The Human Toll Of Fallout 76’s Disastrous Launch

June 9, 2022 10:28 AM

“No one wanted to be on that project because it ate people. It destroyed people,” one former developer on Fallout 76 told Kotaku. “The amount of people who would go to that project, and then they would quit [Bethesda] was quite high.” Kotaku spoke to 10 former employees of Bethesda and its parent company ZeniMax Media who were familiar with Fallout 76’s development, all of whom shared their accounts only under the condition of anonymity. Some sources said that they signed non-disparagement agreements upon leaving the company, and feared that ZeniMax’s influence in the industry would prevent them from being hired elsewhere.
posted by octothorpe (39 comments total)

Yes, I can imagine the work of turning a game that many people liked into a game that many people dislike is rather soul-crushing.
posted by Down10 at 11:00 AM on June 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

The career of anyone leading or managing a project that treated workers that way should never work in the industry again. There should be a criminal investigation. Law suits at least should be filed.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:05 AM on June 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Whenever management or coworkers emphasize "passion" it's an excuse for paying you less (or working you harder, same deal).
posted by meowzilla at 11:13 AM on June 9, 2022 [16 favorites]

I keep reading about these conditions in the gaming industry, and it seems so endemic that I’m not sure it’s ethical to play computer games. Sure, this happens in other industries… but between the loot boxes, the NFTs, and mandatory crunches, it seems that gaming is just a moral void
posted by The River Ivel at 11:16 AM on June 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

They will never be held accountable. This is exactly what people mean when they say "working as intended". Anyone remember that powerpoint from a couple of years ago that basically said, "Hire autistic people because they're easy to abuse?" Yeah.

This kind of environment is brought to you by the same system that created toxic masculinity, which was invented in the 17th century by the East India Company so that when someone said, "this is causing me permanent long term injury," they could say, "what are you a pussy?"

(ETA: /s, but only a little)
posted by Horkus at 11:17 AM on June 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

> Anyone remember that powerpoint from a couple of years ago that basically said, "Hire autistic people because they're easy to abuse?"

Uh, no! WTF
posted by Down10 at 11:19 AM on June 9, 2022

Related: Raven Software QA workers win union vote
posted by octothorpe at 11:24 AM on June 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

AMA about unionising!
posted by latkes at 11:25 AM on June 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

"Uh, no! WTF"

Here's a Kotaku article about it from 2016. Here is the original material on archive.org, it's pretty bad, but very relevant to the topic of crunch time.
posted by Horkus at 11:27 AM on June 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

I’m not sure it’s ethical to play computer games

for the vast majority of studios, it really isn't

I'm a QA engineer for a relatively large SaaS company and I'm paid practically triple (counting benefits, RSUs, etc) the salary of a gaming QA to do a quarter of the amount of (fully remote) work. the only real difference being that my work is somewhat more boring than playing some broken build of game that you might not even like for thousands of hours at a time

the discrepancy points to a level of toxicity far exceeding even that of just your regular greedy corpo-capitalist shareholder. on top of that, even at my level I know that the revenue generated from my labor is exploited off of me by more than 50% - for gaming, they're literally getting pennies to the dollar's worth of revenue they actually generate. you could also make a convincing argument that their work is far more valuable given the shitfits gamers throw when a game is released kinda buggy (eg Cyberpunk 2077)
posted by paimapi at 12:05 PM on June 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

They joined Bethesda’s Rockville studio because they were fans of the studio’s single-player games, but now they were working in a genre they had little interest in. Two sources told Kotaku that many former Fallout 4 developers they knew especially resented being assigned to make a live-service game. These were veterans who’d spent many years at a studio that was famous for prestigious single-player RPGs.

Sounds like they were about as happy as I was to learn the next Fallout game would be a live-service MMO.

Bad enough that crunch has always been standard in the game industry, imagine crunching for a game you don't even like.
posted by frogstar42 at 12:09 PM on June 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I have worked in software for about 40 years. "The crunch" used to be part of my life (I think it was a part of almost all developers' lives, who lived through the '80s) but I haven't had to crunch for more than a couple of days or maybe a week since about 1995.

