed at adults. The old days of Halflife and
| Warcraft 3 mods were so huge in my childhood, and I feel like
| it's a huge missed opportunity by these studios not to tap into
| this more.
| kibwen wrote:
| The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA
| gaming worse overall. In order to be taken seriously as "AAA" a
| developer feels like they cannot choose _not_ to use the
| hardware to its fullest. Modern hardware means that we _can_
| have huge, open, living worlds, so every AAA game _must_ have a
| huge, open, living world, enormously inflating development
| costs both in terms of scale and complexity. Likewise, modern
| hardware means that we _can_ have beautiful, photorealistic
| graphics, so every AAA game _must_ have beautiful,
| photorealistic graphics, massively inflating the budget due to
| hiring so many artists to make those assets, resulting in games
| that can 't afford to take risks because of how much investment
| has been put into them. The temptation to do this has always
| existed, but now technology (and gamer expectations) has
| advanced far beyond the ability of game devs to scale.
|
| _> Perhaps we'll see an eventual changing of the guard and a
| reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in
| the 90s?_
|
| How about a different point of view: the 90s originated this
| problem. The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game _had_
| to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et
| al) we were _just_ mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly
| all that gets chucked out the window (or _nearly_ all, see
| Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in
| favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations. It wasn 't
| until the mid-2000s that the advent of modern indie gaming
| would pick up the thread of 2D games, resulting in some of the
| best gaming experiences I've had. Maybe ten years from now AAA
| studios will at last feel free from the obligatory burden of
| pushing hardware to its limit and will content themselves with
| putting out games that are less technologically ambitious (and
| put some fraction of the saved effort towards something else,
| like storytelling or game mechanics).
| bob1029 wrote:
| > The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making
| AAA gaming worse overall
|
| Perhaps this is like induced demand with road expansion
| projects. All you are doing is making the pipes/scalars
| bigger. You aren't fundamentally changing the nature of the
| equation or otherwise solving for some bigger creative
| problem.
|
| Constraints are the path to high quality experiences. Fun
| emerges because we impose artificial limits on our reality
| (i.e. game logic). A totally unconstrained simulation without
| any rules would get boring very quickly.
|
| Imposing real world constraints on those developing games
| should also encourage more creative solutions that will more
| likely be experienced as novel and fun by the user.
|
| No one ever had a good time simply because a player model
| could be rendered with 10e8 triangles rather than 10e7 in the
| prior iteration.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if open worlds have become the norm
| because, now that they're possible, they're easier. Not in a
| raw effort sense, but in a creative sense. They solve the
| question of "what will the player do?" by giving the player a
| carnival of map checkpoints: shoot some targets here, do a
| scavenger hunt there; it pads out a story that could
| otherwise be played in 6-8 hours into a game that can be
| marketed as a 40-60 hour AAA adventure you can "play your
| way". They're not easier for the creatives, but they're
| easier for everyone else.
|
| Of course, the continued existence of games like Dark Souls,
| and the meteoric success of games like Among Us and
| Phasmophobia tell me that players don't always want to "play
| their way." There's plenty of demand for games with a finite
| amount of well-made content with a satisfying gameplay loop.
| mdoms wrote:
| I completely disagree with this take. The worst offenders
| recently have been games where the developers were determined
| to continue supporting outdated old XBox and Playstation
| hardware as well as trying to offer a next generation
| experience to PC and next-gen consoles.
| kibwen wrote:
| I'm not aware of this happening to any game other than
| Cyperpunk, can you name others?
| mdoms wrote:
| Battlefield 2042 is the latest example. All of Ubisoft's
| games. The new Call of Duty WW2 game. There are lots.
| devnulll wrote:
| Valhalla is a good example. It's a great experience on
| the modern platforms with SSD/NVME drives, but really
| rough to play on the older HDD consoles.
| Reichhardt wrote:
| The huge 30% commissions charged by Sony, Microsoft, Valve,
| Nintendo, Apple, Google are a huge negative factor to the
| potential profits of the industry. On top of that, you have
| sales taxes from every country in the world, which are creeping
| upwards globally. For every $1 of customer spending, typically
| only 50-60c reaches the developer.
|
| In most other Tech sectors, you can go straight to customer,
| without platform commissions or taxes, and the profitability
| and salaries reflect that.
|
| All of the profits in Gamedev are taken by platform holders.
| LegitShady wrote:
| The market is large enough that I don't see why its important
| in any way. If one company you like has a major failure or even
| gets bought out by a larger firm, there are a lot of
| alternatives who can compete for your time and attention. What
| constitutes a 'rough couple years' for the market?
|
| The guard changed and like hollywood, the accountants and
| inbred corporate boards are in charge forevermore.
