4 ms·

I can exactly imagine how it would happen in a large company: 1. It's a boiling frog problem which developed over several years. It started fast when the JSON

I can exactly imagine how it would happen in a large company: 1. It's a boiling frog problem which developed over several years. It started fast when the JSON file was small but then got a little bit slower each time new content is added. 2. It's also not exactly an "interesting" part of the code base. IIRC it's a JSON file which configures the ingame shop(?). This was probably delegated to a summer intern to implement in a couple of days, maybe in an entirely different department from the people who develop the actual core game. 3. New shop items are probably added by a content team without programmers in the loop who would know by instinct that something must be wrong. People on that content team also most likely don't stay on that team for very long, which together with the boiling frog problem above means that everybody thinks "it's always been like that". 4. Any specific feedback from the outside probably gets lost in the noise of other requests. 5. ...plus a general 'not my problem' attitude common in big organizations and an always-full kanban board ;)

johannes1234321 3y ago
Plus: Most developers probably don't use the full store bundle and skip it, thus don't notice it at all.
rozab 3y ago
This isn't some obscure b2b product, this is GTA5. Surely somebody at rockstar had, yknow, played the game? And noticed they were losing hours of their life on a loading screen? Hell, it's so long you could file a complete bug report in that time. My theory is the fix existed internally but was never merged for weird political reasons. Some have guessed it was due to advertising being done on the loading screen. Or it could have been pure dysfunction, like how fixes for all the notepad.exe problems apparently existed at Microsoft for decades, but it took a full rewrite to have working undo.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  > This isn't some obscure b2b product, this is GTA5. The 'large-organization-dynamics' are all the same though across all industries. I bet enough people down in the trenches noticed, but nobody pushed enough to get the problem investigated and fixed. There's probably several dozen bug duplicates about that problem buried somewhere in GTA5's JIRA (and indeed probably also with exact instructions how to fix, and maybe even somebody did that work but then didn't push enough to get it integrated).
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    This is worth chewing on. It holds so much truth. I work in a larger business but am dealing with a similar problem. Trivial implementation/fix; nearing two years into the effort. What am I doing? Changing 'proxy.remoteURL' for our Docker registries from a painfully slow upstream to a faster one. You can have people in pain with a solution in hand and still find it difficult to sell.
    - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      > What am I doing? Changing 'proxy.remoteURL' for our Docker registries from a painfully slow upstream to a faster one. > You can have people in pain with a solution in hand and still find it difficult to sell. "Well, we don't know what side effects that might have"
- jcranmer 3y ago
  > Surely somebody at rockstar had, yknow, played the game? And noticed they were losing hours of their life on a loading screen? Actually, my understanding is that most devs don't really play the games they build, at least not in the way that people do. (Anecdotal evidence is that quality-of-life features tend not to come from developers very often). And even when they do play the games, internally, it's likely on an internal branch, with internal mocking of things like servers and the like, so a loading time bug that scales quadratically with content is unlikely to be something that would surface in internal playtesting. I also doubt they're playing their games on their own time; if you're already working 40 hours or so each week on the game, it's probably not a feeling of unwinding to put in another 5 or 6 hours on your own time after you come home from work.
- bentcorner 3y ago
  > This isn't some obscure b2b product, this is GTA5. Surely somebody at rockstar had, yknow, played the game? And noticed they were losing hours of their life on a loading screen? Hell, it's so long you could file a complete bug report in that time. My guess is that people noticed but nobody was in the right position to debug - their internal tooling may have been that this code path was usually skipped or behaved differently on internal builds. And debugging a full production build was something many devs didn't do because it was painful.

johannes1234321 3y ago

Plus: Most developers probably don't use the full store bundle and skip it, thus don't notice it at all.

rozab 3y ago

This isn't some obscure b2b product, this is GTA5. Surely somebody at rockstar had, yknow, played the game? And noticed they were losing hours of their life on a loading screen? Hell, it's so long you could file a complete bug report in that time. My theory is the fix existed internally but was never merged for weird political reasons. Some have guessed it was due to advertising being done on the loading screen. Or it could have been pure dysfunction, like how fixes for all the notepad.exe problems apparently existed at Microsoft for decades, but it took a full rewrite to have working undo.

flohofwoe 3y ago
> This isn't some obscure b2b product, this is GTA5. The 'large-organization-dynamics' are all the same though across all industries. I bet enough people down in the trenches noticed, but nobody pushed enough to get the problem investigated and fixed. There's probably several dozen bug duplicates about that problem buried somewhere in GTA5's JIRA (and indeed probably also with exact instructions how to fix, and maybe even somebody did that work but then didn't push enough to get it integrated).
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  This is worth chewing on. It holds so much truth. I work in a larger business but am dealing with a similar problem. Trivial implementation/fix; nearing two years into the effort. What am I doing? Changing 'proxy.remoteURL' for our Docker registries from a painfully slow upstream to a faster one. You can have people in pain with a solution in hand and still find it difficult to sell.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    > What am I doing? Changing 'proxy.remoteURL' for our Docker registries from a painfully slow upstream to a faster one. > You can have people in pain with a solution in hand and still find it difficult to sell. "Well, we don't know what side effects that might have"
jcranmer 3y ago
> Surely somebody at rockstar had, yknow, played the game? And noticed they were losing hours of their life on a loading screen? Actually, my understanding is that most devs don't really play the games they build, at least not in the way that people do. (Anecdotal evidence is that quality-of-life features tend not to come from developers very often). And even when they do play the games, internally, it's likely on an internal branch, with internal mocking of things like servers and the like, so a loading time bug that scales quadratically with content is unlikely to be something that would surface in internal playtesting. I also doubt they're playing their games on their own time; if you're already working 40 hours or so each week on the game, it's probably not a feeling of unwinding to put in another 5 or 6 hours on your own time after you come home from work.
bentcorner 3y ago
> This isn't some obscure b2b product, this is GTA5. Surely somebody at rockstar had, yknow, played the game? And noticed they were losing hours of their life on a loading screen? Hell, it's so long you could file a complete bug report in that time. My guess is that people noticed but nobody was in the right position to debug - their internal tooling may have been that this code path was usually skipped or behaved differently on internal builds. And debugging a full production build was something many devs didn't do because it was painful.