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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand the negativity. You get paid to spend your time:

  1. finding work inside ubisoft
  2. finding work outside ubisoft
  3. improving your skills on your own
  4. work on projects you didn't have time for while
     in perpetual crunch on a ubisoft project

The alternative is to be let go immediately and do all of the above on government aid (if your location even has that).

Am i missing something or are the negative voices mentioned in the article just people who don't deal well under self-direction?

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From being in partially similar (although not exactly same) situation (kinda "on the bench" as described in other comments, or kinda "interproject nothing to do"), I'll try to list some disadvantages I noticed (they surprised me somewhat too):

- it's hard to invest all your self into a "new project prototype"/"quick indie game"/... because: you totally don't know how much time you have (1 day? half year?) till you're "hired back"/"given new work"; and also there's huge probability the corporation will totally ignore your result however awesome it is, and at the same time you can't legally take it away and reanimate on your own because it's company property (done on company time). So, there's a strong feeling you might pour lots of hard work into project doomed to stupid failure and done on totally unpredictable schedule.

- you start to have feelings of "I'm worthless -- nobody needs me" -- because that's actually the truth: nobody needs you (at this moment - but maybe longer? maybe that's an allusion?). Also, in consequence, you start to lose confidence and trust to others: you were so strongly needed just days before (in the intensive project while you were "fully hired"), but then they threw you away so quickly and lightly... so were they lying from the beginning and did never really need you? or maybe you only thought you are good but are poor and they were relieved to get rid of you? think, why did they choose to get rid of you, not this other guy? also, why they didn't tell you anything straight in your face? And then after all of this, when living in this official "limbo", you're 100% surrounded by a band of similar "pseudo-loosers-maybe-not-really-but-often-feeling-so", many of whom feel similarly, resulting in a self-reinforcing echo chamber... (not to say the article notes that the building itself is already depressing...)

- A side note, for a partially different situation: (warning: stream of consciousness coming; sorry, don't have this analyzed well yet): when you're in an unofficial "interproject nothing to do", there are also two additional problems: one is, that it's unofficial; officially the company and manager expect you To Do Something, but they don't have time to give you something concrete, or give you crap looking totally like "nobody really needs it, but you'll have something to do". The second one is, that your schedule is even more unpredictable, because however long it spans eventually (even more than half a year), every minute you know they might just come and give you some serious work (fresh bug, or some longer project) and dump whatever "prototype" you were doing immediately. Finally, now I realized your prioritization also gets partially botched, because whatever crappy work you were given as "important" before, something slightly more important may come and show that the previous thing was in fact just pseudo-important. That said, you can try to fight to retain consciousness and self-confidence, but it is really not trivial, and there are ways in which this situation can be depressing. Not to say it's 100% so (for some time this can feel like vacation, opportunities for learning, etc, etc), but the advantages were already listed in other comments, so I wanted to just show the disadvantages here.

And just to make it clear, regarding suggestion of "people who don't deal well under self-direction", I totally can, have loads of free-time hobby projects and entertainments (i.e. out of work), managed to have some of them published and open sourced, also did some freelancing gigs. So, for me this argument seems totally irrelevant.

edit: also, what started to interest me now, after reading the article and putting down my thoughts, that I don't really know, and am very curious, how this situation could be improved? because I believe its existence is rather unavoidable; I suppose in every one programming job there are more or less explicit interproject periods. (Or aren't they?) edit2: I mean, improved by the management guys / boss / company owner.

1. Improve internal tools / processes / documentation / furniture

2. Improve external tools / projects / documents via Open Source contributions

3. Try short crazy projects, e.g viral marketing campaign, official ludum dare participation

4. Teach each other cross-role skills so the programmer understand better what the texture designer does and vice versa

5. Put one or two permanent management people there for continuity

6. Do the usual team building exercises or soft skill training or plain fun stuff

The 1. & 2. seem for me to still strongly clash with the problem of extremely unpredictable/volatile schedule. 3. also, although I agree somewhat less as to ludum dare, so maybe kinda compromise (I believe a viral campaign can be quite a huge industrial project underneath, counterintuitively).

