How the hell does something obviously intended as funny get modded insightful? Even if you missed the whole humorous link to the GP's misuse of PVC (instead of PVR), the post would, at best, be Offtopic...
*sigh* This is the problem of using the general (posting) public for moderation.
To quote George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half the people are DUMBER THAN THAT!"
If you're in a job like that you've got some seriously dysfunctional management.
I was in the game industry for 5 years. I have put in upwards of 110 hours in a single week, not counting an hour for lunch or a half-hour for dinner break. Now when you realize that 18+ hours a day for MONTHS on end is normal in the game industry, well, they might have something to complain about.
I have some former coworkers from that studio who have moved on to positions with other large corporations and they may wind up doing 60 hours weeks for 2 or 3 weeks. But nothing like the death marches we regularly endured.
I'm currently with a smaller company. Any overtime has to be cleared with the president of the company. Most folks who work here haven't seen any overtime in over a decade. My brother (who worked at the same game sutdio) works for a medium size corporation now, and he hasn't seen overtime in over a year. And then it was only one 50 hour week.
Once people realize that overtime is something that should be RARE rather than the norm, and start calling their boss on it, corporate America might just get the hint. In the meantime, enjoy your hours upon hours of being worked to death to pay for someone else's vacation home.
TFA talks about the observed disk providing evidence that planetary disks are more stable than previously thought - NOT that the supernova involved in the creation of THAT specific disk also created our solar system.
FTFA:
"It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It's a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments," said lead researcher Deepto Chakrabarty, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But John Riccitiello was very up front about saying "I want to build upon the great cultures you've created, I don't want to take it apart, I don't want to change it, I don't want to turn you guys into something that you're not." And he's certainly been true to his word, and we have to our employees as well, and that's very important to us, because at the end of the day, our talent is where we get all these great ideas, and how we make great games.
Sounds familiar. Last game studio I was part of was acquired by a large, unammed publisher who spouted those same promises. Yet, within a year, there were a lot of nasty changes, including the head of the studio (who had spent 15 years building a best-in-class franchise) leaving.
Most of the comments seem to be missing the fact that the Post Title is (surprise surprise) highly misleading. This is NOT an imminent plan to do this. THis is one blogger's wishful thinking that's being repeated as gospel by WOW and Everquest addicts who desperately want this to be true.
FTFA: "Jacob Citrin was once employed by International Airport Centers and given a laptop to use in his company's real estate related business. The work consisted of identifying "potential acquisition targets."
Essentially the product of his job was the information about which properties to acquire.
From the Judges decision (PDF here: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/tmp/R31363C0.pdf ): "decided to quit IAC in violation of his employment contract, he resolved to destroy files that incriminated himself and other files that were also the property of his employer"
He apprently deleted the files containing the information he had been hired to collect after violating what sounds like a non-compete clause in his employment contract because he wanted to go into business for himself doing the exact same thing he'd been hired to do.
Poor analogy: As a surveyor for a mining company, it's my job to find mineral deposits for my employer. Using company time and equipment, I find such a site, but fail to disclose the location because I decide I want to start my own personal Survey firm. I'd say they'd have a pretty darn good case against me.
I also don't think the case from TFA is going to get laughed right out of court.
****** Lameness filter encountered. Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. ******
Actually, having been at MS for several years (see my earlier post elsewhere attached to this story), I'd say that comment applied even more to the times I got a good review score than when I got a bad review score.
Good Review Scores were a direct result of playing the "Review Game":
I made sure my manager was aware of every little task I completed I made sure his manager was aware of every large task I completed I made sure as little mention was made of co-workers accomplishments as possible I made sure to be "extra nice" to said managers I documented every little thing I did and produced a 3 page bulleted summary of my accomplishments for review time etc, etc, etc
And yet, most of the time I got a poor review score I was doing the same, if not more work, but couldn't muster the energy to play the game.
