The average American citizen has less influence on politics in their "republic" than a citizen of a dictatorship. Only the will of the financial elite actually has influence. See Gilens and Page 2014.
It really doesn't matter if people are convinced to want single payer or not, it isn't going to happen. There are many, many systems in place to prevent the will of the people from happening if the elite don't want it.
They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons that don't actually look any better, added some realtime shadows that don't fit with the style of the game, and called it a "Warcraft 3 2.0".
Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.
I buy all games on GoG when I can, especially classic games, but new ones as well. It's so nice to just have a collection of DRM-free installers, and be able to support a company that does right by the classic games.
Blizzard started down the path to failure when they merged with Activision, though I'm not sure they would have lasted much longer outside of that. It's apparent to me the only way "make quality stuff" survives as a strategy long term is to stay private like Valve. Public ownership ruins companies. They grow into inefficient messes and lose any edge they had while alienating their customers in the interest of short term gain.
Maybe companies should consider limiting their growth to stay nimble enough to provide value and stay viable. Maybe they do more good by being good at what they do than by chasing peak profit and diminishing their brands. Either way, Bobby Kotick was a bad CEO.
Same experience as an employee really. Want to work for a healthy company? Join a private one. It is of course no guarantee and there are exceptions as well, but there certainly seems to be a trend.
IMO, Goodhart's Law[1] "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" is a big part of it. As soon as stock price is the primary target it ceases to be a good measure of the actual value of the company, management will try to game the stock price at the expense of the underlying value.
At least when it comes to artistic endeavors like video games it makes sense to be small. I find that the more you turn art into a massive assembly line the less passionate the product becomes. If the goal is quality art than massive growth is not the way.
Unfortunately the expectation for modern games is this near infinite scope which requires several years to complete and way too much money. If your game is required to be this large then you either need a huge team or decades of time from a small time.
So I believe that the larger the game the more likely it is going to be devoid of passion and artistic value. I'd prefer game studios to split up into many smaller studios and make more smaller games.
* The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public
* real id debacle
* Diablo 3
* shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3
* spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump
* x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled
* spent years trying to create a dedicated moba, and hots came out after the hype of the genre was gone
* Cancelling semi-experimental games (the Warcraft Point'n Click Adventure game, the Starcraft: Ghost game, and many others[1])
I'm sure there are more issues/fuck ups blizzard did, the point though is that the company couldn't adapt to the new norms of the industry (some are excusable due to the fuck you money wow gives) and thus became the black sheep.
Starcraft 2 murdered RTS genre, it was and is so good, that nothing comes close. I have no idea why you put it on the list.
Activision Blizzard was 2008. Shutting Blizzard North was 2005.
So indeed it seems it was rotting before official Vivaldi-Activision merger.
I think, just like with Starcraft, you misread the situation with "hype of the genre was gone" about moba. I think Blizzard was very good at creating extremely polished products, but LoL already was polished and well established.
Project Titan's assets were used in Overwatch, but yeah, spending so much time on a big project to abandon it really shows poor management skills and overall bad design of the project.
The problem was the timing, Starcraft 2 mechanics wise is fine even if they made some really whimsical balance changes that plagued the esport scene until it was almost pulled off life support (similar to how Overwatch couldn't balance itself to the point where the developers gave up).
If like HotS and Diablo 3 it came out much earlier it would've kept the RTS genre most likely alive (only revived interest in AoE 2 started to get the ball rolling for RTS again).
Not only that but Blizzard had since WC3 tried to create their own MOBA and stalled time and time again, they announced Blizzard All-star while announcing SC2, only for HotS to be announce after Dota 2 had left beta & LoL was already moving away from static MOBA design to the more "skill based" design they currently got.
Especially if the rumor that icefrog (last dev of Dota) approached Blizzard and Blizzard said no, it's the most obvious act of stupidity Blizzard did.
By the time HotS was out it was dead in the water because it had no competing feature setting it apart from the competition:
* if you wanted micromanaged static MOBA: Dota 2
* If you wanted a 3rd person shooter MOBA: Smite
* If you wanted a "skill based" dynamic and more casual MOBA: LoL
HotS tried to mimic LoL which meant an already watered down MOBA being further watered down.
