[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[ceo]

Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes wrote:
> Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 11:47:27PM -0400 in <29127.1059623247 at kanga.nu>,
> J C Lawrence <claw at kanga.nu> spake:

>> This is rather different than most business software development
>> where the field and the technologies used as well developed, well
>> explored, and well known.

> That is very much not the case, in my experience.  In over a
> decade of freelancing, I've worked on maybe two business projects
> which were known quantities.  You almost always have to do true
> innovation and hard research and design work.  If anything, it's
> more difficult than games, more experimental and
> technology-driven.  Graphics cards are not the only form of
> technology, though I'm sure there are people who'd disagree with
> that ("No, no, there's sound cards, too!"  <sigh> ).

There's a lot of self-selection involved here. If you want to work
on largely undefined business projects, you can with little effort
bend your career to keep taking you to companies that re-invent the
wheel (not necessarily a bad thing). Good freelancers/consultants
also tend to be drawn to the difficult / failing projects, partly
because they're more challenging, and partly because companies often
only pay the inflated salaries (justified by specialist
skills/experience) for projects which are NOT run-of the mill (or
are looking likely to fail).

> True horror story time:

>   The year I spent in the commercial games industry convinced me
>   of just how bad and incompetent games management is.  There was
>   no...

...

> That's not technology-driven.  That's not necessary.  That's
> incompetence, plain and simple, and it's perfectly typical
> incompetence for the games industry.

> I've talked to a lot of burned-out games developers since then,
> and heard identical stories from them, so this was not a one-off
> bad experience.  This is how most, maybe all, games companies are
> mismanaged.

I'm a little disappointed that you write off an entire industry
apparently on the back of one year and just one company (although I
don't in any way want to make light of your suffering!). As an
example, one of the teams I worked for inside IBM for just under a
year was equally terrible (although in a different dimension)...but
I would never have assumed it to be typical without considerable
evidence to show it (talking to burned-out developers probably rates
as highly as speaking to project-hopping IT consultants - I'm not
saying consultants are generally terrible, but there's always a
large pool of people who's experience can show any industry to be as
bad, just because there's always a lot of terrible companies in
every industry [or because they're incompetent]).

> IBM has done statistical research on their developers which showed
> that the optimum level of work is 6 hours per day; if you try to
> get...

:) do you have a reference for that? I'm most interested in knowing
if it's new research or old (although I assume it's relatively
new)...some of their statistical analysis of development is from
back in the 70's or earlier, and not all of it is equally valid
today.

Adam M
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev