I get that point but you can also do short term contracts. As long as the employee is well aware of the length and consents to it I don’t see the down side.
Short term contracts are a surefire way to get bad results. A dev that knows they don’t have to maintain the systems doesn’t have a reason to care about long term sustainability. So you have to have senior devs babysit them instead of writing code. Some seniors are fine with that, others will start interviewing elsewhere when they can’t code.
There’s also the old joke of “it’ll take a month to get done. ok what if we double your manpower? Three months to get done”.
Not to mention the multiple months of on ramp that happens as a dev learns what the codebase actually does.
After a hire I wouldn’t expect them to be meaningfully architecting anything in a codebase for 2 months. Only doing minimal patch fixes, small 1 and 2 point tickets. A contractor would never be trusted with arch and would never graduate off those short tickets.
This is literally a microcosm of the whole issue with gamedev right now. Constant churn of short duration contracts terminating the second the money coming in is below a predetermined threshold. Good on Arrowhead for trying not to be part of the problem.
He mentions looking into contractors which is basically exactly this. Going through a 3rd party can make that process easier for short term needs, which is what he is saying the current situation might be.
It’s a really bad idea to try to hire at this point to try to remedy a scaling issue. They are likely already low on resources dealing with the problems, having to try to onboard someone at this point will make the problem worse - see Brooks’ Law from The Mythical Man-Month.
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caringantithetical to the rules of acquisition.I get that point but you can also do short term contracts. As long as the employee is well aware of the length and consents to it I don’t see the down side.
Short term contracts are a surefire way to get bad results. A dev that knows they don’t have to maintain the systems doesn’t have a reason to care about long term sustainability. So you have to have senior devs babysit them instead of writing code. Some seniors are fine with that, others will start interviewing elsewhere when they can’t code.
There’s also the old joke of “it’ll take a month to get done. ok what if we double your manpower? Three months to get done”.
Not to mention the multiple months of on ramp that happens as a dev learns what the codebase actually does.
After a hire I wouldn’t expect them to be meaningfully architecting anything in a codebase for 2 months. Only doing minimal patch fixes, small 1 and 2 point tickets. A contractor would never be trusted with arch and would never graduate off those short tickets.
It’s fun that most of lemmy are software engineers. Replies from other sites to a comment like this wouldn’t understand
Idk if most are SWEs or not but it’s definitely a crowd that leans technical
Being able to draw talent in.
As a dev myself, a short term contract would have to be pretty favorable for me to consider it.
This is literally a microcosm of the whole issue with gamedev right now. Constant churn of short duration contracts terminating the second the money coming in is below a predetermined threshold. Good on Arrowhead for trying not to be part of the problem.
He mentions looking into contractors which is basically exactly this. Going through a 3rd party can make that process easier for short term needs, which is what he is saying the current situation might be.
And their water sucks too
It’s a really bad idea to try to hire at this point to try to remedy a scaling issue. They are likely already low on resources dealing with the problems, having to try to onboard someone at this point will make the problem worse - see Brooks’ Law from The Mythical Man-Month.