The people I work with are mostly not dickheads and the pay is reasonable. It’s the mountain of ugly spaghetti code I’m expected to build on top of that kills me. There’s no time to do refactors, of course.
WrongBot
Karma: 3,083
When a deadline is near, all best software practices are thrown out of the window. Later in the project, a deadline is always near.
This is precisely the problem. Not really much more to add.
Up until a month or so ago, I was convinced I’d landed my dream job. If I had a soul, it would be crushed now.
Which is not to say that it’s awful, not by any means. I’ve just gained a new perspective on the value of best practices in software development.
I’m working on a video game in which the player controls a horde of orcs and attempts to take over the world. The game is narrated, however, from the perspective of the humans who are being crushed. You get lots of opportunities to commit atrocities, of course.
As far as mechanics go, it’s simplified grand strategy tuned so that a typical game takes no more than a couple hours. Haven’t gone much beyond design writeups and figuring out my platform (Unity), but I’m only about five hours of actual work into the project.
My realistic goal for the game is for it to serve as a portfolio piece (I work as a game designer). My stretch goals are to get it into the IGF and/or release it on Steam/Desura/etc.
Anger is pretty easy, too. All I have to do is remember a time I was wronged and focus on the injustice of it. Not very fun, though.
Karma isn’t (necessarily) about punishment. Downvotes often just mean “I’d prefer to see fewer comments like this.”
Tapping out, inferential distance too wide.
Please stop making these little explanatory comments. They’re obnoxious, unhelpful, and their karma ratings should indicate to you that they are not well-liked.
Your edit demonstrates that you really don’t get consequentialism at all. Why would making a good tradeoff (one miserable child in exchange for paradise for everyone else) lead to making a terrible one (a tiny bit of happiness for one person in exchange for death for someone else)?
Omelas is a goddamned paradise. Omelas without the tortured child would be better, yeah, but Omelas as described is still better than any human civilization that has ever existed. (For one thing, it only contains one miserable child.)
Before the bootcamp, I’d just barely managed to graduate college and didn’t have the greatest prospects for finding a job. (Though to be fair, I was moving to SF and it was a CS degree.)
At the bootcamp, I founded (and then folded) a startup with other bootcampers, which was profoundly educational and cost a couple months of time and <$100.
Now, <1 year after the bootcamp, I’m doing programming and design work on the new SimCity, which is as close to a dream job for me as could reasonably be expected to exist.
I can’t attribute all my recent success to the bootcamp, because I was pretty awesome beforehand, but it really did dramatically improve my effectiveness in a number of domains (my girlfriend is grateful for the fashion tips I picked up, for example). Other specific things I’ve found useful include meditation, value of information calculations, and rejection therapy.
Harry could destroy his own reputation in order to save Hermione, by (for example) threatening to forever abandon Wizarding Britain. He is a beloved celebrity, after all, and it would be bad press for the Wizengamot if the Boy-Who-Lived defected to France.
Not sure how likely his dark side is to go for a self-sacrificing ploy, though.
Fair enough. The canon definition of a squib is specifically a non-magical child of wizarding parents. I’d assumed the Grangers had wizarding blood further back than that, making them genetically identical to squibs but not meeting the definition of the term as used in wizarding culture.
The Grangers are squibs?!
Yeah, that would definitely allay my concerns. I think it’s the uncertainty surrounding the number and quality of other entrants that bothers me.
Maybe the thestral blood added permanence, because death is permanent? If it was replacing blueberries I doubt it was the key magical ingredient, and so its effect may not be directly related to its properties.
ETA: And also that’s why this version of the potion so much more dangerous. It has Death in it.
See Raemon’s comment. The Dark Arts are involved, mere honesty is no defense.
Thank you for explaining to me what I was thinking. This is exactly my concern.
This is all great except for the contest part, which I might currently have moderate ethical objections to. In general I’m concerned by contests which are held as an alternative to just paying someone to do the work for you; I objected to the contest that SI used to select their new logo (which is great) for the same reasons.
Essentially what you’re doing is asking some unknown number of people to work for highly unpredictable pay, which is mostly likely to be (assuming at least a half-dozen entries), no pay at all. This tactic makes lots of financial sense and I understand why it would appeal to a cash-strapped non-profit, but it seems to me that if you’re going to ask someone to do work for your benefit, you should pay them for it. This is a slightly muddier ideal when it comes to non-profits because I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking people to volunteer their time. Perhaps it’s the uncertainty that’s bothering me; it’s as though you’re asking people to gamble with their time.
So perhaps it’s ethically equivalent to a charity-sponsored raffle, which I don’t object to. Is my reasoning wrong, or am I just inconsistent? I’m not sure.
I work in video games, so my experience isn’t at all typical of programming more generally. The big issues are that:
Development priorities and design are driven by marketing.
Lots of time is spent doing throwaway work for particular demos. I (and many others) wasted a couple weeks hacking together a scripted demo for E3 that will never be seen again.
The design for my portion of the project has changed directions numerous times, and each new version of the feature has been implemented in a rush, so we still have bits of code from five iterations ago hanging around, causing bugs.
Willingness to work extremely long hours (70+/week) is a badge of pride. I’m largely exempt from this because I’m a contractor and paid hourly, but my salaried coworkers frequently complain about not seeing enough of their families. On the other hand, some of the grateful to have an excuse to get away from their families.
The downside of being a contractor is that I don’t get benefits like health insurance, sick days, paid time off, etc.
Many of these issues are specific to the games industry and my employer particularly, and shouldn’t be considered representative of programming in general. Quality of life in the industry varies widely.