The 4. and 6. sound interesting. Thanks! Although, not sure how long those could be sustained? Also, now I think this limbo should maybe not be made too fun, or people wouldn't want to come back to "real work".... heh, catch-22, good one :)

As to 5., I don't understand - continuity of what? what and how this is meant to improve?

I'm guessing he means continuity of the experience. One of the complaints was that you never know what happens when somebody leaves; did they get fired? Or are they on a new project? Did they quit?

Having a manager who's consistently there, who knows the people on interproject and is aware of the comings and goings that you can bring questions to would help clarify that.

Yes, but thanks to project managers and bean counters everything has to have a project/cost center etc

1. A lot of people are going to complain if you improve things but it affects them (even if it's a global improvement and affects them is: works faster. Yup, I've seen it happen)

I agree with the spirit of your post, but the chances of this happening there I'd say are almost zero.

Yeah, I'm right there with you. What an opportunity! You're sitting in an office, surrounded by a bunch of other game developers / designers with nothing to do. How are they not churning out indie-style games by the dozen???

The description of "interproject" sounds like my dream job (well, apart from the lighting). Anyone that finds themselves in that position, and then wastng it by doing nothing, well, those people would by high on my list for firing if I was management of Ubisoft. Maybe that's the point, maybe this is a test to see if they actually want to retain the employee or not. You would have to suspect that the people that find themselves in interproject are already not the best performers, who would have already been poached to participate on other projects, so this is a way of winnowing the herd a bit maybe?

> How are they not churning out indie-style games by the dozen???

Work contract?

I think he meant developing/prototyping ideas not actually releasing them

She meant developing indie games for Ubisoft. Surely they should be able to come up with a few that would be good enough to become actual products...

I highly doubt that. If you're:

* Vexed by crippling anxiety about whether you're going to be laid off

* Your schedule for next week is perpetually "well, I MIGHT be on a project and will no longer have time to complete my half finished game".

* Ubisoft would own the IP to your game anyway.

Then what's the point?

Added to which, this type of atmosphere sounds like the very last place that would be conducive to being creative.

"* Vexed by crippling anxiety about whether you're going to be laid off"

Sounds like a regular normal day at an American company.

Isn't that a contradiction?

If they're a bunch of professional game developers sitting in an office run by one of the industry's most famous developers/publishers and developing games, then how can they be said to be doing "independent" games?

From my experience of the game industry, it would be quite hard to do something that very much looks like a game project at a place like that, without also involving the normal planning/financing/sales/marketing requirements.

If it looks like a game project, in those circles it's probably going to be a game project, and there are rules for those. Just my thoughts.

> .. then how can they be said to be doing "independent" games?

They would still be doing the game/prototype independently from the company. There would be no difference in the making of the game from an "actual" indie dev.

Now for the IP, legal things surrounding it that's a different question.

Which would be why, in my original post, I used the phrase "indie-style"...

Ah ok, then I fully agree with you.

From the article:

>> Programmers and project managers, for example, are often high in demand within the studio, and if they're sent to interproject, they could wind up leaving after just a few weeks. ... But other employees said they spent months and months in interproject, unsuccessfully looking for new gigs within the company, before they were finally let go.

I suspect there's a lot of overlap between the types of people who see free time as a productive opportunity and the people who are valuable enough to get snapped back up quickly and vice versa.

I don't want to repeat what other already have said, so here's another point: this 'opportunity' is about 40% sponsored by corporate government aid. I know first hand from a person who is going to Quebec next month as a 'digital artist' to work on a great project and he is fully aware that the company will receive about 40% of his salary back from citizens of Quebec and Canada.

That 'career vector limbo' is more of an anomaly corporate credit conditions that are very favorable in that region. It distorts market salary conditions so much so that they are willing to poach other bodies to ship them to Quebec.

I am not surprised at all to see this story posted.

Exactly. Having few weeks you can spend learning about technologies you had no time for while at project and catching up the news is beneficial thing. I would consider it a perk.

Too much time in limbo would be bad thing, just like unemployment. However, paid limbo while you can look for job still beats being really unemployed, so again, perk.

I can understand where the negativity comes from, as can anybody else who was without work for some months or maybe even years. You are absolutely correct that there are a lot of opportunities in that kind of department, though. People who use them are probably the kind of people who find another project within weeks.

Be very careful with n.4 though

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