I have a friend who worked retail and he would have a 50-100% more work efficiency than everyone else on the floor during his shifts. However, they were all paid the same wage. He said to me he decided to do what everyone else was doing and decided to min/max and be as lazy as the others working during his shift. Management noticed this and instead of praising him for his work ethic they gave him a write up for underperforming instead of actually writing up the others who were always underperforming. Yeah he quit his job after that and said it was the best decision he made in his life.

The problem is that at most jobs, if you're good at your job, your only reward is being given more work.

5:20 There's a very closely related idea called Goodhart's law; A metric for measuring performance stops being reliable once it becomes a metric, specifically because people end up trying to game the system

lemme tell you the story of when i went to a college full of game devs. i used to be in a college specifically made for people who were going into the industry of gaming, animation, and music. I had to do community service (i did something illegal and i was being punished) so the Dean made me work in the college Food Drive by stocking the donated canned goods in the storage. According to the Dean, "the workers at the drive have been trying to stock these for several months now and still havent finished. I dont expect you to finish it either, but this should keep you busy by the end of your quota". While stocking the food, i overhear the Food Drive workers saying theyre all gonna head out to get boba tea while one stayed behind to watch over me and was just watching youtube the whole time. I finish stocking all the boxes of food in about half an hour and i go, "ok so wheres the rest of the boxes?" "what the hell, youre done?" "yeah is that it?" "omg that was hella fast. yeah thats all the boxes" This was just 3 boxes of cans and packaged goods. a dozen lazy twats took several months to fail at stocking 3 boxes of canned goods and told the dean they didnt have enough manpower. So i just watched youtube with her for the rest of the service until the secuirty guard came to check up on me. sees me doing nothing and i explained that they had nothing else for me to do. So he writes me as finishing my quota for the week and the Dean ends up chewing out the Drive when he found out they have been fking around this whole time.

I feel like it’s bigger then just the gaming industry. I feel like the job industry itself is suffering.

He's essentially describing wanting employees to have personal ownership and interest in the product/task, as well as a feeling of responsibility on the outcome on the product/task. Unfortunately, that's going to be a minority intangible across many (if not all) industries.

My favorite boss of all time told me he strived to be a leader, not a boss. You ask a question, he would educate you in the best way and make you feel good about yourself after. If you messed up, you felt like you let him down and you just want to be better so we can all be happy. He was also always in the trenches with his coworkers. Once he left, turn overs were happening all the time and work ethic tanked.

Asmon is the kinda guy who devises a 125-step plan to avoid having to answer the door for his pizza delivery guy.

His complaints about the 'it's just a job' attitude in game development overlooks the fact that a significant percentage of those people will be laid off as soon as the game makes initial release. The are not invested career wise in the company except for padding their resume for the next job which may or may not come before the game they are working on is released.

The problem is and I'm sure most people in every field can attest to this, is this. People are not adequately rewarded for going above and beyond. If you work at 110% while everyone does the bare minimum to not get fired and then you realize you are getting paid the same and not getting promoted fast enough to work this much harder than everyone else, and you drop your level to theirs you will often get criticized because you set a standard and fell below the expectation. But the inverse is not true, others are not expected to rise to your level, it's a shame and I realized this in the military as well, it's exactly the same. In the navy you have a bunch of other collateral duties, which equates to more work to do that ISN'T your job. and being promoted often more heavily relied on how well you did the extra bs jobs that wasn't your job. So if you were a kick ass mechanic for example but didn't really care about advertising the business you wouldn't get the promotion over someone else who is also a mechanic like you, but they suck at it and don't care about improving but man did they promote the business well. It's dumb and most fields work in a capacity that does not reward working above the minimum.

i worked at this company and i always tried to improve my workrate if it didnt impact my quality of work and all my co-workers were asking why i put so much effort into my job. all i could think of was that they were idiots and they didnt like their jobs. until i worked there for 3-4 months and realised nothing was being said about me doing my best, litterally nothing. i even made a suggestion that got put into motion on how to improve workflow on the floor and everyone seemed to like it but i didnt get a reward or anything. after that i didnt try my best anymore and just did the bare minimum until i eventually got bored of the job and quit about 7-8 months working there.

