Fallout Creator Explains Why Modern Games Suck 

As a software dev, it's shocking how many devs have no idea what they are doing.

Game developers used to be gamers. They aren't anymore.

The difference between a dev who WANTS to be working on a project and a dev who is there for cash is absolutely massive.

Tim Cain is a master of the craft. I could listen to him speak for hours. I'm not in the industry, but I'd love to have this guy for a boss or colleague.

“Why does it take 4 weeks?” Destiny developer - “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain”

Quickest way to destroy a game company, become a publicly traded business. You start having to please the shareholders by always showing money coming in.

I think this is a very good example of what's happening across the entire workforce. I see so many people refuse to accept blame or point fingers, and all because the second they do they're fired or don't get a raise. No one's encouraged to make mistakes anymore. People have to make mistakes. It's how we improve.

I started working for a very large company once (came in as a senior developer) and was handed a program (a very SIMPLE one) to do a change to it. The program had about 2000 LOC (lines of code). Blew my mind. I asked the senior developer, "Who wrote this?" "He doesn't work here any more." "Good. Because this program should be about 100 LOC." We kind of got in an argument because he didn't want me to re-write it. "It took that guy a month to write that program. Don't touch it!" By the end of that day, I handed him a new program, with his changes in it... in about 100 LOC. Within my first year there I had re-written every program that joker wrote. LMAO

as a Dev, it blows my mind how much a small indie team can accomplish with less funding and manpower. There's no excuse really

Honestly alot of my fav games are from smaller or indie devs now, this helps me further understand why

As a solo dev, I watch this guy every day. His talks are always interesting and inspirational. Glad to see him getting some publicity here.

I lost a job because I was too efficient. I worked 2 to 3 hours a day and the boss didn't like that. But there was nothing for me to do after that. They hired someone incompetent who take 8 hours to do what I did in 3, and the boss is very happy to see those hours on paper.

As an engineer I loved that conversation between Scotty and Jordy in engineering where Captain Pickard asks Jordy for a time estimate over coms and Jordy tells the captain 1 hour. Then Scotty asks Jordy how long it will really take and Jordy says 1 hour and Scotty is like, "Dont tell your captain how long it will really take! Tell him 4 hours and when you finish it in an hour you will look like a genius!"

I worked in 2 video game studios: 1) studio A - excellent simple games, very good generalist programmers who played and loved games 2) studio B - very good AAA games, excellent programmers, most of which never played video games I stayed 5 1/2 years at Studio A and loved every minute. I stayed only 3 months at Studio B and soon left. If you want to do great things, set objectives, make a plan and do it with like minded people. Great teams with great ideas make great projects.

I think part of the problem is people start their career eager to work and they'll get a lot done... But then they start to get continuously burned by bad managers. I've seen so many bright eyed hard charging people get completely destroyed by toxic management and then they turn into those ultra cautious people who want lots of time and everything documented and signed off on because they feel it's the only way to protect themselves and their career from management.

The difference between 10 years ago and today is 10 years ago if they told you they would quit if you wrote their name on the whiteboard you would’ve laughed and then wrote their names on the whiteboard. The minute you gave in and told them you weren’t gonna use the whiteboards you lost control of your company.

I’ve been a dev for 30+ years. Although I’m not in the gaming industry, I’ve seen the same trend. That said, I must admit my generation had it easy: we used to work at a really low level. Not that many bloated frameworks on which to write our code. Working much closer to the metal allowed us to deal with much less variables. We had much more control. We were also much more “code before, ask questions later”, and that’s probably a big no no today. We worked a lot, but it was passion driven, rarely imposed by management.

As a software dev (NOT game dev) I can tell you that your program is only as modular and easy to work with it if it was designed from the ground up properly. This "all inventory load" BS is bad coding plan and simple. They were given the option to do it the right way or the fast/cheap way and they chose cheap and shitty.

As someone who worked in a collaborative and creative job, this is so real. I would take responsibility for my work and I would put my name on things. What happened was that if anything went wrong even if I had no hand in it, it was put on me. Because everybody else wanted as little responsibility as possible. Even then, I still took responsibility and tried to take on a leadership role even though I was not in that position. I did it because I had a passion for my work and wanted to see good outcomes. Once I was able to rally some motivated people to work together, the upper management got on my case about exceeding my job. So, these environments are created and creativity is snuffed because it's too much of a "risk". They want what is safe, and they want thier workers to do what is safe. I had to quit my job because of these issues and myriad of others, but after years of trying to lift up my co-workers only to see them be pushed back down and all the blame be put on me, I just couldn't deal with it anymore. I feel guilty because I know that place is in a worse spot without me, but my mental health was starting to suffer too much.