Because development managers in the non-gaming world (mostly) eventually learned that the crunch is where projects fail. If you have to crunch you have already fucked up.

As for QA "getting paid to play games," anybody who says that should be tied to a chair and made to execute manual testing scripts until they shut up. Getting real QA is part of what made it possible to not crunch. (Back in the day, developers did their own "QA," with the result that when the deadlines came shit did not work.) I am so glad I have professional full-time QA backing me up. One way you can tell a real pro developer from a cowboy wannabee is how they relate to QA.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:56 PM on June 9, 2022 [35 favorites]

Aardvark Cheeselog, I'm just starting in QA, but it's a lot like the relationship between a writer and an editor, to me. The good ones value it. The bad ones take it as an affront.
posted by atchafalaya at 1:04 PM on June 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

QA testing for games has been terrible for a very long while: Penny Arcade (2010). I suppose there are been just too many people willing to sacrifice themselves for the industry to make any progress.
posted by meowzilla at 1:08 PM on June 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you have to crunch you have already fucked up.

I worked in video game development for almost a decade (one of the old-school, original arcade companies that had tried to make the transition to console games) before getting completely burned out and becoming a librarian. The crunch was unbearable- all of the horror stories are true- and the studio blew through so much money, insane, ungodly amounts of money, that (the questionable ethics of the games I was working on aside) it began to feel ethically questionable just being on the payroll.

I quit and six months later the company went belly-up, its assets sold off to other companies. I don't regret leaving although I miss the people I worked with- we all knew how bad it was and the only enjoyable thing was hanging out with other lost souls, busily rearranging the deck chairs.
posted by 40 Watt at 1:23 PM on June 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

I suppose there are been just too many people willing to sacrifice themselves for the industry to make any progress.

The problem is twofold.

One, there are way too many people who view the games industry as the Puppy Factory, which means that unless you are senior enough or important enough, you are expendable, and everyone knows this. That said, this is starting to change as more and more people are seeing how the game sausage gets made.

Two, way too many game devs believe that the industry needs to be abusive, because suffering for one's art is a cultural myth that goes to the fucking bone. This was a response to a GDC survey question about unionization:

It will destroy games. Making games is intrinsically hard. I've never seen it be easy. I'm not saying that it needs to be cruel, but if you aren't paying with blood, sweat, and tears, you probably aren't hitting your true ambitions. True genius has a price.

There is a sickness in the industry, and it goes deep.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:31 PM on June 9, 2022 [30 favorites]

I don't really understand what's so attractive about working in games, that lets them get away with this shit. Pretty much nowhere else in professional software development (in the US, anyway) do you see crap like this.

Yes, occasionally there are projects that will get behind, and maybe you'll "crunch" for a week or two to make it up. I managed a project once where we had a hard deadline due to interdependencies with other ongoing projects, and I had to ask staff if they were willing to do overtime. Some said yes, some said no thanks. I bought everyone who was there at 6PM dinner every night. Silly "night owl" t-shirts were made. A supply closet was turned into a nap room. We did the thing. It was, in retrospect, kinda fun—for two weeks.

I can't imagine doing it repeatedly. What the hell is wrong with these companies' management, that it seems to happen so regularly?

And what the hell is wrong with employees that they still go and work for these firms? Is the idea of working on games really that attractive? Software is fucking software, guys. The best, most professional developers I know literally don't give a shit what their code does, as long as it does what it's supposed to do. They could be coding the firmware for a Japanese bidet or the fire control for a nuclear cruise missile. They come to work, go to a meeting or two, write code, go to lunch, write more code, go to another meeting or two, go home, have hobbies, have families, whatever, rinse, repeat, retire in 30-40 years. Anything else doesn't seem sustainable.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:37 PM on June 9, 2022 [11 favorites]

I've only been adjacent to the games industry rather than part of it, but my god there's a whole lot of toxic horribleness, and even more of a "feed your people into the meat grinder" than the rest of tech.