Hearthstone is a good example of how Blizzard's games could have looked have they timed their releases better and stopped with "fold it 3000 times", since you can only do this if the game's budget is a typical 90s game budget or you've got alternative income sources & isn't publicly owned i.e. Valve.
> * if you wanted micromanaged static MOBA: Dota 2
Static? Dota 2 is not a dynamic game? Not why wdym by "micromanaged" - Meepo, Nature prophet?
> * If you wanted a 3rd person shooter MOBA: Smite
Paragon?
> HotS tried to mimic LoL
Completely different games, hots feels more like a team based game compared to Dota 2 or Lol because it has shared experience + no gold + no items - so the gap between a good and a bad player is not that visible compared to Dota2/Lol where you can abandon your team for 20-30 minutes and then destroy everyone
>Static? Dota 2 is not a dynamic game? Not why wdym by "micromanaged" - Meepo, Nature prophet?
Dota 2 afaik still relies heavily on static effects such as on click effects rather than LoL where it's mostly just a matter of "skill" based abilities.
>Completely different games, hots feels more like a team based game compared to Dota 2 or Lol because it has shared experience + no gold + no items - so the gap between a good and a bad player is not that visible compared to Dota2/Lol where you can abandon your team for 20-30 minutes and then destroy everyone
HotS is a watered down version of LoL, it doesn't mean it's bad it just means it could never compete to garner the same audience when we already have "Dota 2 for big brain people, LoL for casual people".
MOBA is a strange genre. Seems to take the worst bits of of RTS and the worst of ARPG, and combine it with the worst of the gaming community and a multiplayer-only design that's very hostile to beginners.
Never got on with them or really understood the appeal, despite loving RTS and ARPGs.
The goofy thing about all this is that HotS is really good if you judge it on its own merits. I played DotA for a long time, switched to HotS, and never looked back.
As a casual player who was deeply invested in the Blizzard-verse me and my wife absolutely loved HOTS, regardless of timing et. al. that you mentioned.
Our problem with it ultimately became the drudgery. We wanted more game modes, some wacky whimsical arcade-like stuff. It's been a while and my memory isn't great in terms of the timeline but I think eventually they did add something like that? Can't remember but basically we gave up on the game because there was no gameplay experience diversity; stuff was more or less the same.
...and then they abandoned it... :(
HOTS is still a beautiful and well-made game though. To this day.
That's bullshit, the greatest thing about SC2 was its marketing (including e-sports money). Ok, also the first campaign is great and the polish is, as always, top tier.
But RTS was only in a slump in the sense that the apex of the popularity of that genre was around the turn of the millennium (which probably was unavoidable).
And only a few years before SC2 released we've got the likes of Dawn of War 1 and Supreme Commander 1, and, last but not least : the amateur-made Spring(-Recoil) games, which put almost every other RTS game to shame, so advanced they were in comparison (and, sadly, still are, when you look at today's player's first impressions of BAR, despite it mostly only having improved in the graphics and performance department, as the 'R' suggests).
Compared to Spring games, Starcraft 2 looked like a very solid and polished, but also very safe and almost obsolete game.
Sure, but the terrain wasn't truly 3D. I'm pretty sure there isn't any ballistics calculations for the attacks in Starcraft. It could have easily been a Starcraft remaster. It didn't really take the RTS genre to the next level. Doom does a lot more innovation between iterations.
Have you played Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander? Those increased the scale, the tactics, the map size. The weapons felt more varied. Really, made SC 1 & 2 feel rather Mickey Mouse.
I don't like Supreme Commander, but I definitely agree it is the competitor of Starcraft 2. AoE don't seem this way to me, these games are so clunky. And tens if not hundreds of titles that feel like inferior reskins.
Tastes are tastes and as such are subjective and can't be contested. But Supreme Commander looks like almost a different genre to me. I like SC2's format to this day.
I hate to just drop a book recommendation, but Jason Schreier's Play Nice covers the history of Blizzard in comprehensive detail.
The overall situation was multifacted, but my takeaway is that Blizzard's recent failures come down to two main themes:
* World of Warcraft's success gave the company unrealistic expectations of what a successful "normal" game looked like, and
* "When it's ready" covers up the sins of a company that never quite figured out project management.
My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.
Activision's influence didn't help, and it imposed a tighter focus on prompt monetary return after Titan's cancellation. That clashed with the long development cycles of even the successful projects.
So interestingly you see this sort of thing play out in online media.
