King’s Quest: The Tale of How an Nvidia Engineer’s Cube Became His Castle (2014) | Hacker News Reader

King’s Quest: The Tale of How an Nvidia Engineer’s Cube Became His Castle (2014)

blogs.nvidia.com

63 pointsbcaulfield16 comments

> Spouses called, first worried, then angry. Yet the work continued:

Somehow I feel like this part is something that shouldn't be celebrated.

Don't get me wrong it's a clever prank(and we had plenty of those at our game studio) but the game industry has enough problems with work-life balance and crunch that it feels tone deaf. I saw enough divorces at my last gig to know this stuff can have a non-trivial impact.

Sounds to me like this is on the Life side of the work-life balance. If they were already in on Saturday doing work for a looming deadline on the other hand....

There's a big difference between spending time on a hobby and spending time that is required by management.

Some people go fishing on the weekend. These people built a castle.

I'm not entirely sure nVidia should be equated to the "game industry" in that regard.

Do you think it was a decision that came from above to build this castle, and it had to be delivered before the next Tuesday otherwise they would be fired?

If not then it is clearly their personal decision, do you presume knowing better than them how they should spend their free time?

I think it's easy to view this that way from the outside, having spent time in this space(on multiple angles both gamedev and HW/OEM):

1. This is still happening "at work", from the outside the optics aren't awesome.

2. This is on an official company blog and not Joe developer's blog/etc. Saying "We pissed off their spouses, but hey wasn't it funny!" doesn't paint your company well.

3. There's a culture of "family-second" in the industry which this is just a natural extension of. Yes, they technically had the "free will" to put their foot down. However once you start exercising that option you get marked as "not a team player" and slow-rolled out the door.

4. A lot of younger engineers(myself included at the time) just don't know better and can be naive when it comes to work-life balance. We should be setting a better example so that the industry becomes less of a meat-grinder. The number of really good engineers I see hemorrhage from that industry is incredible.

I think you're over-reacting. I used to work at a company which did lots of shenanigans like this and -- beleive it or not -- the people with families and outside commitments were never shamed, ostracized, or fired for not contributing.

I look at it the opposite way: the world is chock full of the 9-5, "bring the kids to soccer practice" culture -- so what if there are a handful of companies are full of energetic young people with an excess of free time? If it bothers you that much, don't work there.

I'll freely admit that I have an axe to grind. However, that's because I've seen this all first-hand across a bunch of different companies.

This doesn't sound like young people with free time, this sounds like people with commitments that had a culture where it's okay(and even celebrated) to blow off those commitments.

It's a cultural thing in this industry that does a ton of damage to the engineers who want to sustain a family life and work a job that's deep and interesting. I'm certain I'm not over-reacting though, I've seen it enough times in this space(and even from NVidia reps who came to pitch/visit us) that I know it's an issue that's worth addressing.

"A few weeks later, Jonathon got word. The castle used too much paper. It was a fire hazard. It was impossible to get in and out of easily. “Totally legitimate complaints,” Jonathon adds.

So, the edifice was dismantled."

Nice corporate ending right there.

I particularly liked the description at the end:

> So, [because of fire hazards and other complaints] the edifice was dismantled. Sections of it are still attached to Jonathon’s cube — like the remains of a Norman castle in an English pasture.

> But it was incredibly quiet and peaceful inside, it was like having an office

Hint, hint, nVidia.

This stuff is better on Reddit. Lets keep it there

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Call me absurd, but I'm a hacker. I found this interesting, in the sense that a bunch of other hackers took to planning something amazingly absurd, and that their employer decided to let them do it.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I've never seen this covered on TV news, so, guess it's more to the "On Topic" section.

Yeah, well HN isn't your castle, and you ain't its king.

Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!

Ni!

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