Every time I got a good review score, I couldn't help feeling it was more spending a good chunk of time each and every week during the review period schmoozing my manager than any actual work.
Watching some co-workers who spent most of their time gaming the system and getting good score after good score, I knew it had little to do with performance.
"Large corporation with enormous bureaucracy has internal politics" Where's the story?
Yeah, I worked for MS for 5 years. Yes the review system runs largely on Politics - those who play the game get the rewards. How is this different from 99% of the rest of corporate America?
MS takes pretty darn good care of it's employees (my salary at MS was anywhere from 150% to 200% of industry standard for my position depending on whose numbers you looked at, and that doesn't even count top notch health benefits). In return, they expect you to buy into the company culture that your job is your only priority. I knew guys who would set up their Outlook to send emails at 2 and 3 in the morning to give the impression they were working late. I had a manager who's only measure of an employee's worth was whether or not they were working at least 10 hours of "overtime". Our Society as a whole tends to reward appearance over substance 9 times our of 10. Why is it a shock when corporations follow suit. If you were willing to spend the time and effort to play the game, you too could get the rewards. Personally, I couldn't stand the Company Culture at MS and that's why I'm not working there anymore and will not be working there for a long, long time (if ever) if I can help it. But just because that culture doesn't jive with my own standards and priorities doesn't make it immoral or illegal.
Now, there's business practices of upper management that are a whole other story as far as immoral and illegal, but I'm not getting into that here.
Heh, reminds me of my favorite joke while I was working there "The day Microsoft sells something that doesn't suck is the day Microsoft starts selling Vacuum Cleaners".
Aren't Industry NDAs fun...
One of the titles was not originally tied into A.I. but was being developed for a completely different (and pretty darn obscure) property. When MS acquired the rights for A.I., management of our studio was given the directive to swap it over to the A.I. universe...but the game under development didn't really fit the A.I. storyline at all (after getting/having to sit through A.I. opening day just because our studio was developing a game for it).
Think Diablo-style action game with an "upgradeable main character"
But the whole thing was scrapped after A.I. tanked...
By and large nowadays the actual programmers aren't making the majority of the big design decisions on any given game. That job belongs to the Lead Designer. Game develpment teams are big enough that the stereotype of 6 coders banging out a game is outdated. It's 6-12 programmers, 6-18 artists/content (including sound, layout, etc), 1-3 designers, and however many testers can be squeezed into the remaining budget.
I've met some Designers who used to be programmers, but the majority weren't. ex-management types or ex-artists seem to be more prevalent.
The programmer gets some say in how individual features work out (since they're actually implementing it), but final say always rests with the Designer and/or Producer (or whatever title the management bloke in charge of the whole shebang gets).
If you want better game design, grumble about the Game Designers, but try not to be so hard on the poor programmers.
For the record, I spent 7 years in the game industry as a tester, so I was even lower on the totem pole than the programmers. In those 7 years I saw it evolve away from the lead programmer having final say on anything related to his project to the Designer and Project Lead having most of the power.
Back when I was working for a very large publisher in the video game industry, there was a fellow who ended any chance of a career with said publisher by simple expedient of sending an email from his company account instead of a personal account.
The gist of the story is that large, popular game website "A" had been given a tour of this publisher's facilities, including a sneek peak at a highly anticipated, pre-release title. Of course, the write-up posted on their website was along the lines of "how cool is it that these people get to make games for a living and OMGLOL we got to see 'X Cool Game' before any of you did and it rocks!" Well, this individual I worked with felt that the website had "sold out" because they weren't critical enough of what he felt were shortcomings with 'X Cool Game' and so he wrote a blistering email flaming both website "A" and the publisher (that was signing his paychecks).
And sent it from his company email account.
Well, the people at website "A" notice the return address of this email and forward the email back to their contact at the publisher. Long story short, the email was passed all the way up to the VP of the publisher who took one look at it and said "He's fired". With no chance of ever being re-hired.
