7 ms·

I’m starting to slowly realize how terrible it is working in environments where people simply aren’t curious. It’s so hard for me as an individual contributor t

I’m starting to slowly realize how terrible it is working in environments where people simply aren’t curious. It’s so hard for me as an individual contributor to decouple this way of thinking. Curiosity is how we find better ways of doing things or finding out hidden flows that can be better. Incurious people are a contagion, but I want to believe you can make people curious. It can’t be innate. Every company talks about wanting to have driven curious employees to solve complex issues or challenges but you just get stomped with a boot to your face if you do anything outside your lane or simply ask why. It’s also worse because I’m starting to realize how lucky I was to be raised as a curious individual from my parents who never went to college but at least were curious themselves about different things (pottery, soldering, gardening). The quote “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form” suddenly has a different context when working for a company.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
Don't blame the people, blame the environment. People might start off curious but eventually they keep running into political roadblocks and other nonsense, which slowly beats the interest out of them. If those are the kinds of people that continue surviving then those are the kinds of people which your environment cultivates.
- azemetre 4y ago
  That’s totally fair, I honestly meant to blame the environment and not people. It just sucks to see the pattern of curiosity get stamped out of people due to environmental changes that aren’t obvious.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- miahi 4y ago
  Discussion from today: "Do you know if feature X works? A customer is asking about it" "No, it was disabled because of a bug a while back" "Hmm, found the ticket, it's from 4 years ago!" "Yes, basically it's a bug from a new version of a 3rd party software that made it unusable. At that point it was basically decided that we will not try to find a workaround, we just tell the customer that it's a 3rd party issue." The funny thing is, all the people who made that decision left the company/project and now we have the option to change it. Can't wait to see what happens next, if the new leadership changes that or not (my money is on "not"). The other funny thing is, I can think of at least two workarounds that only need a day of work and a couple for testing it.
alach11 4y ago
Sadly at Rockstar it's likely that employees are curious, but are under so much pressure for deadlines, and working such long hours, that they don't have time to follow their curiosity.
- switchbak 4y ago
  When problems are this obvious, it's surprising that someone doesn't have a look, even if they're busy. Maybe I'm asking too much/projecting here, but I just don't understand how people put up with fairly obvious semi-breakage as much as they do. I have this at my current job, I seem to be the only one (not really, but seems like it sometimes) interested in finding out why things are slow/broken and investing the time to fix it. If you're "busy" all the time, but put up with things that slow you down, you're hamstringing yourself by not fixing the brokenness. When only a small number of people take the time to fix things (typically other's issues), that becomes very demotivating. That would be like being on an all-day ski tour, and feeling too rushed to bother getting rid of the slush on your skis. Yes, you feel rushed because you're moving slower that usual. Taking 4 minutes to kick the slush off will make you much faster on the overall trip. (Sharpening the saw analogy, etc). Sometimes "busy" is a state of mind, more than it is a reflection of reality. I know each situation is unique, but I've seen this enough times to understand that it's often a form of dysfunction rather than a reasonable reaction to the work situation. This is like when people used to say "we're too busy to write tests". Well, maybe you need to get better at communicating the trade-offs to the broader business, and be a bit more assertive about non-functional aspects that are still important to address.
  - 0xFACEFEED 4y ago