As for Fallout 76, I started playing at launch and my god it was a buggy pile of cruft, although I really enjoyed the content (in between the bugs). They've got most of those egregious bugs. The new content once they brought in NPCs was fun, but I really liked a lot of the "there's nobody here everyone you read about is dead" doomfulness - it felt post-apocalyptic in a way very few other games I played have. (You get multiple notes and tapes made by some of the same characters over the years so you can follow some of the characters' lives and development, so people have stories, it's just they're over and everyone's dead even the things that went well, everyone's dead.)

But even from the outside of the development side, it was obvious the level of chaos going on behind the scenes since launch.

I do find it hilarious that they thought they were going to make a grumpy harsh game with lots of PvP and instead it's turned into what is a surprisingly wholesome player community.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:40 PM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Capitalism makes video games worse. This is the second time today I have posted this.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:40 PM on June 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

Jeezus, that Alex St John PowerPoint linked above.
Couldn’t help but notice the tags -
Topics: management, employment, poes law, sociopath, engineer, programmer, manager, employer
posted by q*ben at 1:46 PM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

FTA: "In June 2019, Howard gave an IGN interview about how was a game that “we wanted to play.”"

Maybe I'm just not parsing this sentence correctly, but it feels like this article about the importance of QA could have used another trip through QA.
posted by xedrik at 2:21 PM on June 9, 2022

Alex St. John and Brad Wardell are the anthromorphic incarnations of What Is Wrong With The Gaming Industry.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:27 PM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

xedrik, the text I see says, 'In June 2019, Howard gave an IGN interview about how Fallout 76 was a game that “we wanted to play.”'

You might want to check and see if, for example, an ad-blocker is doing in-text removal of brand links? I've had this happen before, making an article about a tire recall completely incomprehensible to me, but normal looking to most other people.
posted by Horkus at 2:29 PM on June 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Horkus, that seems to have been it. Weird; first time I've seen that happen (or, at least, that I've noticed it.)
posted by xedrik at 2:56 PM on June 9, 2022

I'm a QA engineer for a relatively large SaaS company and I'm paid practically triple (counting benefits, RSUs, etc) the salary of a gaming QA to do a quarter of the amount of (fully remote) work. the only real difference being that my work is somewhat more boring than playing some broken build of game that you might not even like for thousands of hours at a time

I don't really understand what's so attractive about working in games, that lets them get away with this shit. Pretty much nowhere else in professional software development (in the US, anyway) do you see crap like this.

It’s really bizarre to me. Like probably a lot of people I learned to code as a teenager because I wanted to make games. At some point prior to actually getting a software job, though, I found out that boring web stuff is not only more relaxed but pays much better. I suppose game development is comparable to other entertainment sectors that are known to work people to exhaustion, where people put up with it in the name of “passion” and all that. And the crazy deadline-driven stuff isn’t totally unique in software, it’s just not super common these days. But it’s a very strange situation because it involves quite a few people who could in theory take the same basic skill set somewhere else and be treated totally differently.

(Well, presumably many eventually do.)
posted by atoxyl at 3:50 PM on June 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

And what the hell is wrong with employees that they still go and work for these firms? Is the idea of working on games really that attractive?

My first paying job as a game developer was about 25 years ago as an Intern Tools Programmer at age 16. I haven’t been doing it completely uninterrupted ever since (coming up on 16 years continuous) but I’m currently working AAA at a studio that is widely reputed as the best (or least-bad) in the industry at treating employees right and largely lives up to the hype.

And while I’m very happy I opted for an employer that actually takes work/life balance seriously, and am no longer averaging 72.5 hours/week like I was for eight years on the Bioshock series, the truth is that my answer to your question would still be “yes.”

I don’t really want to do anything with my life beyond making games, playing games, and hitting the gym a few times a week. I rarely have other aspirations. Pretentious d-bags will “oh how sad” at that, but all our existences end in the dirt and I’d rather spend my subjective experience in contexts less bounded than reality’s, or making my own unbounded contexts.

I am here to make and play games. End of story.

There are a line of people out the door that feel the same way, or close enough that by the time they discover otherwise their replacement is ready to step in. As a socialist (in political beliefs, at least) I was thrilled to read about that one recent QA unionization, but I don’t see that spreading much outside the most egregiously abused parts of the industry.

Capitalism is exploiting the shit out of us, but if we lived in a sane society with universal healthcare and universal basic income they probably wouldn’t have to pay me at all.