|
| Massive gamer expectations don't exist in a vacuum, they exist
| because the AAA game space is heavily marketing for the purpose
| of building hype and expectation. It's on purpose. once in a
| while there's an anthem or cyberpunk level implosion but why do
| they care when they're raking in billions in microtransactions?
| That's just the cost of doing business.
|
| The companies release incomplete low content games because
| people keep buying them and the profit is massive. There's too
| much money to be made in microtransactions and repeat fees like
| season passes. There have been a few large notable failures but
| their net loss is much smaller than the massive income through
| microtransactions.
|
| We will never return to a 'sustainable market' because the
| market is all about companies trying both the existing things
| and new things to maximize profit and minimize cost, and others
| copying. The market is thus always in tumult and is never
| sustainable, with some firms failing and some firms succeeding
| at different times based on the ebb and flow of whatever the
| current events are at the time.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I've often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer
| expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable.
|
| The most recent AAA game that I have attempted is Battlefield
| 2042.
|
| I managed to force about 7 hours of that game in, and probably
| won't be able to convince myself to go back for more. I had
| maybe ~15 minutes of fun across that interval. You could
| probably flip a coin to determine if my experience was adverse
| because of rushed buggy garbage, or if it was a bad gameplay
| concept to begin with (i.e. ridiculous scope).
|
| I still find myself playing older games like Overwatch, League
| of Legends and Minecraft with far more frequency than anything
| else out there. Maybe I've become jaded or burned out on
| gaming, but something in my head keeps saying that these
| studios just aren't trying anymore.
|
| What is it about one of these "older" titles that can keep me
| playing for 5-6 hours per day that we cannot seem to capture
| and move into newer titles? Maybe this is just me and
| everything is fine...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| New AAA games feel like what you get when you digest a
| previously popular title through "What did you like?" focus
| groups, generate a list of checkbox features, write a game
| spec from that list, and then make that game.
|
| And at no point is anyone in the room asking "Is it fun?"
| bob1029 wrote:
| > And at no point is anyone in the room asking "Is it fun?"
|
| Would it be economically infeasible or otherwise
| unattractive to investors to propose a new game development
| business where "Is it fun?" is the only question that
| matters?
|
| Presumably, you have access to this entire marketplace of
| exiled ubisoft/blizzard/et.al. employees, so maybe the
| formal business plan starts with acquiring some of this
| talent and determining what projects they might want to
| work on.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Nintendo is that company, so it seems like the concept
| can exist and satisfy investors. Satoru Iwata was big on
| this mindset. I guess he's been gone for 6 years now
| (good lord, how could it be so long ago?), but I think
| they still do a good job in this area.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Essentially, that's Nintendo's first-party business model
| (or at least as close as it gets in the industry).
|
| But the "acquiring some of this talent and determining
| what projects they might want to work on" is the standard
| bloodletting that happened every few decades in the game
| industry.
|
| Usually, this resulted in the next Blizzard, Westwood,
| Dynamix, etc. being founded, growing, and then dissolving
| into the next wave of smaller companies.
|
| But it's been screwed up the past cycle though, as the
| investment required to make AAA-level games was only
| available from large publishers, who set terms that
| generally resulted in development studio bankruptcy and
| subsequent buyout-by and incorporation-into the
| publisher.
|
| Which is how you got your Activision Blizzard, EA, Take-
| Two, Ubisoft arrangement.
| friedman23 wrote:
| I'm a massive battlefield fan, I've played every game they've
| released in the past 15 or so years and battlefield 2042 was
| so actively not fun I got a refund for it.
|
| Almost every major game developed during the pandemic has
| been like this. Even Halo, a really good game, had massive
| swathes of content cut from the game because it was
| unfinished.
| sosborn wrote:
| It is partially you, but not in a general "You are different
| than everyone else" sense. Nostalgia is powerful - the games
| I played when I was younger will always win out in my head
| compared to newer games.
| lampe3 wrote:
| Except Nintendo games I only play indie games.
|
| They are like the games in the 90s or 00s.
|
| So yeah we have this market its just not were these AAA
| companies play.
|
| Some cool indies: - Shovel Knight - Hades - Deep Rock Galactic
| - papers please! - unnamed goose game - Probably more which I
| forgot
| crate_barre wrote:
| As a gamer, I can say we are a fickle bunch. We're no different
| that pop-song listeners at this point. We love it when it's a
| hit, and we'll play it out until we can't stand it anymore and
| never look back. If you make an indie game or a big budget one,
| you are vulnerable to this fickle crowd. You are better off
| hyping the living hell out of a game and cashing in the initial
| few months than you are to build a modest game with a community
| that will stick around.