There is rule in business that says, competent people will be promoted above their level of competence, and then be doomed to failure. You see this most in big companies. If you refuse the promotion, the company will see you as hostile rather than reasonable. In government you often see people promoted based on seniority rather than skill and results.

Id love for you to get this guy on your stream for a lengthy interview. I feel like there is a need for more opinions straight from the source, actual devs (that are not currently actively involved in the game/games that are talked about)

Worked as a consultant for a few game companies Theres really two archetypes of companies that exist A close knit team of high performers (sounds like his whiteboard story for fallout) And Adult daycares where its all about being nice not actual skill of employees

Tim Cain has a wonderful channel. It’s like a proper course on how to make games in the right way.

As an ex-programmer, been there. Spent more time writing notes for the upper echelons than actually programming. I was constantly being pulled off task to explain the task to people wanting to show their management that they understood it. Then it takes time to get back into the headspace. Add to that, that nobody's permitted to revisit previously written common code that becomes ever less fit-for-purpose as the project expands (until much later in the project, if ever.) It all meant that most of the 'good stuff' was written on my own time (unpaid) and had to be 'presented' to clueless suits for me to have what I needed to do the job. That's just the tip of the iceberg - one that I'm, thankfully, not standing on any more. 😀

Tim Cain is the godfather of modern RPGs and one of the best game devs of all time. This video just proves that he still knows his stuff after all these years.

As a software dev, I can confirm most developers in big companies just dont wanna work more than 2h a day

The fact that the father of Fallout said the truth is shocking and i do love his reasoning, he made one of my favorite series, and he is still here in the trenches, making more great things

As a software dev, we do pad estimates, if we think we need 45min for the code, we might ask for half a day just in case, if I were to ask for 4 weeks I'd probably loose the job.

I've been a software dev for large and small companies for over 15 years. He's not wrong, but caution comes from working in larger companies. I HAVE to pad my estimates because I'm CONSTANTLY interrupted by HR meetings, TPS reports, and project managers demanding status updates multiple times a day. How can I possibly get anything done quickly when I rarely have a single day where I have 4 hours of uninterrupted time?

Tim's a legend. Created the game that most marked me as a gamer. Fallout 1 and 2.

Not bending the knee to corporatism is a big reason Fromsoft games are doing so well. They are chock full of artistic vision and story.

As a dev, half my fucking job is trying to understand what the fuck some finance bro or nepo baby actually wants me to implement. Project managers, usually at least, tend to be coherent because they've often been devs themselves.

Nice to see Timothy reacted by you, hope this push up his channel. He's a really good guy and has a lot of really interesting videos

At a big AAA company, if you have a really talented and motivated gameplay programmer who wants to implement a really cool feature that is outside of the scope of the game or wasn't planned, it will almost certainly be shot down in favor of the tried and tested formula (aka, similarity to previous games from that company). This is simply how it will always work at these companies, shareholders don't care about innovating and they certainly do not want to take risks, they want you to churn out games that are moneymakers first and foremost. At a small indie studio, if one developer gets a cool idea they can simply run it by the other coders and get to work. There is a lot more trust placed in individual workers than at a big company.

This is a major problem with team bloat that often gets ignored. There’s so many people being hired that you can’t possibly train them all. And you can’t even assign them meaningful work that will teach them skills because there isn’t enough to go around. The tech industry has this the worst because they have gotten in the practice of hiring people not for how they can use them, but to prevent anyone else from using them

Game industry became way too glorified and mainstream. And now the passionate people who actually cared got replaced by normies who are just after money

I work at one of Swedens biggest companies and we do almost exactly like he described in the beginning of the video. You get assigned tasks on a timeline and each week we have a big meeting going through it all to see what each person has done, what he/she needs help with etc. And I think it works really good and there’s no toxicity about it, but good conversation revolving issues that arise.

Tim is awesome. Not only does he give great insight into game development but he’s also a great story teller. Probably the best channel I’ve seen on RU-vid in years.

Big thing I miss about 90s early 2000s gaming is companies took big risks and made all sorts of game no matter how weird they were.

7:11 I also get this manic when I'm deep in some design/scripting work. Freaked out the class once when I suddenly leapt from my seat yelling with joy after fixing a game breaking bug that I had been working on for a week straight. Makes me feel good knowing I have this in common with a game developer I greatly admire.