- Youtuber X has a runaway successful video/s.
- Seeing the cashflow from that video, they think "Hey, I could probably duplicate this!"
- When that duplication fails, they decide "You know what, maybe I just need to make a lot of videos"
- When that doesn't bring in the expected income and/or leads to burnout they think "You know what, I think I need some outside help to make me see my blindspots".
And, of course, invariably when that outside help comes in, so does the slop. The outside help does not care about quality, they care about getting money in through the door. That often involves hack and slashing all efforts at quality, shilling out endlessly, and some real questionable decisions when it comes to employment.
Now, of course, the creator is still responsible for what their company becomes. But, money is money and a creator/owner is just more likely to like easymode income (for themselves) vs duplicating the efforts of a prior period.
I used to really like James and Mike Mondays. Then Mike posted a dick pic on the subreddit and for whatever reason that wasn’t a fireable offense. Kind of killed the vibes for me. That was even before everything started really changing. Now it’s like the avgn is reanimated from the grave for each episode. I haven’t really watched in years.
As someone who’s seen the inside of a game company, this thesis reads true. Success really warps expectations, and warped expectations create perverse incentives that are different than make this particular game good.
There was also imo a big cultural hubris among the Blizzard developers that if it wasn't done their way (i.e. they couldn't just take an existing IP like Dota and slap Blizzard logo on it, no no, had to start from scratch).
My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.
Going over budget and going over scope can only happen depending on who is measuring. I can spend 6 months developing a part of a game and not consider it a waste of time or out of scope. I’m of the mind that this was the natural state of Blizzard prior to Activision.
I mean, they are fundamentally making things that roughly sound like this - we are all going to sit around on a server and pretend to have a giant adventure
Ridiculous, the very concept is out of scope lol. You simply can’t have the wrong minded people involved in this process, certainly not the wrong project managers. You can’t even have the wrong parent company for a pursuit like this.
Nah, as you can see with its online-only requirement (and ActiBlizz being greedy about custom made maps), it was already the new Blizzard, after merging with Activision and the changes that WoW brought.
* Releasing Diablo II Resurrected and striping multiplayer option to host own server, because some modder, made a patch to play with old D2 Lod version on modded server in Alpha version.
Years later they patched stripped multiplayer back and now modders are working on D2R multiplayer modded servers, Blizzard people are so smart...
Nope, all of these things happened before the merger, the fact that Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, etc. was released after the merger doesn't change the fact that Blizzard was dragging their feet on those IPs.
The Warcraft Adventure was terrible. I was working at Bliz at the time. Imagine the worst LucasArts-style fan art with no real story behind it. The true believers would have loved it and anything else released in the Warcraft universe, but.. it was very very "not good"
Oh totally, I think that if you guys had somehow manage to get LucasArt to make it or some other notoriously good Point'n Click studio and not... the makers of such classics like: Zelda games for the Philips CD-i or IM ME'EN.
This just reads as a random mishmash of missteps the company has taken over its 33 years of existence (remember, it's older than Amazon or Google) rather than a proper critique of when it arguably lost its shine in the public's eyes. The company still generates a ton of money, continues to set records for day 1 sales of its games, and owns extremely valuable IP in the gaming industry, so you can't really say it hasn't adapted well to the current industry norms. At times, it practically sets them. It has certainly missed a lot of opportunities, such as turning BattleNet into a public digital storefront before Steam, or capitalizing on the MoBA genre that spawned from their own games before competitors did, but I doubt that they would have had as much success even if they did because their approach would have been different.
Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi.
Polygon [1] covered the Starcraft: Ghost game. Long story short, it got canned because it was in development hell for too long. Originally under development by a studio in the Bay area, there apparently wasn't a dedicated Blizzard producer to the game for the longest time, and the idea of what it should be kept changing as new games came out and HQ wanted them to copy those ideas. At some point, Blizzard shifted development to a different studio just miles away from them because they wanted multiplayer, but the same issues persisted. And then they released WoW, which consumed all of their attention. With the release of the gen 7 consoles around the corner, requiring further investment, they made the sensible choice to shelve it so they could focus their time and money on their new cash-printing machine instead.
Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft.
