I Freelanced On Halo 4. It's Time For Gaming's Contractors To Strike
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This sounds like a typical story of poor management in any industry: Lack of communication, failure to follow through on performance review policy, hostile work environment, inability to recognize and allocate talent, etc. Then again, we're relying entirely on this guy's self-assessment for that last part. This bit in particular set off some alarm bells for me:
> I took the job by the horns and ran with it. I did everything I could to stand out. I asked a ton of questions about code, the debug, the game modes, everything. I talked to all the producers and developers and level designers I could to ensure we were on the same page and also so they would know my name.
Despite his good intentions, he might have inadvertently gone too far and turned himself into "that guy". You know, the one who people see coming from a mile away and think "Shit, here he comes to bug me with a million pointless questions again." Ambition is a good thing, but sometimes they just want you to do the job they hired you for and stop distracting other employees, and those other employees only have so much patience for the new guy who keeps asking questions.
I have a friend who was a game tester. It's not just a kid's job. If you ever see someone who is good at being a game tester do his thing, you will find out that they are very skilled and many have a wealth of experience in terms of where to look for bugs.
EDIT: Now my friend has moved out of the game industry and into corporate life. The pay is better and the job is more secure.
I'm sure testing games is far more demanding and tedious than kids imagine it to be.
You might want to rephrase this then, your original wording comes off in a condescending "playing games? for money? he should be glad to have a job!" sort of tone to me.
Everything is more demanding and tedious than kids imagine it to be. :-)
Don't get me wrong, I wanted to blame the victim too, especially when he said "I stopped going in, and would show up whenever", but whatever this guy did, the point is that "they will work you to death and they will promise you potential, but it is for nothing."
Organizing is probably a good idea, there are already freelancer unions out there. But is that going to fix temps not being treated like employees who have been there for years, or make them more likely to be hired on?
I'm not saying we shouldn't all work together to make a better workplace for workers of all stripes. But this guy just doesn't seem to have much to complain about.
Things like the Freelancer's Union are really about getting group benefits.
Part of being a freelancer or contractor is that you already have all the power
This is a joke, right? How much power does a single independent contractor have by themselves over (say) Electronic Arts? Especially when they have no other clients to fall back on should EA tell them to go pound sand?
Ill point this post out to one of the people I know in BECTU not sure if anyone has got the Games industry on its Organizing list
I don't see what was wrong with what happened. In the beginning it was fun. Then there was pressure to get the game out so the mood changed a little. He got demotivated and quit. Perhaps I missed something.
That's what contracting is.
They asked for lots of hours, which is fine. They paid for them. They asked for some weekends, which is fine. As long as they pay for them, which they did. And as long as the contractor agreed to work them, which he did.
In short, it sounds like a completely amicable gig. Except for the part where the author is upset about it. He doesn't really explain what he thinks the company did wrong.
I can see lots of places where he did himself a dis-service. Agreeing to work in the software industry for $11/hr is one place, as is agreeing to work hours he would have preferred not to, as is misunderstanding the relationship and expecting mentoring, recognition, training, promotion, etc. But none of that is the company's fault.
You hear a lot of horror stories from the gaming industry. This doesn't seem to be one of them.
But at 32 I never ever would have taken a job for $11 an hour. If he was paid $40 an hour, would he have been happier in the end?
And his feeling if isolation as a contractor rather than an employee, especially in a department full of contractors, is his own damn fault. I've never had a contract position that felt isolated for long. But then, I don't ever treat anyone differently than respected coworkers, so they quickly learn to treat me nicely, too.
"I talked to all the producers and developers and level designers I could to ensure... they would know my name." People see that shit coming from a mile away. He got pegged as a slimeball early, that's why he didn't make any progress.
"Once, I worked an entire weekend on a voluntary basis." As a contractor, this is the surest way to lose everyone's respect.
The article title is just inviting the Prisoner's Dilemma. Ain't going to happen. For every shmoe who calls for a strike, there's another shmoe ready to fill his spot. Games won't get better until they stop being made by-and-for petulant children, be they 13 or 30.
1) IMDB credits are not all equal. If OP received credits for major television shows (which it sounds like), it's obviously different than you make a movie yourself.
2) You view pretty standard networking practices as him being a "slimeball". You have no idea if that's how they interpreted his behavior. More likely, they thought he was friendly, outgoing, and ambitious.