    > Maybe I'm asking too much/projecting here, but I just don't understand how people put up with fairly obvious semi-breakage as much as they do. > I have this at my current job, I seem to be the only one (not really, but seems like it sometimes) interested in finding out why things are slow/broken and investing the time to fix it. You will quickly shed yourself of this philosophy if you become a business owner. You can test those waters by releasing a non-trivial open source project that gains a non-trivial amount of users. There will always be at least 100 things that are broken in some way but not impacting the core business. You'll have to pick only 1 to work on. And, if you're unlucky, some frustrated customer may write a blog post about issue #65. An issue that you're fully aware of but haven't prioritized. Guess what you'll do as a business owner? You'll prioritize that issue since it's now very visible and maybe even throw $10,000 at the customer who took time to do their research; as is what happened here. > This is like when people used to say "we're too busy to write tests". Well, maybe you need to get better at communicating the trade-offs to the broader business, and be a bit more assertive about non-functional aspects that are still important to address. Or perhaps the need for tests was communicated and the business made the decision to not prioritize it. You may not like that decision. Mind that the decision to "not write tests" is never explicitly stated so simply. No one wants to look bad. Instead that decision is expressed through minimizing its level of priority compared to other things. Still don't like the decision? Well you have three options: 1) Ignore the stated goals of the company and do what you think is right instead. In which case you're acting against the interests of the company that's paying you. 2) Sacrifice your own free time in order to provide your idea of value to the company (that may actually be valuable! but that the company doesn't value enough to prioritize) 3) Do what the company asks with plausible deniability. Also known as kicking the can. Also known as not my problem. Sometimes doing #1 or #2 could greatly benefit you. Perhaps that thing you're doing (eg: writing tests) will somehow measurably improve the business in the future WITH PROOF so that you'll get get recognized. Or perhaps there's management shake-up and the new leadership perfectly aligns with your philosophy, etc, etc. But that's rare. More often than not your attempt at fixing the company's problems behind the scenes will go unnoticed and unrewarded. And if you do get rewarded, often times it's a pittance compared to the amount of time you invested. My personal philosophy is I simply do not work for companies that don't align with what I value. For example, to me, it's exhausting and unrewarding to work at a company that doesn't appreciate a GREAT user experience.
jdwithit 4y ago
+1 to the other replies here, I think it's very poor form to throw the engineers under the bus for not being curious. The most likely explanation is they were under insane time and resource constraints, especially in the games industry. They wrote something that worked, then were forced to move on to the other 5000 tasks in their backlog that had to get done before release. When you're already being told to crunch 80+ hour weeks for months or years at a time, you run out of gas. I guess it's possible that the engineers who were talented enough to create this extremely impressive game in the first place somehow threw up their hands and said "guess it can never take less than 7 minutes to load, best we can do". But it seems much more likely that they were well aware, but never allowed by poor management to go back and fix it. The game was released and printing money, why bother. They're on to the next title.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  The problem with this way of thinking is that it basically absolves everyone of blame. Bad stuff happens and nobody's at fault. You point to the managers, because the engineers were so busy, but the managers are going to claim they were busy too. Again, from the manager's perspective - the managers aren't even in a position to understand the problem or the reasons for it.
  - delusional 4y ago
    "the managers aren't even in a position to understand the problem or the reasons for it." Which is again the fault of management. It is the responsibility of management to facilitate proper management.
    - blowski 4y ago
      As a shareholder, I’d be rather happy with the management of GTA - it’s phenomenally profitable. That sounds like proper management to me.
  - mrandish 4y ago
    Having been on both sides of this (as a developer and later a senior manager with product/feature responsibility), I'd say it can be both. A really good manager/executive has enough knowledge and experience to ask the right questions and parse the answers even when they are technical. Sadly, many managers aren't that good (at least yet). On the other side, a really good developer has the knowledge and experience to frame the problem in an understandable business context when communicating the issue and options to management. Some of the best work experiences I've ever had were in orgs with such experienced developers and managers. Working together we were often able to solve apparently intractable problems with creative options which would never have been conceived absent the clarity of thought and communication on both sides.