>This just reads as a random mishmash of missteps the company has taken over its 33 years of existence (remember, it's older than Amazon or Google) rather than a proper critique of when it arguably lost its shine in the public's eyes. The company still generates a ton of money, continues to set records for day 1 sales of its games, and owns extremely valuable IP in the gaming industry, so you can't really say it hasn't adapted well to the current industry norms.
At the expense of being treated almost as bad as people treat activision.
>It has certainly missed a lot of opportunities, such as turning BattleNet into a public digital storefront before Steam, or capitalizing on the MoBA genre that spawned from their own games before competitors did, but I doubt that they would have had as much success even if they did because their approach would have been different.
Afaik they never tried to compete with Valve with a Steam alternative shop, this only came about way later with Activision releasing their games onto BattleNet platform.
>Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi.
Outsourcing those games was then the issue, they should've either done it in-house or tried to work with a more well known company, since afaik it wasn't exactly done by LucasArts or Seria but the same studio who did the Zelda games made for the Philips CD-i.
Same thing goes with SC: Ghost, and as you point out it was rife with mistakes that screwed it all up.
>Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft.
I agree to an extent, you can experiment as much as you want, but if it keeps on happening without much change within the company, there's probably something systemically wrong within the company, which was the case for quite some time with Blizzard.
The issue is effectively that Blizzard released Starcraft 2 during a time where RTS was seen as a forgotten genre entirely, the best you had was the Company of Heroes & Dawn of War.
If they had released it 5 years earlier it might have allowed the genre to stick to the huge cultural legacy it had, at least in Korea.
Let alone the fact that the story of Starcraft 2 was... white-washed entirely compared to the OG & Brood Wars.
SC2 plays pretty great but the plot really went off the rails. Brood War was already worse than base SC plot wise but at least it was still rather dark. SC2's plot feels like garbage fanfic.
Overwatch launched, for pay, I believe at $39.99 USD. It was very fun very micro-transactions are optional and purely cosmetic game. I bought it day one.
Then they saw the success of PUBG and Fortnite's season passes and decided "we want some of that" and launched Overwatch 2 going so far as locking entire characters behind micro-transactions.
The day they launched Overwatch 2, they entirely shut down the Overwatch 1 servers. Something they had said earlier on that they were not going to do, before they later changed course. They took away the game I loved, the game I paid for, and replaced it with a junky free-to-play game dancing around in its skin like Edgar the Bug in Men in Black, all "Look at me, I'm still Overwatch, pinky promise", but anyone with a sense of taste can tell it really isn't. They ruined it.
Literally all my friends played Overwatch. My wife was in an Overwatch League. I don't know a single person who stuck with Overwatch 2 for more than a couple weeks. My wife's entire league just shut down.
I hear people play it but I sure don't know anyone. I would estimate mostly people who never played the original? Left such a sour taste in my mouth that I am hesitant to ever give Blizzard money again.
Don't forget they nearly killed Overwatch by barely supporting Overwatch 1 while they worked on Overwatch 2. But when they finally released Overwatch 2 there were barely any changes from Overwatch 1, except for the season pass system and a switch from 6v6 to 5v5. Apparently most of the development time was spent on single-player content that was first delayed and then cut entirely
I was really looking forward to the single-player/PvE content. The gamers in my household are all fairly low skill (myself included), and one of our favorite original Overwatch events was Junkenstein's Revenge-- more of that kind of thing was huge on our anticipation list.
When they not only killed the original Overwatch but also suddenly decided to abandon the PvE component, it was a double whammy which resulted in us instantly abandoning what had been a regular staple of our gaming time. We moved on to other things such as Deep Rock Galactic and haven't looked back.
Blizzard basically ignored Overwatch 1 (except for lootboxes) for the last half of its life.
Players would have paid for maps, paid for expansions, paid for spectating the overwatch league, paid for spectating their favorite yt personalities commentary, but nope, they promised some fever dream single player which went nowhere.
The issues with Overwatch 2 were fixed. All heros are available for free; you can get the season passes for free (the free pass includes enough premium currency to buy the premium pass); you can get most skins for normal currency and you can get the mythic currency for the mythic skins by playing the battlepass.
There are still a few skins you can't realistically unlock without paying; but that doesn't ruin a game. Overwatch in its current state is great.
No lol. Not "The" Overwatch League. I should have maybe chosen my words more wisely, though I'm pretty sure they referred to themselves as a "league" though. My wife is asleep, otherwise I would ask her the correct terminology.