3) The Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't entirely apply here, unless you know exactly what the talent pool looks like and where incentives are at. There are tons of hopeful actors who would probably scab work without SAG membership, but the studios will still be plucking from the SAG pool.
Flip side, working for free on an hourly job is...baffling. The arrangement is: you work an hour, they pay you for an hour. You start working more than they want to pay you for, they get concerned that you're going to bill them for it. If they're willing to pay for whatever you can put in, they get concerned that you're not being compensated - nay, refusing compensation - when you should be. Was the time he spent really something they wanted him to do?
If you are employed by a temp agency, I don't think there is much progress to be made. The company needed a QA, temp agency forwarded the resume, there was a match, and that's that. There is no defined career path. I believe anyone who does contracting knows that. There might be a small carrot about full time hiring, but it happens very rarely. If the company hires all of its contractors, what will be the point of having contractors in the first place. Besides some temp agencies have no-hire contracts with their clients.
> "Once, I worked an entire weekend on a voluntary basis." As a contractor, this is the surest way to lose everyone's respect.
Contractor or not, working weekends is appreciated either when it's actually needed or you are a recognized workaholic who connects from home a lot(nothing out of ordinary when you work over the weekend). If you are doing it so that you get a better review, you are bumped up the promotion ladder, you are hired full time...it's going to be frowned upon, and rightfully so.
Side note: This "Once I worked a weekend" irks me more than it should. I can only imagine the reactions he will get from game devs who are notorious for their inhumane schedule when he mentions "once" he worked over the weekend.
full source article: http://kotaku.com/i-freelanced-on-halo-4-its-time-for-gaming...
This is also why banning by domain is crap.
He gave up a viable career in music because of one failure. Lacking more productive alternatives, he took on play-testing games. Lacking any inherent forward momentum, not standing out in an abundance of similar applicants, he quit that too.
Supply-and-demand rules. There's a lot of kids wanting to get paid to play games. There's probably a bunch like him, older looking-for-something-anything types overqualified but willing. There wasn't an apparent upward-mobility path, and while he may have been better than average he didn't sound outstanding in a room full of easy-come-easy-go high-turnover types. With so many applicants for a short-learning-curve job, the company has little incentive to keep 'em happy.
Don't mean to bash the guy. He, and his situation, are not horrible - and not outstanding. Work is work, some jobs have a certain degree & type of suck, do it or move on ... he moved on.
What's to strike about? $11/hr to play games? Industry won't pay more because there's plenty willing to work for that pay. Crappy conditions/treatment? High-turnover positions in a high-stakes industry tend to. You're doing a low-training task (playing games) in a rather safe & comfortable environment, paid a decent wage considering the job, and have otherwise little stake in the project; it's not like you risk falling into a sausage grinder or have your life savings tied up in the product's success. Strike? You don't show up, somebody else will be happy to take your seat.
* The gaming industry has far more people that want to work in it than there is need for. This gives the employer a LOT of leverage.
* The type of Quality Assurance that this individual speaks about is not a position that could be considered "highly skilled". Though there are QA positions that require a higher level of expertise and knowledge, the people doing regression testing on a game are not them. Because of this, there is a mentality within the industry that "if you won't do the job, it will be trivial to find someone else that can".
* This type of QA the writer speaks of tends to have a productivity curve that is concave. The difference between a really great QA tester and an okay QA tester is probably less than 2x. The type of management style described in this article tends to be pervasive in professions with the aforementioned productivity curve.
On a personal level, I do feel for the individual. That being said, the best solution to his problem is to gain a skill set that gives him more leverage in the work force, and get out of low skilled quality assurance testing.
I suspect that's a self fulfilling prophecy there.
> The difference between a really great QA tester and an okay QA tester is probably less than 2x.
If you're going to treat people like QA people like they're low skilled, and that they really make no difference as people, then you're going to get wind up with people like that. QA can be more than just kitty on the keyboard button pushing. Customer service has been thought of this way, and unsurprisingly, companies got lots of mediocre and bad outcomes. Zappos shows that this doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
I wasn't saying that. What I was trying to say is that this style of Quality Assurance tends to have a throughput that scales linearly. There are a lot of professions like that, even highly skilled ones. For example, traditional hand drawn animation (think Bambi or any other classic disney movie) requires highly skilled artists. And though some of those artists maybe faster than others or more proficient, it is nowhere on the scale of what you might see with a profession such as software development. A few A+ developers can probably build a system that can support just as many users just as fast as a much larger C team. The same isn't true for a feature animated film, in which a single person will hit a physical limit to the number of drawings they can create in a day, or for QA'ing a game, where the number of areas that can be tested or bugs that can be found is also bound, and where the quality of the product created does not directly influence productivity by orders of magnitude.