Estimate padding is very much an unintended consequence of KPI driven production. KPIs are supposed to be used to indicate that there is a failure or bottleneck, which then needs to be fixed. Eventually, this often becomes not about fixing the root of the problem but about meeting the metrics. Therefore, people engage in estimate padding: treating the symptom rather than the disease.

There's a reason retro gaming and game emulation have been getting more popular over the last few years.

Oh man, as someone who works in an office, i can tell Tim is one of the real ones. Its the same everywhere; if the leadership doesnt define and live the work culture, their employees will

As a software engineer, I can say this is across the entire field - not just game dev. The "padding" is a real issue but also a necessary one to an extent. 45 minutes of code is just for the coding. That doesn't include the time it takes for those changes to be reviewed by the team, regression tested, sent to QA for testing, etc. Some "small" changes can also have a high likelihood of introducing regressions, meaning those will need more thorough reviewing and testing. Maybe the developers thought he was asking how long for that change to be considered "done". That said, 4 weeks is wild for almost any ticket, let alone a smaller change. I would say max a week for a ticket that size. The accountability issues are a huge problem though. A lot of engineers hide behind the fact that the job is often hybrid or remote work and choose not to take much work on. I work with people who have been with my company for 3 years and still have no idea what the hell they're doing because they only ever agree to take the simplest of tasks and bugs to work on. Others will utilize "pair programming" for every single ticket they work on and essentially wait for a teammate to hand them the solution on a platter. I blame engineering management for not cracking down on this behavior harder.

I've spent ~15 years doing software development (both developer + manager) at both startups & big companies. There's another side to what Timothy is saying: 1) Padding estimates: Devs often have to work with shitty spaghetti codebases, which means it takes a *lot* longer to do an intuitively simple fix. Instead of changing the code in 1 place, they'd have to change it in 5 places. If they forget one place then they introduce a new hard-to-find bug, which itself takes tons of time to find and fix. Truth is, most devs like to work with clean code. Senior devs like to spend time refactoring, which basically means detangling spaghetti code and making everything nice, neat and compartmentalized. So, why do you have shitty spaghetti codebases? Higher-ups will set some bonus-driven deadline, try to "push the team" super hard, resulting in devs taking shortcuts and neglecting their sleep and mental health which causes them to make more even mistakes. That's how we get large shitty spaghetti codebases. 2) Greed. There's a saying in software development: Pick 2 of 3, fast, cheap, and good. Big corporations churn out AAA titles quickly by hiring shitloads of people. More people means more meetings, more "alignment", more egos and politics. This explains why their games have no soul. But it also explains why Baldur's Gate 3 took six years to develop, three of which were in open beta. There's a saying in our field: Pick 2 of 3 -- fast, cheap and good. And it turns out that buggy and poorly-written AAA titles still rake in billions. So if you want to get better games, have some self-restraint and don't buy it if it's crap.

This is a problem in tons of different industries not just game development. My brother works at a company that does audiobooks and you should hear some of the horror stories he tells me about recent college grads who get hired in. It's like they wait to find the most petty things to complain and go to HR about. It's actually shocking the things he's told me that they complain about.

This is what happens in every industry. The first generations are always those who have extreme passion, talent and willpower all together. Because if they didn't, they'd either be in other industries instead of this uncertain one, or fail in pushing through the difficult and unknown path. They're the vanguard, and they will take the hardships head on. Then the industry takes form, investments are poured in, and things become relatively more safe and reliable. Jobs become just jobs, instead of and expression of love and passion, and therefor it attracts those who just want to do a job. The desire to create something outstanding diminishes over time and generations (at least the fraction of total people) and most of employees would be content by just getting payed, no matter what kind/quality of product they end up producing. In the end, it becomes much rarer to see a collective strong will to create something genuinely great.

I always worked with Jira, we always know who works on what and if you break something, you're going to fix it. I think it's more about if a company has or not an engineering culture. Maybe the dev he asked for the estimate was a junior and didn't know anything about the existing APIs. He wasn't vulnerable for sure, he didn't know how to do the story quickly, that's a junior move. Maybe they have a super long pipeline that even if the thing is coded now it won't be in the staging env for 1 week, we don't have the full picture, but for sure the algo he described was indeed a good place holder and quick to do.

I work in industrial controls and the same lack of accountability is rampant here too. At this point, being accountable, having a good work ethic, and being competent in your field is essentially a super power.

As a senior software dev in a large corporation I've been pulled aside and scolded by managers for undercutting their estimates - when I should realistically be the authority on what actually needs done to complete the task. It really takes the wind out your sails, to the point that I'm now I'm very much the "fuck it I guess it'll take 4 weeks" sort of developer for now.

