A few years ago, a lone programmer named t0st did something extraordinary: he fixed an 8-year-old bug in GTA Online that had been driving players crazy. The bug? Painfully long load times, sometimes u
This is something I really love about my job. It’s a small company, and we don’t have any of these kinds of process overheads.
It’s accepted that people fuck up (and in most cases that’re relevant to me, I’m the people in question) but if I can reproduce the problem, I can often get the fix in the users’ hands the next day. Generally the positive effects of a quick turnaround and feeling like they matter outweigh the negatives of the problem being there in the first place.
Not to say I don’t have stuff in the “tech debt” bucket, but having the autonomy to just fix the low-hanging fruit makes for a satisfying work environment.
Works for a small company. If everyone in a large company is allowed the same leeway nothing could ever ship - while no one person (except a few incompetent that get fired eventually) makes too many mistakes, the combination of all of them mean the system is always horribly broken.
Of course 50% of my job is just getting simple changes though which is annoying - but more than once that process has meant I didn’t break everything.
Works for a small company. If everyone in a large company is allowed the same leeway nothing could ever ship
Oh for sure. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve only ever worked for places with at most a few hundred employees, so my experiences of larger companies have been at best second-hand — but it was enough to know that I’d never want to work somewhere like that.
I’ve worked for both over the years. Small companies have their own downsides. There is no clear winner. People complain all the time, so if you have never worked at a large company you have no clue what it is really like. Sure there are things not to like, but there are also things to like.
This is something I really love about my job. It’s a small company, and we don’t have any of these kinds of process overheads.
It’s accepted that people fuck up (and in most cases that’re relevant to me, I’m the people in question) but if I can reproduce the problem, I can often get the fix in the users’ hands the next day. Generally the positive effects of a quick turnaround and feeling like they matter outweigh the negatives of the problem being there in the first place.
Not to say I don’t have stuff in the “tech debt” bucket, but having the autonomy to just fix the low-hanging fruit makes for a satisfying work environment.
Works for a small company. If everyone in a large company is allowed the same leeway nothing could ever ship - while no one person (except a few incompetent that get fired eventually) makes too many mistakes, the combination of all of them mean the system is always horribly broken.
Of course 50% of my job is just getting simple changes though which is annoying - but more than once that process has meant I didn’t break everything.
Oh for sure. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve only ever worked for places with at most a few hundred employees, so my experiences of larger companies have been at best second-hand — but it was enough to know that I’d never want to work somewhere like that.
I’ve worked for both over the years. Small companies have their own downsides. There is no clear winner. People complain all the time, so if you have never worked at a large company you have no clue what it is really like. Sure there are things not to like, but there are also things to like.