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“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and

“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero” This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
I would say I have seen two.
- rusk 7y ago
  I would say that there is challenging work out there if you look for it. I’ve studiously avoided the kinds of places described here and it has paid off for me.
pishpash 7y ago
Entitled incompetents who are not only highly paid but expect scheduled promotions as if given a sinecure have really run amock in this sad sad industry.
bsenftner 7y ago
It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.
- wbl 7y ago
  "In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult."-Clauswitz. I would trust SNAFU exists for a reason.
ACow_Adonis 7y ago
I can say I worked on one. But because it was well managed, small team, everyone listened to each other's areas of respective expertise and authority, we wrapped it up in a year on a 6 digit budget. Meanwhile, a previous project elsewhere i have experience with, had a team of approx 30 cycle through, 10 to 20 external consultants (some flown in and put up in hotels, but who had no actual experience in the things they were consulting on) , had been running for several years, estimated 8 digit budget, and by the time i left had been running for several years with no discernable output compared to the status quo except reports and presentations taking about how good things would be one day in the indeterminate future. I'm convinced the later is the norm, and it's even harder to go back to once you've worked on a project that 'just works', but I'm sure several people used the later one to land themselves high paying jobs by putting it on their resume using management speak to make it sound impressive, so I guess success depends on whose point of view you're looking from...
- ethbro 7y ago
  From my experience in consulting and internal, there are two major things you can do. 1) Use objective KPIs + encourage a culture of admitting, taking responsibility for, and being forgiven for failure Failing to admit failure is incredibly toxic to ongoing corporate functioning, and a culture that doesn't allow for it endlessly moves goalposts until there is success (by some metric) without motion (by objective metrics). 2) Don't allow anyone to overscope sprints If all the "team" can accomplish is a "Hello World" in the next week, then that's the goal. Better to be honest than slide down the slippery slope of lying to ourselves.
ethbro 7y ago
The irony is: how does a company that conducts itself thusly manage to retain people? To which the answer is: pay well above median wage The mind boggles. One of my founding tenants for any company would be "Never assume work done in service of profit is inherently profitable work."

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

I would say I have seen two.

rusk 7y ago
I would say that there is challenging work out there if you look for it. I’ve studiously avoided the kinds of places described here and it has paid off for me.

pishpash 7y ago

Entitled incompetents who are not only highly paid but expect scheduled promotions as if given a sinecure have really run amock in this sad sad industry.

bsenftner 7y ago

It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.

wbl 7y ago
"In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult."-Clauswitz. I would trust SNAFU exists for a reason.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago

I can say I worked on one. But because it was well managed, small team, everyone listened to each other's areas of respective expertise and authority, we wrapped it up in a year on a 6 digit budget. Meanwhile, a previous project elsewhere i have experience with, had a team of approx 30 cycle through, 10 to 20 external consultants (some flown in and put up in hotels, but who had no actual experience in the things they were consulting on) , had been running for several years, estimated 8 digit budget, and by the time i left had been running for several years with no discernable output compared to the status quo except reports and presentations taking about how good things would be one day in the indeterminate future. I'm convinced the later is the norm, and it's even harder to go back to once you've worked on a project that 'just works', but I'm sure several people used the later one to land themselves high paying jobs by putting it on their resume using management speak to make it sound impressive, so I guess success depends on whose point of view you're looking from...

ethbro 7y ago
From my experience in consulting and internal, there are two major things you can do. 1) Use objective KPIs + encourage a culture of admitting, taking responsibility for, and being forgiven for failure Failing to admit failure is incredibly toxic to ongoing corporate functioning, and a culture that doesn't allow for it endlessly moves goalposts until there is success (by some metric) without motion (by objective metrics). 2) Don't allow anyone to overscope sprints If all the "team" can accomplish is a "Hello World" in the next week, then that's the goal. Better to be honest than slide down the slippery slope of lying to ourselves.

ethbro 7y ago

The irony is: how does a company that conducts itself thusly manage to retain people? To which the answer is: pay well above median wage The mind boggles. One of my founding tenants for any company would be "Never assume work done in service of profit is inherently profitable work."