4 ms·

I don't think they'll introduce "scabs" simply because it would be a marketing _disaster_. However, I work in the industry, and I think you'd be shocked by how

I don't think they'll introduce "scabs" simply because it would be a marketing _disaster_. However, I work in the industry, and I think you'd be shocked by how replaceable American developers are. Huge amounts of artistic labour _is_ done cheaply, and in relatively decent quality, oversees in countries like South Korea, China, Japan, and to a lesser extent, Thailand. Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios.

void_mint 5y ago
Also work in the industry (but in the US as an employee, not a subcontractor), totally opposite opinion. Outsourced labor is similar to Associate-level responsibilities. The reasons assholes don't get fired in the games industry is because experience and skill is so difficult to find.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Having worked with overseas contractors on a number of projects, I can say my personal experience is that the work product varies wildly in quality, shop to shop. I wouldn't say it's "relatively decent quality" in any universal or guaranteed sense. Not that American developers are necessarily more skilled, just that the lack of a culture and sometimes language barrier is pretty evident in the resulting work product, in my experience.
- dleslie 5y ago
  Considering the popularity of Japanese-developed, Polish-developed, German-developed, and other foreign-developed games... I don't think sharing American culture matters much.
  - MAGZine 5y ago
    You've missed the point. The point is, cultural (and time differences, language differences, etc) differences slow down collaboration. it has nothing to do with specifically american (or german, or polish) culture. How many roles do you think to be outsourced by the polish or japanese? not a lot, which keeps them efficient. especially in creative endeavours, its best to keep things colocated.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      Like I said, I work in the industry. I've worked on several projects with teams on more than one continent. The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time. 100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.
      - TameAntelope 5y ago
        I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe. Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
        dleslie 5y ago
        It's been seamless for us for 5y. We did crack the nut: we stopped being ameri-centric, and we rejected the notion that productivity must be directly observed during the process to be measured. We rejected "core hours" and we rejected ephemeral vocal communication. If it's not on record it has no value to us. We have people working at all hours of the day. We have teams split across continents. We have team meetings, but we schedule them a week or more in advance, and even then they're optional. We make prodigious use of Miro, Basecamp, and other collaboration tools. We don't consider any collaboration "finished" so much as "in progress" and often a "meeting" could take course over days, as team members from around the world chime in. There has never been, and will never be, an office. It works great.
        void_mint 5y ago
        I think this person is mostly just being self congratulatory. It's not seemless, they're a subcontractor, without being too directly disrespectful, their view is heavily skewed towards singing the praises of cheap outsourced labor.
shadowgovt 5y ago
To my mind, the hardest part of scabbing a game studio is picking up where dev teams left off. Game engines and pipelines are savage beasts, and often heavily customized and under-documented (everybody using them "just knows how they work;" internal cultural knowledge and on-the-job training are the standard operating procedure). You'll need a particular type of developer or artist to come up to speed quickly on the pipelines and toolchains studios in-house develop, even given the relative standardization of the Activision space.
- dleslie 5y ago
  I've been a part of teams that were hired to "finish" certain major products, and I definitely agree with your perspective. We usually ended up ripping out much of the original development code because it was too brittle/broken/undocumented to bother continuing forward with. Rewriting from scratch was often faster and had more predictable results.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  Someone on HN recently posted a Jonathan Blow talk, "How to Save Civilization," that argues the normal evolution of technology is not a linear progression upwards, but actually slow degradation due to loss of knowledge and maintenance. I think this is a perfect example of why.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    This is part of the advantage of the "Unix Philosophy": many small, easily understood processes that work in tandem to produce a complex outcome. Each individual process is less prone to knowledge decay. However, this is moot in gamedev. We throw everything away before starting the next project because we don't "own" the IP from the last project.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      I also strongly suspect that game development slightly favors a monolithic approach because performance is key, and it's extremely hard to maintain maximum performance with thick abstractions. Inevitably, you find out you can do something faster if you stop making a function call or treat a binary representation in two different ways in two different places in the code and abstractions leak and break. Unless all the small processes are designed with a very firm pattern underpinning them that happens to be the correct pattern to maximize efficiency, you'll inevitably find a situation where two subsystems need intimate knowledge of how each other work to maximize performance.
908B64B197 5y ago
> Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios. The situation in Canada is interesting: their own government heavily pitched the country as an outsourcing destination, boasting Canadians devs are worth 50k less than American ones. [0] Is that a popular measure? [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-workers-pay/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...
- dleslie 5y ago
  I think most folks are unaware, really. What's more, here in BC the NDP (left-leaning labour party) stripped Tech Workers of the majority of their labour rights. Not even meal breaks were saved. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-altered-for-high-tech-professionals/27938 https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-a...
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Interestingly, that party and the people in charge of the "tech policy" are all Indians aren't they? [0][1] It makes sense they would pitch offshoring and low cost for programming since they saw it working for their country. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      > Singh was born on January 2, 1979, in Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario > Bains was born in Toronto, Ontario on June 16, 1977
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        Not sure what's the point being made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizenship_by_Descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizen...

void_mint 5y ago

Also work in the industry (but in the US as an employee, not a subcontractor), totally opposite opinion. Outsourced labor is similar to Associate-level responsibilities. The reasons assholes don't get fired in the games industry is because experience and skill is so difficult to find.

