251–260 of 508 posts
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But they might be right this time. Many game devs are fungible cogs, implementing a well-defined blueprint. Especially Activision games like Call of Duty. It doesn’t help that there’s just so many devs these days that they can seemingly abuse them for decades and nothing has collapsed.
Their games are fungible too.
Atari in 1983 went from the leader in video game production to completely imploding. In 1979, four of their best programmers left after demanding equity in the sales and were refused. Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". They left and formed A…
I agree 100% with much of the sentiment here that creators deserve respect and a cut of the spoils At the same time, it really depends.... I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any…
Otherwise, get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation before they get up to speed with your particular application/code base/equipment. Can easily be more than a year - especially with some of the big systems.
So yes there is an impact on business performance, and a highly damaging one, far more often than is realised. Companies compete - and companies go under and get replaced, all the time.
The wedding photographer/videographer business I discussed in another thread last week. All his employees quit and he went under. I've personally been involved with more than one general contractor going under. When I was a young carpenter, I followed my best friend from job to job and contractor to contractor. When he walked off a job, the rest of us followed. He and I and a group of Dominicans (from Dominica not th…
Link to the wedding business comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32740708
Sounds like the archetype of "being a manager means being angry at people. business knowledge optional"
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It’s justified though. Games are basically a solved problem these days, and the developers of today are most of the time just building on abstractions and best practices that didn’t exist during Atari’s time. Once a particular domain of software becomes sufficiently mature, there is no real opportunity for heroic programmers to emerge who become too valuable to replace. Eventually more people emerge who are just as g…
>Games are basically a solved problem these days I... have you played games at all recently? Have you seen the recent major releases? BF2042, Cyberpunk, etc. Even the highest quality game studios (not the aforementioned) have trouble making good high quality releases, especially with consistency. Games are certainly not a solved problem.
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the irony is that the CEO probably does less work than the assembly line worker
A lot of CEO's at places I have worked didn't really make decisions. They schmooze the biggest customers. Constantly, 12-14 hours a day.
Atari in 1983 went from the leader in video game production to completely imploding. In 1979, four of their best programmers left after demanding equity in the sales and were refused. Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". They left and formed A…
> Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought.
A daughter of my friend was not very happy in her job: a Silicon Valley company hired her as a security pro, but was using as a coder, which she hates. She was going to leave, but decided to wait ten months or so until her stock options vested. She and a big group of other engineers were fired right before the vesting moment.
All this time the CEO was generating absolutely politically correct sounds: people are our best capital, diversity is our strength, etc. She would be better off if he was honest.
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Ironically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.
But they might be right this time. Many game devs are fungible cogs, implementing a well-defined blueprint. Especially Activision games like Call of Duty. It doesn’t help that there’s just so many devs these days that they can seemingly abuse them for decades and nothing has collapsed.
Even simple boilerplate is done differently by people. Some will automate them, some will do them manually forever. Some will naturally organize to discuss how to limit or improve them, some will stay with the status quo ad vitam. Some will document how to do things, provide templates to limit mistakes and mentor new comers. Some will just do their job.
And that's not even touching the fact some are simply bad at what they do.
In all the successful projects I've seen, hiring the right people or replacing the one leaving were critical processes, not just swapping.
This idea you foster is probably half the reason 2/3 of IT projects fail.
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Shockley deserves as much credit for the creation of that wealth as the wind deserves credit for an amazing photograph of a beautiful summer sky.
How do you figure? He invented several kinds of semiconductors he assembled the team that went on to found an entire industry. Much of that wealth could have been held onto by him, had he been less of an ass. People didn't leave over equity, or pay, they left because he was an asshole. Without him being a jackass, his company might have invented the things later invented at Fairchild.
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Noncompetes are pretty toothless, even illegal in several jurisdictions. Even then, a company with money and clout to poach talent like that can also stand up for you if your failing ex-employer chooses to lash out.
>Noncompetes are pretty toothless Not true. They’re illegal in California, but in other US states where they are legal they can be quite toothful. I have seen several ex-employees of my prior company get sued and lose. It became a silent doctrine to just leave a two year gap on your public LinkedIn after working there. If you put anything in that period (the length of the non-compete), you were at risk of the CTO sui…
And, even if you don't end up losing after being sued, many people won't roll the dice if a threatened with a suit because they'll probably be out big bucks even if they win. Better to just take a year off; I've known people who have done so when they've been in a situation where a prior employer was likely to sue.
Not too long ago, I worked for a pre-IPO "startup" with ~2,000 total employees. Over the course of a few months, the core of engineering (based in Bay Area) was gutted by a FAANG, out of retribution, because said startup had poached some key employees from the FAANG. After I left as part of the exodus wave, I learned there was an "unlimited" $30+ million dollar extra budget for hiring employees from the startup, lol.…
This is the first time I have encountered the word 'pandemic' being shortened to 'pando' either online or meat space.