5 ms·

> The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. W

by xg15 4y ago

> The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. Was your rebooted worldview that you had been factually incorrect (i.e. the senior dev actually did do his work) or was it that you were factually correct, but hierarchy and office culture demanded that everyone pretend you weren't?

sillysaurusx 4y ago
I wanted to touch on that: one of the things you learn is that it’s better to be liked than right. We devs often fixate on whether we’re right and the other person is wrong. One specific incident comes to mind. I was working on Heroes of Newerth, a DotA clone. We achieved a bit of popularity in those days, and we reached around 50k concurrent users. So our servers tended to melt. One day, the servers went south, and although games were being completed, none of the stats were being recorded. (Think of it like, the database was in read only mode.) I remember it feeling a little surreal how they decided to handle it. They kept cool, looked into the problem, and got the servers back up within a couple hours. Then they went back to their usual jobs and didn’t seem bothered by the ticking time bomb. I think in my usual 22yo fashion, I said that it was dumb that no one seemed to care that the servers were going down, and that we had to do better for the players. What I should have done was ask questions. Should we try to figure out the root cause, and make sure this doesn’t happen again? Or was it really not a big deal? A few hours’ downtime may or may not have been a big deal. We did end up suffering from some pretty serious server malfunctions which limited our ability to scale. But I certainly mishandled how to approach it, and won no friends. Every team is dysfunctional in their own way. It’s important to adapt to the dysfunction and push things in a positive direction, not merely to be right.
- maest 4y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, I don't think technical issues were the reason HoN failed. For context, I have played a lot of DotA2 and HoN (5.2k hours in DotA2, probably 1k hours in HoN). This is anecdotal, but I was never really bothered by outages and neither were the other people that I played with. Instead, I think HoN made some very bad decisions regarding cosmetics and fostered an extremely toxic playerbase. At least for me, those were the 2 main factors that drove me away to play DotA2 (even though I thought HoN's gameplay was superior).
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Surprisingly, what killed the company was the lack of competitive scene. We sort of expected players to organize themselves. We also had a lot of the DotA pros at the time. The moment icefrog and valve dropped their $1M tournament prize pool, the company in hindsight was doomed. But it took a couple years to sink. Players follow pros, and if the pros are playing DotA, they’ll switch to DotA. Our only chance was to keep the pros. It would have been smart to make an exclusive contact with as many pros as possible. But of course, that’s with hindsight. The rise of twitch happened to coincide with the rise of pro DotA, which I think was a factor in shifting popularity.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > extremely toxic playerbase > drove me away to play DotA2 How toxic is the HoN playerbase if DotA2 is an improvement? I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed my games as much as in DotA2.
    - maest 4y ago
      I think the difference comes down to a few things: * the existence of behaviour score together with a functional report system, which I don't think was a thing in HoN. I'm at 10k behaviour score (max) and there are generally no game ruining griefers. Some people do trash talk sometimes, but nothing too obscene. * HoN cosmetics actively encouraged players to BM one anther. e.g. the Dumpster Taunt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4j4U7K6mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4j4U7K6mc If you die while taunted you have a dumpster thrown on you and the global announcer tells you to get "dumpstered". Taunting a player right when they die (which is a strongly negative emotional moment) is a great way to tilt them and, in turn, make them grief, com abuse or generally bm. That negatively affects the rest of the players and the cycle goes on. * A bunch of players in the HoN pro scene had really bad manners, e.g. Moonmeander was notorious for his trash talking, taunting and general BM. He actually significantly toned it down when he moved over to DotA - unclear if that was because he grew up or because the DotA pro scene is a different environment. Regardless, the behaviour of pro players sets the tone for how the community at large behaves, and the DotA pro scene is much nicer. (incidentally, this is why I believe pro players should be held at much higher standards of manners than the rest of the player base. Stuff like saying glhf, gg and generally not acting dickish should be mandatory)
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  You are conflating "ask questions before jumping to conclusions" with "ignore inconvenient truths that are politically/organizationally uncomfortable" and using the obvious merits of the former to defend what I would describe as a toxic culture.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  This comment just brought me back to the League of Legends <=> Heroes of Newerth arguments. Complete with both games having server stability problems. (But obviously one is worse than the other!) Thanks for the nostalgia hit!
