toucanplay
Novice
- Joined
- Apr 8, 2018
- Messages
- 33
I've worked in (non-game) tech for about ten years now, and I'm married to someone who's worked in (game and non-game) tech. We've run into the latter here and there (and we're both very critical towards incompetent people), but astonishingly bad managers/leadership are everywhere.That doesn't change the fact that crunch, as experienced in Tech, appears to be unreasonably protracted. I work in manufacturing, we have deadlines, crazy ones too, including same-day orders. At the worst of our days no one's pulling all-nighters, napping next to the machinery or skipping breakfast.
From what I gather Tech is a unique blend of profound incompetence by management and profound incompetence by the developers.
A lot of the problems in tech are the same as everywhere else: managers that come from "outside" and don't know how things work, or that are only interested in their own careers instead of things functioning smoothly, or narcissism (talking over you, interrupting you, fobbing you off, stealing your ideas), or just being a cunt in general.
With tech, you have the additional problem of people treating it like it's voodoo magic, and not knowing just how much they're speaking out of ignorance. Some small change may sound simple, but depending the code/data/physical tech, that simple thing could be days of work, and sometimes even the experts won't know until they've worked on it a little. Turnover is very high in tech as well, and a lot of stuff is very badly documented and code is often written in a rush (often for management-driven reasons) so it's easy to lose key people who know what's going on.
Game tech has the additional problem of not nearly paying as well as elsewhere, so turnover is even higher than usual, and big dev companies can get away with it because a lot of people think making games is "fun" and "cool". There's also a lot of middleware involved to cover for skill gaps, and if game middleware is anything like the "middleware" I've used elsewhere, it'll be only slightly better documented, and full of kludge because that'll have been made by some other tech team working under the same sorts of pressures.