I still remember what my SSG told me in 2005. The more overly complicated you make a process the more likely people will find a way around it. The key is to find the least amount of work needed to reach the desired outcome and often times that requires less complexity.

The root of every problem in video game development is money. Back in the 80's and 90's, video games were made almost exclusively by people who wanted to play them. These people would go to work, spent 8 hours making a game, work another 1 or 2 hours, often unpaid, because they were that excited by what they were doing, then go home, eat a ham sandwich because that's all they could afford, then spend the next 8 hours playing video games. They'd get too little sleep, get up, and go back to work making video games again, and they were HAPPY about this. Then, somewhere along the way, the money people got involved. Publishers, who were largely home video publishers who published video games as a side business, started to see how much money they could make. They influenced the leaders of some of the studios - not all, people like Carmack and Cain didn't care, but many - and money crept into the studios as an influence. Decisions that had always been made based on "would we like to play this ourselves?" were now based on "how many dollars of residual revenue will this make us?" The second half of this was when community colleges started reeling in people who had absolutely zero interest in either playing or making video games, promising them riches earned at a desk in an air conditioned office. These people started filling up little campuses across the country around 2002, and what do ya know, 3-4 years later, games started being really sh*tty. It wasn't a coincidence. Instead of games being made by gamers, now they're being made by single mothers and wannabe actors who come home after 8 hours of game development - and you bet your ass not a single millisecond of overtime - and spend their off hours doing ANYTHING IN THE WORLD but playing video games because after a day of making them, they can't stand to look at them. These people have ZERO passion for game development. It's just something that pays their bills. Money killed video games from both ends. There's a reason why the indies are where a lot of the best stuff comes from. They're the few who do this because they love it, not because it pays well.

The uncomfortable feeling of being similar to Asmon. - when I stopped caring about my job, 'cuz the boss was plain inefficient and outright incompetent, I started replying with "detailed optimism". AKA expressing a strong desire to start on a task right away, by asking for details you know a specific person has and won't give you in a timeline fashion, typically the person asking you to do the task. "That's a great idea! I'm on it! I will need the client list you had worked on. Can you send that over?" (always show seemingly genuine enthusiasm, and ask for resources that you know he doesn't have, but in a way that gives the impression that you think he's completed the work. The trick being: you establish that the person was competent enough to have done XYZ, and him admitting he has not completed that would break that high esteem you have established, so silence and forgetfulness becomes the original asker's defacto state)

"They're not fixing the problem, they're making it not visible anymore" I say that a LOT about people who just block/deplatform people for "being problematic." It's like if there was a snake loose in the house and you made it invisible and silent. You didn't fix the problem you just made it invisible.

16:00 The thing so far is, he's talking about a systematic issue and Asmon is talking about employee engagement. What he was saying was literally that comments focused too much on the people and not enough on the issue itself, which is on the education & training side. The example of the prototype AI is more that they couldn't envision doing a rushed, unfinished AI even though that was exactly what was needed. It's not the people themselves who became like this on their own, but the entire system that taught them that such a prototype would be inadequate, thus they don't have the flexibility of mind to see things otherwise.

It was easier to feel a sense of personal ownership of your work 30 years ago when executives made something like 10x their workers. It's harder for employees to feel that these days when executives make 300x times what they do, and always resort to layoffs rather than executive paycuts whenever something goes wrong. Duty, commitment, and loyalty are all two-way streets!

