9 ms·

Epic Games is making hundreds of temp testers into full employees with benefits

233 points by orangebanana1 5y ago

echelon 5y ago
The war over traditionally maligned and abused video game engineers, artists, and ancillary staff (testing, community leads, etc.) is about to begin. Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work. They're gunning at a $100B+ valuation, and they've got a multi-trillion dollar market to capture. It helps that they own one of the biggest rendering technologies and have turned it into an entire career and marketplace. They have huge mindshare across a half dozen industries. The last two technological waves were Internet and Smartphones. The next one is GPUs and all of the things unlocked by them: deep learning, rendering, spatial computing, etc. Longbets: Epic surpasses Google's valuation one day. We're in the early stages of a brand new surge of innovation and investment. Imagine the browser being leapfrogged - that's where Tim Sweeny's head is.
- throwaway473825 5y ago
  Many companies will surpass Google's current valuation due to inflation. However, I don't see how Epic could replace Google as the third most valuable tech company. For one, Tencent owns almost half of the company.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    That doesn't make sense. Inflation would impact everyone, including Google, the same.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work. Ironically, every engineer I know would drop a $150,000/yr Epic contract to work for half the salary at Valve. You're right, though: the war is about to begin, and it's going to be very entertaining from an outsiders perspective.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    > Ironically, every engineer I know would drop a $150,000/yr Epic contract to work for half the salary at Valve. I don't believe that for one second.
    - throwyccaaa 5y ago
      I doubt that a person would have to drop to 75000$ to work at valve, i would imagine they can compete given how comically different their income streams are.
      - spywaregorilla 5y ago
        Whether they would actually need to take a comp hit is irrelevant to the hyperbolic claim that a random engineer hypothetically would prefer to switch to valve in exchange for a comp hit.
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        Valve is probably one of the rare companies that don't need to compete with compensation, but can.
  - throwyccaaa 5y ago
    I think this an interesting thing, where I think if you have the skill and savings to work in games, nobody is going to choose Epic which have provided little in value overall as far as actual useful consumer things go outside of free games, that steam has had for a long time (steam controller system, quality online save sync and mulitplayer, proton????, etc) over either an indie studio or a place like valve where (from my personal perspective) it seems like real innovation is happening -- between things like the steam deck and it being not only a really intersting powerful and open device but it also being repairable, to it also running linux and also things like their vr headsets where they at this point set the standard for a real premium experience, even occulous with all of Facebook's money hasn't created an experiencing that comes close to how amazing half life alyx is. I hope valve succeeds in all their endevours because while I can only assume their efforts are not altruistic, they have improved so much of the linux ecosystem for what so far has only been at their own expense.
- scarface74 5y ago
  Multi trillion dollar market?
  - yakaccount4 5y ago
    Also: GPU's are new?
    - echelon 5y ago
      PDAs existed before smart phones. There's an inflection point, and it's happening now. GPU-powered applications are going to eat Hollywood, music production, literally every form of entertainment. Everything a person watches or listens to. Kids will be making their own Star Wars films from their bedrooms. Every creative industry will be upended. I don't like the term "metaverse", but there are a number of spatial computing trends that are undeniably evolving at a rapid clip. Volumetrics, photogrammetry, 3D SLAM warehousing. Pose correction, relighting -- photography, telepresence, video games -- everything is going to change. And it goes without saying that deep learning is only getting started. GPUs are the next big thing.
      - scarface74 5y ago
        The entire movie business is $42 Billion dollars a year and declining. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry The entire music industry is $23 billion a year and declining https://www.statista.com/statistics/272305/global-revenue-of-the-music-industry/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272305/global-revenue-of... Honestly, you sound like every bad pitch deck from startups. The $x industry is $y billion big. If we only get 10%…
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > The entire movie business is $42 Billion dollars a year and declining. Your own source says $136 billion for the industry, $42.2 billion is just global box office.
- d23 5y ago
  It’s fascinating to me that they keep overlooking and/or downright abusing their contributors on their answer hub / forums (in the form of routinely wiping content in a knowledge base that’s been built up for years).