Man, this hits hard. I am not involved in this industry at all, and am just a lowly warehouse manager, but i've had the kind of mentality from the second story for every job I've had recently. So many times I've overperformed, or my team overperformed and suddenly we are short staffed and struggling. I've gotten into the habit of complaining on behalf of my team, and pushing back, and trying to slow things down to save jobs and my sanity, when all our jobs could have been done fast rather easily. You just cant trust companies or owners to see that without thinking of dollar signs.

Software dev POV: That aggression priority target list; yah. 30-45 minutes should be plenty of time to implement in C or C++, which I guess the original Fallout would have been made with. That said, I've had times with a 4 month backlog of 30 minutes to 16-hour tasks, so sometimes there's miscommunication of how long it will take to make versus when it will be done. Had 3 bosses that kept shuffling what was prioritized and couldn't agree on which tasks should be focused on. Double the estimate of focused development work because you get disrupted and there will be as much overhead as development time, and you have to include your testing time. This just makes management planning easier and more accurate. If you don't know how to tackle a task, it may take significantly longer. If you run into some undocumented issues - yes, well, there goes the planning. Borland c++ Builder 3.5 (I think) had a memory leak. It took us months to find out what the problem was, and it was only fixed by upgrading our compiler.

I've worked in a corporate setting, and I saw many coworkers just act docile and almost motionless. Everyone had to act "nice" all the time. They don't like it when people are yelling. They also don't like it if you make a fuss at lazy coworkers who are not even working. They fire people for insane reasons. My boss got mad when I was 2 minutes late. You can get in trouble for talking back and it's perceived the wrong way.

Tims videos are absolutely phenomenal. The insights from his time in the gaming industry is invaluable.

Imagine going to work and be expected to do some actual work.

The amount of times asmon steps into the 'Dunning-Kruger effect' is wild

I also experience the same thing he mentions in his 3rd story all the time. People think any sort of excited conversation is frightening or creating an uncomfortable scene. God forbid there's a friendly debate or everyone needs to go on stress leave for the next week.

Padding work time is how the entire corporate system operates. Task going to take you 2 hours? Give me a week. Task going to require multiple days of work? I’ll have it ready a month out. This is one of the huge disparities between blue and white collar jobs. An hourly worker is literally doing their job the entire shift. White collar worker does 2 hours of work in a 9 hour day.

As a software dev, the 2nd story is something that manifests in many teams, many times. There is almost always a senior dev that can do things 5-10x faster than anyone else, and that person is always the busiest on the team. The problem is when that senior dev is working on a large enough product, they simply cannot do everything, and they are forced to delegate to new hires or other junior members that cannot perform at that level.

I’m a game programmer who has been working on games for 20 years. Modern programmers in the AAA games industry are all the spawn of bad teaching when programmers are taught by those who can’t for generation after generation. Programmers who are actually competent don’t get interviews because they refuse to pay to get a degree from a program taught by people like that. Myself, I’ve worked on my own games and lived that way for the last decade because of that rather than go work for a company filled with these programmers.

Its mostly that 'easy' changes look easy on your side, but as the game is SO big and SO frankensteined together you can never be sure that what you're doing won't mess with someone elses code, break a plot line or add a bug. And that causes fear and uncertainty, so people want to be more and more careful. In a competent well run team with good planning and communication its usually not a problem, but if you have several Devs, each coding in their own dumbass way you get problems. add in stupid time constraints and people rushing and not talking and stuff goes sideways far too easily

Nearly all your hot takes are pretty damn spot on and I've been a Manufacturing Engineer and Project Engineer in Aerospace for most of my 20 year career. The most toxic part of work is often your reaction to embarrassment, admitting inability or skill gaps and pointing out others to simply try and move the bar and do your job. In the most toxic companies, your most talented go getters that are getting things done, being real and serious, can and will be pulled down by others and stacked on by bosses bc they know who to go to. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And if you are actually just working hard and don't add fluff to the way you talk and add super personable conversation to some of these lazy people that seemingly have a ton of extra time on their hands, you are now the toxic person... . Enter Layoff and contractor culture is here to stay.

Oblivion is 49% Jank, but still beats most newer games.