I feel like a big problem is people have had previous experiences with bad bosses. where if you ask "why are we doing this?" you will either get fired or lose any possibility of growing within the company. Timothy seem to completely ignore the power imbalance between him and his employees. "they only seem to do what i tell them and they never do random things and stray from the instructions" Ye because they have no idea about how you will react, and will get no reward from you if the response is good. Only the possiblity for negative consequence exist

"It may break other stuff in the game." says the people that clearly don't code games. There are these strange dimensions called "test cells" where you can test a prototype and see how it jibes with other features. That's the point. To see if they DO break something, and if they do, then you dump it or change it. You don't know until you test it. Sometimes a new function improves previous features, or gives you a EUREKA moment where you know how to add something else better. Timothy Cain is 100% right about this. When people refuse to do something out of this kind of fear, you never take a risk that can have potentially favorable payouts. Half of the mechanics I've made for my personal projects were the results of accidents by trying to use two different designs together. And no. It's not a big risk, as they were tested in isolated constructs. The most I lose is some time, and the better a programmer you are, the faster you are.

What I'm sensing is the core issue is employees are no longer getting the sense that they are getting a good deal. They work hard, their life style outside work doesn't improve. The core reason goes all the way back to inflation really. If your money consistently buys less and less and you're not getting paid more and more... what's the point anymore? Business owners and leaders are paid more so inflation is hitting them less hard. Sure, you could be working with the most respectful and understanding people around you and you could be doing the hardest best work... but if your life is getting harder and harder, that doesn't last. And it shouldn't really; we need to stop the inflation practices that are causing this and stop letting our money be managed by corrupt institutions.

If one person is not doing their job, well ok, but if an entire team is this dysfunctional, the dysfunction is a fault of leadership not the employee. Why did this employee need 5 weeks to do this, lack of training? Over-punishing metrics making them want to take their time? Lack of accountability across the field causing hard working employees to get burn out covering the load for weaker ones, or the same issue but instead of weaker employees it's understaffing to stay in budget/bonuses.

As a therapist, the part about writers writing out their therapy is so true. Many of the conversation I hear in retail between NPCs sounds just like my therapy sessions (and most of the therapy sessions I have sat in on). They think writing out something emotional equates good writing.

Listening to asmon describe how much of a cockroach he is, is just inspiring. This guy is great.

The estimates thing is also similar to implementing things like KPIs. A scenario: a developer usually gets their work done roughly on time or ahead of their estimates, but then one time gave an estimate of 3 days, when it legit ends up taking 6 days due to unforeseen complications, and they get chewed out for it. You can be sure that is the last time they will underestimate a piece of work, from then on every estimate is padded by 50% just in case the 5% chance it ends up being much more complicated and it being delayed gets them a black mark. Additionally, and I don't know what the discipline is like at Tim's company, but 'test' code that's added to software as a crutch, often ends up as production code, due to crunch time or other tasks being re-prioritised. Maybe that developer didn't want poor quality throwaway code added to the codebase because they've been burned in the past. Obviously this is all devil's advocate. He could have just been a lazy employee for sure, but all we have is one perspective.

The reason why that this exists, is if someone is really good at their job and they excel, their boss will exploit that if they can and over work their worker for no increased pay. I've personally learned to give long timelines to complete projects, because if I didn't, I would be overworked for no increase pay and it only hurts me in the long run. No one wants to accurately pay a good working employee anymore. They will use you and toss you away when you are no longer needed. It's something that i've learned over time, and why giving a timeline of 2 weeks when it can be done in hours or less happens. It is what it is. I'm not working more for the same pay, so i'll work less for the same pay.

I think you might have missed the initial point, the issue is not the guy that told the estimate, it's the process involved in producing that estimate. When I have to estimate development of a feature, I *can't* only estimate development time (the time it takes to write a feature), I have to think about all the bureaucracy around it aswell. For example for every feature I need to produce documentation, tickets, ask for the QA team to test the feature, add automated tests and that particular feature needs to be approved by a number of other on my team and the management. It's a rabbit hole of useless and time consuming processes.

Doing more work more efficiently leads only to being given more work

Folks just don’t have any drive to do anything these days. I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve ever worked. People look at me crazy for doing my job.

Being A small indie dev I take heed to what he has to say. Then again if you want something done well do it yourself. Indie is the future

This attitude is all over the job market in general. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that real wages have been stagnant since the 70s, and there's a real lack of incentive for people to give a shit. I mean why go above and beyond when people who do half the work you do are paid the same?