Basically she was on a non-professional all woman team for almost six years that would go head-to-head with other teams in scheduled tournaments. Her team even managed to get one-on-one coaching from some guy on the actual official "Overwatch League".
They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant.
> They dissolved shortly after Overwatch 2 came out. The move to 5v5 did not help as suddenly one of their tanks was redundant.
This is so sad to read. :(
Grassroot competition like that is the basis on which esports scene thrives...
Blizzard really wrote down the manual of everything you shouldn't do to make a game into an "esport", from the competition structure and insane costs (remember the initial slots for a league that hadn't had its first season yet was between $2 and $15 millions...), to the game balance which led to one meta destroying interest completely for way too long, making an entire role useless in the process, and the list continues.
They added insult to injury to the 2.0 upgrade by releasing promo material (supposedly screenshots) [0] that looked exactly like what fans wanted from them. Turned out, those were fake and they quickly removed most of them and what they actually did was a bad AI upscale instead.
All true. For anyone unfamiliar, WC3 Remastered also did two other things:
1. It changed the ToS so Blizzard owns the IP rights to any third-party maps, effectively killing this community. Why? Because of Dota 2. There was a customm mode called Defense of the Ancients ("Dota") that somebody took and basically created the MOBA genre. Blizzard decided to sue and lost. They tried to create their own (ie Heroes of the Storm) but the space came to be dominated by League of Legends. Blizzard didn't want a repeat of that. Ridiculous; and
2. WC3 Reforged ("Refunded" as it was commonly called on release) also made the original game worse even if you didn't have Reforged. The game downloaded a bunch of assets you didn't use. It broke compatibility with some maps. I think there were a bunch of other problems too.
More [1]. Some of these might've been fixed by later updates now.
> Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.
Oh, Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs.
I tried AoE 3 on Steam (demo). It was a total disaster. Downloading was slow and then the game: At the first start would not let me build barracks (no suitable place found).
At the second start it was hard to found the baracks again (all icons look the same - Windows style enshitification) but the peasants will not harvest berry bushes.(bugs)
They made the UI much worse. The playground is round. The icons look the same so one has to look at tooltips to build a house. All in all a crappy experience.
I guess i will stick with AoE 2.
my child insists, reasonably, on playing minecraft, so we must endure the microsoft launcher ui stewardship for mc. what a hot mess of bloated bureaucracy-software-dungheap. It is as if even their installer has an installer and a loadscreen.
Consider if you, gosh, want to continue PLAYING EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS LAST NIGHT.
The launcher design response: ouh, i did NOT expect that! Please wait while we reauth and 2FA and sync your account and download and reinstall your game client.. wait a minute.. hmm, on second thought, Im not SURE we can just let you continue the game from "last night"..? oops, no wait.. WE CAN?!
I swear there is more code in, and people assigned to, their crappy bloated launcher, than to the game itself. Ironically, their store features are so buggy I often dven cant manage to buy their DLC theft-as-servjce stuff.
Kind of yes, the bigger problem is that Azure and XBox are now the money makers, so even Win32 isn't being updated that much since Windows XP, note that most Win32 APIs are now available via COM, and that is what UWP/WinRT offered, COM vNext, instead they messed up, and now we're back into COM classic with crappy tooling, even though it is the main API delivery mechanism.
It feels like the movement in the community is also slowing down. One of the most popular streamers T90 for example, has had less and less views through the last years, a reversal of a long trend upwards.
They also added easier ways to do things which were giving competitive edge to the players who could efficiently do them the hard-way, perhaps reducing the motivation to train further for the top players (why train to do hard tricks if they could be automated by the game later).
I didn't know AoE2 was getting content updates or balancing. I thought it was the same game, locked in. I notice aoe4 has seasons and rebalancing... Not sure how to feel about it.
Some of the new civs are amazing. Two of my favourite civs are Lithuanians and Romans.
I can also tell you, since there is a whole new generation of gamers out there who have practiced countless hours of various games, the game play and what is a n00b has dramatically changed. Plus us old timers are really good as well.
To be fair, using humans to spend time sifting through AI slop determining what is and isn't AI generated is not a fight that the humans are going to win.
I saw a lot of unbelievably bad code when I was teaching in university. I doubt that my undergrad students who couldn't code had access to LLMs in 2011.