Early days of gaming: "I've programmed 2 squares to move up and down and deflect another square. It kinda resembles a game of ping pong." Golden era of gaming: "Dude, I've had this story floating around in my head for YEARS. Look at this concept art. Check out these systems. I call it ________, and want to make it a reality. I'm a gamer, so I want to make games that I'd enjoy because I think others would too." Shit era of gaming: "OK, we've hired a market research team to find out what is currently trending... and by the time we've turned that into a saleable idea, and spoke to our investors, yadda yadda yadda... Hopefully it'll be due to release some time in 2025... _Completely missing the 1 month window of opportunity where Extraction Shooters/Asymmetric 4v1 Horror Games/Fall Guys/Among Us were actually popular on streaming sites."_

Tim has some fantastic videos, "The True Purpose of Vaults in Fallout" is a great one.

The problem is vast, but here's something I noticed. A lot of times in legacy systems, a single person or a small team will write most of the code. More often than not, it was terrible to look at, disorganized and nasty, but it worked. When something went wrong, the developer, who has an intimate understanding of the system, would know where to go and add more crappy code. These days, there's less disorganized code, but also less comprehension and responsibility. Now, you have leads, which could be the same type of people who made the messy but functional code, who are building teams of developers lists of requirements based on their understanding of building systems. The problem with that is that it is difficult to know what kind of issues you're going to face without writing the code yourself. So when a behavior occurs that is not expected, but the requirements are met... well it's not the programmer's fault and someone will have to figure out how to fix it later. Depending on the team, this may not be a problem. Bugs can be gathered and kept track of and fixed later. But it helps if your developers notice flaws and work to improve the existing requirements. If that doesn't happen, you get more organized but less functional code.

it's fundamentally a management problem, it exists in every industry, global wise, doesn't matter if you are in third-world country or first-world country, doesn't matter if your company is small or big, as long as you're running a company you're gonna face this "people issue". Unfortunately, after running a company myself for 8 years now, i've learnt the hard way that firing people alone won't solve the problem at all, the management style has to change, company culture has to change, rules and regulations have to change, hiring policy has to change, as well as incentive and punishment policy, the list goes on, in short you gonna hire more 'wolf' instead of 'sheep', people say 'nah, this whole generation is like this,' which i don't agree at all, because there's always hard working people out there

Having worked with dev teams for over a decade, my first guess is that this Fallout Creator may likely have a history of introducing scope creep without adjusting timelines and then holding devs accountable for it when those deadlines are missed. This is not always the case, but I have seen it so many times, and every single time the devs respond with more and more cautious estimates as a means of basic survival inside the company.

IMO, a lot of what Tim mentions in the first part of the video is a symptom of Agile development as implemented in a corporate environment. Meetings all day every day, and padded estimates (because if you end up going over your "estimate" you are absolutely crucified) are all endemic to poorly implemented Agile, which is unfortunately the norm in most development houses today.

As a professional software developer, there are absolutely jobs you need to pad estimates - and its the majority. Because 3/4 of your job in many large organizations is dealing with absolute bullshit spreadsheets thrown at you by management, dealing with bizarre requests that aren't captured as effort, scope changes for no fucking reason and awful tickets you need to go back and forth with the reporter before you actually understand the problem space. I've had jobs where by the end of it, I only got to *start* coding every day at around 3-4pm and finished up 7-8pm, because between meetings and random admin duties, you don't get time to code until everyone else clocks off and stops bugging you with "must have" bollocks. So pad your estimates. Otherwise you won't get your sprint items done. If you don't pad estimates, you end up working 80 hour weeks or don't hit your sprint goals, and who gets blamed then? And if you work the 80 hours, you don't get paid extra. And you don't own the game like early game dev or indies, you get paid a straight salary, so what incentive do you have to kill yourself over a game that gets you nothing more? Bad management leads to bad workers. Smaller orgs you just talk directly to people and have way less need to do this, or smaller teams with a protective manager it works better.

My hubby works for a small game dev company down here in South Africa and I showed him the first few minutes of this. He is absolutely flabbergasted at the fact that either the ToDo lists or the small coding segment would raise any concerns even with the small dev team like the one he works with.

As a software developer I can just say that working with software just gets more complicated over time. The bar keeps getting higher for entry level and “emergent” technologies just forces the hand of many companies to be continuously shuffling projects and redesigns. In the past you could do an html page with some JavaScript and PHP to handle APIs while now you gotta setup NPM, do a “vendor install” which loads hundreds of megabytes even for the simplest application, and these dependencies make the app stop building entirely after a few months if you don’t keep upgrading it and making it compatible with newer stuff that works the same literally. Software developers creating software have made it so complex and interconnected that it’s like a pyramid scheme where you must keep paying for courses and licenses to just run a website. It’s become normalized that everything is so complicated that it requires a full team of varying developers with a QA team since things break so often and a PM with a whip for when estimates go over of deadlines aren’t met.

