Is this a war tho

You can live off minimum wage in Canada in some regions, if you’re children-free. It gets harder with kids, though the state will cover some of it of you’re low-income (Like a couple hundred per months, and virtually no income taxes).

Yeah, payroll was outsourced and they met with the firm once or twice a year. The firm took care of mostly everything legal, including insurances and tax benefits afaik. The head of “HR” was a lifelong friend of the owner so I guess he didn’t want to go there.

My experience in a big software company was different and probably just like yours. The people there were rockstars.

Yeah, 4 employees out of 20.

The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.

At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.

HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.

Must be AI-written.

Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.

So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.

My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.

I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.

You know what they say about guys with big hands.

Too early to tell, but it could signal the start of a trend where developers and game studios at least entertain the idea of having a look at other engine before going with unity.

Don’t underestimate the sunk cost of Unity. The commitment to Unity it big. Unity is taught in game classes, people are formed and specialized in it, and you might have years of in-house tools which you couldn’t re-use.

I can see hobbyist switching and game studios with games that are easy to port, like arcade-style 2d games. For a lot of studio switching is a real risk of bankruptcy, more so than the extra fees. It will take more than a few days for Unity to fall, or even have an “exodus”.

Yeah, that explains it I think. Making video games is hard work and it is normal quit or stop caring.

Hey, fair points. I am not saying that all big are bad and all indies are good. The industry is definitely getting carried by indies in some genres and that is ok.

It would seem you agree on most points, as I passionate myself it just surprised me to sometime be surrounded by people who didn’t really care. It depends on the project and the studio of course. I can’t really blame the workers though as I said, so I agree with you that it makes sense in most cases to not recruit only “gamers”. Thanks for sharing!

Agree on all points, I was just making an observation. It sucks that all the people with money don’t care though.

No, not to the same extent. I mean past a certain size we probably shouldn’t expect big executives to care, but you still have a lot of passionate people in this industry, so you can totally have “true” gamers working in big budget games.

Yeah, it is kind of the default isn’t it. It kinda make sense for the programmers and artists, but it is still kinda weird that the actual designers don’t really understand why people play video games. You wouldn’t expect a movie director to not like movies, or a car designer to not like cars. I guess it must be happening everywhere at least to some degree.

Nowadays I would compare some game studios to what some boys bands were to music. You start with some guys with money who are neither musicians, nor sound engineers, nor anything really. They pick singers and musicians based on look and market research, they hire a large team of specialized workers, and then they spend millions on marketing to flood the space with their new album. The indie developers in this scenario would be Pink Floyd.

It wasn’t always like this, at least for video games. I feel like in the 80s up to the early 00s it was mostly dominated by passionate workers, but there just isn’t enough passionate workers for the demand. As the industry grew, big players started building those “soulless” projects to make good return on investment. Not to denigrate the individual contributions of the workers, but sadly the people who own those business don’t really care if they’re making games or cars or selling cigarettes. They care about r.o.i.

We’re all so bad at communicating and it is the bottleneck in most relationships, workplaces, and in politics.

We talk past each others when we argue. We’re bad at definining the stuff we argue and talk about. We’re bad at ignoring the pedantic stuff and focusing on the “spirit” of the argument.

At the workplace I feel the ability to share information to all the relevant parties without it being noisy has never been solved in big corporations. It is either a free-for-all situation where you’re expected to read hundred of emails, answer anyone anytime, go in tons of meeting, OR to work in complete silos where you only talk to a supervisor once in a blue moon.

In friendships you have people who talk but don’t listen and people who listen and don’t talk. Oversharers, bullshiters, people who can’t get to the point, people who gives 5 minutes of context and disordered information for every little things. Friends who mumble, or who don’t finish half their sentences.

In relationships we let unresolved issues become taboos, and we let petty stuff buildup because we can’t addresss it without anyone feeling attacked.

Communication is important, as you’ve already been told by a poster or an HR person, but I rarely see people actively try to better themselves in that area, nor the corporations I worked at. You won’t have anything durable without it, or anything capable of scaling efficiently.

I am probably very bad at it too, for the simple reason that virtually all the people I know are ever good at best at a few aspects of it. I am self-conscious about communicating properly but I too probably suck at it and I have my blind spots just like everyone else. For this reason, this is the thing I hate about everyone, we can’t communicate for shit and we don’t even realize it most of the time.

I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.

Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.

Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.

Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.

You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.

This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.

Afaik even in other “similar” industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.

I really like ReactiveX for async programming, though having to go through a library is definitely a pain. It also does not make it less awkward to design your public API unless you’re okay exposing Rx types. Fair points!

It is incredible really, I worked with C# for so long, and I tend to be very critical of the stuff I’ve used for a long time. For C#, I am struggling to figure how I would improve it, because all the stuff that suck in C# is usually the lesser of two evils.

Of course if you hate classes, types, managed memory or anything invented in the last 20 years you will hate it, and I’ve met people like this. That is why you gotta keep learning as a dev, you don’t want to be one of those.

The database should be made in Flash.

Yes, and the test suites were insane. The program was outputting a lot of data, and we basically asserted on anything and everything for any given integration. I mentioned that testing wasn’t the only issue, well there was a lot of issues. Unfortunately the behaviour changes were requested by the stakeholders and there was no way around it. That being said, had this thing we maintained been properly developed those changes would have been a breeze imo. The actual requirements were very simple.

But anyway, I realize this is maybe an extreme example to paint integration tests negatively, but the point remain. In this scenario, every time we changed a bit of code it broke dozens of integration tests instead of breaking just a relevant integration test, had everything that could have been unit tested been written that way. The integration tests could probably also had been less… exhaustive, but it was probably for the best considering the codebase.

Makes a lot of sense. I figure contract tests is more or less what I have been doing then.

I think there is that misconception that unit tests are about validating each line of code and preventing logic bugs. Though obviously you understand that this isn’t just about that, or not at all about that I would argue. Unit tests won’t prevent accidental breaking changes, but you can at least add new tests every time this happen, so you’re at least guaranteed that the next maintainer won’t be doing the same mistake.

In an ideal world we could probably have nothing but integration tests, but in my experience if you only do integration testing you end up working really hard maintaining tests that are prone to break and costly to run. Unit tests are cheap to code and cheap to run, it is a great place to enforce your “contracts” with tests that are theoretically immutable. After those tests are out of the way, you can focus only on the actual interaction between your systems with the more expensive tests.

Anyway, you have a good take I am just blabbering. This is based on my personal experience as someone who only cared integration tests but was later converted by a person much smarter than I am. And then later on by joining a team that exclusively did integration testing, hundred of tests. It was hell (imo), we had to change dozens of tests for every little bit of modification. The rest of the team seemed fine with it though. We rarely shipped bugs but progress was incredibly slow for a module of such low complexity. Testing wasn’t the only issue with that codebase though.