This makes me wonder how Valve does QA. Also, note that QA of this kind has the same kind of scaling as customer service. The raw measured throughput may not vary that much. Quality could vary a lot, however.
I did QA for about 5 years at a Fortune 100; my admittedly anecdotal experience was that top performers wrote more Priority 1 issues that resulted in more fixes than many people combined. It depended on the team and the project, but for me it was closer to 6x.
Beyond find & fix rates, there is the general quality of a bug, good QA understand the system well enough to quickly & correctly isolate where a problem occurs even without looking at any code. This can result in a ton of saved time for developers.
Regression testing is a small part of QA, just because you have a focus area for a particular day doesn't shut down your capability to find bugs in issues unrelated to say, regressions.
And for a final tidbit, regression testing (going through bug reports that have already been fixed, ensuring they are still fixed) probably has the lowest find rate out of almost any type of other testing in my experience (in terms of the original issue being 're-broken'), and it should be done by software, not people.
This kind of sadly smacks of someone putting too much credence towards the myth that you need a degree to get hired. Or worse, the kind of person who believes that a degree entitles you to a job.
Also,
> In late 2010, I closed shop on my business, sold off every bit of music equipment I had, and sold off all of my possessions, except for my Xbox 360. I moved in with my sister and decided I needed to start over. With all of my free time, I managed to pick up Battlefield 3 on release (I was already playing Bad Company 2, and played the BF3 Beta to level cap). I would play it about eight hours a day, and eventually saw that I was ranked 3,338 on the Xbox leaderboards. I then made the decision to try and get back into the gaming industry.
Or, he quits his job and plays videogames for the majority of his day. Instead of, perhaps, writing his own scores or producing audio for an open project or a game mod to put into a portfolio (maybe he did do this, but I'm assuming not, since he sold off all of his possessions except his least useful thing - an Xbox).
This doesn't sound like a story about getting screwed over, it just sounds like he doesn't want to put (the right kind of) effort towards something he really wants.
If a moderator could change the article URL to the Kotaku article, or a fixed Pastebin (http://pastebin.com/JHP8yCk4) that would be appreciated.
The missing section for reference:
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One of the cool things we did at CA were playtests. A lot of playtests! For nine months I literally played Halo 4 every day for money. We would grab the newest build and go into a closed room with 16 Xboxes and play various modes, checking code and, most importantly, monitoring host and client frames per second.
These playtests would always be a mixture of QA, developers, coders, producers and artists. It was not uncommon to see Max hang out and observe or even play.
Most of the sessions were fun, but there was also a nasty air of "nerd-dickdom" competitiveness. Controllers were slammed; F bombs were dropped; homosexual slurs were tossed about (and I know for a fact we had some gay workers in the studio). So yeah, it was grown-up nerds making a video game.
At this point in the article, some readers may be thinking, “Well what is the problem here? This sounds awesome!” Truth be told, it wasn’t, and it was because I was a contractor. It was like being Jon Snow or Theon Greyjoy under the Stark roof. Yes, people may talk to you, or relatively like you, but you are not accepted. The smiles, and jests and "bottle talk" always seemed phony, and the reason was because I was temp—in fact, my whole department was.
One of the reasons I took this job was because they sold me on the fact that, if I did well, and showed promise, that it would be a real possibility to get hired on full-time. I sure as hell did not accept it for the whopping pay rate of $11 an hour. So being older and a bit more experienced in the work world, I took the job by the horns and ran with it. I did everything I could to stand out. I asked a ton of questions about code, the debug, the game modes, everything. I talked to all the producers and developers and level designers I could to ensure we were on the same page and also so they would know my name.
Once, I worked an entire weekend on a voluntary basis. Halo 4 primary developer 343 wanted to cut our signature mode: Dominion. At that time, it was broken as hell and really unbalanced. The concept was outstanding, but there were a crap load of balancing issues. 343 was always tinkering with kits and available weapons, so the devs were having a hard time balancing ordnance drops.
