Ship It - Tales from the Trenches

http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/ship-it

by Sodaware • 15 years ago

32 19 15 years ago

trenchescomic.com

edge17• 15 years ago

i'd hire that guy

writetoalok• 15 years ago

yes, curious why he was fired for? Maybe he reported it too late ...

dholowiski• 15 years ago

Sounds like they shotthe messenger

sidman• 15 years ago

This happens all the time. Some people at the top just want to hear good news even though its false news. If there is one individual saying dont ship and they ship it, if it roots up after its been released the 2 get fired cause

1 - the marketing guy didnt listen to advice 2 - the developer introduced the problem

If the person giving the advice isnt there to say "Hey i already told them that ! but they didnt listen" they can declare it as a mistake or an unknown bug. Usually people dont get fired for an unknown bug and dont look "as bad" as if they where told and chose to ignore it.

Happened at my work a few times, engineer didn't get to the point of being sacked but when the severity 1 solution was ignored in preference of another more "stupid" solution proposed by business types the engineer that suggested the proper solution was never invited to meetings anymore. Then when the initial solution didnt work and used the said engineers solution they didnt even tell him they implemented it until weeks later when he found out indirectly.

[edit] hmm, after reading it again, its either what i wrote above or someone lied and said QA didnt find any problems so we shipped it based on their recommendation(which in my opinion is worse then a way to keep his mouth shut)

tomfakes• 15 years ago

Based on the context of the article, he was a QA person in a triple A game company. It seems to be standard practice to let most of the QA teams go once the game has shipped, as most of these guys are contract, not full time.

huhtenberg2• 15 years ago

It depends on if he wrote that stuff in the first place.

makira• 15 years ago

Why not just delay the manual save until the auto-save is done ? That'd take just a few hours to implement and test...

davmar• 15 years ago

agreed. saying it'd take a few months to fix a save problem? hard for me to believe. maybe it is true but it's difficult to imagine.

monochromatic• 15 years ago

If your answer to a bug like this, a week from the deadline, is that the only way to fix it is to rewrite the entire file structure instead of putting in a workaround... you probably deserve to be fired. I do wonder if they had someone else code up a workaround before shipping though.

ansy• 15 years ago

I don't think it's clear, but it seems like the person who wrote the article is a QA tester and the developer who suggested the fix was another person.

I doubt they would fire a QA tester just for finding a bug. He might have been laid off with a bunch of other people or he might have been getting a big head about his prize defect. Granted, it is kind of a big defect. But some people can be sore winners.

genbattle2• 15 years ago

It's hard to know the exact situation the author was in, but it certainly seems like there would have been a quicker fix than what he proposed. He never says the game wasn't fixed before it was shipped (and he probably wouldn't know if it was), he just states that it still shipped.

Because you only get his side of the story, you don't know if the reason he was fired was because the other devs knew it wouldn't take that long to fix, or because he had some negative history with the company.

I'm not writing the guy off here. It just pays to be wary with stories like this that end with "and then i was fired", because the outcome and tone of the story automatically makes the reader feel that there is some sort of residual bitterness that has shaped the author's view negatively.

But I suppose if you get fired you have every right to be bitter about it too.

joelhaasnoot• 15 years ago

We had a tester/QA person like this for a project, an older lady who knew the domain at hand, but not so much about computers. She'd find the craziest bugs and produce amazing stack traces, mostly in the last week before a release was to go out. By the last week before release, it took the program manager 2 minutes to see that the bugs were not worth fixing...

bragh• 15 years ago

Rest of the stories on the page should be printed out as a reminder for everyone not to ever work in the games industry.

genbattle2• 15 years ago

I agree, but I also think that to a certain extent no matter where you work in the software industry there is always a certain amount of this going on.

People just tend to get screwed over more often in the games industry because people think it's the holy grail of jobs, so you have 10 more poor saps lining up to replace every 1 who gets fired over something like this.

huhtenberg2• 15 years ago

I worked with a dev who was assigned to a full-time QA duty by the management. Sort of development pre-QA tester if you will. Guess what? He filed over 200 (two hundred) bug reports within a couple of weeks. Major ones. Other devs never complained, the management was ecstatic, but the guy still quit few months later because they refused to release him from QA duty and back into the development.

salemh• 15 years ago

Curious if you can expand on your thoughts / experience related to Developers on QA duties, versus a "Developer in Test" designing the frameworks for automation (or, would that be company dependant?)

The difficulty in recruiting SDET'S / SET's is...ridiculous (though some companies don't different between a strong automation QA and a mid-SDET), however, as a single EG, a top-3 financial firm's Developer in Test positions (agnostic on languages) were the highest paid developers in the company (sans HFT). They were also held to the most strict of hiring standards (target school, Masters, 3.+ GPA, summa cum laude, stable work history of 3-5 years at a time with companies, etc.)

Ship It - Tales from the Trenches

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