It's hard to know the exact situation the author was in, but it certainly seems like there would have been a quicker fix than what he proposed. He never says the game wasn't fixed before it was shipped (and he probably wouldn't know if it was), he just states that it still shipped.

Because you only get his side of the story, you don't know if the reason he was fired was because the other devs knew it wouldn't take that long to fix, or because he had some negative history with the company.

I'm not writing the guy off here. It just pays to be wary with stories like this that end with "and then i was fired", because the outcome and tone of the story automatically makes the reader feel that there is some sort of residual bitterness that has shaped the author's view negatively.

But I suppose if you get fired you have every right to be bitter about it too.

If your answer to a bug like this, a week from the deadline, is that the only way to fix it is to rewrite the entire file structure instead of putting in a workaround... you probably deserve to be fired. I do wonder if they had someone else code up a workaround before shipping though.

agreed. saying it'd take a few months to fix a save problem? hard for me to believe. maybe it is true but it's difficult to imagine.