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Epic doesn't make GPUs though?
pm90 5y ago
The article (and Epic) don’t seem to answer the basic question of what changed that made them take this step. It alludes to a difficult labor market, so I’m guessing that’s the reason but it’s not clearly stated why the company decided to make this change now and what criteria it used for making these offers.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  High churn in this labor market is probably pretty bad for overall productivity.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  I’ve been waiting for years for companies to figure out that internal promotion yields huge benefits over outside hiring. If you promote a temp to a full-time, it’s going to be successful 99% of the time because you already know the work ethic of the employee. Better yet, you get to skimp on training. If you hire someone from the outside, the chance is much lower that you’ll get a solid hire. What I’m saying isn’t new - companies promote from within all the time. What I’m advocating for is to codify the practice - only hire your software devs from your QA testers. Not only does putting that pipeline in place ensure better devs but you also make the QA job more attractive as a reliable stepping stone. I’ve seen this suggestion swatted down at multiple companies.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    How would that work as a broad industry practice though? If a dev wants to change companies, they would have to start all over as a QA somewhere else? Most people would rather find another industry their skillset is compatible with than do that.
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    Hiring all your devs from testers? Generally dev requires a comp sci background, tester doesn’t. I won’t claim every developer needs a 4 year comp sci degree, but I would be worried on a project with 0 degree holders. At some point someone has to like pick a data structure or interface with like hardware.
pengaru 5y ago
Good. Around a decade ago I briefly shared a house in San Mateo with some rando who was a tester for EA. Many of the conversations we had were surrounding his contract ending and employment uncertainty. Especially in an expensive region like the SF Bay Area, it just seemed like an unnecessarily abusive relationship. He was constantly under a cloud of doubt about having a job next quarter, despite working for a well established large employer.
- yelnatz 5y ago
  EA needs this. Spent a decade there and have seen many QA testers treated like shit. Low pay and no future.
- ahefner 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but "some rando"?
  - pengaru 5y ago
    > I'm sorry, but "some rando"? Random person, someone I didn't otherwise know before sharing a house with them. Is it that confusing or hard to believe?
    - ahefner 5y ago
      I read that as a very disrespectful and/or dismissive way to refer to someone. My context is first learning it as a term used to refer to strangers popping up out of nowhere replying to twitter posts or similar, to whose contribution you ascribe no value. If the term has been normalized to some more benign interpretation, perhaps I'm just getting old. Apologies if so.
      - djur 5y ago
        For what it's worth, I first heard the term many years ago used to refer to either a one night stand ("picked up a rando") or a previously unfamiliar housemate ("rented a place with a rando from Craigslist"). It certainly is dismissive in the sense that it communicates "this person was of no special importance to me", but sometimes that's an appropriate thing to communicate.
robotburrito 5y ago
So good to hear. I wish that places like google and meta would do this!
- lokar 5y ago
  Google has minimal to zero manual testing. Engineers assigned to write tests and test infra are regular employees.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Testers are an interesting bunch within the game development industry. Large studios will typically hire hundreds of these for short periods, often bringing on entire smaller studios to smooth out the wrinkles in the games during crunch period. It's likely that this isn't strictly a financially winning move for epic. Way too much cost having them around for periods of low testing needs. Reputational gains could possibly offset it.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Their cash cow, Fortnite, is essentially always in development and always in need of tester labor.
- toast0 5y ago
  Testing used to be part of the process of a publisher. If they have more testing staff than they need, they could use some people to test games that they're publishing. Maybe to improve quality of games on their store as a way to entice people to buy things from their store (although, presumably issues that are found in this way would be fixed everywhere if the developer fixes them), or maybe as a way to entice people to publish with them.
yazaddaruvala 5y ago
Anyone that’s played Fortnite knows how many bugs there are. I just figured Fortnite ran the nightly build of UE5 and is used as Epic’s integration test fleet lol. More seriously, I’m very glad to see more responsible labor practices from a company. Hope it creates a trend.
- MattRix 5y ago
