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What is Wrong With Game Development?
Warrior-GS writes "Seamus Blackley, who has done everything from work at Looking Glass Studios to evangelize for the Microsoft Xbox, sounds off on what's wrong with the relationship between developers, publishers and their audience. Also, as part of coverage of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, GameSpy has chats with Miyamoto about The Wind Waker and Yu Suzuki about his gaming influences. Some interesting reading."
So, when managers and the other suits try to tell the coders, "OK, well put in a good 8 hrs of coding today, and Mike and Punjab will as well, and we'll have 24 hrs of coding done today on NewGameApp v1.0." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Which is why PMs go round and ask programmers, "how long do you think it will take to code this?" (this being described in a functional spec sent round earlier). Then they take the number, fudge it (multiply by 1.5 or 3 or maybe even more, depending on how well you know that developer's history) and enter that into the plan. Then you can reasonably say, programmer X should have feature Y completed by time Z. The project plan might have 1000 person-days on it; a team of 25 should be able to get that done in 40 days.
I love programming. It's like a cross between a fine art, such as opera, and a deeply complex science, such as molecular physics.
Unless you are at the cutting edge of theoretical research in a top-ranked CS faculty, or a Fellow at a major corporation, that simply isn't true. Programming is a skilled craft like carpentry. A few programmers are cabinetmakers, most are in the construction industry. Anyone who likens it to "fine art" is either pretentious or inexperienced.