mrandish 4y ago
> I want to believe you can make people curious In my experience it's the opposite. Most people are born innately curious. It takes intense systemic conditioning to suppress their natural curiosity. For many of us that conditioning begins in the traditional education system and is completed in the workplace.
- jrlowe 4y ago
  >It takes intense systemic conditioning to suppress their natural curiosity. Yep, the public school system in America excels at squelching curiosity and any desire to learn.
  - sassy_quat 4y ago
    Just to be clear, you are saying, matter of factly, that the whole point of the American education system, is to suppress free thought. You better tell Congress, the last thing they want is for America to fall into totalitarianism.
    - NateEag 4y ago
      John Taylor Gatto was an award-winning public schoolteacher who more-or-less agreed with this sentiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
      - sassy_quat 4y ago
        How are you incapable of understand sarcasm? In fact you're arguing from Appeal to Authority now. I just, I don't understand. The weird thing is that your argument is extremely convincing at first glance even though the entirety of your argument is in a link to wikipedia?
        wizzwizz4 4y ago
        Sharing knowledge and understanding doesn't have to be an argument.
khalladay 4y ago
I'd be careful about painting the developers at Rockstar as "not curious," that feels like an incredibly unfair conclusion to draw from this. Those developers have other pressures, and deadlines to hit. There are a million reasons why this bug wasn't solved by the team there. When a user complains about a bug in software you wrote, is it because you just "weren't curious" enough? Or is the situation more complicated? Lots of incredibly talented people worked on GTA Online, it's worth trying to think through why a team of smart developers might not have prioritized this, rather than assuming something negative about them.
- delusional 4y ago
  You might say that assuming this was due to inherent incuriousity amongst the developers is quite incurious.
- azemetre 4y ago
  I wasn’t trying to blame engineers that wasn’t my intention, but someone needs to own establishing the environment that actively encourages or doesn’t encourage curiosity. Talented people are found everywhere, but hopefully someone with authority over them doesn’t slowly poison the drive out of them.
  - blowski 4y ago
    Why should developers necessarily be trying to cut loading times? Perhaps GTA is phenomenally successful because they have good BAs and POs who are able to identify and convince engineers to work on what matters to the bottom line.
    - dingleberry420 4y ago
      You've clearly never played it nor read any of the community discussions about the game. The #1 complaint is (or was) loading times. It's why I've personally stopped playing years ago.
      - 4y ago
ajuc 4y ago
In gamedev where crunch is the default and people are routinely working for 10, 12 or more hours a day, sometimes including weekends, sometimes for months on end - it's not very kind to assume it's curiosity that they lack.
- azemetre 4y ago
  Yes but death marches are typically a sign of bad project management IME. As for lack of curiosity, the environment obviously plays a huge role in what is encouraged. I feel like history is repeating itself here (at least in regards to death marches): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_blog_post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b...
ramesh31 4y ago
>Every company talks about wanting to have driven curious employees to solve complex issues or challenges but you just get stomped with a boot to your face if you do anything outside your lane or simply ask why. That's because "curiosity" translates to "more work" at #BigCo. And people work at #BigCo so that they can comfortably do as little work as necessary to maintain their lifestyles. This is a hard rule for any organization. So if you want what you're describing, it will only be found at small startups where everyone has skin in the game.
rvba 4y ago