|
| It was never really like this, I'm not sure what happened. I
| really don't know where it all went wrong.
|
| It's a hits driven industry at this point.
| oneepic wrote:
| I'm going to go ahead and guess platforms like social
| media/twitch/etc encourage us to keep looking at the next
| thing instead of looking at what we have. Meaning the
| previews look great but they dont translate into lasting
| experiences.
| michaelt wrote:
| I'm a non-gamer, but my impression is the opposite.
|
| We programmers expect all our tools _and_ libraries to be not
| only free, but open source too, _and then_ will bitch if they
| have bugs.
|
| Gamers, though? AAA games release with loads of bugs, clunky
| DRM/anti-cheat rootkits, often have cheat problems anyway,
| hundred-gigabyte downloads, online services going down on
| christmas day, online voice chat full of race hate? They'll
| pre-order before a single review has come out, at a cost of
| $70.
|
| These are some of the least fussy customers in the world.
| oneepic wrote:
| It really depends on where these players live. A
| significant number of them read Reddit and Steam reviews,
| watch YouTube gaming channels, hate
| Activision/EA/Blizzard/etc big companies and swear against
| buying their games... but there's tons of buyers outside of
| the Internet who don't listen to all that. Lots of people
| just buy games from companies they know. Moreover, lots of
| these people are parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles who know
| nothing except the company name, and know the names of
| stuff their kids are talking about... and they go buy those
| games for Christmas. The latter buyers are often
| disconnected from the real players of those games.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Games has been a hit driven industry really since it started.
| Having a longer tail is really a very recent trend. That's
| why everyone wants an evergreen GaaS setup. Get a steady
| annual income and you can float about burning money. You
| might not even need another hit for decades.
| gjhh244 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype
| and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just
| don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how
| fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie /
| decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are
| mostly niche strategy games.
| hylaride wrote:
| The video game industry as a whole has been a notoriously bad
| place to work for techs for a long time. It is extremely deadline
| driven, technical decisions are often made by product managers
| (or worse, other business people), and on top of that the pay is
| often mediocre compared to other industries.
|
| In the past, they've gotten away with it by enticing young people
| in (often because they loved video games growing up and want to
| make them) and burning them out. That seems to be a strategy that
| no longer works now that recruiters for all sorts of
| companies/industries have become so aggressive that you'll very
| quickly learn you're being taken advantage of if your linkedin
| profile is even moderately up to date and checked.
|
| These labour shortages (in all sorts of industries) are really
| going to be fascinating to watch. It's been 40 years since
| workers have had this kind of power/positioning and it'll be
| interesting to see if and how companies will adapt and change.
| jatone wrote:
| agreed, I'm excited to see what happens. its taken those 40
| years for globalization and women in the work force to be
| integrated and absorbed. we're just now seeing the labor
| markets plateau.
| hylaride wrote:
| I think on top of all that, the two largest demographic
| groups, millennials and boomers, are no longer working
| together as the latter start to retire en mass (that's
| already been accelerated as many took early retirement during
| the pandemic). It will indeed be exciting to see what happens
| now...
| croutonwagon wrote:
| I was reading an AMA with Todd Howard of Bethesda a while back
| and noticed he said they were hiring. So I took a look
| specifically in my specialty (ops/cloud ops etc). I hesitate to
| use the buzzword dev ops because all of our code is focused on
| automating operations, enhancing reliability and balancing with
| cost so my core devs can do their work better, faster etc.
|
| Anyway. In Bethesda land it was called NOC admin or something
| with a very clear deadline of you becoming a developer only
| within three years or getting out.
|
| It made total sense why fallout 76 has so many issues with
| their net code. They don't actually want people with any
| experience in managing these things, they want guys to just hit
| reboot it seems and use it as a jumping block.
|
| At my company it's telling how little networking and systems
| stuff our coders and sql folks know and when left to their own,
| things run pretty bad. My company has learned from this and we
| have pretty good reliability as a result and have a unique
| ability to scale and automate, especially products that were
| done by different core teams since my team often comes in and
| makes it all integrate well.
|
| Anyway, all that said it was pretty eye opening and while I
| still like video games here and there, and even Bethesda ones,
| I have no desire to go work in that industry. I'll stick to my
| sector.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >That seems to be a strategy that now longer works now that
| recruiters for all sorts of companies/industries have become so
| aggressive
|
| Companies are also becoming more and more willing to post
| salary ranges along with job postings these days as well, which
| makes jumping ship from game dev even easier. "I could make
| 30-50% more and only work 40 hours a week instead of 60-80, at
| the low cost of giving up games to write boring tax software
| instead? Sign me up"
| kranke155 wrote:
| You also will be working on boring tax software from 9 to 5.