Yet, if he had sent it from a personal email account, there would've been no problem as website "A" wouldn't have connected him with the publisher.
It's Common Sense: If you're not willing to write a letter on company letter-head, sign your name to it, and fax it to each major news agency, DON'T SEND IT THROUGH COMPANY EMAIL!
No, it's closer to "Concerned writer offers suggestions to Game Companies on possible ways to maintain interest in their MMOG titles on the part of casual gamers as a device to improve income."
If the MMOG Companies can figure out how to make it attractive enough for players to maintain their monthly subscriptions even if said players don't have time to log in every week or even every month to play, they've hit a potential goldmine of long-term subscriptions.
For instance, I played Asheron's Call for nearly 6 years. I was part of a good monarchy, had characters in various states of advancement and even had in-game goals I was actively working towards. I started playing before I got married, and even after I got married, I simply got my wife hooked on the game and we played together. So why did I cancel? Well, one-month old newborn twins will severely negatively impact both your wallet and your spare time. AC fell far enough down the priority list that I could not justify paying the subscriptions on the three accounts we own when we didn't have time and energy to log in for more than 5 minutes in a given month. Paying $40/month to Turbine for essentially nothing wasn't a worthwhile proposition.
But if Turbine had set it up so that some sort of advancement was happening on my character even if I didn't log in for 6 months straight but merely kept my subscription active, well, I might still have one or more active accounts.
In the end, it's not about Lamers wanting something for nothing. It's about Game companies maximizing their revenue streams (Duh). If allowing some sort of limited, offline advancement for players who merely maintain an active subscription keeps players like me who would otherwise cancel their subscriptions for lack of time and desire to play then the Game companies have found, in essence, a source of free money.
Back when I was in the game industry for a large, unnamed publisher, management sat us all down and went through a breakdown on what and where all the costs for making a video game are. They did this to try and soften the blow of cancelling a game that had been in development for 13 months (yeah, they had a near-riot on their hands when they announced the cancellation to the rank-and-file)
Anyway - you can go through ~18 months of development and cancel and only be out 2-3 million on a large-budget title.
Once you kick the marketing and distribution machinery into motion, costs on the game easily rise into the 10-15 million dollar range.
So cancelling a game you've been working on for over a year but can't find a way to make fun makes more financial sense than bringing it to market and having it totally flop.
The eye is focused by muscles. Just as you wouldn't sit there trying to hold even a 5-pound weight straight out to the side for hours on end without varying the position of your arm to fight muscle fatigue, you need to "change positions" with your eyes as well. Take it from someone who survived the trenches in the 20-hour-day gaming industry and fought eye strain most of the time.
Taking the advice of many people more educated about the anatomy of the eye than myself can help a lot. Fairly frequent breaks where you give your eyes a chance to focus at different lengths, or even just closing them for a minute and giving them some rest.
Every time I go to the eye doctor I get told "Well, I could give you glasses but you can probably get along well without them" Been going on 15 years of hearing that and I still don't need glasses. I have just learned to give my eyes a break.
Well, there's Utopia (http://www.utopianet.org/), and it's already live in some cities with an average speed of 10Mbps Symetric for Data with the possibility of using the connection for Voice/TV as well... Should be available at my hosue in 2-6 months (the work crews are about 3 blocks from my house right now, Woot!)
For those who don't know what it is, a bunch of cities in Utah got together to build a Fiber Optic infrastructure that any service provider can use. Qwest and Comcast lobbied long and hard to get it shut down, but since the cities weren't actually offering services, but allowing any provider (including Qwest and Comcast if they so chose) to offer service over it, they failed to get it shut down.
For people living in cities where it's already available, you can get your Comcast monthly bill cut in half by calling Comcast and mentioning that it's available in your area. Seems competition is already good for the consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
>Have they enslaved millions of people to do their bidding in extremely harsh and abusive environments?
Well, there's only 30,000 or so of them and they call them employees, but still...