Employers want the highest amount of work from the least amount of pay. Employees want the highest amount of pay for the least work. It’s always a battle

The problem was described by Tim in the video, in the game industry accountability and passion are rewarded by layoffs. The best example is the Creative Assembly fiasco, 40% of the staff fired because of the executives, how can anyone have passion and want to be accountable in that environment?

I guess game studios nowadays have had a huge... fallout

I am the best at ignoring problems and I can 100% confirmed that many of them will go away, the problem is some of the bigger ones stick.

One issue with the 'list of problems, no can do' is that often the problems are realistic, rather than purely figurative. There is something called 'tech debt' when legacy software causes increasing problems with trying to make changes - if the company doesn't deal with this then the 'lazy peon' might actually just be 'peon having to push back the tide while lighting a fire'. The company knows this and they often underfund infrastructure, so it can become ever more difficult to figure out which one the peon is. The advantage is, regardless of which one the peon is, the root of problems that are given can be managed - so having a 'lazy peon' can actually be an advantage as they will point out what is causing them more work rather than staying silent until everything collaspes.

Good example... that Add fight at the door in the first Dragonflight raid. I was throwing a lot of rocks. Got yelled at for not doing enough dps. SO i started mutishotting more, my dps was near the roof, and i didn't throw any rocks. We rapidly started getting overwhelmed every pull. And thats when i realized almost nobody was throwing rocks, even though every single one one-shot a mob with like 11million health. People are stupid.

people are taught to just do whatever you are told to do for the entirety of their formative years is it really a surprise that they keep doing that when they grow older?

As an IT professional and software developer, I can't tell you enough how the majority of people just want to superficially solve the symptoms and not dig into root cause analysis to solve the underlying problem. Dragging it on and on and causing pain for everyone instead of rolling up sleeves to eradicate it once and for all.

Asmon gave it his best shot, but he just couldn't replicate the guy in the Thumbnail 😅

People can never be the issue. It opens up confrontation immediately and instead of moving forward together, you're stagnated fighting a battle you don't need. By the same measure, to quote the Marines, " You lead people, your manage things." Often things need to be managed better.

It almost always ultimately comes down to one thing: money. This of course often means stressed employees, unreasonable goals, less for more pricing (especially since DLC and microtransactions started becoming the norm rather than the exception), rushed development, lack of proper product testing (because why would you spend time and money playtesting if the day 1 players do it for you anyway) and lack of passion products. So sad to see many industries suffer from this trend.

I worked as a walmart manager for a while andit was fking hard to not do the floor work myself. Or just help someone. I actually got written up by a division manager for working with my employees to teach them efficiency. The higher ups were younger than me,(college age) and they expected me to just fire people who couldnt figure out the fastest production efficiently. It was rough. I could feel their coruption taking over the way I started seeing people. Now whenever I see people working in a store I just feel bad for these people because I know they dont make enough to live on happily. I have also noticed the people working in the stores have maintained a lazy attitude towards work because nobody teaches them anything.

He makes a good point, and made a great game, but the company went bankrupt at the end of the day. Hard to get investors on board for a new project when the risks are that high.

He's just pointing out why indie games are better then most AAA.

Also just to shed some light on this - People who do what they are told normally are one of two kinds. They either don't care and just want a paycheck - Or they don't want to lose their job so they don't rock the boat. In video games, there is no sort of personal stake, unlike an industry where personal safety is a concern. So - you have bosses who say 'we are gonna do this' and if you have someone that questions why, some bosses will look at that person and go 'if you don't like it, we will fire you' and then gets them in line. Lots of places are like this. This isn't unusual. I think the problem is you have nepotism and morons running things, then they get their stupid kids in management, and it gets worse and worse.

More small 'garage' companies, less corpos. It's the only way to return to form.