We worked all weekend while coders would cook up frankenbuilds, and even Max stayed for the majority of the sessions. After long playtests he would take us in the kitchen and personally ask everyone in the group their thoughts. I felt like I was a part of something special.
Syndicating here because Hacker News's submit system does not like Gawker Network links.
I did search through the archives to see if there were any recent kotaku.com submissions and couldn't find any.
The description of the reason for working the extra weekend, I think reflects well on your motivation. I'm not a games company, but I have hired developers and testers : if I saw this bullet point on a testers CV, that would stand out.
So instead of feeling taken advantage of, which you were at $11 an hour.. put a more positive vibe on this and see it as a path from tester to whatever is next.
Maybe your passion is some aspect of developing games, or developing better automated test tools? Is there some open source thing you can work on, that will give you a lot more leverage when the next gig comes around?
Somehow get your CV to stand out from the mass of guys who will work for 11/hr and into the more professional 50/hr skill-set bracket. Maybe that's not happening right now in games, maybe take those skills and put them to use in another industry that is happy to pay better. Or stay in games but specialize and become killer and own your particular niche.
Wear this experience as a Medal of Honor [pun, ouch] that you worked on Halo4.. how many people get to do that? It is money in the bank when gaining street cred with any young person, even your own kids later.
I would rework this story.. put a more positive slant on it, its a great blog post, shows character, yadda yadda. Squeeze a bit of mileage out of the pain and glory you went thru.
I love reading these war stories and postmortems on Gamasutra, you have an audience.
I know several people who've been pretty successful in the gaming industry, none of them started out in QA.
Generally, they just worked on small bad/games eventually moving up to bigger and better ones. They all had solid track records of being active in various communities writing FAQs/guides or modding before finding a way to do those things for a living.
It might be better than no job, but I suspect if you start out with one it could have a long term detrimental effect on your career (I escaped that because my QA job ended with a demanding software project and the company was independantly of my group going down the tubes, Lucent made a bad bet on next generation technology, and in trying to catch up, shipped a ton of equipment that didn't work ... and financed too much of their equipment sales, which ended badly when too many of those companies went bankrupt; see http://www.amazon.com/Optical-Illusions-Lucent-Crash-Telecom... for lots more details).
As a result, QA does provide one thing earlier than other areas: management responsibility. Because churn is so high, it's important to put in good processes. Additionally, very few people stay. As a result, it isn't uncommon for QA managers (in any part of tech, not just games) to be in their mid-20s. This is demonstrated in the story, with the managers being in their mid 20s.
That said, as you say, it can be detrimental for software development careers.
I work in QA. I am fully able to read and write code. The engineers I work with have a background in computer science, and I have a background in the domain. The engineer is learning about the domain as he does his job. I am learning about computer science as I do my job. QA and engineering have to operate as a cohesive unit. It's not supposed to be one group against the other. Both groups are there to make the product better. The two groups are just approaching a better product from different directions.
The engineers I have the easiest time working with are the ones that leave the ego at the door, realize that both sides bring something to the table, and are simply concerned with solving the problem at hand.
But companies in markets that value quality can use QA for competitive advantage.
Management knows this, and exploit this. It's always suggested that QA is a valid track to move into actual development, but this rarely/never happens. Nonetheless, companies perpetuate this myth to keep the seats filled with starry-eyed folks who dream of building games rather than testing them.
It's upsetting that this man didn't have a fulfilling experience with the studio, but there are a couple of things to consider. I'm not trying to be harsh, just realistic:
- He was contracted through a third-party, and was never an official employee of the studio.
- He was paid relatively little (as evidenced by asking for a $1 raise), so was probably not a senior member of the QA team.
- He is still able to say to any future employers that he worked on Halo 4, and even had influence on map names, etc. Presumably, he did good work there and they might even act as a reference.
- The gamedev industry is very competitive, even in QA roles. This man has now worked at Activision and Certain Affinity, and will hopefully be able to get a full-time staff position at his next job.
I know it seems blunt, but a lot of the problem here is just supply and demand. There are a lot of people trying to get their foot in the door at game studios, and a lot of people that think they'd love to play video games for a living (even buggy ones). That makes studios able to pay very little, and hire temp workers for ramping up their projects.
