> "An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z""
In practice this never goes as smoothly as you think.
It's a constant antagonistic battle between management and the people on the ground doing the work. Let's face it, the devs also want to have a chill time and develop at their own pace (because it allows them to not stress, slack off, but also because they can focus on quality and the art of it, etc). Management knows about this, they just suffer from a lack of ability to tell the difference between which one the dev is doing when when he asks for "more time".
Either way, you need engineering leadership that has clear goals and priorities. Having management with non-technical people that don't trust the technical people, along with conflicting and opposing constraints, will give you Boeing and this game disaster.
But some management jobs are technical themselves. Take CFO for example. It would be very difficult for an engineer to become a CFO in any reasonable timescale.
Marketing, HR, Sales and the aforementioned finance are all things that a frequently trivialised on hn, but none of them would be an easy transition for your average engineer.
I am not in gaming but I run finance at an organisation that has a lot of engineers.
1) I spend a lot of time explaining what our organisation does to our finance team. This is rare in my experience.
2) giving up on engineering focus to want to become commercially focused is a big step, and not one everyone is going to want to take. Imagine suddenly being dragged into a meeting with your holding company to explain why your project is losing money?
Overall I can't believe that they develop games like this. If you have a game about battling in Japan, and you want to make a game about battling in Rome...why does that need any programming at all? New maps, new units etc.... then maybe use it as a chance to launch the latest version of your game engine
> If you have a game about battling in Japan, and you want to make a game about battling in Rome...why does that need any programming at all? New maps, new units etc.... then maybe use it as a chance to launch the latest version of your game engine
Well the new version of the engine is what makes the programming required :p
Each new Total War game introduces some new mechanics, so obviously it needs a rewrite sometimes. As the author said, they had 2 systems that now had to be merged together, and the engine wasn't built to handle the situation properly.
Even between the Warhammer games, they massively changed things around between 1, 2 and 3, with lots of new mechanics and tweaked old ones.
In practice this never goes as smoothly as you think.
It's a constant antagonistic battle between management and the people on the ground doing the work. Let's face it, the devs also want to have a chill time and develop at their own pace (because it allows them to not stress, slack off, but also because they can focus on quality and the art of it, etc). Management knows about this, they just suffer from a lack of ability to tell the difference between which one the dev is doing when when he asks for "more time".
Either way, you need engineering leadership that has clear goals and priorities. Having management with non-technical people that don't trust the technical people, along with conflicting and opposing constraints, will give you Boeing and this game disaster.
We need to bring back meritocracy.