I'm honestly curious. What line do you think the left crossed first? There is nothing in my mind that comes even close to the lines that have been crossed by this administration.
Just that line alone makes me think you're far less centrist than you claim to be.
This response is rich in vibes, low in fact, but my guess is OP is generally referring to things like the FBI's storming of Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the infiltration and surveillance of organizations, basically right and far right, in response to the OKC bombing, in the name of preventing domestic terrorism.
Go farther back and we have Hoover building kompromat on basically everyone, farther still you get McCarthy anti-Left. I don't think there's an era without any kind of corruption or abuse of power. It's romantic to think there was ever restraint, and like believing so seems to depend on starting the clock at an aribitrary historical point.
>There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.
There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.
It’s not necessarily laziness. They just don’t care about your request. “This thing you’re asking for is not important compared to the other things I need do.”
I used to run build call and this was the bane of my existence. People who just never engage (but pretend they are to get you to go away).
Fair question. It might be internal jargon. Refers to making a go/no-go “call” on the quality/readiness of a new build.
e.g. A new release candidate is built and tested from a commit. Some tests fail and each test failure is blocking unless the product area owner (or test owner) attests that the issue is not a blocker (test flakiness, test environment specific issue, extremely low priority bug, etc). The build can release only when all test blockers are closed out.
Most build call processes I’ve seen burn more time investigating flaky tests than real issues and the person running build call (often the “release driver”) typically wastes significant time flogging people to close out the same flaky bugs from the last build. I strongly recommend not building one if you can avoid it.
> The real solution is to simply fire these people.
I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.
If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.
If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.
This is why I said "repeatedly" i.e. a pattern has already emerged.
And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. You're often working on a different team from the people doing reviews, so in a large enough company they are just a faceless/nameless person from the perspective of your PM.
> And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. L
You are responsible for delivering tasks, but if you are blocked by the process then it's not you who is preventing the task from being delivered. Whether it's the scrum master or sdm or project manager, someone else is responsible for keeping the tasks moving. Once you mark a task as pending review, you are blocked. From that point onward all you have to do is raise awareness of reviewers to the task pending review, and raise visibility with stakeholders that your deliverable is being blocked by the review. As long as you don't slack in raising awareness, it's not your problem anymore.
you are describing a work cultural issue - putting merges on the person that is writing, as a personal failing of people focusing on getting their own code merged, and probably having similar difficulty with that.
why are you working on teams where you are always touching somebody else's code without also making friends with them?
If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
Offloading responsibility for getting code through review to a manager or scrum master sounds at least as dysfunctional as people avoiding doing the reviews.
> If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
If that's how you interact with your team members, no wonder they refuse working with you.
What any competent developer does is a) update ticket to move it to review, b) call out the PR in whatever system you guys use, c) after a reasonable amount or time inform your scrum master/manager that your task is code-complete and is blocked by the review, d) update ticket with a notice that PR is still pending review. Go back to step b) and repeat until the PR is merged.
Done.
Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you. By design. That's how things are supposed to work. If your manager doesn't care, it's nothing they want to push anyway, as proven by the ticket history.
> Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you.
I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe. But then everywhere I’ve ever worked has expected a high level of personal responsibility, not “best effort” that consists of a one time Slack
message and tagging work as blocked.
This may be small nuclear team vs sprawling org difference.
This process works so well in a team that are all pushing together.
Moving the ticket along and a slack to the effect of "this one is quick and easy" Vs "this one's a bit gnarly, happy to jump on it with someone" generally sees PRs reviewed very quickly.
A pleading cat gif is usually enough as a reminder.
A well oiled team is working to deliver customer value (internal or external). I've been lucky enough to have had a few teams of incredibly good engineers over the years. So much gets done.
I can see it not working so well in a team of "individuals" focused on their own performance and "personal responsibility" solely for their bit.
The kind of teams that throw everything over the wall to an individual making a build gate go/no-go decision perhaps.
> This may be small nuclear team vs sprawling org difference.
This is very likely a big part of the difference. Most of my career has been spent at very large companies. Smaller teams that can manage to be more inwardly focused with fewer cross, team dependencies, can doubtless operate differently.
> The kind of teams that throw everything over the wall to an individual making a build gate go/no-go decision perhaps.
That’s not really what I described. I ran the process, not the fundamental go/no go decision, which was a distributed responsibility. That was the exact friction, and it’s very similar to the code review friction in large organizations. A PR author has a responsibility for their PR but it may require sign off from numerous other teams.
Some of this is necessary complexity that arises from large teams building large products. Some of it is certainly dysfunction.
When a small team sits close to each other, you can simply say: "hey guys, anyone got time to check my PR?".
