Was your rebooted worldview that you had been factually incorrect (i.e. the senior dev actually did do his work) or was it that you were factually correct, but hierarchy and office culture demanded that everyone pretend you weren't?
One specific incident comes to mind. I was working on Heroes of Newerth, a DotA clone. We achieved a bit of popularity in those days, and we reached around 50k concurrent users. So our servers tended to melt.
One day, the servers went south, and although games were being completed, none of the stats were being recorded. (Think of it like, the database was in read only mode.)
I remember it feeling a little surreal how they decided to handle it. They kept cool, looked into the problem, and got the servers back up within a couple hours. Then they went back to their usual jobs and didn’t seem bothered by the ticking time bomb.
I think in my usual 22yo fashion, I said that it was dumb that no one seemed to care that the servers were going down, and that we had to do better for the players.
What I should have done was ask questions. Should we try to figure out the root cause, and make sure this doesn’t happen again? Or was it really not a big deal?
A few hours’ downtime may or may not have been a big deal. We did end up suffering from some pretty serious server malfunctions which limited our ability to scale. But I certainly mishandled how to approach it, and won no friends.
Every team is dysfunctional in their own way. It’s important to adapt to the dysfunction and push things in a positive direction, not merely to be right.
Instead, I think HoN made some very bad decisions regarding cosmetics and fostered an extremely toxic playerbase. At least for me, those were the 2 main factors that drove me away to play DotA2 (even though I thought HoN's gameplay was superior).
The moment icefrog and valve dropped their $1M tournament prize pool, the company in hindsight was doomed. But it took a couple years to sink.
Players follow pros, and if the pros are playing DotA, they’ll switch to DotA. Our only chance was to keep the pros. It would have been smart to make an exclusive contact with as many pros as possible. But of course, that’s with hindsight.
The rise of twitch happened to coincide with the rise of pro DotA, which I think was a factor in shifting popularity.
> drove me away to play DotA2
How toxic is the HoN playerbase if DotA2 is an improvement? I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed my games as much as in DotA2.
* the existence of behaviour score together with a functional report system, which I don't think was a thing in HoN. I'm at 10k behaviour score (max) and there are generally no game ruining griefers. Some people do trash talk sometimes, but nothing too obscene.
* HoN cosmetics actively encouraged players to BM one anther. e.g. the Dumpster Taunt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4j4U7K6mc If you die while taunted you have a dumpster thrown on you and the global announcer tells you to get "dumpstered". Taunting a player right when they die (which is a strongly negative emotional moment) is a great way to tilt them and, in turn, make them grief, com abuse or generally bm. That negatively affects the rest of the players and the cycle goes on.
* A bunch of players in the HoN pro scene had really bad manners, e.g. Moonmeander was notorious for his trash talking, taunting and general BM. He actually significantly toned it down when he moved over to DotA - unclear if that was because he grew up or because the DotA pro scene is a different environment. Regardless, the behaviour of pro players sets the tone for how the community at large behaves, and the DotA pro scene is much nicer. (incidentally, this is why I believe pro players should be held at much higher standards of manners than the rest of the player base. Stuff like saying glhf, gg and generally not acting dickish should be mandatory)
Thanks for the nostalgia hit!
Broadly, maybe. At work, I don't care about being liked by people that can't admit they are wrong.
That doesn't being a dick to anyone I think is wrong. The whole point of telling someone that they're wrong is to correct course and fix things, and bullheaded, righteous, approaches never accomplish that.
But it does mean you don't keep quite. You don't give up. You ask questions, you try to learn. Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one.
I understand being unwilling to bulge to people that come in thinking they know better about everything. But I do not accept not even listening to someone that disagrees, that's a red flag,and I am out asap.
Why do you presume all outcomes of your eggregious interactions is placing blame on others?
It seems you are totally oblivious to some of the most basic principles of working in a professional environment: if you antagonize and attack your team members, you are not trusted to help out and have their backs. This means you are not an asset but a liability. Working close to you is making them vulnerable to being stabbed in the back by you at the slightest issue. And that's why you are not liked, even if/when you are right.
All the people can be right, but that doesn't justify you insisting on pissing on everyone else's cereals.
I 100% agree that if you tell people they are wrong aggressively and arrogantly, that will backfire, and they are probably justified in ignoring your correction.
But some people, and particularly some organizations, seem incapable of accepting even the most thoughtful correction, and that's the kind of place/people I'd rather keep a distance.
Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one.
Not only are there better ways to let people know they're wrong when you're 100% right, but in your example you aren't even sure you're 100% right, yet telling others they're wrong.
Good luck with that :)
"Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one."
So, yeah, I don't see a conflict on thinking something is wrong, pointing it out, and arguing for change, and at the same time be open to be convinced that it wasn't, in fact, wrong.
Saying that something is wrong doesn't imply (at least for me) that you're 100% sure that it's wrong.
English is my second language, so, I might be missing some nuance.
Telling someone they are wrong, means you know for a fact that they are wrong.
It does not mean you think they may be wrong.
It is binary.
You do not tell someone they are wrong if they may in fact not be wrong.
What a novice usually does not realize is:
It is easy to be right. What is hard is being actually helpful, coming up with a viable solution (vs. an idea).
In the posted article there simply was no such solution. It was not viable. Unacceptable.
Yes, an outsider with fresh eyes might see things differently and without bias, but most certainly the experienced team knows damn right that you're right (to some degree), but also knows that it's just not that easy.
Throwing "We are doing this all wrong" around is often just short of saying: "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!".
I'm not saying that fresh input can't be helpful, outsiders might bring in new tricks and ways, but being humble is way more helpful than being loud.
> "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!".
It's easier to be wrong.
In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs.
They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues.
They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project.
> It was not viable. Unacceptable.
The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took.
Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice.
But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.
And it is cinsiderably harder to be actually helpful.
While everything you said is true, we and the author do not know what was previously discussed with the client. We don't know what was promised by either party, we don't know what the client messed up
Heck, I attended meetings with partners/clients that were simply impossible to get an output from, since the expectations in general were on completely different sides of the book.
But you air this out, realize that everyone agrees, most people resignate, and really helpful is this one guy, that offers to invest effort and time to work closely with a well chosen peer from the other side to get them on your side and finally work on the interesting things.
This is helpful. And it is hard.
That isn't the case, has never been the case and will never be the case.
There could be dozens of other reasons beyond just these two...
The single most common fault that I see is perspective. Individual sections have limited context or visibility of the whole picture to assess the importance of their section's dysfunction. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- in a highly-fluid environment, it's often important for sections to achieve their own objectives without N^2 comms overhead (e.g. military command & control). Firefighting provides a useful analogy. One section's 4-alarm fire might actually be a 1-alarm or 2-alarm fire for the broader organization -- which means that other sections might get top exec billing.
For example: If this $60M contract was at Boeing during the last few years, it will rightfully be deemphasized while executives deal with the existential threat of 737 Max matters.