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EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

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Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#61

Post by rmc »

rikthevik wrote: post #35
weavejester wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is more fundamental than that. The requirements for a house are pretty much static. The requirements for an application are often in constant flux.

I think the requirements for the house change a lot more than you think. There's definitely a push/pull with the client in civil engineering as well. And for contractors, oh boy, do they deal with clients changing things on them constantly. I don't have much faith in most Enterprisey teams to ship good software even if they have a thorough concrete spec. We love to blame changing / incomplete specs, but I'd imagine t…

Programmers have it worse: http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/architects.html

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#63

Post by teamonkey »

mattm wrote: post #62

I have no inside knowledge of EA but from reading this and the EA Spouse letter in the past, I'm amazed EA can actually deliver any software.

It's almost as if two whistleblowing-style blogs were not entirely representative of the company as a whole.

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#64

Post by teamonkey »

pilkers wrote: post #18
rthng wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were some similarities in the situations from what EA Louse is saying to what I experienced. I'll be interested in seeing the Old Republic launch product because of that. In respect to the RTW failure, senior dev Luke has a series of articles which explain it much more eloquently (and kindly) than I ever could. http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime...

RTW claimed to be of top pedigree, yet spent a long time and a lot of money to make a horrible game. Led by pretenders, I'd say.

Led by some of the same people featured in this documentary.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1012096952890708986...

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#65

Post by batasrki »

pmjordan wrote: post #60
silverbax88 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all. We don't care if your ATM transaction works flawlessly. We don't care if the health monitors keep you alive while you're in a hospital bed. We don't care if you accidentally show up on a police blotter because a database went corrupt somewhere. Nope, but if we were working on games, we would care then.

You're trying to attack something I never even said. OP was talking about the "enterprise", which is known for its low-hanging fruit of embarrassingly terrible software. You seem to be talking about specialist systems software for banks, medical engineering, etc. or even software in general.

Well, that's because bank and medical software usually falls under the "enterprise" umbrella. So, while you may be right that a lot of enterprise software is terrible, there are projects in said enterprises that work great and for which people developing them care a lot. You generalized, so he/she struck back with a general statement.

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#66

Post by pmjordan »

batasrki wrote: post #65
pmjordan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to attack something I never even said. OP was talking about the "enterprise", which is known for its low-hanging fruit of embarrassingly terrible software. You seem to be talking about specialist systems software for banks, medical engineering, etc. or even software in general.

Well, that's because bank and medical software usually falls under the "enterprise" umbrella. So, while you may be right that a lot of enterprise software is terrible, there are projects in said enterprises that work great and for which people developing them care a lot. You generalized, so he/she struck back with a general statement.

Wait, I'm generalising?

silverbax88 interpreted my

"I don't know about the enterprise area"

to mean

"Yes, everyone who works on software for any company other than gaming doesn't "really care" at all"

And I'm the one jumping to conclusions?

All I know is I've yet to meet someone in gamedev who doesn't care about the product they're working on. Probably because the pay is much lower for the same level of skill as elsewhere, so you won't find anyone doing it for the money. Have I met software developers in other areas who don't give a crap? Lots. Have I met ones who care? Also lots. None of this contradicts anything I've said.

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#67

Post by fleitz »

ahoyhere wrote: post #11
ukdm wrote: post #3

I worked on Warhammer Online for nearly two years before it left the offices of Climax Entertainment in Nottingham, England. When I arrived the game was already a couple of years in development, but the focus was on the technology not the game. We had no game, just a test area running on a local server. There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on ques…

A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.

The one thing about large enterprise projects is though, you can usually convince the mismanagers that it's good for their career, and the mismanagers end up disliking the competent programmers. If you're a vulture or a hyena a large IT project can become like a elephant corpse, easy pickings. Convince the mismanagers to move competent people to your team in exchange for your yes men. Then find a piece of infrastructure you need for your project and offer to build it for the larger project. This is basically an excuse to use their infrastructure, db servers, test servers, etc. Use this to get buy in to slip your own schedule so you have time to deal with the inevitable feature creep. Go to the design and planning meetings and suggest new and exciting technologies that they can figure out. When it doesn't work, take the hardware they req'd off their hands for the infrastructure you offered to build them. Make sure you integrate your project to the infrastructure first (you can always pitch it as reducing risk to the large project) so they can't make any changes to it with out breaking production code.

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#68

Post by mseebach »

maukdaddy wrote: post #59
br1 wrote: post #44

"I'm sick of seeing EA outsource" My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.

This comment needs to be stickied, printed, whatever so that people can ALWAYS see it. This one bit of insight is key to what's happening with American technical talent and managers. I see MBA students who would happily outsource their work and have no moral qualms about it. They will turn around and work for companies where they will outsource work because they are only thing about 1 thing - cost. My wife's company…

> My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.

Replace "outsource" with "computerize" and you have a common complaint from 15 years ago, made by people ignorant to the possibilities of computers.

Outsourcing is not a silver bullet, and it's not easy. Does that mean that outsourcing is always a bad idea, and only ever decided by stupid managers? Of course not. Just like the fact that many software projects are failures doesn't make software a bad idea.

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#69

Post by vannevar »

rick_2047 wrote: post #23
ahoyhere wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.

Sometimes it feels this is so because we have a lot less number of ruins when it comes to IT related projects. Stop construction of a building you have a gigantic half constructed bloat of concrete and bricks. Nothing can be reused (except for the land). Stop construction of a program and you will have some files which can be deleted, all the machines are general purpose and all this can be reused.

I agree. There is no field of human endeavor (except war) where you can spend so much and have so little to show for it, as the enterprise software business.

Re: EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO

#70

Post by potatolicious »

mattm wrote: post #62

I have no inside knowledge of EA but from reading this and the EA Spouse letter in the past, I'm amazed EA can actually deliver any software.

I grew up in Vancouver, Canada - home of EA's largest office, and knew many people who worked for them.

They deliver code because the number of glory-seekers is basically infinite. They can afford to burn people out and abuse them to no end because there are a hojillion more lined up outside the door, just begging for someone to get burned out and leave so they can get in. I also knew some testers, and heard about the horrific hours that they voluntarily put themselves through on the vague promises by management that exemplary performance in testing could be a path to development. This rarely actually happened, but it happened enough that the testers would basically pummel themselves with work for that off chance.

At this point I'm unconvinced that the majority of CS grads will realize what a shithole the games industry is in terms of sane employment. It seems to take some first-hand experience (I've also known people who interned with EA and then ran away screaming) for people to realize that making games is a completely different beast than playing them.

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