Epic Games is making hundreds of temp testers into full employees with benefits
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
I don't really feel like giving a giant corporation making piles of cash a cookie for being slightly less shitty.
They treated contractors as second class citizens, being physically segregated, sketchy overtime arrangements, verbal abuse...
And this was, 3? 4? years ago now so it'd be too late for a lot of people who suffered.
And it's not like Epic just got the funds to do this either. So sounds like they might be bleeding the people they treated like undesirables.
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Of course this is the internet and someone will likely reply this is false and Epic is actually wonderful.
And I won't say they're lying, but this was from first party retellings of conditions immediately after leaving the place so...
I just figured Fortnite ran the nightly build of UE5 and is used as Epic’s integration test fleet lol.
More seriously, I’m very glad to see more responsible labor practices from a company. Hope it creates a trend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Random person, someone I didn't otherwise know before sharing a house with them.
Is it that confusing or hard to believe?
If the term has been normalized to some more benign interpretation, perhaps I'm just getting old. Apologies if so.
I'm also not particularly concerned with being obsessively PC in everything I say or write.
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 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.
Not that there isn't lot of work to run store and related services also at Epic Games.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't believe that for one second.
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 is a pretty cool company. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Source: I actually do know Epic engineers, my game is published by them.
The ones I know who are still there got a pay raise when starting, not a pay cut.
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.
GPUs are the next big thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry
The entire music industry is $23 billion a year and declining
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272305/global-revenue-of...
Honestly, you sound like every bad pitch deck from startups.
The $x industry is $y billion big. If we only get 10%…
Your own source says $136 billion for the industry, $42.2 billion is just global box office.
How many of those are going to need any type of special effects?
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?
That's not a shrinking industry.
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.
A virtual camera would do this automatically and let you adjust pacing, placement, and more all with knobs.
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.