General / Off-Topic Disastrous Release reflects FDev's current state as an employer

Zinegata

Z
Winkelmann said:
  • Chaotic management, you never know what you will be doing next month or next week and a lot of time things do not make sense
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This, at the minimum, is true. It is simply absolutely inexcusable to have four CTDs in 20 minutes on a livestream by an actual popular streamer. It means the marketing department were unaware that the game was that buggy, or they didn't care about how that could badly affect the game.

And that's before you had this patch that supposedly fixed so much.... and yet killed the login server for a couple of hours. That's literally just the product of people having no sense of direction on what should be the priority in terms of fixes.
 

Mack Winston

Mack Winston
Juniper said:
It's the same with any company that is beholden to its shareholders and not privately owned.
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The shareholders ARE the owners.

In any case, Frontier is more than 50% owned by Frontier insiders - meaning Frontier insiders are both in full control from both an investor's perspective as well as a day-to-day management perspective. Braben alone owns 45% of the shares.
 

Mrc_NorthEast

Mrc_NorthEast
Food for thought on reading some of the comments at glassdoor for Fdev. Just look at the status of the Odyssey release and what we "the paying consumer(s)" were told vs reality. Yeah something is that bad at Fdev, not sure what, but something stinks.

So if they 'FDev' lie to the paying customers about what is in the release, the state of the release, the pics of the planets showing 'in game footage' vs what was delivered, what do you think they do and say to their own employees? I am not surprised at all by the glassdoor reviews. FDev clean up your act. Fire whomever made the call to release Odyssey in the rubbish state it was in, and maybe things will get better for everyone involved!
 

VR StarLightPL

VR StarLightPL
hunvagy said:
But even in other fields, IT is trying to shoehorn and "transform" to agile, and to the managers, that means that people do everything faster and that they don't need to hire testers any more, or architects, the dev will do everything.
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That's Agile done wrong. I've worked in properly implemented Scrum teams, and it's really nice although the bitter aftertaste when you don't deliver in a Sprint is real. But since it's all in a smaller chunk of time, it can be processed easier. It is also easier to backtrace on something if it doesn't work the way we expected it to when we planned it, and you can shift the course from sprint to sprint...

What you describe are pato-agile deployments where somebody from management read something about agile and understood it his/her way (WERK FASTA!). Also often in bad agile deployments the rigour is put squarely on the development team while management are "free" to "intervene", for example in a middle of a sprint.

But when it's working well, I find it very rewarding, and the sprint review is a joy where you get to share your work proudly. Work is calm, defined in advance, planned. And as for the testers, testing was a part of Definition of Done. So all in all nice working environment.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
hunvagy said:
Trust me, there were times where I thought to myself that flipping burgers would be more relaxing, appreciated and rewarding. And I'm not even in the game industry.

But even in other fields, IT is trying to shoehorn and "transform" to agile, and to the managers, that means that people do everything faster and that they don't need to hire testers any more, or architects, the dev will do everything. In a landscape like that, where they throw rubbish bingo like T-shape at you at every corner, it is hard to find competent workers, when you don't open your wallet.

I'm still in a team of two, because the third one left due to how the management and customer behaved, and you can't just hire a SharePoint developer off Fiverr :D
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Agile is starting to fall out of fashion a bit now.

Its now all Continuous Delivery or DevOps.
 

Juniper

Juniper
winston said:
The shareholders ARE the owners.

In any case, Frontier is more than 50% owned by Frontier insiders - meaning Frontier insiders are both in full control from both an investor's perspective as well as a day-to-day management perspective. Braben alone owns 45% of the shares.
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Appreciate that, but these are people who have no actual interest in Frontier, its employees, or the general well-being of the products produced or any of that ilk. All they're interested in is ROI, and for good financial results so they can sell at a profit.

The fact that the Odyssey release went down the way it did (and the reasons for it) are a good case in point. Another is CDPR, as mentioned.
 

Juniper

Juniper
Agony_Aunt said:
Agile is starting to fall out of fashion a bit now.

Its now all Continuous Delivery or DevOps.
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Indeed, which is why I always advise anyone looking to get into the software development industry (any genre or area) to make sure you understand CI and DevOps. These are immensely marketable skills nowadays (when I started, it was waterfall, then agile in various forms, now it's almost all DevOps). Yes, I'm old. 🤷‍♀️

I've only ever left one Glassdoor review, and that was for a company who fired me last year for the 'crime' of contracting Covid. I felt people needed to know what the company was like, especially given the number of glowing positive reviews for that company. I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously, because Glassdoor, but it felt good to get it off my chest at least. I know they can't edit or delete that review, so it will stay there & people can make their own minds up about working there.
 
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