Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter (2018)
Very interesting article. Some of these are shocking:<p>&gt; Use Source Control: Do you not use source control?<p>How do professional companies not use source control in the year 2021? The mind boggles.<p>&gt; Smaller Commits, Better Commit Logging: Submitting a 2GB 2000-file change to Perforce with the description &quot;did some work&quot; is terrible<p>Also quite surprising. If you are going to log your progress, you might aswell properly document what actually changed.<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t Ignore Your Lead Engineer if You Have One: If your lead engineer says that you need to spend $2,000 on SSDs or buy X license for Y, and your answer is immediately no because you believe your engineer is just trying to waste your budget, you either need to learn how to trust your engineer or find a new engineer. I have seen a company waste 70 man-hours a week simply because they had their workers on slow hard drives. Giving everyone faster SSDs would have cost the company ~60 man-hours in budget.<p>This one really hits home and something that I personally had to deal with. I had to complain and fight for a long time to get the company to actually buy a SSD (or another job critical piece of time-saving hardware). Usually its not management saying no to such requests, its more of a strong general attitude of saving money and keeping expenses low. I have quickly learned that this level of penny pinching is a red flag and you should bail out as fast as you can because it rarely gets better and that attitude is rarely limited to one department.<p>Also related: Sometimes its about money but in a very indirect way. The amount of time I had to waste waiting for slow builds to complete because the corporate Anti-virus scans every new generated file is staggering. What should be a 10 minute build was over 1 hour, all due to the mandated new corporate anti-virus. Corporate IT could not adjust the security policy because they are understaffed because management laid off 80% of the IT team causing a huge backlog of work which then cascades to every other part of the business. Then they wonder why they get negative feedback during workplace reviews.<p>---<p>A thing I quite liked: the hierarchy ranking of engineers and distinction between senior and lead engineer.<p>---
Also, does anyone know of places where I can read similar war stories? These articles are always super interesting to read and learn from.