Dear Halo 4 QA tester: We don’t need to strike

Context worth noting: Penny Arcade also runs a webcomic about gaming QA: http://trenchescomic.com (humor style is consistent with that of normal PA webcomics, so it's love-it-or-hate-it.)

More noteworthy is the "Tales From The Trenches" section, with horror stories about gaming QA: http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/14999

Amen. That original article wasn't even worth a rebuttal.

I started in QA (on EverQuest) when I was 20. No degree, just a couple level 60 characters. After 2 years of overtime, hard work, and taking programming classes at the community college I got a junior programmer job in another department. 12 years later I'm a cofounder and CTO at my own indie game startup. The system works!

This is a hack piece.

The paragraph most indicative of this?

"This guy failed to make a major dent in music, and then moved into gaming because he thought he was good at Battlefield. He knew, KNEW, that he would be a valued member of any team, and he would rapidly move up to the ranks. He gets angry that he has to do many different tasks, although that's often part of the job. He gets mad that management doesn't allow them to be unprofessional on chat programs. He gets mad that he doesn't get the raise he thinks he so honestly deserves. He stops coming into work during his last two weeks. He seems to think that someone liking an idea puts him on the path to being a designer."

I know that Ben has made his living being an enraged mouth-breather on the 'net for many years now (before Penny Arcade, he was a resident ragemonger at Ars Technica), but really the sad thing here is that he'd still write this.

Do we really want to mock people for the audacity of trying to contribute to a team? For asking for a raise after doing work, only to have it bounce through two or three layers of bureaucracy? For trying to succeed doing something they love, making a go of it for years, and then trying something else?

This is just mean-spirited, this is just cruel. This surely cannot be the type of sentiment we'd like to see in the games industry, and even though we can't ignore it we ought not endorse it.

Then again, what do I know? I don't get payed to be an angry asshole on the internet making fun of other people who are actually trying to do cool things.

(I have to do it for free.)

I dunno. I'm getting kind of tired of the frequency Kuchera's opinion pieces are condescending "hard truth"-telling. Regardless of if I agree or disagree with his broader points, reading his posts feels like a slog. I guess that's his shtick, but I can't stomach it.

edit: I removed a criticism of a particular bit of his post, it struck me as really silly but was a tangent.

Both pieces feel hackish to me.

In the valley, the monoculture here suggests that this man in the QA environment did not do enough to succeed. In other cultures, it might be said that he wasn't given an opportunity to succeed. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.

What do we know about big gaming companies? AAA titles are expensive and if you pay people a lot of money to test your games, that lowers your margins.

OP should concentrate on getting some marketable skills and the replying author should consider not wasting his breath. Both of these articles would be better off never having been written.