For those interested, Scorpia and Desslock were legendary computer game reviewers in the Golden Age of CGW and PC Gamer in the 1980s thru 90s. respectively. Scorpia was especially admired/feared - her review of Ultima 8 (Pagan) was one of the most brutal ever published about a major title up to that point in any magazine.

As a Senior Software Engineer at one of the largest food delivery companies in the world, leading one of the top priority projects of my pillar I am of two minds with this. I totally agree with the lack of accountability. At my company we use Jira and every single developer is assigned a ticket. That ticket has the developer's face on it from start to completion, not so we know who to blame but so leadership can have a better idea of how resources are being allocated and in the event of a failure we know who to contact for insights that might be useful for debugging. I don't see any reason why you wouldn't have your name associated with your work, it's just being professional. As to the second point, I think it's almost an inevitability to have slower development speeds in large corporations for three main reasons, one of which he mentioned in the video: 1 - Money. Big corporations have big stakeholders that aren't necessarily interested in the product. They want profits. If what you're doing won't result in money made or saved that can be sold to an exec, it won't get done. Last year a 15 min outage at my company lost millions of dollars. Ever since the processes got stricter, the security measures increased and our estimations extended with it as part of management requests. 2 - This also plays a part in 1 but processes, bureaucracy and politics. Large corporations make complex products. Complex products require multiple teams. No single person/team has time to work on the entirety of World of Warcraft by themselves. So they divide in teams. Each team is vying for a slice of that corporation budget to work on their quarterly plans and create good features that will increase their budget next quarter. Now, lack of speed can lower a team's budget but you know what can harm it even more? Losing money. Outages, crashes. Not only the team, but developers can lose jobs over things like that. So while startups and indie companies have a lot more maneuverability when it comes to that sort of thing, large corporations do not. 3 - Complexity. When the scope of your project is small you can afford many shortcuts and techniques to speed up your development process. This is also not the case in large corporations because they have many more concerns that smaller companies do lot. Legal department asking for logs of operations saved, stored and accessible, security department requesting a tighter control of vulnerabilities, a very large codebase often times very intertwined because it was created originally as a smaller company with no concern for scalability, security and maintainbility and every code change in a place can affect code in a completely different component. I once had a project manager that asked for a button. I told him It would take a week. He said he could do it in html and javascript in 2 hours. I answered: Neat. So can I. This isn't developed in justJavaScript and html though, it needs to not only perform its button action but also needs to send campaign information to marketing, logs to sentry, the request needs to go through a proxy and then through an API which does not have a method to support it. Then we need to apply database migration to correct data and finally thoroughly test it because if it fails and users get their app crashing, we might lose funding for our next project by upper management looking unfavorably at our lack of professionalism and you still won't get your button. In short, TLDR: Large corporations will always be much slower because of stakeholders, project scope and simply how little maneuverability they have as companies. If we're looking for risks and daring decisions, we need to look at indies.

As someone working outside of game dev I can say this responsibility avoidance is quite common. Part of the problem is that a lot of the time people are working on a bunch extra work that's not part of their normal responsibilities so people get trained to avoid responsibility. Like you get assigned a simple configuration or coding task and in the middle of it you find out there's 5 things that were broken so now ya got to do 6 tasks.

The problem is people who make lots of money want to just come in, clock in, stand around trying to get a feel the current day's politics, disappear, and then clock out. NO ACCOUNTABILITY.

I'm a dev, I do have some feedback here (only 15 mins in). Estimates are estimates for you and your team, but leadership treat them as promises, and build everything around it. This makes a vague estimate into something you are now responsible for. Then when your estimate falls short, you get slapped (overtime, crunches, worst case fired/witholding raises). Especially for videogames, where there is a lot of R&d (emphasys on R, so a lot more unknowns). Having crunches for months due to a bad estimate is what leads to this stupid level of padding. It's trauma enforced by the industry. While each dev also need to be able to get above that and give proper estimates, some junior devs with less faith in their abilities will naturally pad the shit out of their work to be sure they are not stuck in another crunch time. So really the industry created that problem. The best way to break this pattern of over padding stories/tasks is to encourage failure within your teams (obviously within reason). Failures are useful as they help pinpoint your limits as a team and narrow down your velocity (For simplicity, velocity is how quick and easily you can finish a task). When failure is punished, you get that type of shitshow as described in the video.