*rimshot*
Drogo - Escapee from the tyranny of Mecha-Ballmer...
How the hell does something obviously intended as funny get modded insightful? Even if you missed the whole humorous link to the GP's misuse of PVC (instead of PVR), the post would, at best, be Offtopic...
*sigh* This is the problem of using the general (posting) public for moderation.
To quote George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half the people are DUMBER THAN THAT!"
If you're in a job like that you've got some seriously dysfunctional management.
I was in the game industry for 5 years. I have put in upwards of 110 hours in a single week, not counting an hour for lunch or a half-hour for dinner break. Now when you realize that 18+ hours a day for MONTHS on end is normal in the game industry, well, they might have something to complain about.
I have some former coworkers from that studio who have moved on to positions with other large corporations and they may wind up doing 60 hours weeks for 2 or 3 weeks. But nothing like the death marches we regularly endured.
I'm currently with a smaller company. Any overtime has to be cleared with the president of the company. Most folks who work here haven't seen any overtime in over a decade. My brother (who worked at the same game sutdio) works for a medium size corporation now, and he hasn't seen overtime in over a year. And then it was only one 50 hour week.
Once people realize that overtime is something that should be RARE rather than the norm, and start calling their boss on it, corporate America might just get the hint. In the meantime, enjoy your hours upon hours of being worked to death to pay for someone else's vacation home.
How is it price gouging when the price of crude oil keeps climbing?
Funny maybe - but certainly not interesting.
TFA talks about the observed disk providing evidence that planetary disks are more stable than previously thought - NOT that the supernova involved in the creation of THAT specific disk also created our solar system.
FTFA:
FTFA:
Sounds familiar. Last game studio I was part of was acquired by a large, unammed publisher who spouted those same promises. Yet, within a year, there were a lot of nasty changes, including the head of the studio (who had spent 15 years building a best-in-class franchise) leaving.
I fear for the future of Bioware.
Most of the comments seem to be missing the fact that the Post Title is (surprise surprise) highly misleading. This is NOT an imminent plan to do this. THis is one blogger's wishful thinking that's being repeated as gospel by WOW and Everquest addicts who desperately want this to be true.
Is that x386 Processor years or AMD64 processor years?
FTFA:
"Jacob Citrin was once employed by International Airport Centers and given a laptop to use in his company's real estate related business. The work consisted of identifying "potential acquisition targets."
Essentially the product of his job was the information about which properties to acquire.
From the Judges decision (PDF here: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/tmp/R31363C0.pdf ):
"decided to quit IAC in violation
of his employment contract, he resolved to destroy files that
incriminated himself and other files that were also the
property of his employer"
He apprently deleted the files containing the information he had been hired to collect after violating what sounds like a non-compete clause in his employment contract because he wanted to go into business for himself doing the exact same thing he'd been hired to do.
Poor analogy: As a surveyor for a mining company, it's my job to find mineral deposits for my employer. Using company time and equipment, I find such a site, but fail to disclose the location because I decide I want to start my own personal Survey firm. I'd say they'd have a pretty darn good case against me.
I also don't think the case from TFA is going to get laughed right out of court.
One comment with 750 "don't be evil."'s
******
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
******
Ok, ok - so that was going to be 750...
Actually, having been at MS for several years (see my earlier post elsewhere attached to this story), I'd say that comment applied even more to the times I got a good review score than when I got a bad review score.
Good Review Scores were a direct result of playing the "Review Game":
I made sure my manager was aware of every little task I completed
I made sure his manager was aware of every large task I completed
I made sure as little mention was made of co-workers accomplishments as possible
I made sure to be "extra nice" to said managers
I documented every little thing I did and produced a 3 page bulleted summary of my accomplishments for review time
etc, etc, etc
And yet, most of the time I got a poor review score I was doing the same, if not more work, but couldn't muster the energy to play the game.