Not saying where, but well before transformers were invented, I saw an iOS project that had huge chunks of uncompiled Symbian code in the project "for reference", an entire pantheon of God classes, entire files duplicated rather than changing access modifiers, 1000 lines inside an always true if block, and 20% of the 120,000 lines were:
//
And no, those were not generally followed by a real comment.
And yet, I have an unfortunately clear mental picture of the human that did this. In itself, that is a very specific coding style. I don't imagine an LLM would do that. Chat would instead take a couple of the methods from the Symbian codebase and use them where they didn't exist. The God classes would merely be mined for more non-existent functions. The true if block would become a function. And the # lines would have comments on them. Useless comments, but there would be text following every last one of them. Totally different styles.
I've seen exactly what you describe and worse *, and I've also seen them keep to one style until I got bored of prompting for new features to add to the project.
* one standard test I have is "make a tetris game as a single page web app", and one model started wrong and then suddenly flipped from Tetris in html/js to ML in python.
Maybe it's the norm, but it's a dysfunctional company if you have engineering that only cares about "doing things the right way", product that only cares about "get the next feature out as soon as possible", and corporate that just thinks "minimize software development costs". And on top of that, you have arbitrary regular deadlines that dictate the flow of work.
That points to everyone being focused on their own goals rather than working together to deliver the product that will satisfy customers the best.
I can tell from your comment that you are on the engineering side of things. Corporate should focus (among other things) on reducing COGS, product again should focus on delivering customer facing features.
The problem are timelines. We all know what technical debt is. You can cut corners and rush a feature out, however at the expense of future velocity. When engineering and product collide, engineering triangle forms and compromise has to be made. The classic triangle is defined as quality -- speed -- cost, however that is more applicable externally. Internally the compromise triangle looks more like "fixing bugs -- delivering features -- maintaining future level of bugs". The more the triangle is stretched towards "delivering features" the more maintenance suffers.
I have seen this coming from engineering far to often. Oh no, product are idiots, they do not understand importance of bug fixing, cleaning of technical debt and maintaining architecture. Believe me, they are roughly as smart as you, you are in the same broad team anyway. Where product fail is at estimation. They lack domain expertise to correctly gauge the impact of rushing a feature on future velocity. They probably understand this relationship, but they cannot quantify the effects. This is where engineering comes: to provide domain expertise.
As TFA correctly implies, product does not give a shit about architectural decisions. For all they care it can be held by either literal or metaphorical duck tape. It's the job of engineering to quantify the cost of rushed features. If engineering thinks that product are idiots for rushing n features, then either 1) engineering fails at understanding business goals or 2) engineering fails to convey impact of rushed features.
Both are communication problems. Interestingly, the onus is on management to sort internal communication out.
If my job is to prioritize work and understand all the tradeoffs involved in that work, you can be damn sure I'll go understand the tradeoffs. If Product don't understand that technical debt makes things slower, and exactly how much slower it makes them, then they aren't doing their jobs.
My current role is "Director of Product and Technology", so I have to look after both domains. I have deep knowledge in technology, but if I'm not going around the company asking other departments what the impact of the work they want is (and what happens when they don't get it), I'm just plain bad at the product side of my role.
Yeah.. I think the problem is when product dictates what is going to be implemented without asking developers if it's feasible. It happens.
At the other end of the scale there are many programmers who are in the habit of making up bullshit technical reasons why something can't (or shouldn't!) be done when the real reason is they just don't want to have to do it.
Often they'll resist doing a useful feature because it can't be done perfectly. For example we can't report browser tab memory usage because some memory is shared between tabs so the numbers wouldn't make sense. I used to do that until I had a manager that changed my view.
> I think the problem is when product dictates what is going to be implemented
I don't think of that as a problem, that's one of the primary goals of product. Problems (yuuge problems) arise when product also gets to dictate cost/timelines. Sorry, that breaks basic management principles.
> I used to do that until I had a manager that changed my view.
Small, young teams (e.g. startups) can easily do without management, because communication is unhindered and ad-hoc. The more organization expands and matures, the more communication suffers. That's the primary goal of engineering management - facilitate conversations. When I have a request that is tad too technical I always try to backtrack and ask what's the business goal. I am 99% certain "display memory usage per tab" is not the business goal. "Find resource hungry tabs" sounds like a good candidate for a business problem.