I can see his concern about this because his style of development is aging out which is a damn shame

the process Asmongold described where he is able to extend out a task into all of its steps and substeps isn't itself a symptom of adhd, but what is when a person can't control it, where their mind always does that, it makes every single task incredibly exhausting and can be debilitating. I do think Asmongold described it very well and suspect he has had issues with it in the past, but if he can control it then good for him, some people cant though, and that sometimes where medication can help if simple therapy cant

What he’s talking about is a lack of people taking ownership of their work. This is because we’ve been taught from a young age that obedience is rewarded, not ingenuity or ownership. Read Seth Godin’s “Stop Stealing Dreams” and learn how the modern school system is ruining all the qualities that are required to do meaningful work.

You actually can make people care. You pay them enough, you treat them with kindness and respect, and you attempt to convey why whatever it is you're doing matters... and that burden is on you if you've been there longer and are getting paid more.

Asmon's technique against people asking for favors is almost identical to Sam Hyde's strategy to get debt collectors to leave you alone. This shit works

This video is the main reason why games aren't optimized today...because people like this are no longer in the business.

Honestly , any high level position held by somebody in favour of rapid prototyping is a blessing . He’s somebody who wants to get shit done

I mean we just saw the Hans Zimmerman of gaming get axed (Michael Salvatori). How can you expect the people literally laying the foundations for these games to do anything but the bare minimum knowing regardless of how well the game does they are on the chopping block first. At the same time the people in charge of major decisions that usually ruin games are just trying to make the quarterly reports look good so they can get their end of the year bonus.

The fact that he's gping out of his way to make videos about what's not working for the game industry and why, shows he really cares about it, and I'm sure MOST game developers or heads of these companies wouldn't waste their breath on trying to fix anything. So long they're still getting a fat check, that is.

I worked in game development for a couple of years. During that time, I was helping in the hiring process of a couple of people. The most important thing for me, besides perhaps the main skills we were looking for, was this 'independence' he's talking about. I was mostly doing UI programming, but I was often going to the general gam designers saying 'I disagree with this design here, because this and that. Why aren't er doing this other thing instead?'. Of course it requires a certain environment. But I think I the result will always be much better.

never give 100% of yourself to another person (especially an employer), unless youre in control of the outcome either way. This is why indie devs will always be the ones to push things forward, because they truly care and have a passion for what they are working on, and once those devs make it big, the cycle of self destruction and stagnation continues until someone new comes along. Creative Assembly is a perfect example of this, because their issues are recent but have been piling up over years.

6:07 Actually, there are people who can 'think' and people who can only 'follow'. I am at the position where I dealt with both. The first kind of people, giving them freedom to do things their way get things done in the most efficient way they can think of. While the second kind of people, if you do not set processes in place for them to follow, they don't get things done, or a ton of mistakes is made along the way. Not intended, but I do have to treat them like factory workers.

Effort and efficiency is never rewarded accordingly, if ever rewarded at all, that makes people who outperform eventually tone down and face consequences. A lot of people may see this average performance as 'mediocrity' but in reality there's no reason to do more than the expected, no incentive, no motivation to excel, because the moment you raise your expectations of yourself, it becomes your new 'average performance' and when you back it down you are perceived as lazy. Acting your wage has been a mindset that pretty much everyone adopted in several parts of the world, and it sucks because there's people who really want to escalate and feel like they're making a change in the world but popping outside the average is just asking for problems. Being mediocre is how you play the game, and it was never the employees fault that it has come to this.

Your example of telling two guildmates who dislike each other that you'll deal with it but then not doing anything is actually not an example of ignoring the problem. You are addressing the problem via psychological manipulation and intimidation which works. Ignoring the problem in this example would be to not say or do anything about it at all.

My job recently moved my productivity requirements up by 40%. I was able to hit my marks easily before but becasue of that enjoyed the job, always went past the mark, and did good work. Now, I barely hit my marks and I feel rushed all day, so my work is also worse overall. Super fun!