  Considering the complexity of Fortnite and the rate it gets content updates, it really isn’t very buggy at all, certainly not more so than other similar games (ex. I play a lot of Overwatch and despite the game not changing in two years it still has bugs showing up constantly)
  - whatcd 5y ago
    Not only that, Fortnite has full cross platform support for PC, PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Series S/X, some Android phones/tablets, Nintendo Switch, and of course iOS and iPadOS when Apple and Epic weren't fighting. Fortnite definitley has a stigma around it for the younger demographic and toxicity, but from an engineering perspective it's pretty amazing.
- Quikinterp 5y ago
  Fortnite is really not a buggy game to me. I rarely encounter any game breaking bugs. I'm sure people find a lot online but that's the nature of a game that popular
- MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
  I know this wasn't really your topic, but you've stumbled upon a pet peeve of mine: Dedicated testers aren't primarily to blame for bugs, nor are they primarily to be credited for bug-free software. For one, everybody should test, not just dedicated testers. And two, buggy-ness is primarily a function of design and implementation. Testers can improve the product, but if the product is fundamentally buggy there's no amount of after-the-fact testing that will fix that.
  - 5y ago
black_13 5y ago
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
I work in technical IT, and regularly develop or write unit tests, but I don’t have any formalised training in functional testing short of common sense. I believe having some form of more formalised training as a functional tester would make me better at my current job. Can anyone recommend any books or video training courses that go from zero to functioning functional tester?
- MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
  There's plenty of training available because there are plenty of people trying to make money selling it, but I can't think of a single one I'd recommend. If the "good" training is out there I certainly haven't seen it. Part of the problem is the inconsistent role of the tester. In some organizations testers are there to ensure the requirements are fulfilled. In others they are truffle pigs for bugs. Some testers are expected to keep their testing black-boxed and high-level, while other testers are expected to help troubleshoot the bugs, the environments, and the CI pipelines. My advice to you (as a developer, I presume) is to stop relying on others for testing. Pretend they don't exist. With every commit you make you should assume it's heading straight to the production environment. So you need to have confidence not only in your unit of code, but also in the behavior of the system as a whole before you submit your pull request. I am a tester, not a developer, but from my perspective TDD is the way a developer should go. The highest-quality products I work on are the ones where my testing is the least needed. If I'm bored that's usually a good thing.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    Thanks for that input, mostly I’m the sole developer / tester, I’m also a penetration tester by trade (which loosely follows a methodology, but I’ve always found granular checklists to be an antipattern resulting in poor quality engagements). What I’m curious about is if there are workflows or components of workflows I can steal from functional testers.
ryanmcbride 5y ago
It's so bizarre to read a positive article about a gaming company that I had to re-read it just to make sure I wasn't missing some lurking terrible part. From what it says here they'll still use contract work for short term things, but most of these contractors who have functionally already been working full-time will now officially be full-time employees. That's really cool imo.
- melissalobos 5y ago
  Hopefully that is what this is. I would try to reserve judgement until more details are out, but it does look good.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  My guess is that they were required to do it by the IRS or a state dept of revenue breathing down their necks over abusing independent contractor status, but even if that's not the case... I don't really feel like giving a giant corporation making piles of cash a cookie for being slightly less shitty.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  The horrible part is they have to play Fortnite.
  - Karsteski 5y ago
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      > Are you a child..? No, I thought I made it clear that I don't like Fortnite ;)
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  If you really want a negative side, I've worked with former QA engineers from Epic in NC and heard truly awful things They treated contractors as second class citizens, being physically segregated, sketchy overtime arrangements, verbal abuse... And this was, 3? 4? years ago now so it'd be too late for a lot of people who suffered. And it's not like Epic just got the funds to do this either. So sounds like they might be bleeding the people they treated like undesirables. - Of course this is the internet and someone will likely reply this is false and Epic is actually wonderful. And I won't say they're lying, but this was from first party retellings of conditions immediately after leaving the place so...
pmarreck 5y ago
Maybe one of them will cough up a Linux version

233 points by orangebanana1 5y ago

The war over traditionally maligned and abused video game engineers, artists, and ancillary staff (testing, community leads, etc.) is about to begin. Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work. They're gunning at a $100B+ valuation, and they've got a multi-trillion dollar market to capture. It helps that they own one of the biggest rendering technologies and have turned it into an entire career and marketplace. They have huge mindshare across a half dozen industries. The last two technological waves were Internet and Smartphones. The next one is GPUs and all of the things unlocked by them: deep learning, rendering, spatial computing, etc. Longbets: Epic surpasses Google's valuation one day. We're in the early stages of a brand new surge of innovation and investment. Imagine the browser being leapfrogged - that's where Tim Sweeny's head is.

throwaway473825 5y ago
Many companies will surpass Google's current valuation due to inflation. However, I don't see how Epic could replace Google as the third most valuable tech company. For one, Tencent owns almost half of the company.
- sofixa 5y ago
  That doesn't make sense. Inflation would impact everyone, including Google, the same.
smoldesu 5y ago
> Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work. Ironically, every engineer I know would drop a $150,000/yr Epic contract to work for half the salary at Valve. You're right, though: the war is about to begin, and it's going to be very entertaining from an outsiders perspective.
- mdoms 5y ago
  > Ironically, every engineer I know would drop a $150,000/yr Epic contract to work for half the salary at Valve. I don't believe that for one second.
  - throwyccaaa 5y ago
    I doubt that a person would have to drop to 75000$ to work at valve, i would imagine they can compete given how comically different their income streams are.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Whether they would actually need to take a comp hit is irrelevant to the hyperbolic claim that a random engineer hypothetically would prefer to switch to valve in exchange for a comp hit.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Valve is probably one of the rare companies that don't need to compete with compensation, but can.
- throwyccaaa 5y ago
  I think this an interesting thing, where I think if you have the skill and savings to work in games, nobody is going to choose Epic which have provided little in value overall as far as actual useful consumer things go outside of free games, that steam has had for a long time (steam controller system, quality online save sync and mulitplayer, proton????, etc) over either an indie studio or a place like valve where (from my personal perspective) it seems like real innovation is happening -- between things like the steam deck and it being not only a really intersting powerful and open device but it also being repairable, to it also running linux and also things like their vr headsets where they at this point set the standard for a real premium experience, even occulous with all of Facebook's money hasn't created an experiencing that comes close to how amazing half life alyx is. I hope valve succeeds in all their endevours because while I can only assume their efforts are not altruistic, they have improved so much of the linux ecosystem for what so far has only been at their own expense.
scarface74 5y ago
Multi trillion dollar market?
- yakaccount4 5y ago
  Also: GPU's are new?
  - echelon 5y ago
    PDAs existed before smart phones. There's an inflection point, and it's happening now. GPU-powered applications are going to eat Hollywood, music production, literally every form of entertainment. Everything a person watches or listens to. Kids will be making their own Star Wars films from their bedrooms. Every creative industry will be upended. I don't like the term "metaverse", but there are a number of spatial computing trends that are undeniably evolving at a rapid clip. Volumetrics, photogrammetry, 3D SLAM warehousing. Pose correction, relighting -- photography, telepresence, video games -- everything is going to change. And it goes without saying that deep learning is only getting started. GPUs are the next big thing.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      The entire movie business is $42 Billion dollars a year and declining. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry The entire music industry is $23 billion a year and declining https://www.statista.com/statistics/272305/global-revenue-of-the-music-industry/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272305/global-revenue-of... Honestly, you sound like every bad pitch deck from startups. The $x industry is $y billion big. If we only get 10%…
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > The entire movie business is $42 Billion dollars a year and declining. Your own source says $136 billion for the industry, $42.2 billion is just global box office.
d23 5y ago
It’s fascinating to me that they keep overlooking and/or downright abusing their contributors on their answer hub / forums (in the form of routinely wiping content in a knowledge base that’s been built up for years).
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Epic doesn't make GPUs though?