In a gigantic org, you can message them on Teams, but everyone keeps getting messages on Teams constantly so they are probably going to ignore you for an hour.
Dude, you're the one talking about talking down to people telling them they are not doing their job. Relax.
> I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe.
What do you think a PR reviews process is? It is literally "I will be prevented from merging my work so that all of you may have a say on what I'm doing".
This is precisely how and why it is designed to work.
In basic scrum, you know that part where the scrum master asks in daily meeting whether people are blocked? What do you think it is used for?
Pray tell, what do you think a PR is used for, and how does the process work?
> The place I currently work at operates quite differently.
If your place of work had no one responsible for setting work priorities of managing task delivery and then find yourself blocked by mundane things like a PR then it seems you are developing novel ways of being dysfunctional. Perhaps you PR process is indeed not the problem but a symptom.
It's pretty rare that I get blocked on something mundane like a PR, but if I do I just tend to message a colleague something along the lines of, "hey, can you please take a look at X when you next have a moment? blocking me for Y" and that resolves the issue promptly.
TBH I think micromanaging inter-team communication by turning it into a process that requires a responsible individual to run is far more dysfunctional.
It is managers responsibility to set priorities including those of other team members. Including priorities of code review. That is not offloading. It is also considerably less toxic then "I demand people to be fired because my code review was not done in 12 hours".
Your PR is not the importantest thing being worked on.
What I said is it’s not my manager’s job to wrangle people to do code reviews for me. It’s absurd that the immediate response to friction is to offload it to someone else. Certainly if there is a cultural problem, or misaligned priorities, discuss the general issue with your manager. But “I set the ticket to blocked so I’m done” is not an acceptable process anywhere I’ve ever worked.
Much of the time the person I’m waiting on doesn’t report to my manager anyway. My manager can’t change their priorities any more than I can.
This doesn’t change much though. If there is a general problem, it’s likely appropriate to pull in management to figure out the issue. But it’s probably not a management problem that my specific PR needs a review.
It's literally the most management problem imaginable.
Management decides the process, management decides who to hire, management assigns the roles and management decides how urgent the work is.
If the constellation is so that reviews are required, but the reviewer is not under the control by the manager and reviews do not happen, then some manager somewhere made a mistake.
Why? Because PRs are expected to be reviewed. Any process in which that does not work automatically is dysfunctional and needs to be fixed until PRs are being reviewed properly again.
If everything is working as intended, but it's the manager who created a false sense of urgency and pushed all of the responsibility onto the person who cannot do anything about that, then the only person who can fix the problem is the manager and the thing he has to do is something very easy: be more patient.
Edit: It might not be obvious, but all the things you claim that strengthen your position are already table stakes and assumed to happen regardless. The question is, who is responsible for making the invisible and automatic happen? And you're saying the manager can shirk his responsibility onto the blocked employee, which is hilarious because it means your entire operational strategy for fixing a broken process relies purely on being lucky.
Another thing that might not be obvious but if you write a bad pull request and the reviewer tells you it is bad and can't be merged that's on you as well, no shit Sherlock.
> What I said is it’s not my manager’s job to wrangle people to do code reviews for me.
I'm sorry to say, but it is. Is your manager responsible for managing workloads, task assignments, and priorities?
> It’s absurd that the immediate response to friction is to offload it to someone else.
That doesn't sound right. A PR review literally requires you to dump your workload onto someone else. Often times a PR requires significant amounts of time to review. Your team members need to set aside significant amounts of time out of their schedule to look at your work.
You cannot frame a problem that fundamentally revolves around dumping work onto someone else as being absurd to dump your work onto someone else. I mean, what do you think happens when you ask someone to review your work? Do you expect your team members to blindly sign off?
It's obviously about offloading work. And it's the Manager's job ro set those priorities.
It sounds way more dysfunctional to start doing the managers job to me.
If you think it is your responsibility to get a reviewer on the other side to prioritise reviewing your work then you basically made yourself responsible for hiring and firing people or reassigning their project responsibilities.
By the time you managed to have your review get through you might not even be a developer anymore.
> Harpe accepted responsibility for sharing her credentials but argued that firing her was excessive.
> In her appeal, Harpe said her husband was a certified federal law enforcement officer and that every search was conducted for law enforcement purposes.
> “The violation occurred because I gave my husband, who is a certified law enforcement officer with the Department of Homeland Security, access to my Flock account,” Harpe wrote. “Every search he conducted was for law enforcement use only and not for personal gain.”
There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility. They believe they should have unrestricted access to everyone else and that they are above us all.