As someone who worked in leadership for years, you should be asking why people don't want their names attached to something. If people are literally threatening to quite because they've been assigned a specific task, you have significant issues to deal with throughout your organization and your leadership. These employees don't feel confident or secure in their jobs to take on more. I worked in leadership environments that were oppressive and demoralizing, this was the result. Disengaged, scared and defensive employees. I've worked in other leadership environments where we were stepping over each other to take on new responsibilities because everyone felt secure, supported and ready for growth. That doesn't mean it was a free ride, far from it. Setting clear expectations and ensuring a job done well is critical with consequences attached. The difference is are you engaged as a leader, involved in the process, clearing obstacles for your people and encouraging growth and development? If the answer is "I'm the boss, I tell you what to do and you do it", the results will not be what you hopped for.

In regards to story 2 the only reasonable explanation of why something simple like that would take longer is if they're workload is already full up. But they should be able to easily explain that when asked. I deal with this as an HVAC engineer, architects will send in a request that should only take 2 or 3 hours to complete and then complain when we tell them to expect it in two weeks. And the reason isn't because we want to make them wait two weeks, it's because if our schedule is fully booked up then if we do their request then something else we've already promised a completion date on falls behind. This reason is almost always accepted because it makes sense. They should definitely be able to explain why it'll take 4 weeks.

Games taking 5-10 years to develop is a lie. This guy just said what everybody already knew in the industry.

This guy totally gets it. It feels good to hear this from someone who knows what it's like to make a game

I'm a systems architect, and I've been writing code since the 1980s. I heed the Scotty Principal and pad my all timelines now because more often than not, when I have to go into code I haven't seen before, I find the previous developer wrote crap spaghetti code with no test coverage, and it takes me a lot of extra time to rework things the way it should have been just so I can get what I needed to do done. Like others here, I'm amazed at the number of devs who have no clue about what they are doing. The bigger problem, though, is artificial timelines and pressure by the management causing mediocre devs to write the absolute shittiest code as fast as possible so they don't get in trouble. And it's not even mostly their fault, because (at least here in the US), the pressure to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of developers by management is the reason you see massive amounts of tech debt and asymptotic cyclomatic complexity graph lines, all of which never get addressed. That dev that quoted 4 weeks might have only taken 45 minutes to do the needful if the code he had to modify was okay, but he was probably hedging on the target system being a rats nest of vomit code when he got into where he needed to make the changes.

Regarding the 2nd story, there's a huge problem in the software development industry as a whole where devs grossly overestimate how long a coding task will take. A couple reasons why is that large software projects are complex, which makes underestimating the task really easy, so to counter act that they double or triple what they think it will take. Which most of the time is way too much but the devs would rather be safe than sorry. Most managers in software development don't know how to code at all. Tthey don't know how long things take, so they just have to take the devs word for it. Also agile (scrum) makes it worse by demanding consistency over productivity. So in agile (scrum) you're suppose to plan out the entire sprint ahead of time, so scrum masters encourage you to overestimate tasks to ensure everything gets done by the end of the sprint. That way the scrum masters can look good in front of their boss by saying "see we got 100% of our tasks done, look how good we are". Meanwhile the team was only working at 50% capacity.

I always loved the whiteboard approach, it let me know what i needed to do without needing to ask and made me feel some sort of agency in what i was doing, instead of showing up and waiting for someone to explain it to me. It felt like i didnt need my hand to be held

I am a more recent software engineer (graduated in 2019, started working professionally in 2020). In this video Tim Cain just described what I've been frustrated about in both of my jobs. Anytime I make a mistake or didn't think about an estimate correctly I'm always up front about the idea I have, how to execute it, and feel very comfortable saying "Yah that bug/mistake is on me". However, if you try to ask 90-95% developers just what their though process was or why something happened it's immediately "We shouldn't be blaming each other, we shouldn't me asking how we're executing, every idea is a good idea". In the industry people are encouraged to avoid accountability and accept the idea of "even if the code is horrible, as long as nobody notices when they're quickly testing it - it's good to go".

Back in 1993, I had a college Professor who would post our grades on the door with our names next to them. Another student whined because he got a C and went into the room and complained about it being posted, not about the grade itself. The Professor said “If you don’t like the grade being posted, don’t earn such an embarrassingly low grade”. Even back then students were beginning to push back on being held accountable for failure.