pm90 5y ago

The article (and Epic) don’t seem to answer the basic question of what changed that made them take this step. It alludes to a difficult labor market, so I’m guessing that’s the reason but it’s not clearly stated why the company decided to make this change now and what criteria it used for making these offers.

bpodgursky 5y ago
High churn in this labor market is probably pretty bad for overall productivity.
jimbob45 5y ago
I’ve been waiting for years for companies to figure out that internal promotion yields huge benefits over outside hiring. If you promote a temp to a full-time, it’s going to be successful 99% of the time because you already know the work ethic of the employee. Better yet, you get to skimp on training. If you hire someone from the outside, the chance is much lower that you’ll get a solid hire. What I’m saying isn’t new - companies promote from within all the time. What I’m advocating for is to codify the practice - only hire your software devs from your QA testers. Not only does putting that pipeline in place ensure better devs but you also make the QA job more attractive as a reliable stepping stone. I’ve seen this suggestion swatted down at multiple companies.
- Talanes 5y ago
  How would that work as a broad industry practice though? If a dev wants to change companies, they would have to start all over as a QA somewhere else? Most people would rather find another industry their skillset is compatible with than do that.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  Hiring all your devs from testers? Generally dev requires a comp sci background, tester doesn’t. I won’t claim every developer needs a 4 year comp sci degree, but I would be worried on a project with 0 degree holders. At some point someone has to like pick a data structure or interface with like hardware.

pengaru 5y ago

Good. Around a decade ago I briefly shared a house in San Mateo with some rando who was a tester for EA. Many of the conversations we had were surrounding his contract ending and employment uncertainty. Especially in an expensive region like the SF Bay Area, it just seemed like an unnecessarily abusive relationship. He was constantly under a cloud of doubt about having a job next quarter, despite working for a well established large employer.

yelnatz 5y ago
EA needs this. Spent a decade there and have seen many QA testers treated like shit. Low pay and no future.
ahefner 5y ago
I'm sorry, but "some rando"?
- pengaru 5y ago
  > I'm sorry, but "some rando"? Random person, someone I didn't otherwise know before sharing a house with them. Is it that confusing or hard to believe?
  - ahefner 5y ago
    I read that as a very disrespectful and/or dismissive way to refer to someone. My context is first learning it as a term used to refer to strangers popping up out of nowhere replying to twitter posts or similar, to whose contribution you ascribe no value. If the term has been normalized to some more benign interpretation, perhaps I'm just getting old. Apologies if so.
    - djur 5y ago
      For what it's worth, I first heard the term many years ago used to refer to either a one night stand ("picked up a rando") or a previously unfamiliar housemate ("rented a place with a rando from Craigslist"). It certainly is dismissive in the sense that it communicates "this person was of no special importance to me", but sometimes that's an appropriate thing to communicate.

robotburrito 5y ago

So good to hear. I wish that places like google and meta would do this!

lokar 5y ago
Google has minimal to zero manual testing. Engineers assigned to write tests and test infra are regular employees.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

Testers are an interesting bunch within the game development industry. Large studios will typically hire hundreds of these for short periods, often bringing on entire smaller studios to smooth out the wrinkles in the games during crunch period. It's likely that this isn't strictly a financially winning move for epic. Way too much cost having them around for periods of low testing needs. Reputational gains could possibly offset it.

dundarious 5y ago
Their cash cow, Fortnite, is essentially always in development and always in need of tester labor.
toast0 5y ago
Testing used to be part of the process of a publisher. If they have more testing staff than they need, they could use some people to test games that they're publishing. Maybe to improve quality of games on their store as a way to entice people to buy things from their store (although, presumably issues that are found in this way would be fixed everywhere if the developer fixes them), or maybe as a way to entice people to publish with them.

yazaddaruvala 5y ago

Anyone that’s played Fortnite knows how many bugs there are. I just figured Fortnite ran the nightly build of UE5 and is used as Epic’s integration test fleet lol. More seriously, I’m very glad to see more responsible labor practices from a company. Hope it creates a trend.