It is not that developers arent curious. They probably are in their cages set by bad project managers who dont even play own game and dont notice it takes forever to load. The project managers could put load times as a priority but they genuinely dont see it as a problem or dont care at all. It happens all the time. There is a lot of unoptimized software. Perhaps the issue comes from the top: the project managers are supposed to only do things that increase revenue and all other things are not rewarded at all? Perhaps executives only care if they hit quartely results? (Short term gain traded for long term loss - the game is made for whales who are so invested that they will play even when it is technically bad - so milk them now with new content for whales and ignore everththing else, who cares that new players will be discouraged by bad load times). In my opinion if nobody plays own game / eats own dogfood, they dont even see its problems. Blizzard is at this stage now - some of their games barely work. You buy Starcraft 1 through the launcher... and it doesnt work(I think it works now, but it took them 1 month to notice it and another to fix it). Heroes of the storm - downloaded a 137mb patch every run - it took them half a year to notice it and do something with it. It is like nobody cares about the brand at all. Game company where your games dont work. IMHO a problem with people - that comes from the top. They want only story points for things that bring money. The project managers either dont care, or cannot deal with other problems at all. I bet they dont care. This happens in many companies - there were few people who tried, they got burned for that: terminated or quit -> so now nobody cares. "The game is good enough to still sell some skins to the whales, so why bother". Look at the results: they got an external comment what to fix. Did they launch their own internal project to optimize the game? Did they check for other things that make it load slow? It looka that someone else did a partial fix that is "good enough" so everything is back to usual and nobody cares about load times.
rexpop 4y ago
I'd never heard that Nabakov quote, but it's terrifically cynical and, I hope, false but, in my experience, not entirely untrue. Designers' unnecessary desire to delight users staves off the more Kafkaesque user experiences, and we all live in the gap of cops' unnecessary (occasional) sympathy for (some) nominal outlaws (we're all nominal outlaws).[0] When you mentioned curiosity I thought of a firm where colleagues scoffed at me as I rummaged through conference room drawers, saying, "you're not going to find anything interesting in there." I'm curious about cupboards as well as log traces -- an almost ubiquitously "eyes-glaze-over" boring artifact of modernity that, alongside popularly mind-numbing "code", I am equipped to find interesting. Is it any wonder, then, in this workplace where such innocent, cheap, curiosity were scoffed at, I was not too long after threatened with the extraordinarily archaic (in our at-will state, at least) legal notion of "insubordination"? It's a shame, because insofar as "all ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system,"[1] the liberated curiosity of individual contributors is often the only "crack in everything" that's "how the light gets in."[2] 0. "With two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent." (Françoise Bertaut de Motteville) 1. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/ 2. "Anthem" - Leonard Cohen
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
asdff 4y ago
Curiosity has to come from the top and fall all the way down. As others and you have noted in other comments, its the environment for the workers that sets up whether or not they will even be able to pursue curious things, and that's on the managers to create that environent. However, the managers themselves have bossess too, so that has to trickle up, to their bosses bosses all the way up the chain. In short, every job needs to be able to have autonomy to enact on the ground solutions for what their immediate team needs. You shouldn't be penalized for going off the reservation and coming back with a creative solution. The problem is corporate structure for the past few decades has been about rooting out this autonomy and anything opaque about job responsibilities. There is a lot that's been done that would need undoing to change those environments, and imo you are better off finding another workplace than bringing about the monumental change required. A mature corporation is like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside; you can hardly change its course much less stop it short of where its heading.
samstave 4y ago
My brother is the polar opposite of me when it comes to curiosity. I ALWAYS ask questions like "How did this come to be, How much did this cost, who designed this and why" etc. My brother gets annoyed that A) I ask and question everything, and B) Laments he doesnt know as much as me. However, this is spurred by my ADHD... and I at times wish to be able to have a more precise control of my focus.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