Every time I got a good review score, I couldn't help feeling it was more spending a good chunk of time each and every week during the review period schmoozing my manager than any actual work.
Watching some co-workers who spent most of their time gaming the system and getting good score after good score, I knew it had little to do with performance.
"Large corporation with enormous bureaucracy has internal politics" Where's the story?
Yeah, I worked for MS for 5 years. Yes the review system runs largely on Politics - those who play the game get the rewards. How is this different from 99% of the rest of corporate America?
MS takes pretty darn good care of it's employees (my salary at MS was anywhere from 150% to 200% of industry standard for my position depending on whose numbers you looked at, and that doesn't even count top notch health benefits). In return, they expect you to buy into the company culture that your job is your only priority. I knew guys who would set up their Outlook to send emails at 2 and 3 in the morning to give the impression they were working late. I had a manager who's only measure of an employee's worth was whether or not they were working at least 10 hours of "overtime". Our Society as a whole tends to reward appearance over substance 9 times our of 10. Why is it a shock when corporations follow suit. If you were willing to spend the time and effort to play the game, you too could get the rewards. Personally, I couldn't stand the Company Culture at MS and that's why I'm not working there anymore and will not be working there for a long, long time (if ever) if I can help it. But just because that culture doesn't jive with my own standards and priorities doesn't make it immoral or illegal.
Now, there's business practices of upper management that are a whole other story as far as immoral and illegal, but I'm not getting into that here.
Heh, reminds me of my favorite joke while I was working there "The day Microsoft sells something that doesn't suck is the day Microsoft starts selling Vacuum Cleaners".
Aren't Industry NDAs fun... One of the titles was not originally tied into A.I. but was being developed for a completely different (and pretty darn obscure) property. When MS acquired the rights for A.I., management of our studio was given the directive to swap it over to the A.I. universe...but the game under development didn't really fit the A.I. storyline at all (after getting/having to sit through A.I. opening day just because our studio was developing a game for it). Think Diablo-style action game with an "upgradeable main character" But the whole thing was scrapped after A.I. tanked...
Typical release cycle for an A-level game: 12-18 months start to finish
Daikatana: 3 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana
By and large nowadays the actual programmers aren't making the majority of the big design decisions on any given game. That job belongs to the Lead Designer. Game develpment teams are big enough that the stereotype of 6 coders banging out a game is outdated. It's 6-12 programmers, 6-18 artists/content (including sound, layout, etc), 1-3 designers, and however many testers can be squeezed into the remaining budget.
I've met some Designers who used to be programmers, but the majority weren't. ex-management types or ex-artists seem to be more prevalent.
The programmer gets some say in how individual features work out (since they're actually implementing it), but final say always rests with the Designer and/or Producer (or whatever title the management bloke in charge of the whole shebang gets).
If you want better game design, grumble about the Game Designers, but try not to be so hard on the poor programmers.
For the record, I spent 7 years in the game industry as a tester, so I was even lower on the totem pole than the programmers. In those 7 years I saw it evolve away from the lead programmer having final say on anything related to his project to the Designer and Project Lead having most of the power.
Back when I was working for a very large publisher in the video game industry, there was a fellow who ended any chance of a career with said publisher by simple expedient of sending an email from his company account instead of a personal account.
The gist of the story is that large, popular game website "A" had been given a tour of this publisher's facilities, including a sneek peak at a highly anticipated, pre-release title. Of course, the write-up posted on their website was along the lines of "how cool is it that these people get to make games for a living and OMGLOL we got to see 'X Cool Game' before any of you did and it rocks!" Well, this individual I worked with felt that the website had "sold out" because they weren't critical enough of what he felt were shortcomings with 'X Cool Game' and so he wrote a blistering email flaming both website "A" and the publisher (that was signing his paychecks).
And sent it from his company email account.
Well, the people at website "A" notice the return address of this email and forward the email back to their contact at the publisher. Long story short, the email was passed all the way up to the VP of the publisher who took one look at it and said "He's fired". With no chance of ever being re-hired.