MattRix 5y ago
Considering the complexity of Fortnite and the rate it gets content updates, it really isn’t very buggy at all, certainly not more so than other similar games (ex. I play a lot of Overwatch and despite the game not changing in two years it still has bugs showing up constantly)
- whatcd 5y ago
  Not only that, Fortnite has full cross platform support for PC, PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Series S/X, some Android phones/tablets, Nintendo Switch, and of course iOS and iPadOS when Apple and Epic weren't fighting. Fortnite definitley has a stigma around it for the younger demographic and toxicity, but from an engineering perspective it's pretty amazing.
Quikinterp 5y ago
Fortnite is really not a buggy game to me. I rarely encounter any game breaking bugs. I'm sure people find a lot online but that's the nature of a game that popular
MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
I know this wasn't really your topic, but you've stumbled upon a pet peeve of mine: Dedicated testers aren't primarily to blame for bugs, nor are they primarily to be credited for bug-free software. For one, everybody should test, not just dedicated testers. And two, buggy-ness is primarily a function of design and implementation. Testers can improve the product, but if the product is fundamentally buggy there's no amount of after-the-fact testing that will fix that.
- 5y ago

black_13 5y ago

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago

I work in technical IT, and regularly develop or write unit tests, but I don’t have any formalised training in functional testing short of common sense. I believe having some form of more formalised training as a functional tester would make me better at my current job. Can anyone recommend any books or video training courses that go from zero to functioning functional tester?

MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
There's plenty of training available because there are plenty of people trying to make money selling it, but I can't think of a single one I'd recommend. If the "good" training is out there I certainly haven't seen it. Part of the problem is the inconsistent role of the tester. In some organizations testers are there to ensure the requirements are fulfilled. In others they are truffle pigs for bugs. Some testers are expected to keep their testing black-boxed and high-level, while other testers are expected to help troubleshoot the bugs, the environments, and the CI pipelines. My advice to you (as a developer, I presume) is to stop relying on others for testing. Pretend they don't exist. With every commit you make you should assume it's heading straight to the production environment. So you need to have confidence not only in your unit of code, but also in the behavior of the system as a whole before you submit your pull request. I am a tester, not a developer, but from my perspective TDD is the way a developer should go. The highest-quality products I work on are the ones where my testing is the least needed. If I'm bored that's usually a good thing.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Thanks for that input, mostly I’m the sole developer / tester, I’m also a penetration tester by trade (which loosely follows a methodology, but I’ve always found granular checklists to be an antipattern resulting in poor quality engagements). What I’m curious about is if there are workflows or components of workflows I can steal from functional testers.

ryanmcbride 5y ago

It's so bizarre to read a positive article about a gaming company that I had to re-read it just to make sure I wasn't missing some lurking terrible part. From what it says here they'll still use contract work for short term things, but most of these contractors who have functionally already been working full-time will now officially be full-time employees. That's really cool imo.

melissalobos 5y ago
Hopefully that is what this is. I would try to reserve judgement until more details are out, but it does look good.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
My guess is that they were required to do it by the IRS or a state dept of revenue breathing down their necks over abusing independent contractor status, but even if that's not the case... I don't really feel like giving a giant corporation making piles of cash a cookie for being slightly less shitty.
seattle_spring 5y ago
The horrible part is they have to play Fortnite.
- Karsteski 5y ago
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    > Are you a child..? No, I thought I made it clear that I don't like Fortnite ;)
BoorishBears 5y ago
If you really want a negative side, I've worked with former QA engineers from Epic in NC and heard truly awful things They treated contractors as second class citizens, being physically segregated, sketchy overtime arrangements, verbal abuse... And this was, 3? 4? years ago now so it'd be too late for a lot of people who suffered. And it's not like Epic just got the funds to do this either. So sounds like they might be bleeding the people they treated like undesirables. - Of course this is the internet and someone will likely reply this is false and Epic is actually wonderful. And I won't say they're lying, but this was from first party retellings of conditions immediately after leaving the place so...

pmarreck 5y ago

Maybe one of them will cough up a Linux version