Don't blame the people, blame the environment. People might start off curious but eventually they keep running into political roadblocks and other nonsense, which slowly beats the interest out of them. If those are the kinds of people that continue surviving then those are the kinds of people which your environment cultivates.

azemetre 4y ago
That’s totally fair, I honestly meant to blame the environment and not people. It just sucks to see the pattern of curiosity get stamped out of people due to environmental changes that aren’t obvious.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
miahi 4y ago
Discussion from today: "Do you know if feature X works? A customer is asking about it" "No, it was disabled because of a bug a while back" "Hmm, found the ticket, it's from 4 years ago!" "Yes, basically it's a bug from a new version of a 3rd party software that made it unusable. At that point it was basically decided that we will not try to find a workaround, we just tell the customer that it's a 3rd party issue." The funny thing is, all the people who made that decision left the company/project and now we have the option to change it. Can't wait to see what happens next, if the new leadership changes that or not (my money is on "not"). The other funny thing is, I can think of at least two workarounds that only need a day of work and a couple for testing it.

alach11 4y ago

Sadly at Rockstar it's likely that employees are curious, but are under so much pressure for deadlines, and working such long hours, that they don't have time to follow their curiosity.

switchbak 4y ago
When problems are this obvious, it's surprising that someone doesn't have a look, even if they're busy. Maybe I'm asking too much/projecting here, but I just don't understand how people put up with fairly obvious semi-breakage as much as they do. I have this at my current job, I seem to be the only one (not really, but seems like it sometimes) interested in finding out why things are slow/broken and investing the time to fix it. If you're "busy" all the time, but put up with things that slow you down, you're hamstringing yourself by not fixing the brokenness. When only a small number of people take the time to fix things (typically other's issues), that becomes very demotivating. That would be like being on an all-day ski tour, and feeling too rushed to bother getting rid of the slush on your skis. Yes, you feel rushed because you're moving slower that usual. Taking 4 minutes to kick the slush off will make you much faster on the overall trip. (Sharpening the saw analogy, etc). Sometimes "busy" is a state of mind, more than it is a reflection of reality. I know each situation is unique, but I've seen this enough times to understand that it's often a form of dysfunction rather than a reasonable reaction to the work situation. This is like when people used to say "we're too busy to write tests". Well, maybe you need to get better at communicating the trade-offs to the broader business, and be a bit more assertive about non-functional aspects that are still important to address.
- 0xFACEFEED 4y ago
  > Maybe I'm asking too much/projecting here, but I just don't understand how people put up with fairly obvious semi-breakage as much as they do. > I have this at my current job, I seem to be the only one (not really, but seems like it sometimes) interested in finding out why things are slow/broken and investing the time to fix it. You will quickly shed yourself of this philosophy if you become a business owner. You can test those waters by releasing a non-trivial open source project that gains a non-trivial amount of users. There will always be at least 100 things that are broken in some way but not impacting the core business. You'll have to pick only 1 to work on. And, if you're unlucky, some frustrated customer may write a blog post about issue #65. An issue that you're fully aware of but haven't prioritized. Guess what you'll do as a business owner? You'll prioritize that issue since it's now very visible and maybe even throw $10,000 at the customer who took time to do their research; as is what happened here. > This is like when people used to say "we're too busy to write tests". Well, maybe you need to get better at communicating the trade-offs to the broader business, and be a bit more assertive about non-functional aspects that are still important to address. Or perhaps the need for tests was communicated and the business made the decision to not prioritize it. You may not like that decision. Mind that the decision to "not write tests" is never explicitly stated so simply. No one wants to look bad. Instead that decision is expressed through minimizing its level of priority compared to other things. Still don't like the decision? Well you have three options: 1) Ignore the stated goals of the company and do what you think is right instead. In which case you're acting against the interests of the company that's paying you. 2) Sacrifice your own free time in order to provide your idea of value to the company (that may actually be valuable! but that the company doesn't value enough to prioritize) 3) Do what the company asks with plausible deniability. Also known as kicking the can. Also known as not my problem. Sometimes doing #1 or #2 could greatly benefit you. Perhaps that thing you're doing (eg: writing tests) will somehow measurably improve the business in the future WITH PROOF so that you'll get get recognized. Or perhaps there's management shake-up and the new leadership perfectly aligns with your philosophy, etc, etc. But that's rare. More often than not your attempt at fixing the company's problems behind the scenes will go unnoticed and unrewarded. And if you do get rewarded, often times it's a pittance compared to the amount of time you invested. My personal philosophy is I simply do not work for companies that don't align with what I value. For example, to me, it's exhausting and unrewarding to work at a company that doesn't appreciate a GREAT user experience.

jdwithit 4y ago

+1 to the other replies here, I think it's very poor form to throw the engineers under the bus for not being curious. The most likely explanation is they were under insane time and resource constraints, especially in the games industry. They wrote something that worked, then were forced to move on to the other 5000 tasks in their backlog that had to get done before release. When you're already being told to crunch 80+ hour weeks for months or years at a time, you run out of gas. I guess it's possible that the engineers who were talented enough to create this extremely impressive game in the first place somehow threw up their hands and said "guess it can never take less than 7 minutes to load, best we can do". But it seems much more likely that they were well aware, but never allowed by poor management to go back and fix it. The game was released and printing money, why bother. They're on to the next title.