- tuckerpo 4y ago
  HoN kicked ass back in the day. Thanks for the anecdote.
- tonnydourado 4y ago
  > it’s better to be liked than right. Broadly, maybe. At work, I don't care about being liked by people that can't admit they are wrong. That doesn't being a dick to anyone I think is wrong. The whole point of telling someone that they're wrong is to correct course and fix things, and bullheaded, righteous, approaches never accomplish that. But it does mean you don't keep quite. You don't give up. You ask questions, you try to learn. Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one. I understand being unwilling to bulge to people that come in thinking they know better about everything. But I do not accept not even listening to someone that disagrees, that's a red flag,and I am out asap.
  - yucky 4y ago
    Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one. Ironically, you are wrong. Not only are there better ways to let people know they're wrong when you're 100% right, but in your example you aren't even sure you're 100% right, yet telling others they're wrong. Good luck with that :)
    - tonnydourado 4y ago
      What other way there is to tell someone that they are wrong then, well, telling them?
      - yucky 4y ago
        You said: "Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one." So which is it? Are they wrong for sure, or are you willing to learn that you may be the wrong one?
        tonnydourado 4y ago
        Saying that something is wrong doesn't imply (at least for me) that you're 100% sure that it's wrong. I always consider colloquial affirmations to carry an implicit degree of confidence, which is rarely 100%, and I often try to make that explicit by phrasing it like "I think that ...", etc. So, yeah, I don't see a conflict on thinking something is wrong, pointing it out, and arguing for change, and at the same time be open to be convinced that it wasn't, in fact, wrong.
beambot 4y ago
> hierarchy and office culture There could be dozens of other reasons beyond just these two... The single most common fault that I see is perspective. Individual sections have limited context or visibility of the whole picture to assess the importance of their section's dysfunction. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- in a highly-fluid environment, it's often important for sections to achieve their own objectives without N^2 comms overhead (e.g. military command & control). Firefighting provides a useful analogy. One section's 4-alarm fire might actually be a 1-alarm or 2-alarm fire for the broader organization -- which means that other sections might get top exec billing. For example: If this $60M contract was at Boeing during the last few years, it will rightfully be deemphasized while executives deal with the existential threat of 737 Max matters.
bipson 4y ago
You're missing the point. What a novice usually does not realize is: It is easy to be right. What is hard is being actually helpful, coming up with a viable solution (vs. an idea). In the posted article there simply was no such solution. It was not viable. Unacceptable. Yes, an outsider with fresh eyes might see things differently and without bias, but most certainly the experienced team knows damn right that you're right (to some degree), but also knows that it's just not that easy. Throwing "We are doing this all wrong" around is often just short of saying: "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!". I'm not saying that fresh input can't be helpful, outsiders might bring in new tricks and ways, but being humble is way more helpful than being loud.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  > "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!". i may be a total outlier, but personally, i kinda like this type of person... regardless if they are wrong or right, it shows they have passion and really care (though i will admit this may be a naive point of view!)
- yarg 4y ago
  > It is easy to be right. It's easier to be wrong. In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs. They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues. They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project. > It was not viable. Unacceptable. The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took. Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice. But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.
  - bipson 4y ago
    > It's easier to be wrong. And it is cinsiderably harder to be actually helpful. While everything you said is true, we and the author do not know what was previously discussed with the client. We don't know what was promised by either party, we don't know what the client messed up Heck, I attended meetings with partners/clients that were simply impossible to get an output from, since the expectations in general were on completely different sides of the book. But you air this out, realize that everyone agrees, most people resignate, and really helpful is this one guy, that offers to invest effort and time to work closely with a well chosen peer from the other side to get them on your side and finally work on the interesting things. This is helpful. And it is hard.

