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Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

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Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#101

Post by martin_ky »

direfungasaur wrote: post #79
martin_ky wrote: post #69

I'm sure this article resonated with many engineers, not just from the game industry. What resonated with me the most, was the part about hiring a consultant, only to tell management what their employees have been telling them all along (for a ridiculous hourly rate of course). The simplified executive line of reasoning, why to rather trust an external entity over their own people, goes usually along these lines: "We…

> The simplified executive line of reasoning, why to rather trust an external entity over their own people, goes usually along these lines: "We do not take advice from our employees. We hired them for grunt work and we only expect them to follow orders. What could they possibly know that could benefit our high-level decision making. Afterall we pay them so little". It's not always that leadership ignores line-enginee…

I think you hit the nail here with "poaching someone's turf" and the "tribalism" inside a company. I didn't mean to say that leadership considers engineers stupid. They hire them and trust them with solving complex technical problems. It just bothers me, they would often rather take a vague, generic management advice from a third party, who could not care less, over well intentioned, well reasoned, concrete advice, backed by concrete evidence from an engineer (or just do not act at all). This is just my colorful imagination, but I could almost 'hear' some managers thinking while dismissing an idea without giving reason: "I am supposed to manage you, no way you are going to tell me how to do my job". I've seen such behavior and I have no other explanation for it other than ego, office politics and 'cover my ass strategy'. This creates toxic environments and not just for the people working there. Productivity, quality and I'm 100% convinced that ultimately revenue and the ability to compete suffers from this as well.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#102

Post by danbolt »

failrate wrote: post #35
danbolt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the productivity Unity brings, but sometimes I feel like making a game in the engine requires extra polish as I need to make sure the game has character and not “a Unity game”.

I've found that the polish step is necessary no matter what engine you use, or even if you roll your own.

I 100% agree, although I feel like I get better value for my polish effort using a different toolset.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#103

Post by postfacto »

Kapura wrote: post #86

As somebody who writes code for games for a living, I found this article fascinating. Something that was coming up in my mind again and again as I was reading through it is the question of who has the power to affect the necessary changes. That seems to be the crux of a lot of the issues; is the studio leadership wrongminded, or have they put the wrong people at the gate? The parable of the producer ignoring engineer…

It also reminds me of stories I had heard from inside Microsoft in the pre-Nadella era. Tales of power brokers and entrenched lifers who could make things easy or impossible on a whim. What is the nature of the organisations that allow people like these to take root?

At some point when a company gets large enough the actual product it produces stops being something sold outside the company and instead the product becomes one’s increased status within the organization and that of their immediate manager. Status seekers who contribute less technically but spend all their time producing “good optics” for the people above and selling/exaggerating their achievements get promoted a lot more, even if the good optics were achieved by doing something that makes the product less sellable. Eventually status seekers get promoted into management and then promote upward like people who are also status seekers.

The people who spend all their time doing the heaviest engineering aren’t often spending much time selling their achievements to busy executives who don’t have time to look at their accomplishments at let their work speak for itself. Which is why they tend to stay in the lower levels of the company.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#104

Post by koffiezet »

direfungasaur wrote: post #79
martin_ky wrote: post #69

I'm sure this article resonated with many engineers, not just from the game industry. What resonated with me the most, was the part about hiring a consultant, only to tell management what their employees have been telling them all along (for a ridiculous hourly rate of course). The simplified executive line of reasoning, why to rather trust an external entity over their own people, goes usually along these lines: "We…

> The simplified executive line of reasoning, why to rather trust an external entity over their own people, goes usually along these lines: "We do not take advice from our employees. We hired them for grunt work and we only expect them to follow orders. What could they possibly know that could benefit our high-level decision making. Afterall we pay them so little". It's not always that leadership ignores line-enginee…

> Part of the fiction management sells itself is consultants can cut across those organizational boundaries and find the 'right solution'.

Being a consultant, and knowing multiple others, I feel that not being part of the company "tribes", really allows you to more easily cut across those organizational boundaries you mention.

How many times I've heard of 2 technical divisions complaining about each-other where the main issue is the lack of communication and simply not knowing who to talk to in the other "tribe". Consultants however are part of their own little 'consultant tribe' across company tribe boundaries, who more easily bond together and talk about stuff like that. This means this group is more diverse and has more contacts spread throughout the organization, making them ideal to cut trough the bullshit. You also have the fact that when a company was happy about a consultant, chances are that when they need someone somewhere else, they'll hire the same consultant again, dumping them in a completely different group of people.

Yes this is 100% a social problem, but it's there, and a group of outsiders will address this more efficiently.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#105

Post by baud147258 »

Mononokay wrote: post #46
georgeecollins wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly teams of people of that technical caliber today at Blizzard, Riot, Sony Santa Monica (and lots of other places farther from me) making amazing, cutting edge game tech. But there are also teams like the ones the author described that don't have amazing tech skills that still can make games we couldn't dream of thanks to game engines. I think it is exciting.

What's Blizzard done that's technically impressive as of late? They scrapped Titan, and Overwatch isn't particularly groundbreaking from what I can tell.

Blizzard has never made anything truly groundbreaking, it's mostly re using existing ideas, with a high level of polish.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#106

Post by kennethdmiller3 »

egypturnash wrote: post #33
georgeecollins wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OMG: Ken is one of the most amazing people I have ever worked with. You are lucky to count him as a friend.

I haven't seen him in person in years, what with me living in Seattle these days and him being in Austin. But yeah, he's a pretty good guy!

"I'm not dead yet!" :D

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#107

Post by daveslash »

joshu wrote: post #56
Allar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I wrote this article knowing this, which is what I tried opening with. I'm not qualified to write a book however because this article itself is proof my writing skills need work. Otherwise I'd be able to be more clear.

Are you kidding? It was a great article.

Agreed - great article. That said, I think most authors of books like the one we're all imagining have support (in the form of friends and colleagues) in addition to an editor. I don't want to pressure you to write a book, but please don't let your own criticism of your writing abilities get in the way of a book.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#108

Post by knewter »

bitwalker wrote: post #32
georgeecollins wrote: post #3

The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…

Was this the Pandemic Studios version of Battlezone (i.e. Battlezone II) or the first version of Battlezone for PC? If you had a hand in either, then I owe you a beer (or whatever you prefer) a bunch of times over because I loved both of those games so much. Endless hours of entertainment!

fancy seeing you here. I loved battlezone as well, though I just played the arcade version (at my local thrift store)

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#109

Post by pas »

jeremiep wrote: post #82
pas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consultant, they never change.

As an employee happy with his current employer, those who can change will and won't hire consultants in the process.

Not that kind of consultant. :) And sort of agreed. Though, those who can change and will, should stop being a problem "soon" anyway.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#110

Post by egypturnash »

kennethdmiller3 wrote: post #106
egypturnash wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen him in person in years, what with me living in Seattle these days and him being in Austin. But yeah, he's a pretty good guy!

"I'm not dead yet!" :D

Oh hi there :)
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