Software is fucking software, guys.

Someone here on Metafilter (I think it was NoxAeternum, actually) said something a few years ago that stuck with me (and I apologize for probably munging the quote): “This exploitation will continue until game developers stop seeing themselves as artists.” Which is absolutely, perfectly true. I see myself as an artist whose work is interactive world-building and whose medium is software. Things are improving, but there’s enough people with that view to keep the industry this way for a very, very long time.

FWIW: the claim that you can’t make games without abuse is bullshit. The limiting factors are team size and creative cohesion - the larger the team, the less hours each individual needs to work (mostly, some tasks are pure serial), but also the less the creative vision is shared by all participants. Pouring more money into headcount can alleviate the problem to some extent, but your competition is shitty companies willing to cough up large development costs AND treat their people like shit. That gives them a competitive advantage that can be hard to overcome. And while we’d love to counter with squishy feels-good answers like “people who aren’t abused are more creative!” that isn’t actually true, or at least it’s not true enough to make much difference. I don’t think this situation can be fixed without demolishing capitalism entirely.
posted by Ryvar at 4:24 PM on June 9, 2022 [26 favorites]

Someone here on Metafilter (I think it was NoxAeternum, actually) said something a few years ago that stuck with me (and I apologize for probably munging the quote): “This exploitation will continue until game developers stop seeing themselves as artists.”

The problem isn't that they see themselves as an artists. I like artists! I think artists make cool things that I enjoy, and should be properly compensated for it!

No, my problem is that these people have a conceptualization of labor that is, pardon my language, utterly fucked.

Now to be fair, the vast majority of that is because society has sold you, me, and the rest of us a bill of goods that creative labor isn't actually labor, and that someone who treats creative labor as labor is doing something harmful to society and has become a "sellout" or a number of other slurs meant to demean the concept of asserting the idea that creative labor is labor. Thus we have bullshit sayings like "Do what you love, and you'll never work another day in your life." (People who turn their hobbies into careers soon find that doing so alters the relationship, rarely for the better.)

And my vehemence over this comes from two places. One, I can see how this belief hurts the people who hold it, making them targets for abuse and exploitation - this is what St. John's vile presentation is about. Two, I also get to see how this belief hurts other people like myself, because those people are then used as a cudgel to beat on the rest of us who believe that labor should be properly compensated, because we're told that it is somehow immoral that we labor for compensation, and not "passion" (This, by the way, is why amateurism is class warfare - the idea is that amateurs are somehow "purer" because they don't labor for compensation.)

So no, the problem isn't artists - it's that we don't treat artists as the laborers they are.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:51 PM on June 9, 2022 [11 favorites]

Adults in software development know that 'cruch' means 'project management fucked up'. In my very large, old skewl org, if an app owner came back with "look, the dev team needs to work 60-80 hour weeks for the next 2 months to make this work, and they should be good with that" they would be quietly escorted out to the dumpsters and shot in the head. Game dev is the "sometimes your role in life is as an example to others" of software development. That the utterly incompetent dev leads in game dev are lionized is the problem.
posted by kjs3 at 5:08 PM on June 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

And what the hell is wrong with employees that they still go and work for these firms? Is the idea of working on games really that attractive?

Just a reminder that 2D artists (concept artists, UI artists, illustrators etc) are a thing, and that while other jobs in alternate industries (animation, film and advertising) exist, the job conditions in these industries are also problematic. And it's not even like you could pivot between studios in the same industry seamlessly: unless you luck into having the 'correct' art style, you're going to have to take a significant amount of time studying and retooling your portfolio.