by xg15 4y ago

sillysaurusx 4y ago

I wanted to touch on that: one of the things you learn is that it’s better to be liked than right. We devs often fixate on whether we’re right and the other person is wrong. One specific incident comes to mind. I was working on Heroes of Newerth, a DotA clone. We achieved a bit of popularity in those days, and we reached around 50k concurrent users. So our servers tended to melt. One day, the servers went south, and although games were being completed, none of the stats were being recorded. (Think of it like, the database was in read only mode.) I remember it feeling a little surreal how they decided to handle it. They kept cool, looked into the problem, and got the servers back up within a couple hours. Then they went back to their usual jobs and didn’t seem bothered by the ticking time bomb. I think in my usual 22yo fashion, I said that it was dumb that no one seemed to care that the servers were going down, and that we had to do better for the players. What I should have done was ask questions. Should we try to figure out the root cause, and make sure this doesn’t happen again? Or was it really not a big deal? A few hours’ downtime may or may not have been a big deal. We did end up suffering from some pretty serious server malfunctions which limited our ability to scale. But I certainly mishandled how to approach it, and won no friends. Every team is dysfunctional in their own way. It’s important to adapt to the dysfunction and push things in a positive direction, not merely to be right.

maest 4y ago
If it makes you feel any better, I don't think technical issues were the reason HoN failed. For context, I have played a lot of DotA2 and HoN (5.2k hours in DotA2, probably 1k hours in HoN). This is anecdotal, but I was never really bothered by outages and neither were the other people that I played with. Instead, I think HoN made some very bad decisions regarding cosmetics and fostered an extremely toxic playerbase. At least for me, those were the 2 main factors that drove me away to play DotA2 (even though I thought HoN's gameplay was superior).
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Surprisingly, what killed the company was the lack of competitive scene. We sort of expected players to organize themselves. We also had a lot of the DotA pros at the time. The moment icefrog and valve dropped their $1M tournament prize pool, the company in hindsight was doomed. But it took a couple years to sink. Players follow pros, and if the pros are playing DotA, they’ll switch to DotA. Our only chance was to keep the pros. It would have been smart to make an exclusive contact with as many pros as possible. But of course, that’s with hindsight. The rise of twitch happened to coincide with the rise of pro DotA, which I think was a factor in shifting popularity.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > extremely toxic playerbase > drove me away to play DotA2 How toxic is the HoN playerbase if DotA2 is an improvement? I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed my games as much as in DotA2.
  - maest 4y ago
    I think the difference comes down to a few things: * the existence of behaviour score together with a functional report system, which I don't think was a thing in HoN. I'm at 10k behaviour score (max) and there are generally no game ruining griefers. Some people do trash talk sometimes, but nothing too obscene. * HoN cosmetics actively encouraged players to BM one anther. e.g. the Dumpster Taunt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4j4U7K6mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4j4U7K6mc If you die while taunted you have a dumpster thrown on you and the global announcer tells you to get "dumpstered". Taunting a player right when they die (which is a strongly negative emotional moment) is a great way to tilt them and, in turn, make them grief, com abuse or generally bm. That negatively affects the rest of the players and the cycle goes on. * A bunch of players in the HoN pro scene had really bad manners, e.g. Moonmeander was notorious for his trash talking, taunting and general BM. He actually significantly toned it down when he moved over to DotA - unclear if that was because he grew up or because the DotA pro scene is a different environment. Regardless, the behaviour of pro players sets the tone for how the community at large behaves, and the DotA pro scene is much nicer. (incidentally, this is why I believe pro players should be held at much higher standards of manners than the rest of the player base. Stuff like saying glhf, gg and generally not acting dickish should be mandatory)
whimsicalism 4y ago
You are conflating "ask questions before jumping to conclusions" with "ignore inconvenient truths that are politically/organizationally uncomfortable" and using the obvious merits of the former to defend what I would describe as a toxic culture.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
This comment just brought me back to the League of Legends <=> Heroes of Newerth arguments. Complete with both games having server stability problems. (But obviously one is worse than the other!) Thanks for the nostalgia hit!
tuckerpo 4y ago
HoN kicked ass back in the day. Thanks for the anecdote.
tonnydourado 4y ago
> it’s better to be liked than right. Broadly, maybe. At work, I don't care about being liked by people that can't admit they are wrong. That doesn't being a dick to anyone I think is wrong. The whole point of telling someone that they're wrong is to correct course and fix things, and bullheaded, righteous, approaches never accomplish that. But it does mean you don't keep quite. You don't give up. You ask questions, you try to learn. Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one. I understand being unwilling to bulge to people that come in thinking they know better about everything. But I do not accept not even listening to someone that disagrees, that's a red flag,and I am out asap.
- yucky 4y ago
  Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one. Ironically, you are wrong. Not only are there better ways to let people know they're wrong when you're 100% right, but in your example you aren't even sure you're 100% right, yet telling others they're wrong. Good luck with that :)
  - tonnydourado 4y ago
    What other way there is to tell someone that they are wrong then, well, telling them?
    - yucky 4y ago
      You said: "Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one." So which is it? Are they wrong for sure, or are you willing to learn that you may be the wrong one?
      - tonnydourado 4y ago
        Saying that something is wrong doesn't imply (at least for me) that you're 100% sure that it's wrong. I always consider colloquial affirmations to carry an implicit degree of confidence, which is rarely 100%, and I often try to make that explicit by phrasing it like "I think that ...", etc. So, yeah, I don't see a conflict on thinking something is wrong, pointing it out, and arguing for change, and at the same time be open to be convinced that it wasn't, in fact, wrong.