Software development is all about problem solving and loving to solve problems and see things work. I can understand how Tim feels. If anyone in your engineering department complains about having problems to solve, ask them why they're in their line of work, because that IS the work XD And while bandaid fixes get results, understanding the root cause of something is always a better way to solve something the correct way the first time.

Yeah but the problem is that comapred to him, lower level employees are not able to chagne the process. I'm pretty sure any small change of "do it now" is fine at the moment, but in big corporation setting what makes sense isn't always what is being rewarded. And he is the one who could if anything change how people are rewarded

Tim Cain: What is the best perks in Fallout to pick up? Asmon: Lazy and selfish

11:38 This is exactly how DSP approaches any and every request his audience has ever made of him. There's a hundred examples one could point to but I always recall this video of him back in the day explaining why being a KZfaqr is actually an extremely complicated profession that requires way more work than any of the normies could possibly fathom. He breaks down the process of uploading a video into 85 micro steps, it's absolute lunacy, and hilarious to boot.

The issue (that is not exclusive with gaming) is caring. Most of us do not care in the slightless about our jobs. Why? It boils down to 2 reasons: -1: payment. 95% of time you're getting paid pennies and NO ONE wants to work hard for, essentially, nothing. No matter how good your enviroment is, how good the project is, how good your boss and coworkers are, if you cannot afford the bare minimum, no amount of sugar coat and pizza parties will make you interest in something that is terrible paid (again, most jobs are like that, you have to suck it up) -2: enviroment. Sometimes you coworkers or your boss are idiots. Tim here sounds fine and articulated and he is calmly telling us that he told the coworker to do something easy but in the real life, with the high stressfull situation maybe it wasn't like that. Maybe he yelled (not maliciously, but still yelled) and demanded that simple thing, and reprimended when the worker said that needed time. And I know this is true because this has happened to me many times: bosses screaming out of their lungs like maniacs and later are like "tehee, I was just stressed

Looking at the way Larian dealt with becoming a much larger studio, at least from what I have gathered, they still maintain a level of synergy in the work environment even at a larger scale. At least from what some devs and employees spoke about, they are usually assigned as a smaller group of people each, to work on a particular part and the circle of people that they work with and know in the company is small, but they know each other a lot better and have better synergy because of it. They don't require to be motivated by just the higher up, but they simply motivate each other because that energy that is found in a small studio is still present in their smaller circle of people they work with. That way not everything has to be supervised by the highest in the company on an individual level, and everyone gets room for brainstorming and being engaged with the work that they have to do.

Thank goodness Asmongold commented on this with all of his extensive experience in professional workplaces and game design.

Whole generations went through relentless reverse cognitive behavioral therapy, it isn’t surprising things turned out this way.

It’s strange to think that an employee who steps into work of 100+ person corporation would take ownership over something where they would get none of the credit or financial rewards for. When studios are small, everyone is on the ground floor and the benefits from all of the improvements and hard work are much more tangible. When the companies become too large, the gap between the original staff and new employees becomes insurmountable. The new employees have no vision and feel replaceable because they are. This is the natural order of things, and why indie developers are passionate and artistic…until they aren’t.

Are you doing laundry in the background? I'm expecting a random beep too.

You mentioned what may truly be the issue with one word, "Accountability". I think that issue is spread throughout the workforce. It's also a tough line for managers to walk. Holding employees accountable but also not completely ruining their perceived "self-worth" to the company. Unfortunately not a lot of managers know how to do this, but also employees aren't use to being held accountable . Put those two together and it drastically increases the difficulty.

If you use best practices, changing code shouldn't break shit. If you are just some code monkey not compartmentalizing different aspects of the code you are working on, you are just making spaghetti and it will be tough to swallow later. Those people might be fully capable of doing a good job, but if they are told by bosses to just put in some hack to make shit work sooner, it's no wonder that companies are rarely able to push out a polished game in 2023.]

I didnt catch the first part, but this all depends on who the employee is. A computer scientist is hired to write code, a software engineer is hired to design. You wouldn't ask a construction worker to design a building. Cmon

broken window theory: something is broken, people notice it does not get fixed, they stop caring themselves...