Yet, if he had sent it from a personal email account, there would've been no problem as website "A" wouldn't have connected him with the publisher.
It's Common Sense: If you're not willing to write a letter on company letter-head, sign your name to it, and fax it to each major news agency, DON'T SEND IT THROUGH COMPANY EMAIL!
No, it's closer to "Concerned writer offers suggestions to Game Companies on possible ways to maintain interest in their MMOG titles on the part of casual gamers as a device to improve income."
If the MMOG Companies can figure out how to make it attractive enough for players to maintain their monthly subscriptions even if said players don't have time to log in every week or even every month to play, they've hit a potential goldmine of long-term subscriptions.
For instance, I played Asheron's Call for nearly 6 years. I was part of a good monarchy, had characters in various states of advancement and even had in-game goals I was actively working towards. I started playing before I got married, and even after I got married, I simply got my wife hooked on the game and we played together. So why did I cancel? Well, one-month old newborn twins will severely negatively impact both your wallet and your spare time. AC fell far enough down the priority list that I could not justify paying the subscriptions on the three accounts we own when we didn't have time and energy to log in for more than 5 minutes in a given month. Paying $40/month to Turbine for essentially nothing wasn't a worthwhile proposition.
But if Turbine had set it up so that some sort of advancement was happening on my character even if I didn't log in for 6 months straight but merely kept my subscription active, well, I might still have one or more active accounts.
In the end, it's not about Lamers wanting something for nothing. It's about Game companies maximizing their revenue streams (Duh). If allowing some sort of limited, offline advancement for players who merely maintain an active subscription keeps players like me who would otherwise cancel their subscriptions for lack of time and desire to play then the Game companies have found, in essence, a source of free money.
Back when I was in the game industry for a large, unnamed publisher, management sat us all down and went through a breakdown on what and where all the costs for making a video game are. They did this to try and soften the blow of cancelling a game that had been in development for 13 months (yeah, they had a near-riot on their hands when they announced the cancellation to the rank-and-file)
Anyway - you can go through ~18 months of development and cancel and only be out 2-3 million on a large-budget title.
Once you kick the marketing and distribution machinery into motion, costs on the game easily rise into the 10-15 million dollar range.
So cancelling a game you've been working on for over a year but can't find a way to make fun makes more financial sense than bringing it to market and having it totally flop.
Too bad a lot of publishers push it out anyway...
The eye is focused by muscles. Just as you wouldn't sit there trying to hold even a 5-pound weight straight out to the side for hours on end without varying the position of your arm to fight muscle fatigue, you need to "change positions" with your eyes as well. Take it from someone who survived the trenches in the 20-hour-day gaming industry and fought eye strain most of the time.
Taking the advice of many people more educated about the anatomy of the eye than myself can help a lot. Fairly frequent breaks where you give your eyes a chance to focus at different lengths, or even just closing them for a minute and giving them some rest.
Every time I go to the eye doctor I get told "Well, I could give you glasses but you can probably get along well without them" Been going on 15 years of hearing that and I still don't need glasses. I have just learned to give my eyes a break.
Well, there's Utopia (http://www.utopianet.org/), and it's already live in some cities with an average speed of 10Mbps Symetric for Data with the possibility of using the connection for Voice/TV as well... Should be available at my hosue in 2-6 months (the work crews are about 3 blocks from my house right now, Woot!) For those who don't know what it is, a bunch of cities in Utah got together to build a Fiber Optic infrastructure that any service provider can use. Qwest and Comcast lobbied long and hard to get it shut down, but since the cities weren't actually offering services, but allowing any provider (including Qwest and Comcast if they so chose) to offer service over it, they failed to get it shut down. For people living in cities where it's already available, you can get your Comcast monthly bill cut in half by calling Comcast and mentioning that it's available in your area. Seems competition is already good for the consumer.