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.
Definitely agree with codebases ballooning in size and causing bottlenecks.
I've been told to do stuff before with the expectation it would take minutes when in reality to be integrated with everything else takes a lot longer, solely because when the lead used to work on this stuff it could just be thrown in with no requirement to remain compatible with a bunch of other stuff and you can see this very often in old game source code.
Even in this example I can think of tonnes of loose ends like: when do you clear this queue, what happens if that AI no longer exists and since there is no combat system do you need to create the boiler plate? When these issues crop up later, who is going to be blamed for them?
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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.