Literally changed my perception on what a game was and could be.

I can see that Timothy Cain have big brain and is not one of that corporate bs staff members that are managing this days - great guy this Timothy ;)

It's really interesting to see that people commenting on symptons of the examples he gave, rather than cause. I feel like this is a constant issue no matter what facet of life's problems we are dealing with or disucssing. People are always going to quickly latch onto the path of least resistance. What I feel like we are dealing with in this day and age can only be coined as 'Hyper Choice Resistance'; societies unwavering undercurrent to speed up decision making due to modernisation; the number of problems the average person has to calculate on a daily basis exceeds that of our ancestors, yet the core hardware has not fundamentally changed. We now do not have the time to allocate proper thought to the myriad of tasks thrown at us on a daily basis, so the optimal approach is to only dig surface level for answers. Go watch the start of the movie 'The God's must be crazy' and you will understand what I mean. This is how we've reached a society that wants pandering to a personal worldview. How we want confirmation bias. We want the fast food version of problems/solution; surface level, zero nutritional value, zero effort to digest, highly processed beyond the raw truth. And it needs to come with a side of memes or entertainment. And we wonder why ADHD is being diagnosed more and more than ever. It's because we are running at capacity in this lifetime.

13:40 - I've seen this from both sides - it tends to boil down to "this is what happens when for three decades Management is all stick and no carrot" Some of it is managers jealously guarding their *very* limited resources which is why something that is *objectively simple and even well defined* can take two-four weeks instead of two days with developer level testing. Some of it - and the above one mentions it in an offhand way - is just *completely inadequate* resource availability: Not enough people have been hired or trained to do the job that's needed. Some of it is "Act Your Wage" - Where people have learned that doing heroic levels of work to deliver on a deadline isn't treated as a _one off,_ it instead becomes what management considers to be the *new baseline* - This is actually an old lesson that is just being learned in Programming: Labor Unions have known this shit for *years* And then, yes, of course, some of it is just basic incompetence and laziness. The fucked up part about it? And I'll put it in terms used previously. "Fuck you, I don't care. It isn't *my* problem" - All of these issues are a *Management* problem. Too few resources? Fuck you, hire more people. Resource guarding? Fuck you, manage your employee's allocations better. Act your wage? Fuck you, recognize and respect that you can't run your team ragged and redline all the time - also hire more people. Bad or Lazy workers? Fuck you, it's your job to figure that out.

All of the people who criticized his first video have never had to think critically and collaborate with a team to complete a goal.

He's the Internet Historian

i love around 12 mins when you start to talk about the difficulties of going out. remines me a lot of dating in 2023. people have been burned so bad by now that everyone has a reason NOT to meet vs. just going out and having a little bit of hope. its absolutely crazy that its this difficult to get people out of their house and out of their norms

As my old boss told me when he offered me a job, "coding is innate you either can do it, or you can't, but it cannot be taught." What he meant by this isn't that you can't be taught a coding langiage, but rather the understanding of coding at its core. Think of it on a creative level, coding is an art, everyone can be taught to paint, not everyone can be Picasso.

the problem it seems to me, is ego. EVERYONE from the janitor, on up to the CEO's, simply SUCK at taking criticism. they really think theyre the best ever at this. they arent even close, and they dont even know it. they suck SO BAD at taking criticism, theyll ban YOU for calling out cheaters getting away with it. literally, ive had it happen to me. their failure, was somehow my fault..... the biggest issue i see in gaming companies, is complacency. there is no accountability or recourse UNTIL it gets so bad a company is about to fold. then they go scorched earth, ON THE WRONG PEOPLE!!!!! lack of accountability goes directly on the shoulders of management, not basement employees. they blatantly failed to manage properly. NOW, when management is getting away with NOT managing, now the accountability goes straight to the CEO's and the investors for allowing gross negligence and total failure. and the absolute dumbest part, is the people that literally CAUSE the problems, still get their f*^king bonuses as if they earned something. they arent even earning their base pay, let alone a freaking bonus. these problems START at the TOP of these companies, not the bottom. employees are ONLY going to do, what upper management, CEO's, and investors ALLOW to happen. the REASON none of it EVER gets addressed, is because people just keep throwing money at them, effectively HELPING THEM mask it all. companies will NEVER KNOW they are wrong, as long as customers KEEP MAKING THE EXCUSES FOR THEM. gamers have ALL the respect in the world, for companies that openly DISRESPECT your money. simply put, it appears as if gamers LIKE being abused. thats what it really is. the industry absolutely openly abuses your loyalty TO YOUR FACES

