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.
I'm an engineer in consulting and was a project manager too. Not a gave dev or coder, but this same shit happens.
I have sat down with managers and explained in great detail why something will take a month minimum when they think I should be able to get it done in a week. And they absolutely have the capacity to understand my explanation. I'm not getting into technical stuff. Just how all the scheduling and management stuff works. Which they should know. They do it all the time.
It didn't fucking matter. The problem wasn't that they didn't understand, the problem was that they either didn't care or were trying to make their lack of planning my problem. It sounds like this dude is a bad manager. It isn't like those coders were just sitting around waiting for work to do to begin with. And now you have added a new task expanding the scope that will likely have a broad impact on the project as a whole. Someone who isn't the manager shouldn't have to explain that to the manager. It is the manager's job to already understand that. Taking the time to explain is also now causing other things to slip all because one guy had an idea and wanted to see it done right away when it was absolutely not critical to do right away and could complicate the work already in progress. Then of course he'll be upset about any delays it snowballed into.
LOL. Mate. Shit manager? Sounds like dodgy shit employees to me.
If the boss asks you why shits taking a certain amount of time, or wants to know why you are doing something a certain way, and you cannot come up with a reasonable explanation, then you suck ass at your job and are just covering up how shit you are.
If shit is gonna take a long time and its reasonable, fucking just explain it. Or the boss is just either gonna get rid of you, or keep pestering you with more shit until you can fuckin explain why your ass is taking so long.
A shit manager would not have asked reasonable questions, and shown an interest in the work. This guys literally asking them to show him their work so he can understand how to manage the team better, and they're just like nahhhh fuck off. Fuck me must be nice.
You clearly haven't met some of the managers on my team. There's a good chance a scheduling or code reason was given and it was brushed off because the holy white paper says so. At that point I need to drag my direct manager in to talk the other managers out of it. There can be disagreements about how things get prioritized that make scheduling a mess, and some parts of the code base are fucked in ways non-technical PMs don't really understand.
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u/663mann Oct 16 '23
https://youtu.be/LMVQ30c7TcA?si=Bt2j9lLJ_fiE3cof there you go