Re: the pervasiveness of toxic work attitudes in the industry, I can attest to the fact that it starts in school. Many of my lecturers were industry veterans, and the common refrain was that if we couldn't take the workload in school, we could well forget about entering the industry because it would be worse there. Stories about working 9-12 (am, not pm!) were valorised, and the school absolutely fetishized coming in to school to work even on weekends, even though the school computers were objectively potatoes. I learnt a lot there, but the gruelling hours of 12 hours a day, 7 days a week were absolutely unsustainable.
posted by seapig at 5:11 PM on June 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

Pretty much every high-prestige, intellectually rewarding, high-meaning type of work suffers from exploitation: whether it's PhD students and adjunct professors in academia, the treatment of medical students, unpaid internships in politics and nonprofits, or the notoriously poor working conditions of artists of all kinds. And yes, this exploitation is possible because people will value intellectually stimulating and meaningful work above their financial and even physical wellbeing, but I don't think the solution is to tell people that they're wrong for wanting those things.
posted by Pyry at 5:51 PM on June 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

And yes, this exploitation is possible because people will value intellectually stimulating and meaningful work above their financial and even physical wellbeing, but I don't think the solution is to tell people that they're wrong for wanting those things.

Nobody is saying they shouldn't want those things. What is being said is that they need to respect labor for what it is - labor. And as such, we need to reject the argument that it is somehow "demeaning" for us to demand compensation for our labor.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:01 PM on June 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

This article reminded me of Jason Schreier's postmortems on the development of the BioWare games Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, and I was especially struck by this: "According to one source, Howard was supposed to be in charge of the game, but he spent most of his time working on Starfield, which reportedly started development after Fallout 4 shipped in 2015." MEA was hurt badly by resources being poured into Anthem under the assumption that it would be BioWare's next big thing (spoiler: it wasn't).
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:28 PM on June 9, 2022

Romanticism gave modern Western culture the idea of artist and craftsperson as fundamentally distinct entities. The charming illusions of the Romantics are unusually useful for evil ends. The idea of creative genius has a long and ignoble history of being used to fool people into thinking getting ripped off is part of their vocation.

No software engineer (or designer, musician or anyone else) is any more of an artist than the stonemason who I saw, day by day, take a few tons of irregular slate blocks, covered in 200 year old mortar, and turn them back into a wall even more lovely than it had been before it collapsed*. He knew he was as good as they get, but would've given you a very distrustful look if you'd called him an artist. And as everyone knows, you don't tell builders when their life will be ruined by an entirely avoidable surge in overtime: that's what they do to you.

I suspect that we may ascribe far too much weight to the category "artist". People make things. An artist is a person who makes something that we currently consider to be art. Even if you think "art" is a special category (which most seem to, although I've never quite got it), if it's broad enough to cover coding and cooking (and I see no reason why it shouldn't be), its practitioners surely share no features which mandate any particular approach to their tasks.

* every wall in that house collapsed or had to be demolished at some point. Now that's crunch.
posted by howfar at 6:58 PM on June 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don't think people accept exploitative jobs because they think getting paid is demeaning, or because they don't respect the value of their own labor, but rather because they think the exploitative job is their best or perhaps only entry point to their desired career. And like, I think the glorification of professionalism is part of this as well: people are willing to let themselves be exploited because being a professional game developer or professional artist is seen as so important, this idea that the market has recognized and elevated you above mere hobbyists (see also: being a published writer).
posted by Pyry at 7:19 PM on June 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

The WoW Diary is a great examination of the psychology of this area, it's written by a guy who was working huge crunch hours for years throughout the development process and literally destroyed his wrists and ability to work in the field as a result. There's absolutely no sense in the writing that this was somehow a problem, and regularly he notes periods where developer morale was down and other people would stop coming in first thing on Sundays or similar. It's baffling and kind of sad to read.
posted by xiw at 8:37 PM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I bought everyone who was there at 6PM dinner every night. Silly "night owl" t-shirts were made. A supply closet was turned into a nap room. We did the thing. It was, in retrospect, kinda fun—for two weeks.

Two weeks is about the hard limit for this kind of work. There are plenty of studies about this, but the summary of that research is that after two weeks of crunch you're going backwards, introducing more problems into the codebase than you're solving and progressively less and less able to figure out how to solve them, because you're so tired.
posted by mhoye at 8:37 AM on June 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

There are plenty of studies about this, but the summary of that research is that after two weeks of crunch you're going backwards, introducing more problems into the codebase than you're solving and progressively less and less able to figure out how to solve them, because you're so tired.