"Customers" (e.g. product) tend to be "helpful" and provide technical implementation details, diluting the business problem, while engineering tend to fixate on those implementation hints as if they were technical requirements. Ever noticed how technically inept product managers/owners sometimes tend to be good managers? Well, they are either aware of their technical ineptitude or are inept so much that they can't even express technical details and form their requirements as business questions which leaves implementation details open and allows engineering to implement things "correctly". It's magical how simply communicating on appropriate abstraction level can lead to awesome results as each team can focus on what they are strongest at.
Some of this is what stackoverflow calls an X/Y problem; someone has a problem, got halfway down a route to a solution, and now is talking to you. It can be quite difficult to dig down into what the actual original problem was, then persuade them to back up and pursue what is in your opinion a better solution.
Very briefly, I resisted implemented features that wouldn't work perfectly. The memory use example was a real one (I was working on a profiler of some complex AI hardware). My boss would say things like "can we report how much memory this operation uses", and I would say "no because some of it is shared with other operations or only live for part of the program run etc.".
He didn't really say anything to change my mind, he just kept asking for things that would be useful to customers and eventually I realised that even if we can't give an answer that makes perfect sense or doesn't work all the time, we can still do better than nothing. Very often something that is roughly right and can be shown some of the time is better than something that doesn't exist at all.
It kind of sounds obvious when I put it like this, but you'd be surprised how often you see "we can't do this very useful thing because <minor flaw that means it won't always work perfectly>".
The issue is that most people are not cross-functional thinkers. Those who are not generally fall prey to the “if you have a hammer, every problem is a nail” fallacy. Engineers want to engineer, PMs want to add features, managers want to “manage”, etc.
You don't need everyone on every team to be a cross-functional thinker, but you need the people who are working cross-functionally to actually think about the big picture and realize they're optimizing for company success and not some arbitrary, often ambiguous goal like "good engineering".
Those people that are in the decision-making process need to then communicate the result of the decision with their team, and be able to justify the decision.
But the people in cross-functional roles are still being drawn from a probability distribution in which most people are unable to think cross-functionally.
Your idea of optimism is literally replacing the entire human race (the lineage of all humans on the planet) with a simulation of humans? That's pretty bleak.
I wasn't trying to connect all those ideas like that. I was just trying to bring up concepts like artificial "offspring" etc. because I think they are relevant to the discussion and interesting.
I think you can look at the potential trajectories for technology and humanity in different ways depending on your perspective. The most dramatic changes are totally speculative. Of course I am not hoping for real humans to become extinct.
The average person spends 9-11 hours per day consuming media depending on what source you look at. When people are playing games or browsing social media at the same time that they have the latest Netflix show on their TV, you can't tell me that this is really valuable time spent to deepen one's understanding of the human experience; it's a replacement for the human experience.
Most people will not notice if the soundtrack to a new TV show is made by a 5 word AI prompt of "exciting build-up suspense scene music" while they're playing pouring money into their mobile gacha game to get the "cute girl, anime, {color} {outfit}" prompt picture that is SSS rank.
You or I might not care for AI slop, but it's a lot cheaper to produce for Netflix or Zinga or Spotify or whatever, and if they go this route, they don't have to pay for writers, actors, illustrators, songwriters, or licensing for someone else's product. They'll just put their own AI content on autoplay after what you're currently watching, and hope most people don't care enough to stop it and choose something else.
Completely agree. When you see a business model like this, you know everything about the game is made to get you to spend more money and spend more time in it rather than actually have fun.
Maybe that's to be expected from SaaS B2B software or something, but there's no reason to settle for this kind of garbage in games. Tons of alternatives exist in older games, indie games, and even some AAA games where there is a creative vision with a goal that isn't to empty your wallet or waste your time as much as possible.
That's the same question I have. There is already a ton of great podcasts/music/everything in the niches that I like that I don't have the time to listen to them all. I also like to have quiet introspective time.
So where does AI regurgitated slop fit into my life?
In the case of NotebookLM, the AI generated podcasts aren't competing with existing podcasts, they're competing with other ways of consuming the source material. Would I rather listen to a real podcast? Yes. But no one's making a real podcast about the Bluetooth L2CAP specification.
It really doesn't matter if people are convinced to want single payer or not, it isn't going to happen. There are many, many systems in place to prevent the will of the people from happening if the elite don't want it.
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