beambot 4y ago

> hierarchy and office culture There could be dozens of other reasons beyond just these two... The single most common fault that I see is perspective. Individual sections have limited context or visibility of the whole picture to assess the importance of their section's dysfunction. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- in a highly-fluid environment, it's often important for sections to achieve their own objectives without N^2 comms overhead (e.g. military command & control). Firefighting provides a useful analogy. One section's 4-alarm fire might actually be a 1-alarm or 2-alarm fire for the broader organization -- which means that other sections might get top exec billing. For example: If this $60M contract was at Boeing during the last few years, it will rightfully be deemphasized while executives deal with the existential threat of 737 Max matters.

bipson 4y ago

You're missing the point. What a novice usually does not realize is: It is easy to be right. What is hard is being actually helpful, coming up with a viable solution (vs. an idea). In the posted article there simply was no such solution. It was not viable. Unacceptable. Yes, an outsider with fresh eyes might see things differently and without bias, but most certainly the experienced team knows damn right that you're right (to some degree), but also knows that it's just not that easy. Throwing "We are doing this all wrong" around is often just short of saying: "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!". I'm not saying that fresh input can't be helpful, outsiders might bring in new tricks and ways, but being humble is way more helpful than being loud.

andrekandre 4y ago
> "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!". i may be a total outlier, but personally, i kinda like this type of person... regardless if they are wrong or right, it shows they have passion and really care (though i will admit this may be a naive point of view!)
yarg 4y ago
> It is easy to be right. It's easier to be wrong. In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs. They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues. They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project. > It was not viable. Unacceptable. The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took. Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice. But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.
- bipson 4y ago
  > It's easier to be wrong. And it is cinsiderably harder to be actually helpful. While everything you said is true, we and the author do not know what was previously discussed with the client. We don't know what was promised by either party, we don't know what the client messed up Heck, I attended meetings with partners/clients that were simply impossible to get an output from, since the expectations in general were on completely different sides of the book. But you air this out, realize that everyone agrees, most people resignate, and really helpful is this one guy, that offers to invest effort and time to work closely with a well chosen peer from the other side to get them on your side and finally work on the interesting things. This is helpful. And it is hard.