Comment by fancythat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fancythat | Hacker News Reader

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Look no futher than this: https://archive.is/NCWmz (Wolfenstein 3d iPhone development By John Carmack, Technical Director, Id Software)

To be exact: "The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.

Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. Cass Everitt had been doing some personal work on the iPhone, so he helped me get everything set up for local iPhone development here, which is a lot more tortuous than you would expect from an Apple product. As usual, my off the cuff estimate of "Two days!" was optimistic, but I did get it done in four, and the game is definitely more pleasant at 8x the frame rate.

And I had fun doing it."

Not doubting his greatness, but It's definitely a lot easier to be motivated to work harder and faster when it's your own idea/project. I assume for the team of developers it was just another project their employers were asking them to work on, with all the expected nonsense (rituals) that come with it, and so why would they want to bust a gut / work 20 hour days / care more than they are being paid to care, to get it done in 4 days.

I agree with you, but judging by the whole article the main thing here was probably the same old story with outsourcing company either wanting to bill extraordinary amount of hours or employing novice to medium developers for the project but charging full senior price for them.

I guess that for most of the guys, if they had opportunity to work on something with Carmack or Id Software in those days, it would be a priority to show yourself in best light and even work for free or heavily discounted price if needed to secure future deals. Especially since all source code was provided and basically the whole thing was just somewhat simple porting engagement.

Two months of weekdays is about 40 days, so they would have be 80 hour days. (Although we also forgot to multiply by the number of people on the team...)

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