It's so bizarre to read a positive article about a gaming company that I had to re-read it just to make sure I wasn't missing some lurking terrible part.
From what it says here they'll still use contract work for short term things, but most of these contractors who have functionally already been working full-time will now officially be full-time employees. That's really cool imo.
Maybe it's different in the USA, but in the UK all software contractors (including testers) have no interest in going perm. They make more money, avoid bullshit like yearly reviews and objectives and seem to prefer it.
My guess is that they were required to do it by the IRS or a state dept of revenue breathing down their necks over abusing independent contractor status, but even if that's not the case...
I don't really feel like giving a giant corporation making piles of cash a cookie for being slightly less shitty.
I know this wasn't really your topic, but you've stumbled upon a pet peeve of mine: Dedicated testers aren't primarily to blame for bugs, nor are they primarily to be credited for bug-free software. For one, everybody should test, not just dedicated testers. And two, buggy-ness is primarily a function of design and implementation. Testers can improve the product, but if the product is fundamentally buggy there's no amount of after-the-fact testing that will fix that.
(disclaimer, ive worked on fortnite as an engineer) 100% this. There would much to say as to why this is the case on fortnite but Ill just say this: fortnite is so big that the development methodology and patterns used shows their limits. One of them being that the game design team decide the features and the engineers code. Instead the two deps should be collaborating to ellaborate solution that are both simple in terms of engineering and relevant for the customers. The best example of that is world of warcraft. Wow is extremely efficient in terms of engineering and yet super fun. What Im saying is that sometimes the engineering dep should prevent a feature from being coded, at least the way the designers see it. Or you end up with a pile of crappy code. I would even go further: the engineers should say first what is possible and whats not. Think ID software: Carmack decides whats running and then the designer try to make a game with that. Add collaboration to this core idea and you get WoW (disclaimer I have not worked on WoW but ID software touch is definitely there impersonated by John Cash).
On the flip side, some of the new ID games are nowhere _near_ as popular as the ones from Epic games, and WOW wound up dying by its own hand, to some extent.
The more time I spend working on startups and less at BigCos, the more I value the non-technical train of thought - unburdened by the implementation details. Sometimes those people are needed to push the envelope. Clearly, Fortnite is doing something right. At any rate, it's not a coincidence that most great companies have someone at the head that _mostly_ knows what's entailed by the dreams, but proceeds to dream nonetheless.
Yeah, ultimately how good the code is (or even how buggy the resulting product) is just a side-effect and not the main goal. Fortnite is making so much money that having to spend 2x as much on engineering because the code is a mess is business wise just not that big of a deal.
Somewhat (obviously to within reason) decoupling design decision from what would be easy/convenient for the developers to implement is often the right thing to do from a business point of view.
I mostly agree with this, though I will say that in games it's usually producers and product managers that decide on the bug fix vs new features balance. It's not uncommon to ship a game with hundreds of "known shippable" bugs.
Yeah, you're right. But you'll notice there are some studios that never seem to achieve a bug-free state no matter how many patches they put out. And that's after months or years of free testing from the public. Testers fill up backlogs with bugs the same way the public fills up the Issues lists in GitHub. It doesn't matter how well you test and report if you don't have good enough development practices to fix them and keep them fixed.
I don't think you can generally claim that testers aren't to blame for bugs, nor that should they be credited for bug-free software.
Obviously dedicated testers can't fix bugs themselves, so cannot be to solely to blame for bugs. Similarly, it's possible to write bug-free software without a dedicated tester, so testers can't receive full credit for bug-free software.
However, a testers job is not to play a game haphazardly. Rather, the job of a tester is to develop a methodical way testing software that is under rapid development. This can mean creating test plans, understanding the most important user flows, understanding common failure scenarios, and even light automation. Games are hugely complex pieces of software. This large breadth means that the test workload is too big for the engineering team. Also, the systems underpinning a game are usually very tightly coupled, meaning that changes in one system can break things in a completely unrelated system. Having good testers is an integral part of delivering a bug-free experience in this type environment.
Considering the complexity of Fortnite and the rate it gets content updates, it really isn’t very buggy at all, certainly not more so than other similar games (ex. I play a lot of Overwatch and despite the game not changing in two years it still has bugs showing up constantly)
Not only that, Fortnite has full cross platform support for PC, PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Series S/X, some Android phones/tablets, Nintendo Switch, and of course iOS and iPadOS when Apple and Epic weren't fighting. Fortnite definitley has a stigma around it for the younger demographic and toxicity, but from an engineering perspective it's pretty amazing.
I've played thousands of hours of Fortnite. It's not a buggy game. It's a game and it has bugs. It is still one of the most well designed and performant FPS games I've played.