ALittleLight 4y ago
The problem with this way of thinking is that it basically absolves everyone of blame. Bad stuff happens and nobody's at fault. You point to the managers, because the engineers were so busy, but the managers are going to claim they were busy too. Again, from the manager's perspective - the managers aren't even in a position to understand the problem or the reasons for it.
- delusional 4y ago
  "the managers aren't even in a position to understand the problem or the reasons for it." Which is again the fault of management. It is the responsibility of management to facilitate proper management.
  - blowski 4y ago
    As a shareholder, I’d be rather happy with the management of GTA - it’s phenomenally profitable. That sounds like proper management to me.
- mrandish 4y ago
  Having been on both sides of this (as a developer and later a senior manager with product/feature responsibility), I'd say it can be both. A really good manager/executive has enough knowledge and experience to ask the right questions and parse the answers even when they are technical. Sadly, many managers aren't that good (at least yet). On the other side, a really good developer has the knowledge and experience to frame the problem in an understandable business context when communicating the issue and options to management. Some of the best work experiences I've ever had were in orgs with such experienced developers and managers. Working together we were often able to solve apparently intractable problems with creative options which would never have been conceived absent the clarity of thought and communication on both sides.

mrandish 4y ago

> I want to believe you can make people curious In my experience it's the opposite. Most people are born innately curious. It takes intense systemic conditioning to suppress their natural curiosity. For many of us that conditioning begins in the traditional education system and is completed in the workplace.

jrlowe 4y ago
>It takes intense systemic conditioning to suppress their natural curiosity. Yep, the public school system in America excels at squelching curiosity and any desire to learn.
- sassy_quat 4y ago
  Just to be clear, you are saying, matter of factly, that the whole point of the American education system, is to suppress free thought. You better tell Congress, the last thing they want is for America to fall into totalitarianism.
  - NateEag 4y ago
    John Taylor Gatto was an award-winning public schoolteacher who more-or-less agreed with this sentiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
    - sassy_quat 4y ago
      How are you incapable of understand sarcasm? In fact you're arguing from Appeal to Authority now. I just, I don't understand. The weird thing is that your argument is extremely convincing at first glance even though the entirety of your argument is in a link to wikipedia?
      - wizzwizz4 4y ago
        Sharing knowledge and understanding doesn't have to be an argument.

khalladay 4y ago

I'd be careful about painting the developers at Rockstar as "not curious," that feels like an incredibly unfair conclusion to draw from this. Those developers have other pressures, and deadlines to hit. There are a million reasons why this bug wasn't solved by the team there. When a user complains about a bug in software you wrote, is it because you just "weren't curious" enough? Or is the situation more complicated? Lots of incredibly talented people worked on GTA Online, it's worth trying to think through why a team of smart developers might not have prioritized this, rather than assuming something negative about them.

delusional 4y ago
You might say that assuming this was due to inherent incuriousity amongst the developers is quite incurious.
azemetre 4y ago
I wasn’t trying to blame engineers that wasn’t my intention, but someone needs to own establishing the environment that actively encourages or doesn’t encourage curiosity. Talented people are found everywhere, but hopefully someone with authority over them doesn’t slowly poison the drive out of them.
- blowski 4y ago
  Why should developers necessarily be trying to cut loading times? Perhaps GTA is phenomenally successful because they have good BAs and POs who are able to identify and convince engineers to work on what matters to the bottom line.
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    You've clearly never played it nor read any of the community discussions about the game. The #1 complaint is (or was) loading times. It's why I've personally stopped playing years ago.
    - 4y ago

ajuc 4y ago

In gamedev where crunch is the default and people are routinely working for 10, 12 or more hours a day, sometimes including weekends, sometimes for months on end - it's not very kind to assume it's curiosity that they lack.

azemetre 4y ago
Yes but death marches are typically a sign of bad project management IME. As for lack of curiosity, the environment obviously plays a huge role in what is encouraged. I feel like history is repeating itself here (at least in regards to death marches): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_blog_post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b...

ramesh31 4y ago

>Every company talks about wanting to have driven curious employees to solve complex issues or challenges but you just get stomped with a boot to your face if you do anything outside your lane or simply ask why. That's because "curiosity" translates to "more work" at #BigCo. And people work at #BigCo so that they can comfortably do as little work as necessary to maintain their lifestyles. This is a hard rule for any organization. So if you want what you're describing, it will only be found at small startups where everyone has skin in the game.

