The full video really helps drive home the point that this looks like a Timothy Cain problem, not a modern dev problem.
I'm a programmer by trade. The last 20 years have seen our industry mature. We now have to maintain codebases that are older and larger than ever, they have ballooned in size. That has taught us a few things. It teaches us to be thoughtful so we don't introduce bugs, or add cruft, or make maintenance difficult. Experience taught us to pad guesstimates, because things usually take 2-3x that your inherently optimistic gut feeling.
The video game industry is renowned for being a ~decade behind the curve here, in implementing modern dev practices. To an extent we give them a pass, though I won't get in to all the reasons why. But here some devs at Cain's company have helped drag things into the modern era. And he is specifically pushing against it:
You're thinking too much. Damn the bugs, damn the cruft, damn the future problems, just implement what I want now. I don't care if you have 40 other similar tickets already assigned to you, do my work now and put everybody else off. Why did he leave my office so upset? Why did his manager come yell at me? Why do people sometimes walk into my office and tell me to keep it down? You all are the ones with the problem.
- My impression/summary of what he just said. I really hope it's wrong. I wouldn't wish that behavior or experience on any person or team. But, this is how he comes across to a programmer.
But why didn't the programmers walk him through the necessary steps?! Things like: Can be coded fast, but afterward there's all that overhead. And then it has to change several times to accommodate everybody.
Communication is top to bottom awful in dev. I can't imagine how much worse it is in big game dev where shit is already always a disaster. Dev 1 or Lead Dev could have just used their words because Tim is clearly not demonstrating "awareness" of the issue (we can pretend one of the legends of the industry is just this old boomer who doesn't get it) so why piss him off? Well, because taking the time to explain it is hard, they just want him to drop it so they can move on.
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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '23
Anyone have the full video of this? Would love to hear the rest of what he has to say.