TIL Squad's main business isn't even video games

I have worked in both industries, the comparison is just not valid. To use a metaphor related to construction. A relatively minor production system can seem like it is the same as building a house. You price it accordingly and you set your schedule the same way. During testing you find a bug in an edge case that you thought you had covered in your initial design and then discover that you were not actually building a house, now you have an apartment complex you need to construct so that the edge cases you agreed would be covered are covered and it is due in the time that you agreed to originally. You also realize that if there is more work needed in a construction project you can increase the number of laborers with the required skill set without requiring that they all learn the plans of the building. Need to get the sheetrock done faster, bring in some more contractors. However, that crew you brought in to sheetrock the interior of the house has no need to know how plumbing works or how to setup the electrical. Bringing in additional programmers at the end of a project typically slows everything down because they are unfamiliar with the systems in play. The interfaces are different, the tolerances that you can work within are different. The shared libraries that are licensed for use or created in house may have wildly different outputs than the ones the programmer has used in the past. Bringing on more talent near the end of a project almost in every case results in delays. This is the primary reason why worker abuse occurs. To bring on additional help when you just found out that your 3 room bedroom house has become a 50 unit apartment complex will result in extended delays that you may not be able to afford.

There are of course poorly managed projects out there and some companies are just bad to work for. However, I submit that there is a lot more to this issue than you may have yet encountered. I am sorry to hear about your disability that makes it difficult for you to program as much as you would like but when projects get larger and the required number of people who need to understand a lot to contribute even a little bit you end up in a situation where it is cheaper/easier to bring in a few perks or incentives (including enormous bonuses that likely would have been the cost of hiring a programmer for three months) than it would be to lose the productivity of someone who already understands the project.

/r/KerbalSpaceProgram Thread Parent