If it's because you don't like kotaku it seems like a weird way to protest: if you consider this article insightful enough to post here don't you think you should give them the page hits to "positively reinforce" them?
I really don't know much about kotaku and they may be more evil than I suspect, but it just seems awfully childish and passive aggressive.
I attempted to post the raw Kotaku article but it did not appear at all. I know Gawker network links are auto-deaded, so I figured that was the case.
I did search through the archives to see if there were any recent kotaku.com submissions and couldn't find any.
This isn't subby's protest, it's pg's. You can take that up with him, though I agree that Kotaku isn't that bad.
This is something beyond just the games industry. The other issue I have is from the position that he was in. To have clout as QA takes a lot of work. Especially when you are basically doing black-box testing. He has to be on his very best to show that he should be hired. This post doesn't seem to reflect that.
On the other hand... if you're confident you're dang good at what you do and don't need to seek outward approval (from the wrong sources) keep being a contractor, keep blasting those projects and eventually someone will notice how you're a common denominator of success.
The demand far outstrips the supply. You already have the upper hand on pretty much every employer.
An equivalent association of developers could basically dictate terms for software patents/licensing/ownership issues and software-related IP regulations in the US. They could secure absolute limits on the length of their work week. They could easily block Zuckerberg, et al.'s H1B visa expansion garbage.
And yeah, on top of all that, they could include QA in their little club and maybe get them some health insurance or job security or literally anything approaching just and fair employment terms.
For every Bay Area programmer that is really into sane standards, open software and minimal surveillance, there are probably half a dozen programmers throughout the rest of the world that work 9-5, have a few patents in their name, and primarily care about their family and (consequentially) their employers stability. They are the people participating in most of the stuff the rest of us think is wrong with the industry, and they don't hate themselves for it. On another end of the multidimensional spectrum you have armies of STEM graduates working/contracting for the Federal government who really do buy into "nothing to hide". (For an example of this attitude, see Bob Metcalfe's recent reddit 'AMA').
I'm spinning these perspectives very negatively because I don't share them, but regardless of my bias the fact remains there are a lot of programmers that the diversity of "what programmers think about stuff" is underestimated.
If you are male, between 20 and 30 and fresh out of Stanford, you obviously see things very differently.
What we need is a kind of guild for developers. We can't improve our conditions if it's all about maximizing our take home. We have to seek control over the way software development is performed, setting new standards for what is expected of clients and developers. We need to take charge of providing better educations for new developers. We need the open source model to become the primary way code is written, instead of something capital exploits in order to free ride on the "commons" of the community.
People who reduce it all to making a salary can go far, but they're not doing anything for the community who's shoulders they're standing on. Right now we have a scarce skill, but people are trying to find ways to deskill programming and make it a mindless commodity anybody can do. Maybe they'll figure that out one day. We should have a backup plan as an industry.
For starters, you're doing play testing for a game. Is it really that difficult to see why you're hired on contract? When the game has been released, what are you going to play test? Sure, there will be other games, but unless you have a crazy EA-style development house (doesn't sound like it's the case), it doesn't make sense to be paying people to twiddle their thumbs for 9-12 months waiting for the next upcoming release to be tested.
Adding to that, the fact of the matter is that every job has a pay ceiling. It may seem like a cold business practice, but there are pay thresholds where an employee's compensation exceeds the maximum value the employee's position brings to the company. Adding play testers full time is a poor business practice for this very reason -- the ceiling is very short, and at a certain point it will no longer be "worth it" to pay higher wages to even high-performing play testers.
The issue of the length of employment is a big one. A good friend of mine JUST got hired full time at a large company after freelancing for them for 5 years! Getting hired out of a contract isn't something that just happens after a few months. Companies that work on fiscal years might have to wait for budget approvals before hiring people. Furthermore, it's not just the title that changes: companies are often paying thousands of dollars more when an employee goes full time to cover retirement and health care benefits.
One last thing: even if you had a shitty time at this company, not showing up to work is literally the WORST thing you can do if you have any interest in working in a particular industry. Your reputation really does follow you and can make it very hard to get anywhere. I personally would never hire a candidate that I knew pulled something like that -- I expect that, when an employee doesn't get what they want the first time, they keep working hard while still being persistent when it comes to compensation. Giving up and slacking off isn't the answer.