rvba 4y ago

It is not that developers arent curious. They probably are in their cages set by bad project managers who dont even play own game and dont notice it takes forever to load. The project managers could put load times as a priority but they genuinely dont see it as a problem or dont care at all. It happens all the time. There is a lot of unoptimized software. Perhaps the issue comes from the top: the project managers are supposed to only do things that increase revenue and all other things are not rewarded at all? Perhaps executives only care if they hit quartely results? (Short term gain traded for long term loss - the game is made for whales who are so invested that they will play even when it is technically bad - so milk them now with new content for whales and ignore everththing else, who cares that new players will be discouraged by bad load times). In my opinion if nobody plays own game / eats own dogfood, they dont even see its problems. Blizzard is at this stage now - some of their games barely work. You buy Starcraft 1 through the launcher... and it doesnt work(I think it works now, but it took them 1 month to notice it and another to fix it). Heroes of the storm - downloaded a 137mb patch every run - it took them half a year to notice it and do something with it. It is like nobody cares about the brand at all. Game company where your games dont work. IMHO a problem with people - that comes from the top. They want only story points for things that bring money. The project managers either dont care, or cannot deal with other problems at all. I bet they dont care. This happens in many companies - there were few people who tried, they got burned for that: terminated or quit -> so now nobody cares. "The game is good enough to still sell some skins to the whales, so why bother". Look at the results: they got an external comment what to fix. Did they launch their own internal project to optimize the game? Did they check for other things that make it load slow? It looka that someone else did a partial fix that is "good enough" so everything is back to usual and nobody cares about load times.

rexpop 4y ago

I'd never heard that Nabakov quote, but it's terrifically cynical and, I hope, false but, in my experience, not entirely untrue. Designers' unnecessary desire to delight users staves off the more Kafkaesque user experiences, and we all live in the gap of cops' unnecessary (occasional) sympathy for (some) nominal outlaws (we're all nominal outlaws).[0] When you mentioned curiosity I thought of a firm where colleagues scoffed at me as I rummaged through conference room drawers, saying, "you're not going to find anything interesting in there." I'm curious about cupboards as well as log traces -- an almost ubiquitously "eyes-glaze-over" boring artifact of modernity that, alongside popularly mind-numbing "code", I am equipped to find interesting. Is it any wonder, then, in this workplace where such innocent, cheap, curiosity were scoffed at, I was not too long after threatened with the extraordinarily archaic (in our at-will state, at least) legal notion of "insubordination"? It's a shame, because insofar as "all ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system,"[1] the liberated curiosity of individual contributors is often the only "crack in everything" that's "how the light gets in."[2] 0. "With two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent." (Françoise Bertaut de Motteville) 1. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/ 2. "Anthem" - Leonard Cohen

deleted 4y ago

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asdff 4y ago

Curiosity has to come from the top and fall all the way down. As others and you have noted in other comments, its the environment for the workers that sets up whether or not they will even be able to pursue curious things, and that's on the managers to create that environent. However, the managers themselves have bossess too, so that has to trickle up, to their bosses bosses all the way up the chain. In short, every job needs to be able to have autonomy to enact on the ground solutions for what their immediate team needs. You shouldn't be penalized for going off the reservation and coming back with a creative solution. The problem is corporate structure for the past few decades has been about rooting out this autonomy and anything opaque about job responsibilities. There is a lot that's been done that would need undoing to change those environments, and imo you are better off finding another workplace than bringing about the monumental change required. A mature corporation is like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside; you can hardly change its course much less stop it short of where its heading.

samstave 4y ago

My brother is the polar opposite of me when it comes to curiosity. I ALWAYS ask questions like "How did this come to be, How much did this cost, who designed this and why" etc. My brother gets annoyed that A) I ask and question everything, and B) Laments he doesnt know as much as me. However, this is spurred by my ADHD... and I at times wish to be able to have a more precise control of my focus.