I don't really play it now more because it takes too much effort to be good at it and my friends no longer play. But it's still quite fun whenever I jump on for a bit.
> More seriously, I’m very glad to see more responsible labor practices from a company. Hope it creates a trend.
From across the pons that seems like a weird sentiment. Wouldn't it be better to have responsible labour practices enforced by regulation instead of hoping other companies sacrifice some profits to be nicer to their employees? Which is, of course, highly unlikely.
Fortnite is really not a buggy game to me. I rarely encounter any game breaking bugs. I'm sure people find a lot online but that's the nature of a game that popular
Around a decade ago I briefly shared a house in San Mateo with some rando who was a tester for EA. Many of the conversations we had were surrounding his contract ending and employment uncertainty. Especially in an expensive region like the SF Bay Area, it just seemed like an unnecessarily abusive relationship. He was constantly under a cloud of doubt about having a job next quarter, despite working for a well established large employer.
I read that as a very disrespectful and/or dismissive way to refer to someone. My context is first learning it as a term used to refer to strangers popping up out of nowhere replying to twitter posts or similar, to whose contribution you ascribe no value.
If the term has been normalized to some more benign interpretation, perhaps I'm just getting old. Apologies if so.
For what it's worth, I first heard the term many years ago used to refer to either a one night stand ("picked up a rando") or a previously unfamiliar housemate ("rented a place with a rando from Craigslist"). It certainly is dismissive in the sense that it communicates "this person was of no special importance to me", but sometimes that's an appropriate thing to communicate.
It's not so much meant as disrespectful as used to communicate "a stranger to me". I literally couldn't tell you anything more significant about this person than the EA stuff, it's a rando from a CL house share situation. So maybe the anecdata should be taken with an especially large grain of salt.
I'm also not particularly concerned with being obsessively PC in everything I say or write.
The article (and Epic) don’t seem to answer the basic question of what changed that made them take this step. It alludes to a difficult labor market, so I’m guessing that’s the reason but it’s not clearly stated why the company decided to make this change now and what criteria it used for making these offers.
I’ve been waiting for years for companies to figure out that internal promotion yields huge benefits over outside hiring.
If you promote a temp to a full-time, it’s going to be successful 99% of the time because you already know the work ethic of the employee. Better yet, you get to skimp on training. If you hire someone from the outside, the chance is much lower that you’ll get a solid hire.
What I’m saying isn’t new - companies promote from within all the time. What I’m advocating for is to codify the practice - only hire your software devs from your QA testers. Not only does putting that pipeline in place ensure better devs but you also make the QA job more attractive as a reliable stepping stone. I’ve seen this suggestion swatted down at multiple companies.
I don’t think your idea would work. Most QA testers can’t become software developers. It’s not the same job. Some can but most can’t - they would already be software developers if they could as the pay is nicer. You would need significant training for it to work and even then it would prevent you for hiring more experienced talents as needed from the software developers pool.
I’m not sure this is true - I moved from test to dev and then back to test. I definitely earn more money than I did as a dev and honestly from an engineering perspective I find it’s more interesting. While a developer might focus on web or desktop or embedded or games, I’m a developer that focuses on testing. Maybe you’re right for a subset of manual testers but I like to think there are very capable developers working in the QA realm.
That's true in the software industry in general but games industry QA is very much different from that. The bulk of games industry QA is largely untrained, non-technical personnel manually executing test cases written by others and therefore wages are low and they are treated as completely fungible. (I'm not defending it, just describing it.) The article mentions hundreds of testers, so it's far more likely they're that type of tester rather than SDETs.
Hiring all your devs from testers? Generally dev requires a comp sci background, tester doesn’t.
I won’t claim every developer needs a 4 year comp sci degree, but I would be worried on a project with 0 degree holders. At some point someone has to like pick a data structure or interface with like hardware.
I've got a family member who's worked in the industry and now runs a studio. If I started talking to him about self balancing trees or algorithms for handling hash collisions he would look at me funny. Hasn't stopped him from shipping big budget titles. Despite having a CS degree I would likely struggle (a lot!) doing the kind of work he does. His background is in modding, 3D modeling packages and scripting which is rather typical in the industry.
We are far past self-learned experts in the field. Ofc, there is always a handful, but for making big commercial comp. sci. intensive product I would prefer graduates myself. Let's not forget Epic's main product is an game engine. Which is in upper echelons of product complexity.
Not that there isn't lot of work to run store and related services also at Epic Games.
Most testers at the companies I’ve been at have had dormant CS degrees. They don’t bother keeping their CS skills up because there’s no chance for them to be promoted.