TameAntelope 5y ago

Having worked with overseas contractors on a number of projects, I can say my personal experience is that the work product varies wildly in quality, shop to shop. I wouldn't say it's "relatively decent quality" in any universal or guaranteed sense. Not that American developers are necessarily more skilled, just that the lack of a culture and sometimes language barrier is pretty evident in the resulting work product, in my experience.

dleslie 5y ago
Considering the popularity of Japanese-developed, Polish-developed, German-developed, and other foreign-developed games... I don't think sharing American culture matters much.
- MAGZine 5y ago
  You've missed the point. The point is, cultural (and time differences, language differences, etc) differences slow down collaboration. it has nothing to do with specifically american (or german, or polish) culture. How many roles do you think to be outsourced by the polish or japanese? not a lot, which keeps them efficient. especially in creative endeavours, its best to keep things colocated.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    Like I said, I work in the industry. I've worked on several projects with teams on more than one continent. The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time. 100% remote work makes intercontinental collaboration almost seamless. My current employer has teams on every continent, except Africa (so far), and we've been at it for over half a decade.
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe. Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
      - dleslie 5y ago
        It's been seamless for us for 5y. We did crack the nut: we stopped being ameri-centric, and we rejected the notion that productivity must be directly observed during the process to be measured. We rejected "core hours" and we rejected ephemeral vocal communication. If it's not on record it has no value to us. We have people working at all hours of the day. We have teams split across continents. We have team meetings, but we schedule them a week or more in advance, and even then they're optional. We make prodigious use of Miro, Basecamp, and other collaboration tools. We don't consider any collaboration "finished" so much as "in progress" and often a "meeting" could take course over days, as team members from around the world chime in. There has never been, and will never be, an office. It works great.
      - void_mint 5y ago
        I think this person is mostly just being self congratulatory. It's not seemless, they're a subcontractor, without being too directly disrespectful, their view is heavily skewed towards singing the praises of cheap outsourced labor.

shadowgovt 5y ago

To my mind, the hardest part of scabbing a game studio is picking up where dev teams left off. Game engines and pipelines are savage beasts, and often heavily customized and under-documented (everybody using them "just knows how they work;" internal cultural knowledge and on-the-job training are the standard operating procedure). You'll need a particular type of developer or artist to come up to speed quickly on the pipelines and toolchains studios in-house develop, even given the relative standardization of the Activision space.

dleslie 5y ago
I've been a part of teams that were hired to "finish" certain major products, and I definitely agree with your perspective. We usually ended up ripping out much of the original development code because it was too brittle/broken/undocumented to bother continuing forward with. Rewriting from scratch was often faster and had more predictable results.
planet-and-halo 5y ago
Someone on HN recently posted a Jonathan Blow talk, "How to Save Civilization," that argues the normal evolution of technology is not a linear progression upwards, but actually slow degradation due to loss of knowledge and maintenance. I think this is a perfect example of why.
- dleslie 5y ago
  This is part of the advantage of the "Unix Philosophy": many small, easily understood processes that work in tandem to produce a complex outcome. Each individual process is less prone to knowledge decay. However, this is moot in gamedev. We throw everything away before starting the next project because we don't "own" the IP from the last project.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    I also strongly suspect that game development slightly favors a monolithic approach because performance is key, and it's extremely hard to maintain maximum performance with thick abstractions. Inevitably, you find out you can do something faster if you stop making a function call or treat a binary representation in two different ways in two different places in the code and abstractions leak and break. Unless all the small processes are designed with a very firm pattern underpinning them that happens to be the correct pattern to maximize efficiency, you'll inevitably find a situation where two subsystems need intimate knowledge of how each other work to maximize performance.

908B64B197 5y ago

> Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios. The situation in Canada is interesting: their own government heavily pitched the country as an outsourcing destination, boasting Canadians devs are worth 50k less than American ones. [0] Is that a popular measure? [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-workers-pay/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...

dleslie 5y ago
I think most folks are unaware, really. What's more, here in BC the NDP (left-leaning labour party) stripped Tech Workers of the majority of their labour rights. Not even meal breaks were saved. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-altered-for-high-tech-professionals/27938 https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-a...
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Interestingly, that party and the people in charge of the "tech policy" are all Indians aren't they? [0][1] It makes sense they would pitch offshoring and low cost for programming since they saw it working for their country. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    > Singh was born on January 2, 1979, in Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario > Bains was born in Toronto, Ontario on June 16, 1977
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      Not sure what's the point being made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizenship_by_Descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Citizen...