“And Then My Reward Was More Crunch”
For reasons that are probably contextually obvious, I spent the weekend diving into Tim Cain’s YouTube Channel. Tim Cain is still probably best known as “the guy who did the first Fallout,” but he spent decades working on phenominal games. He’s semi-retired these days, and rather than write memoirs, he’s got a “stories from the old days” YouTube channel, and it’s fantastic.
Fallout is one of those bits of art that seems to accrete urban legends. One of the joys of his channel has been having one of the people who was really there say “let me tell you what really happened.”
One of the more infamous beats around Fallout was that Cain and the other leads of the first Fallout left partway through development of Fallout 2 and founded Troika Games. What happened there? Fallout was a hit, and it’s from the outside it’s always been baffling that Interplay just let the people who made it… walk out the door?
I’m late to this particular party, but a couple months ago Cain went on the record with what happened:
and a key postscript:
Listening To My Stories With Nuance
…And oh man, did that hit me where I live, because something very similar happened to me once.
Several lifetimes ago. I was the lead on one of those strange projects that happen in corporate America where it absolutely had to happen, but it wasn’t considered important enough to actually put people or resources on it. We had to completely retool a legacy system by a hard deadline or lose a pretty substantial revenue stream, but it wasn’t one of the big sexy projects, so my tiny team basically got told to figure it out and left alone for the better part of two years.
Theoretically the lack of “adult supervision” gaves us a bunch of flexibility, but in practice it was a hige impediment every time we needed help or resources or infrastructure. It came down to the wire, but we pulled it off, mostly by sheer willpower. It was one of those miracles you can sometimes manage to pull off; we hit the date, stayed in budget, produced a higher-quality system with more features that was easier to maintain and build on. Not only that, but transition from the old system to the new went off with barely a ripple, and we replaced a system that was constantly falling over with one that last I heard was still running on years of 100% uptime. The end was nearly a year-long sprint, barely getting it over the finish line. We were all exhausted, I was about ready to die.
And the reward was: nothing. No recognition, no bonus, no time off, the promotion that kept getting talked about evaporated. Even the corp-standard “keep inflation at bay” raise was not only lower than I expected but lower than I was told it was going to be; when I asked about that, the answer was “oh, someone wrote the wrong number down the first time, don’t worry about it.”
I’m, uh, gonna worry about it a little bit, if that’s all the same to you, actually.
Morale was low, is what I’m saying.
But the real “lemon juice in the papercut” moment was the next project. We needed to do something similar to the next legacy system over, and now armed with the results of the past two years, I went in to talk about how that was going to go. I didn’t want to do that next one at all, and said so. I also thought maybe I had earned the right to move up to one of the projects that people did care about? But no, we really want you do run this one too. Okay, fine. It’s nice to be wanted, I guess?
It was, roughly, four times as much work as the previous, and it needed to get done in about the same amount of of time. Keeping in mind we barely made it the first time, I said, okay, here’s what we need to do to pull this off, here’s the support I need, the people, here’s my plan to land this thing. There’s aways more than one way to get something done, I either needed some more time, or more people, I had some underperformers on the team I needed rotated out. And got told, no, you can’t have any version of that. We have a hard deadline, you can’t have any more people, you have to keep the dead weight. Just find a way to get four times as much work done with what you have in less time. Maybe just keep working crazy hours? All with a tone that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.
And this is the part of Tim Cain’s story I really vibrated with. I had pulled off a miracle, and the only reward was more crunch. I remember sitting in my boss’s boss’s office, thinking to myself “why would I do this? Why would they even think I would say yes to this?”
Then, they had the unmitigated gall to be surprised when I took another job offer.
I wasn’t the only person that left. The punchline, and you can probably see this coming, is that it didn’t ship for years after that hard deadline and they had to throw way more people on it after all.
But, okay, other than general commiserating with an internet stranger about past jobs, why bring all this up? What’s the point?
Because this is exactly what I was talking about on Friday in Getting Less out of People. Because we didn’t get a whole lot of back story with Barry. What’s going on with that guy?
The focus was on getting Maria to be like Barry, but does does Barry want to be like Barry? Does he feel like he’s being taken advantage of? Is he expecting a reward and then a return to normal while you’re focusing on getting Maria to spend less time on her novel and more time on unpaid overtime? What’s he gonna do when he realizes that what he thinks is “crunch” is what you think is “higher performing”?
There’s a tendency to think of productivity like a ratchet; more story points, more velocity, more whatever. Number go up! But people will always find an equilibrium. The key to real success to to figure out how to provide that equilibrium to your people, because if you don’t, someone else will.