inXile Entertainment announce Wasteland 3 is delayed until August 28

Covid-19: Allowing developers and publishers to pretend delays totally weren't going to happen anyway for a limited amount of time.

http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

That's the first time I hear a company claiming that remote-work would somehow be less efficient than working in an office. lol!

I call bs on it, really. It's just the usual bad project management and unrealistic deadlines common to the games industry, except that now they go a convenient excuse for it.

Quoting: KimyrielleThat's the first time I hear a company claiming that remote-work would somehow be less efficient than working in an office. lol!

You must be joking. I'm working in a big software development department and it is just... hard. The infrastructure is fine for 5% working from home. It is overwhelmed with 90% working from home. I took two weeks off because I couldn't bare it.

Also, it is helpful to look people in the eyes.


Last edited by Eike on 2 April 2020 at 7:45 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KimyrielleThat's the first time I hear a company claiming that remote-work would somehow be less efficient than working in an office. lol!

You must be joking. I'm working in a big software development department and it is just... hard. The infrastructure is fine for 5% working from home. It is overwhelmed with 90% working from home.

Not too surprised by that. If I remember that right, you are in Germany?
Came from there.

Digital stone age, decades behind the modern world. Especially in work culture, home office is practically an offensive word. Not surprised in the slightest switching to home office has overwhelmed a software company there for more than a week or two.
Meanwhile, here (Finland, but really heard the same story from all around, software companies I mean), it was a week or two of adjustment, now things run just fine with the odd hiccup caused by stuff like kids being at home, etc.

Of course, extroverted people have bigger problems with that, requiring the company of others to charge their batteries and all that, but that's not really an issue of work culture.

Quoting: EikeAlso, it is helpful to look people in the eyes.

For what?
I find it bothersome if non-friend people do that to me.

Then again, I worked in an office for two years before I couldn't bear the endless useless discussions, meetings, boring banter, small talk, uninteresting life stories, etc. any more and became a work-from-home (mostly) freelancer.
It's funny really, with that decision I also suddenly became much happier and ill a lot less (from 3-5 times per year to maybe once, if that much).
Being around people made me sick before that became "a thing".

It's kind of a weird feeling, seeing how people around have their surroundings turned upside down while for you almost nothing has changed (except I can't see friends, cinema, etc. right now).


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 2 April 2020 at 8:03 pm UTC

Being a mechanical CAD designer and doing the hardware support for the company, we began a tansition to convert our workstations to mobile workstations, 2 years ago. Innitialy it was for home-working in case of kids' getting sick, when school is closed during snow-storms (Canada) or other family related stuff. At the moment we are really happy to have done the transition, because we are 100% operational.

A good VPN access, a good business and home internet connection and, in our case, Solidworks EPDM vault to work locally (limiting the need to top our uploading cap) and it's quite easy and efficient to work at home.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 2 April 2020 at 8:40 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KimyrielleThat's the first time I hear a company claiming that remote-work would somehow be less efficient than working in an office. lol!

You must be joking. I'm working in a big software development department and it is just... hard. The infrastructure is fine for 5% working from home. It is overwhelmed with 90% working from home. I took two weeks off because I couldn't bare it.

Also, it is helpful to look people in the eyes.

That's the stuff you usually hear from dinosaur managers who are mentally unable to trust their staff to get any work done unless being watched. If a tech company is set up in a way that only 5% of the staff can work remotely, I am wondering if you're working for Fred Flintstone, really. Or any other company still working like they did in the middle ages. Any tech company can do close to 100% of their work online. By definition. Digital work is the very nature of what they do, and everything digital can be done online. Some processes interacting with outside organizations might be exempt when THEY can't handle digital processes, but that's about it.
Otherwise, there is zero reason for a tech worker to ever go to an office, unless it's for socialization reasons. And in that case I would still argue that this can be done just as well in a pub, after work, so people don't have to pretend to be working while they're chatting. If a tech company tells me that they can't digitalize ALL their processes, they should consider hiring somebody that tells them how, really.

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: EikeAlso, it is helpful to look people in the eyes.

For what?

Maybe they like to occasionally glower at other developers while reading over their pull requests?

Looking up their platforms, I see Playstation and Xbox listed. Which means physical copies need to be manufactured, and this is kind of a bad time for non-critical manufacturing. Plus, I would imagine with the increasing number of people losing work that's potential sales that might be going out the window, especially if they're looking at a release when the US is expected to be hitting much higher numbers than they are now.

The Last of Us 2 is doing the same thing, except they've put release on hold indefinitely until things calm down.

Quoting: KimyrielleThat's the first time I hear a company claiming that remote-work would somehow be less efficient than working in an office. lol!

Frankly, it's a mixed bag. (Also, Germany here as well.)

There's several things that play together here:

Children. With schools, kindergardens and kitas closed, a lot of parents now need to handle their children in addition to work.

Internet connection. Here in Germany, that's pretty bad in rural parts. And even many cities are not balanced for a significant portion of people working from home at the same time. From what I hear, the US is also quite bad there.

Everything that requires people to collaborate is slower remotely. That was also noticable when I worked together with people in another office 40km away vs. a colleague in the same room. With experience and as people get to know each other's working operandi better, this can be reduced, sure, but it's still different.

For me personally, I work in a company that has projects that produce hardware in small to mid-sized quantity for automative research. So we order parts, build them into prototypes, put a Linux onto it, write additional software for them. And then they get produced in small batches and have to be set-up or modified manually. That means there's steps were several people work together on one physical thing. Difficult to home-office.

Now, with a coworker being sick, I'm currently handling the Linux base part. And I get mostly get away with testing on a few devices I have here, and some devices for communal use accessible through the company VPN.

We also offer support to our customers, that sometimes means going there. (However, one is a certain big local car company with a relatively strong union culture, so they don't necessarily require people to just drop in willy-nilly.)

And on another personal, about half my company has people now working reduced hours, myself included (due to the federally mandated unemployment insurance, 60% of the loss in income is paid through that, so we can still pay our rent and eat, I'm fine). I find that, at the moment anyway, there's a lot of time lost in just working out if a certain task can be done now. Is it vital, can it be worked around, can it be done in the alotted reduced time a person has or do we need to ask a manager to temporarily increase these hours, etc.

Add to that the general loss of "productiveness" due to feeling insecure in this time, worrying about getting sick or loosing loved ones. I freely admit that I've always been a worrier and I've certainly taken a hit mentally.

It's just an all around weird time right now, we all need to find our feet first, and I don't think blaming delays on people being "lazy" or what-have-you is a good idea. I mean, it nearly never is, but currently even less so.