Seems super unfair indeed.
I am not fully sold on the idea of him losing a bonus is 100% because he defended the person who did it.
It would be different if it had flopped or the bug was released and impacted sales significantly
It absolutely is. Timothy brought the company a whole new profitable franchise. Based on that alone it would have been fair to compensate him well. That he was also in the middle of building the sequel under duress made it also the sensible thing to do. Late 90s and 00s games companies were toxic places to work, and getting demoted or fired due to a simple off-by-one error in a memory unsafe language is not reasonable, it’s extreme. But it was still the norm for the unhinged management of these games companies that couldn’t grasp the huge risks involved with games development, and were also unwilling to appropriately budget or compensate their staff for it.
The oddest thing to me is that he claims he heard about this when opening the check. I don't know how I would have reacted to that but it would not be well. Definitely not with enough grace to go home before writing a resignation.
If the Goose needs a few more days to lay the golden egg should you reduce it's food budget?
Seems kind of short sighted to punish your high performers. I can think of multiple times this happened in my career.
> I am not fully sold on the idea of him losing a bonus is 100% because he defended the person who did it.
He seems to say in the video that part of it was not fingering who did the bug and the other was that his boss wanted someone else's bonus to be higher so he removed some of Tim's bonus.
Any experienced programmer knows off-by-one errors are very common. There’s even a joke about it:
> There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
The real fuck up is the common sin of games industry ownership and management that applies unrealistic timelines to AAA games development which, especially in the days of in-house built render engines, were some of the most complicated software engineering endeavours around.
But if they are already doing that (say, they are making a video game and it is their passion), work extra hours, and on top of that get their bonus cut coz of nothing they can reasonably affect, that just kills morale
I don't think anybody lost any bonuses over that decision. Not in the long run. Sure, running late on a project is a Bad Thing, but nobody will remember it if you eventually get a quality product out the door.
Edit: Steam and the Steam Deck!
Is Cain responsible for the quality? Yes. But IMO the boss should have delegated handling of the issue to him instead of retaliating for apparent insubordination.
He could legitimately complain that Cain provided insufficient process and controls to prevent junior devs from making critical errors. But looking for a scapegoat is indicative of bad management.