Nevertheless, they often know the product extremely well and work hard. If there was a known pipeline for them to follow, I’m certain they’d follow it.
Your story doesn’t add up. Since a CS degree isn’t a pre-requisite to be a tester, and a CS degree goes a good way toward qualifying for a better paid software development job, why are your companies predominantly hiring testers with CS degrees? Why did the testers get the degrees just to let them go “dormant”?
I've never been involved in the game industry but it sounds believable to me. It's not a given that having a CS degree means a person can code, which is one of the reasons we code test in interviews. And I imagine the game industry requires higher coding ability. There are also people that want to be in the game industry no matter what. They would rather be a tester in games than a programmer outside it.
Having worked with a few people that went from testing->upgraded to dev.. there are some large gaps in software composition, design, and stances. It's not imposible to go from testing to dev.. but it really depends on the person's effort into doing so.
That's ridiculous. In most game companies the bulk of testing is manual testing which is an unskilled repetitive job that has more in common with data entry than programming. You would get better results by only hiring devs from say visual artists.
How would that work as a broad industry practice though? If a dev wants to change companies, they would have to start all over as a QA somewhere else? Most people would rather find another industry their skillset is compatible with than do that.
First part yes, second hell no. I haven't met testers in past 16 years with deeper dev knowledge (because they would be already doing that, usually better paid and more creative), business knowledge alone isn't gonna cut it. Unless testers are actually coding unit & integration tests in same language and platform (again, never saw or even heard about that, normally devs did those).
Another thing is that if you go external -> itnernal, you save time and money on whole hiring process. That's quite a bit of valuable time of senior people, and at least in corporate sphere easily 6 month salary of the hire that would go to agency.
QA is an entirely different job from development, and does not use the same skill sets. what is needed is for good QA people to be paid and respected on par with devs, not for it to be viewed as a low tier job where you can get "promoted" to development.
promotion for a tester should ideally be to senior QA engineer, with more autonomy to come up with effective test plans, designing and implementing automated tests, being a team lead for more junior testers, etc .
Contract arrangements are ideal when there is an infinite pool of fungible labor to use. You can even imagine reducing the term of contract to be advantageous when labor gets cheaper.
On the flip side if workers have many competing options and labor is limited, you will need to pay a premium to get workers in the door on a short term contract. More likely, you’ll find that most high quality workers were already taken off the market by career track positions.
Testers are an interesting bunch within the game development industry. Large studios will typically hire hundreds of these for short periods, often bringing on entire smaller studios to smooth out the wrinkles in the games during crunch period.
It's likely that this isn't strictly a financially winning move for epic. Way too much cost having them around for periods of low testing needs. Reputational gains could possibly offset it.
Testing used to be part of the process of a publisher. If they have more testing staff than they need, they could use some people to test games that they're publishing. Maybe to improve quality of games on their store as a way to entice people to buy things from their store (although, presumably issues that are found in this way would be fixed everywhere if the developer fixes them), or maybe as a way to entice people to publish with them.
I work in technical IT, and regularly develop or write unit tests, but I don’t have any formalised training in functional testing short of common sense. I believe having some form of more formalised training as a functional tester would make me better at my current job. Can anyone recommend any books or video training courses that go from zero to functioning functional tester?
There's plenty of training available because there are plenty of people trying to make money selling it, but I can't think of a single one I'd recommend. If the "good" training is out there I certainly haven't seen it. Part of the problem is the inconsistent role of the tester. In some organizations testers are there to ensure the requirements are fulfilled. In others they are truffle pigs for bugs. Some testers are expected to keep their testing black-boxed and high-level, while other testers are expected to help troubleshoot the bugs, the environments, and the CI pipelines.
My advice to you (as a developer, I presume) is to stop relying on others for testing. Pretend they don't exist. With every commit you make you should assume it's heading straight to the production environment. So you need to have confidence not only in your unit of code, but also in the behavior of the system as a whole before you submit your pull request. I am a tester, not a developer, but from my perspective TDD is the way a developer should go. The highest-quality products I work on are the ones where my testing is the least needed. If I'm bored that's usually a good thing.
Thanks for that input, mostly I’m the sole developer / tester, I’m also a penetration tester by trade (which loosely follows a methodology, but I’ve always found granular checklists to be an antipattern resulting in poor quality engagements). What I’m curious about is if there are workflows or components of workflows I can steal from functional testers.
The war over traditionally maligned and abused video game engineers, artists, and ancillary staff (testing, community leads, etc.) is about to begin.
Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work. They're gunning at a $100B+ valuation, and they've got a multi-trillion dollar market to capture. It helps that they own one of the biggest rendering technologies and have turned it into an entire career and marketplace. They have huge mindshare across a half dozen industries.
The last two technological waves were Internet and Smartphones. The next one is GPUs and all of the things unlocked by them: deep learning, rendering, spatial computing, etc.
Longbets: Epic surpasses Google's valuation one day. We're in the early stages of a brand new surge of innovation and investment. Imagine the browser being leapfrogged - that's where Tim Sweeny's head is.
It’s fascinating to me that they keep overlooking and/or downright abusing their contributors on their answer hub / forums (in the form of routinely wiping content in a knowledge base that’s been built up for years).
PDAs existed before smart phones. There's an inflection point, and it's happening now.
GPU-powered applications are going to eat Hollywood, music production, literally every form of entertainment. Everything a person watches or listens to. Kids will be making their own Star Wars films from their bedrooms. Every creative industry will be upended.
I don't like the term "metaverse", but there are a number of spatial computing trends that are undeniably evolving at a rapid clip. Volumetrics, photogrammetry, 3D SLAM warehousing. Pose correction, relighting -- photography, telepresence, video games -- everything is going to change.
And it goes without saying that deep learning is only getting started.
When the inefficiencies go away, the field will enlarge dramatically.
Every kid wants to be a YouTuber. What happens when you give them tools better than Spielberg has and can compress quadratic time manual labor (writing, editing, set dec, etc.) into nothing?
Editing movies is not easy. It's a quadratic time expenditure.
High end phones still use glass and light. This requires a lot of setup from the user to get right, despite the advancement in computer vision and enhancement algorithms.
The former is fixed by making the edit part of the act of capture. Inverting the production pipeline. The latter is fixed by capturing a lot more than just photons. Actually, there are a lot of techniques that will help.
We're getting off into the weeds. Let's reconvene in ten years and see what happened to the movie business.
I'm just glad we're finally debating about a subject I like rather than Apple for once.
How is it a quadratic time expenditure? You’ve been able to edit video like you would text for a decade. An M1 Mac Mini handles 4K video well. A higher end M1 Mac Pro
From everything I have read, filmmakers are giving rave reviews about the editing prowess of high end Intel Mac Pros and they are looking forward to the Arm High end Macs.
But is this “anyone can be a film editor” the next “anyone can code”?
While I can code with the best of them, new more powerful computers aren’t going to make just everyone a film editor (including me) anymore than the low code solutions made it so anyone can code.
Many companies will surpass Google's current valuation due to inflation. However, I don't see how Epic could replace Google as the third most valuable tech company. For one, Tencent owns almost half of the company.
> Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work.
Ironically, every engineer I know would drop a $150,000/yr Epic contract to work for half the salary at Valve. You're right, though: the war is about to begin, and it's going to be very entertaining from an outsiders perspective.
Do you even know a single Epic Engineer? Every Epic engineer I work with has been at the company for ages. They have some of the highest retention in the industry.
Source: I actually do know Epic engineers, my game is published by them.
I've known probably at least a dozen Valve employees and most of them quit to work somewhere else. The studio's culture problems create a real emotional toll on staff and are also somewhat evident in their production and release schedules.
The ones I know who are still there got a pay raise when starting, not a pay cut.
I doubt that a person would have to drop to 75000$ to work at valve, i would imagine they can compete given how comically different their income streams are.
Whether they would actually need to take a comp hit is irrelevant to the hyperbolic claim that a random engineer hypothetically would prefer to switch to valve in exchange for a comp hit.
I think this an interesting thing, where I think if you have the skill and savings to work in games, nobody is going to choose Epic which have provided little in value overall as far as actual useful consumer things go outside of free games, that steam has had for a long time (steam controller system, quality online save sync and mulitplayer, proton????, etc) over either an indie studio or a place like valve where (from my personal perspective) it seems like real innovation is happening -- between things like the steam deck and it being not only a really intersting powerful and open device but it also being repairable, to it also running linux and also things like their vr headsets where they at this point set the standard for a real premium experience, even occulous with all of Facebook's money hasn't created an experiencing that comes close to how amazing half life alyx is.
I hope valve succeeds in all their endevours because while I can only assume their efforts are not altruistic, they have improved so much of the linux ecosystem for what so far has only been at their own expense.
Valve might not be “altruistic”, but they don’t seem particularly financially driven either. GabeN has more money than he could possibly want, and now he mainly seems to want to make cool stuff with lots of other people who want to make cool stuff.
From what it says here they'll still use contract work for short term things, but most of these contractors who have functionally already been working full-time will now officially be full-time employees. That's really cool imo.