They got away with this??

Always happy to chat. Keep kicking ass, dude!

"I want to work at Blizzard!" Blizzard: "You think you do, but you don't"

"Get that shit in writing and don't trust HR" should really be printed on every diploma to any graduate in the world.

Not in gaming, but in a corporate environment. When i started, my department Mgr had quarterly "round table" meetings with Baseline/Entry level staff to directly address/ask questions/be asked questions about processes and the like. The intent was to root out bad supervisors that were shielding themselves and/or others from oversight. Fast forward 7 years, that man is the VP of the same department, and TO THIS DAY holds quarterly meetings with the same front-line people (rotating the agents at random). This recently rooted out a Director that was saying 1 thing to him, and doing another that was against company policy. Always Keep In Contact WIth Ground Troops

This collab needs to be a regular segment

I know a guy who was a QA tester for Obsidian Entertainment working on Neverwinter Nights 2. At the end of development, they invited all the QA testers to the parking lot for a celebration party. There was no party, they disabled all their keys when they got out there, and told them they were all fired. And that was it...

"Get everything in writing" best piece of advice ever. However, i worked for a company where HR NEVER put anything in writing, even in follow up emails where i would say "hey to go off our meeting earlier, i just wanted to confirm that you requested me to do X, please confirm". My hr manager never responded, when it is near impossible to get anything in writing its time to leave, they are setting you up to be fired with cause. Dont let them.

I love that they talk about the influence of a manager is,. I had a breakdown at work and if it was not for the manager saying go home and see a doctor I would have crashed and lost my job. I went back into the job 7 weeks later a total different person. Thanks J Walters for being that manager who understood.

It blows my mind that saying "you're not the rockstars." actually came across someone's mind as an appropriate thing to say. twice.

if my boss said "you can be replaced at any time" I would have been among the first people to walk out. kudos to the team for doing just that.

The "Email Mike" plan is SUCH a good idea if implemented correctly and have the right CEO for it. Everyone's voice should hold the same weight and I respect someone in upper management who will take the time to listen to someone even if they're the janitor.

This whole story reminds me of something I learned the hard way. People don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad bosses.

"I can see you're frustrated" is the HR equivalent of "Thoughts and prayers"

Thor's faceless voice makes it feel like Prime is talking to God.

I managed a team of 3 devs and 2 QA people (in network infra, not games) . Embedded QA is where it's at. You make the devs and QA be a team themselves, and the team is organized around just making the best product. Instead of a confrontational aspect, devs THANKED QA for finding things.

I worked in the aerospace industry for a bit (just a tad under 5 years) and the thing is, that separation of departments started happening where I worked too. When we were an expanding company, fabricators (like me) were encouraged to talk to the engineers and machinists to discuss how things could work better. A person who makes the parts is also generally part of QA in that industry, because if you screw up, you need to know how not to do it again. The process is simple on the surface, but complicated the more you work with the materials and parts. At the end there, we were strongly discouraged from talking to the engineers, and the most hilarious thing to me was when simple parts that they would request would have obviously been easy to make in a certain way had they just talked to the people making the parts who were knowledgeable about how they could be made. And the same kinda language was used, like they were afraid that people would switch sides somehow if they were exposed to the grunts making the parts or, visa versa, the grunts were exposed to the ivory tower engineers. It created a pretty toxic work environment.

“Imagine getting fired for being meticulous.” That happens all the time

Upvote if you also didn't know who Mike is.

Fun Fact: The QA department at my work is probably considered the most important. If a mistake is found in a project, the QA Lead goes hard on everyone involved in the process - The engineer, the checker, the manager. Anyone with a hand gets in trouble if the project isn't spotless. The dude isn't evil, though, he won't fire someone for a few mistakes, but he'll still tell people to their face that the work was unacceptable and they need to redo it. I'm both terrified and in awe of him. Like, talk about dedication to quality! That's how a QA team should be treated. They should be the rockstars because if they aren't there to catch the mistakes, then the entire project suffers. Edit: QA personnel are engineers. Anyone who says otherwise is a moron.

These two guys became my favorite content creators as of lately. I was listening to this while walking my dogs and I couldn't help but to imagine how great it would be to have a podcast with ThePrimeagen, Pirate Software and Low Level Learning. I could listen to them discussing programming, hacking, technology in general for hours!