Firing her was not excessive, it is the bare minimum. Officers should be held to a higher standard, not lower. She and her husband should be in a jail cell.
This was also surprising to me, I'd think the firing would be automatic and then it'd be a legal case about unauthorized access of govt computers, which is generally taken pretty seriously.
You can't make the same argument with financial systems by giving someone at a different bank access to your bank just because you're both "financial professionals", and that's arguably much less sensitive data.
> There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility.
This is why two things should be mandatory for new officers: psychological examination and a mandatory law degree from a qualified institution. If you're enforcing the law, you need to actually know its contents and how it works. That would naturally limit the numbers and discourage people who haven't gotten over high school from using their job as a torment nexus.
Photography is one that comes into play a bit (taking photos in public places). There was a Georgia police chief who gave a press conference on the steps of a courthouse having just lost a civil rights case: his officers arrested a photographer and just kept doubling down. His conference had this marquee quote: "We cannot expect our police officers to be constitutional lawyers or know every minute detail".
"We can arrest you even though we're not really sure if you actually broke a law. You, on the other hand, are expected to know the law, and ignorance is not considered an excuse."
Is it practical to give weapons and combat vehicles to under-qualified but readily-available individuals to enforce laws they don't understand (let alone have knowledge of) like we do now?
It's not. We just accept it as a default because it's easy to dismiss something obviously good (making sure police are mentally stable, law-aware, and held to a level of scrutiny commensurate to the job) because it may require effort.
Someone being handed a gun and told to go "keep people in line" should be held to an almost absurd standard before ever being let on the streets. That we don't already do this speaks volumes about the underdeveloped state of our civilization (despite our hubris to the contrary).
> Is it practical to give weapons and combat vehicles
I get what you mean, but with how easy it is to get a gun (especially in red states), it is practical in the sense that it seems pretty easy to do and there’s no shortage.
But should we? I agree with you, absolutely fucking not.
> I get what you mean, but with how easy it is to get a gun (especially in red states)
Have you tried? I live in Tennessee (aggressively red) and own multiple firearms. Mandatory background checks and a mandatory 3-day wait [1] are the standard. Even online transfers from an FFL require submission of an ATF registration form.
Tangential, but it's not as easy as one would think. Also, there are a shocking number of posers down here. Stars and bars and "don't tread on me" but not a lot of commitment to "the mission." There are far more grown men driving lifted trucks with glow lights on them than serious threats.
Just in one of the super blue states. My buddy lives in Texas, he’s got a couple of guns and says is easy to get.
> There are far more grown men driving lifted trucks with glow lights on them than serious threats.
The problem is these guys join ICE or act like they are, and that’s a serious threat. If you brandish Stars and Stripes / Dont Tread on Me, even if you’re a poser I’m not going to take a risk of finding out. That in itself is powerful.
> privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility
In their eyes it goes like this:
Privacy:- why do you need it if you have nothing to hide?
Checks and balances:- you are the balance and I’m here to check you
Responsibility:- it is my responsibility to check you
I want to say I’m being sarcastic but I don’t know anymore. Arguably their motivation is to hunt and jail people, so it feels like “personal gain” on the fringes. No job is so far removed that it’s devoid of personal gain.
> There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility. They believe they should have unrestricted access to everyone else and that they are above us all.
A large part of law enforcement training is specifically to instill and reinforce this belief. They are officers, you are civilians. You are not the same (in their eyes). They are the thin blue line keeping society from crumbling into anarchy (or socialism). Hell, when push comes to shove, they will close ranks and throw firefighters and paramedics under the bus (arrested on the scene of car accidents for insufficiently respecting the cops "authority"), ER staff (ER nurses arrested for refusing a warrantless blood draw when the cops are desperate to diffuse blame from their off-duty drunk fellow officer who blew a red light and fatally t-boned another car), and so on and so on.
When Batman created his sonar system we cheered because he needed it to fight "the bad guy". It took Alfred to explain this was too much. "The bad guy" has been used for hundreds of years to escuse simple solutions under the premise that we're "the good guys".
>When Batman created his sonar system we cheered because he needed it to fight "the bad guy".
And because it was fiction, and we had suspended our disbelief to enjoy a vision of a different world with guys that are inherently trustworthy, and because there was a confirmed terrorist plot to commit mass murder that literally could only be thwarted with this move.
Don't conflate temporary acceptance of a premise with real-world values, that's like being the guy that responds to the trolley problem with "I would simply remove the one person from the track, saving everyone and refusing to engage with this conversation."
This is expected. A lot of these companies that are closing their doors make a large portion of their revenue based off of ads and upsells which agents can easily be instructed to ignore, and don't interact with like a human.
Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.
People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.
Yes, same with many other things where people were under informed or did t have the time to look out for their own interests. Such as filing complaints, citing the correct legal sections, knowing the procedures, knowing their rights, noticing when they are getting an unfair deal, etc etc.
I do see that there is another side to this. I saw complaints by an event organizer (think weddings etc) who got some special requests and went above and beyond to accommodate but it turns out the extensive requests likely were AI generated fully optimizing for the customer's interests, and just shamelessly asking for many favors essentially. She used to do these things because humans had a bit of embarrassment and friction around asking too many things and so it worked on a social agreement that if you ask it likely is truly important that you made the effort to ask. Now this cannot be assumed. So things will more to more formal rules, more explicit pricing for the small asks, and generally more adversarial and low trust systems that fully squeeze out the human slack from these systems.
For the low entry fee of ~$200 a month you too can escape the permanent underclass - which is more than some countries average citizen makes in an entire year.
Oftentimes I'm buying maybe a tool or a part or something like that which isn't necessarily available in my local hardware store.
Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon
Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.
Or, more accurately, people make stupid mistakes when they lack the experience. Intelligent people often succumb to the fallacy that because they can learn things quickly, they can skip the learning part just figure things out as they go.
> “No more hand-written code” and that the game will be “generated with full AI workflows,” employees were reportedly “stunned,” which many hoped the news was some kind of sick joke.
The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.
This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.
At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.
Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.
I think you'd be also stunned about the custom scripting/tooling studios have built for themselves over the years. Like the Blueprint system of Unreal, and plenty of low-code scene editors and map editors.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.
The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.
This is a critical piece missing from the original article. It would make a lot more sense that game devs and other employees would be "shocked" at being told there would be AI art generated with "full AI workflows"[0].
No hand written code is practically the industry norm now, yet game assets and visuals is still mostly done by hand. The backlash would seem to line up more with Epic encouraging AI generated art, which is incredibly unpopular in the art and game dev communities.
Most people on my project are too. But honestly Claude has gotten good and for 100 dollars of tokens the code is more readable than a humans and I prefer to review it.
For what it’s worth a lot of the code in my company is similar in scope and style. Our design documents are very very thorough and catch edge cases .
I’m not in an ic role anymore but I do feel sad about the loss of handwritten code. It hits at my identity.
As for the article it feels like this is an abuse of ai and is being used for executive cover.
This is interesting but sounds insane to me. At my startup the code has been 100% written by AI agents for the past 6 months. It’s like John Henry vs the Steam engine, time to give it up. The human job which is harder to replace is product manager. Understanding what is valuable to the customer and what the product needs to focus on.
In my experience, AI code is really hard to maintain and overly complex which creates unexpected behavior and hard to catch bugs.
I inherited some vibe coded repos in my company and it's been really painful removing all the unnecessary complexity
Or perhaps the fact that they were stunned should tell you that it's not quite as standard as you think, industry-wide...?
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
I agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.
> Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
Gaming seems like it might as well be a different industry. Theres coding involved but I don't think the typical coder can get into a game dev job. Mostly because of hiring requirements.
I mean, there's a jump between "use AI tooling" and "you're not allowed to handroll code".
Whether Epic leadership themselves can understand that difference is something I'm not sure of, this might be non technical bigwigs speaking and being ignored at the lower end, but these orders taken literally are a "you can't use the letter A" level of dumb.
Man even a cursory look of this site which is very much in the Silicon Valley / Big Tech world and very AI forward will tell you that the usage of AI is still all over the place.
"Just let AI write all the code" is actually reasonable if (and probably only if) almost all code of the project was generated straight from the prompt and never get checked (but it's function still might).
It's like asking AI to generate HTML pages, then just eyeball it to see if the result fits the spec, all without reading the actual code underneath.
Is it ideal and good quality? Hell no, your HTML page maybe 50MB large and comes with some extra tags that's not even in the W3C spec. But... if you observe the behavior of regular consumers and what cheap shit they got lied to paying for, you'll know that most of them don't know (or maybe even care to know) about quality.
Also there's the fact that most top LLMs can now generate code that works mostly correctly, enough to keep most consumers from complaining, all of sudden it sounded reasonable for a for-profit company to try out this route.
Again, I really don't like where this is going, but I can't ignore what I see.
A game is not a website though. The ability for subtle bugs that absolutely devastate user experience to slip through is already obviously present. Looking forward to when fixing the game breaking bug means some poor sod picking through absolute spaghetti. Oh wait they can just chuck the agents back at it and tell it to make no mistakes this time.
Just that line alone makes me think you're far less centrist than you claim to be.
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