I’ve worked at 5 large tech companies including EA. I’m sick of how Wall Street and only focusing on extreme profitability impacts and sometimes ruins products. Not just a gaming thing, but the over abundance of “caution” is a symptom of the company not being allowed to take artistic risks. Now the focus is all on the science of monetization and releasing products before they are done to hit Q4 earnings

This is why indie or games made by small teams are what we need. People who loves games do their best to make a great game, people who love money do their best to lie, delay and milk a game. Undertale, Hollow Knight, Minecraft, Omori, Hades and more is better than almost any triple A games I have seen the last few years. Exception most Nintendo games and Persona those are absolutely goated. Mostly because japanese devs seem much more passionate and hardworking.

The problem I find is people spend more time worrying about the idea rather than just doing it to see if it works. Time is the resource here. That is the direct correspondence with money. Being scared to make something out of fear that it might not work, stops you from actually learning if it works. Try it. I once had someone spend over an hour talking about the type of coat to use in a character design. They had not even started on the concept design or even had a mood board. It caused me to take on the mantra of do it and see the results. Doing this does lead to failed ideas. But I know what ideas won't work as a result from it. Experiment, practice, try things out. Being a little bitch does not get you results.

"No-one want's to take accountability anymore" In my experience, this has to do, with people, especially bosses, not being able (or willing) anymore, to differentiate between things someone could have changed and things outside of your grasp. If you take the responsibility to many people feel invited to dump all blame onto you, regardless of whether it's actually your doing or not! In this toxic environment, of course no one will ever step forward an their own accord!

“how can you say that it’s all dogshit if you didn’t eat the entire plate of dogshit” had me in tears

They work in bi-weekly sprints = 80h. 4h sprint planning. 2h hours story point voting 4h backlog refinement 4h sprint review 2h sprint retrospective 10x 30 min = 5h dailys 21h Just for the overhead of the sprint. Many other meetings I ommit here, like team meetings, brainstorming, demos, discussions in delivery metrics, etc... The rest of the time is for unit testing, merge reviews or simply mangling stuff on the Jira board, documentation, etc... There is hardly any time to develop anything.

Starfield getting a 10/10 from journalist was fucking hilarious to see. IGN with their 7 was the most accurate rating for that game, it was fun to read other journalists try to flame them for giving it a 7 instead of an 8-10.

Yes! There has been so many examples of devs saying, this will take too long to fix, make, etc. "You don't know what your talking about" but someone mods the game an does the exact thing they said they couldn't do, seemingly overnight.

Padding estimates is common in any corporate environment, not just in game development. If you admit that you can do a week-long task in an hour, your boss will give you 40 tasks to complete that week. Meanwhile, your incompetent coworker who legitimately needs a week to complete 1 simple task will only get assigned that 1 task to complete. If you both get paid the same, and get the same performance appraisals because corporate doesn't want to give you a raise, why work harder?

Towards the end of the video when he was talking about managers and about having job specific knowledge. I’m very glad someone else is talking about this. In the past the way things kinda worked was those who went to college would become the ‘manager class’ they would be educated about the world and be able to teach themselves things effectively. This is parallel to the military where enlisted members are uneducated while officers are college educated. Essentially, anyone with a college degree could learn the job in an appropriate amount of time and be able to effectively manage it. This is simply not the case anymore ESPECIALLY with technology related jobs. I have personally experienced having a manager that knows absolutely nothing about how to actually do the job of the people they are managing. I have even been told that managers don’t need any experience with what they are managing at all. I’m fully confident that this is the root cause of many work place issues. If a person cannot understand the problem at hand, because they do not know what is involved in resolving it, that person has no place leading the people who do have that knowledge. For a person to be in that position, I would not consider that a manger, I would consider that nothing more than a middle man. Especially in environments where the workers are highly educated like engineering. The engineering manager might not be an engineer themselves and thus will not fully understand the nature of the happenings of their team. If someone is in that position it is their DUTY to try their hardest to learn the job that their subordinates do in an attempt to effectively and efficiently make the decisions for that team of people. This is also why many teams have a “manager” and a technical lead, effectively taking away absolute power, which naturally works better.

As a developer big teams are a nightmare. Especially when junior developers are moved into a team to 'help' and then leave. All they do is break shit and introduce more bugs that need to be fixed.

I’m a dev for one of the largest software companies in the world. And one of the biggest problems in my job has NOTHING to do with developing. It’s the amount of no technical management that feels they can change or delete my work at whim meanwhile putting me in the target at c suite level management for not making certain deadlines. This is not only why development in general is suffering, but why there is very little PASSION left. Hence why the games are sucking.

Tim Cain has the best channel on youtube. The guy is an encyclopedia on game design.

Padding estimates is a cancer. "Say it will take 4 hours, do it 2 and you'll look great!" Nope. Nobody is impressed. They just think you have literally no clue how long anything takes in your chosen career.