| That gives you hours every week to build your own toy games,
| potentially even with friends making something cool.
| munk-a wrote:
| > One programmer told Axios they were able to triple their take-
| home pay by leaving.
|
| Tripling is pretty impressive - but as a developer who used to
| work in the game industry you'll definitely see a significant
| bump leaving - I personally saw a 50% bump and I'm still not in a
| particularly high earning tech sector.
| Bayart wrote:
| I was about to say, some of it is due to the high demand for
| devs, but a lot of it is just down to the video games industry
| being incredibly exploitative.
| cecida wrote:
| It certainly showed in the hot buggy mess that was AC Valhalla.
| fileoffset wrote:
| Ubisoft are no better than Activision or EA. Absolute scum. They
| ruin every game they touch with their greed.
| [deleted]
| jscipione wrote:
| This explains why the year late Prince of Persia Sands of Time
| remake is probably not going to come out any time soon. :/
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| I wonder if the Splinter Cell remake will fare any better...
| willis936 wrote:
| SC has a lot of goodwill from good memories and not having
| the blood wrung from it yet, so my bet is that it will sell
| well regardless of the quality.
|
| Also, we now have HDR OLEDs so when a guard shines a
| flashlight at the player we can experience this:
|
| https://youtu.be/Zp2EjsIYIhQ
| mabbo wrote:
| It's a great market for senior developers in Canada right now.
|
| A lot of companies are moving to full remote for a large portion
| of their developers. Especially important is that this includes
| some Bay Area big names. These companies are willing to pay well
| for talent and don't care where you live.
|
| Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal have historically paid senior
| developers poorly compared to what the Bay offered. But we devs
| chose to be here instead because we like Canada, want to raise
| our families here. Sometimes because of US Visa issues, but not
| as common as you'd think.
|
| But now we are being offered the best of both worlds. Better pay
| than anyone previously offered; you can stay in Canada; you can
| even work from home every day and avoid commuting.
|
| And it's not like every developer leaving Ubisoft is going to
| Instacart (though I'll bet a few are). The market on senior
| developer labor is just suddenly more competitive. Every dev with
| more than 5 years experience is reevaluating their current total
| comp and listening to recruiters offering more.
|
| But don't worry, says Ubisoft, we replaced those very senior ICs
| with a bunch of new people. As long as developers-in is greater
| than developers-out, I'm sure it will all be fine.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Working for US compagny with not HQ in Canada can be a lot of
| problems. You have to pay for everything, insurance etc ...
| it's a lot of complications.
| kache_ wrote:
| Considering the fact that I made half a million dollars this
| year, I'm sure it was worth not having dental insurance
| [deleted]
| jabl wrote:
| I haven't played anything by Ubisoft in a really really long time
| (nothing against Ubisoft per se), but I have to say based on
| reviews/walkthroughs [1] of Far Cry 6 on youtube that it must be
| a masterpiece. Not because it's any good, but because it
| unintentionally is so hilariously shitty.
|
| [1] see e.g. the ongoing walkthrough by Mighty Jingles
| exar0815 wrote:
| Never, in about a million years, I would have expected The
| Mighty Jingles referenced on Hacker News. My internet career
| now absolutely went full circle.
| jabl wrote:
| Happy to oblige. ;)
| FooHentai wrote:
| Ubisoft have been on my personal veto list for years for a host
| of reasons. Dreadful launcher, bland padded-out content, lack
| of after-launch updates, key activation problems. The juice was
| consistently not worth the squeeze, so I just don't touch
| anything they're putting out nowadays.
| Shorel wrote:
| Reading all comments criticizing some modern AAA games: If you
| are into simracing, we are entering a new golden age.
|
| Particularly with Automobilista 2, the latest update is amazing,
| and the developers, called Reiza, are more of an indie studio
| instead of a big player. But the end result is nothing short of
| AAA quality.
|
| Other titles we enjoy are Automobilista 1, rFactor2, iRacing, and
| Asetto Corsa Competizione.
| aspaceman wrote:
| IMHO, the results possible with modern open source tools are
| really amazing. I think a lot of the "cost" of AAA are
| inefficiencies in the pipeline, and issues of scope.
|
| A racing title seems especially easy to limit scope in. Compare
| your titles with the F1 games. There's no fancy campaign with
| voice acting and 3D modeled faces. But it plays really nice and
| the used assets are pristine. Indie no longer has to imply "2D
| pixel art".
|
| Speaking from experience, it's not that hard to teach some
| artist friends how to use blender. Then it's just a matter of
| compensating them fairly and you're off to the races. Plus it's
| fun. If you haven't tried 3D art, it's surprisingly intuitive.
| Like a sculpting with magic hands and clay that isn't annoying.
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