I have worked in software before and seen some employees that just don't want to perform. I have seen good employees give up for a few reasons: 1. There a contractor and don't care for the company or the product 2. Management keeps changing their minds and not showing a clear vision 3. Management don't want to listen to what is best and the employee feels unheard 4. Too much meeting that go nowhere that saps a workers time

7:27 they've made bet on the person to do the topdown decisions. Give more autonomy for the teams, and you'll get the involvement

Roundabouts are way better than 4 way stops. By a large margin. They allow traffic to keep flowing. No sitting at traffic lights forever. They are getting much more popular in the US.

i really like those confronting views of asmon (assume the worst people (naturally) are and work with it in mind) and timothy (the systems are the problem not the people). i can not help but think reactions like these are what timothy wishes for.

He's asking employees to go the extra mile and wearing a manager's hat on top of their other responsibilities and demanding this with no extra pay for the employees. This is actually pretty normalized in the tech world, as I'm often required to put on many hats as a product designer, but it's absurd and it just comes down to leadership trying to milk as much as they can out of employees with no additional pay. If you ask me to implement something, I don't get paid to ask "why". As a manager/director it's your fucking job to manage what everyone is doing and vet the reasoning, timelines and execution of those tasks. This guy is just telling everyone he's shit at his job and trying to pin it on employees.

What amazes me is a big company with over 500+ devs spend months adding features and bug fixes that Modders had already done in less than a week.

Back in the day, when the industry was small and so were the studios/companies, employees were given large equites and bonuses based on how fast and how much money the product made. This meant that your interest as an employee was to make the product faster and better. Today, you will be lucky if you get a bonus, and in the current situation of the industry, you'd be lucky to still have a decent salary. The executives and manager don't want to hear the truth and the shareholders don't understand the truth.

Whenever I do pottery in school, I often take forever. Last class I realized my issue, i'm not brave. It takes bravery to do something, like changing the ai. Even if it's just testing, anxiety can make it feel like it's not. As in, "Wait, but what if it's not saved correctly? What if I mess up and overwrite it? What if my stats sheet is misplaced or useless? What if i'm not testing it the right way? What if i'm testing the wrong stuff?" Etc etc.. And yes, I know i'll become that kind of person most likely when I get a serious job. But I do hope to have the self awareness to tackle that issue head-on.

When Asmon described the gordian knot, he was describing the programmer's attitude

Every year you work and inflation rises, if you don't get a raise to match you're getting a paycut

Issue with gaming industry is games turned from passion projects to 9 to 5 jobs. Very simple and the reason why indies are way better.

This is insane; I heard you tell a story that basically amounted to "The way you conduct conversation when working on creative projects can get emphatic, the other guy you were speaking with was fine with this and everyone else has been so watered down that hearing you raise your voice means it's "scarwy" so you shouldn't. Even though it had fuck all to do with the folks not involved. Not you being a bad boss mate, it's other people from my generation not being able to have a discussion that involves more than a single insular view shared by both parties.

If anyone knows about the real workplace and has a worthwhile opinion it's Asmon.

11:00 making a temporary AI is the same solution. Temp fix is temp fix

To Asmon's convoluted response example with the microwave. Since I have done the same thing in the past, I know that technique. It is so satisfying when you throw it back at them over and over. "yeah, that's fine. Go to home depot and get the microwave, we can wait."

The original FallOut was something else