• 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle




  • I love Valve, but I really don’t understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don’t truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small studios to pay. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.

    Don’t get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it’s been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don’t need the money as this point. They don’t need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.







  • I worked in the video game industry for over a decade and let me tell you there is nothing more infuriating than arguing with a clueless gamer who thinks everything can be solved in a few minutes with overly naive solutions. Bonus points for trying to “educate” me on my own specialization like “net code”. Why do I even bother.


  • Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.

    Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.

    Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.

    Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.


  • So, I figure all modern corporate offices are exactly the same then. There is some good stuff in there, but it is so over the top and forced that it sort of ruin the benefits imo.

    Positivity is great, even if it is forced a little, but hiding all negativity, issues and criticism make forced positivity completely useless. Not to mention that at the office I worked there was virtually always one or many of your “bosses” in earshot, in every situation. There wasn’t a daily, a meeting or a workstation in that job where some guy responsible for my promotions and employment wasn’t listening. This is how you make sure nothing of value is ever said in your dailies and retro meeting. It’s all great!

    Now let’s play the game of figuring the smallest politically correct nitpick to mention during the retro so that we can check that self-improvement/self-organizing checkbox in front of the boss. What, you think over 10 hours of useless scrum meeting is wasteful, on top of the actual important meetings? Well, better not mention it. I mean you could, but shitting on scrum will get you canned. Do you think the way points/hours/complexity is evaluated completely miss the mark? Or are you tempted to mention Goodhart’s law when reviewing whatever metric in Jira? Well, better not do that, because you might as well say that your boss’s job needs not to exist. Better not mention anything that might compromise someone else in front of the boss, or anything that could be used against you in a review.

    Because that’s the thing, since no one ever admit to mistake and make themselves vulnerable, if you’re the only one to do it it’s gonna raise “red flags” and you’re gonna hear about it in your next review. Better give a good not-so-anonymous review to your immediate managers too, raising any sort of issues could prevent one, or both of you from getting promoted with increased pay.


  • I did not really mind when I worked at a ~10 people company, it kind of made sense. Working on a floor with over a hundred people in an open office was miserable. There was always someone on Zoom or people having live meeting in earshot.

    Blow my mind that all those office managers and floor planners and supposedly expert at organizing a work environment think that it make sense to cram in hundred of people working on wildly different stuff together at earshot distance. How hard would it be to create big divisions so that you only get to hear the 10 or so people which you’re directly involved with. Anyway, there was clearly an “everyone must be an extrovert” culture thing going on. The higher ups sure seemed to enjoy hearing and seeing everyone everywhere all the time.







  • We might as well been coworkers. Crazy just how sheepish all the big execs are. Productivity was supposedly up at the peak of the WFH policies, but now suddenly it is so important to go back even though there is not enough room for everyone.

    I don’t miss being crammed into a pretencious office being surrounded at arm length by 5 other people, some of which at loud as fuck and spend their days on zoom. I really won’t do it anymore, I don’t care if I starve.

    45min commute which cost over a hundred per month and still require me to walk in shitty weather, already soaked in sweat half the months of the year, so I can walk in and plug my shitty laptop on a dock and ultimately still have 99% of my work done remotely and on zoom on my shitty webcam because half the office is home and three quarter of my colleagues live in a different country.