From Jason Schreier. “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’,” but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that they can continue to get work done.
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As someone who works in corporate America this is 10000% true. Giant corporations are hugely bloated, inefficient, slow, and stupid. I honestly can’t believe they are somehow the best way to do things in groups of people. I have never had less work to do than working in a huge corporation.
It’s no surprise that indie games can compete with them. Working in startups compared to huge corporations, I did more code and we got more done in shorter amounts of time vs big corps. There’s no red tape, there’s no committees or directors or people you have to please. There’s no political games, you just do your work. As simple as that. You come in, you code for 7-8 hours, you push your feature, and you go home.
In a megacorp you come in, you get 5 minutes for coffee before 3 people are pinging you on slack for some stupid downstream thing they didn’t read the manual on or was never documented, and then you have 5 hours of meetings, lunch, 2 hours of ad hoc meetings, and then Shirley has to swing by to ask you to take another HR training. So you get maybe 20 minutes of coding done in a day.
For you engineers who have never coded in a megacorp - As an example, most megacorps have an ID service (usually named after a comic book character). This is usually a real service deployed somewhere that nobody maintains anymore, but it’s where you get your… IDs from. Really wrap your head around that. It’s a microservice who is in charge of returning
Guid.NewGuid()
. Then they get pulled into meetings because the ID service doesn’t support this or that, they never thought of this case or that case, how can we upgrade off the old ID service to the new one. In a startup, you’re callingGuid.NewGuid()
The main issue corporations run into that cause this bloat is a situation like the following: Project A needs 500 people to meet schedule and workload. Project B begins spinning up and will need the same 500 at it’s peak. Project A ends and the workload is really only for 200 people on Project B. Do you lay off Project A folks you know you will need in a year? No, that’s a waste of all the talent/training/know how that was built. So you bloat and carry them until you actually need them. Still have to pay them though
Libertarian mythology
Clarification: right wing libertarian
Fair enough