It seems that, again, Peter Molyneux over-promised with his latest "game". Of course, almost everything is done server-side. Of course, it doesn't scale. Of course, the poor developers working for him worked overtime for 36 hours to fix this, and Molyneux publicly boasted about this, rather than being shamed.
The outcry that this produced on Reddit is quite understandable. Unpaid overtime isn't fun. Sometimes, even I will work overtime for a project's sake. But it has to be clear that a culture of overtime is simply not acceptable. Shaming developers for not being "team players" if they refuse isn't acceptable either.
When events like this happen once in a long while, finger-pointing doesn't help. When it's a pattern, blame should be attributed rather than repeating the cycle of making talented programmers pay for predictable mistakes. Hence this outcry. It is far from the first time that Molyneux created this kind of mess, and even worse how in the gaming industry those work crunches are now the norm. It's not because software development is intellectual that doing so for over 30 hours isn't exhausting. It's not like you are having boring meetings for 30 hours; It's banging your head on intellectually difficult problems for 30 hours. Like an exam, but for 30 hours.
Some programmers like me really like what they do for work. Programming for us is both a hobby and a source of income. That means that we do not totally "disconnect" from our work or field of practice when we leave the office. But then, this trait is often taken advantage of by scrupulous managers that want to make us work more for free, so of course we have to place limits of how much we will allow ourselves to invest time into work. And such levels of overtime work is simply unacceptable for most of us.
In the end, though, it's funny how so few in the gaming industry understand how difficult it is to scale server-side game logic. Oh well.
Published on November 13, 2012 at 21:08 EST
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