I have a pretty long career (for gamedev) of observing that this is highly specific to individuals. My most productive hours both in terms of feature turnaround and implementation quality are when I’m in a 100~110hour/week fugue state. Which, agreed: is really only sustainable for about two weeks. You can lifestyle 80, but 65 is about the max comfortably sustainable (assuming no kids and an understanding partner, preferably someone also in the industry with equally limited availability).

The reason for the increased output with greater hours is that the work requires layering so many different models on your mental stack: low-level C++ considerations, high-level software architecture considerations, minute-to-minute player UX vs combat balance design considerations, role of a feature within the overall meta systems design considerations (modulo current design trends), low-level HLSL considerations, overall rendering and GPU pipeline/perf considerations…all filtered through code style guide and project style guide (content layout/naming conventions) and art style guide… that interruption of flow state for more than a couple minutes causes mental stack collapse and productivity implodes.

Fully spooling up so that you can move fluidly between code, systems design, and tech art work all simultaneously takes about two hours to achieve liftoff. Once you’re there you want to keep going partly because of the time required to get into that state, and partly because you are building the fucking game with new features coming online every hour, typically outpacing a striketeam of 4~5 skilled developers working 10x5 or 10x6 by a factor of 2~4x. Solo. You can see the thing taking shape right there in front of you gamejam style and it’s an incredible high accompanied by explosions of creativity as the shape of the systemic constraints and possibility space are revealed.

(Cue Bo Burnham’s Art is Dead singing “I am an addict / I am an addict / and I get paid to indulge in my habit.”)

None of it will actually ship (hopefully), but all of it forms the underlying skeleton of what will ship. If you want to make games and really see and feel that you are making a game - as opposed to receiving a spec, writing code to meet it and hucking it back over the wall - then project standup and game systems prototyping (the formal terms for all this) require you to be comfortable with doing all of the above and then throwing it all out at the end.

I suspect that there has never been a game as good as the praxis of making games.
posted by Ryvar at 11:12 AM on June 10, 2022 [10 favorites]

As a game developer who has worked in crunch conditions semi-voluntarily, I reject the idea that it is unethical to play games that resulted from horrible conditions. The only thing worse than working 70 hours a week to get something out the door so people can enjoy it, is working 70 hours a week for a game that gets cancelled or is so awful that no one wants to play it. The horrible labor conditions have already happened, play the games you want to play and if you post on the internet saying you like the game, there's a good chance that will make a developer happy.

Now, when it comes to rather you should PAY for a game resulting from bad conditions I think that's a lot more complicated ethically. QA is almost always paid on contract so paying for a game they worked on will generally not help them in any way, and if a game has been out for a few years the revenue is probably not going to the people who actually worked on it. Go ahead and pirate the games I worked on 10 years ago, that money is going to some weird holding company. But, please don't pirate the small indie game that came out a month ago and is still providing direct revenue to the developers.
posted by JZig at 3:16 PM on June 10, 2022 [9 favorites]

Is the idea of working on games really that attractive? Software is fucking software, guys. The best, most professional developers I know literally don't give a shit what their code does, as long as it does what it's supposed to do. They could be coding the firmware for a Japanese bidet or the fire control for a nuclear cruise missile. They come to work, go to a meeting or two, write code, go to lunch, write more code, go to another meeting or two, go home, have hobbies, have families, whatever, rinse, repeat, retire in 30-40 years. Anything else doesn't seem sustainable.

Amen. Twenty years ago I was the IT summer intern wrangler for a Fortune 500 company. I had six or seven youngsters that went into various areas of IT (one tailed a PM, a couple stayed with the devs, one doco writer, a business analyst, etc.) At the end of the summer we all went out and I asked them if they'd had fun and all said yes. (FYI I care about fun so they had fun.) I asked if they'd learned things, and they said they had. I asked if this is what they thought development work would be like, and they mumbled something about not knowing what to expect. I asked them what they wanted to do when they graduated and most said writing games. Groan.

My lecture went something like this: You just spent the summer gathering requirements and writing an IT documentation and reference system, actually just the read-only presentation layer for that IT documentation library, for a huge, faceless, plodding religious fraternal life insurance company. But you learned a bunch, you liked your co-workers, you got to use modern tools and methods, you had a great boss (ahem) and you were paid pretty well. So here's the real lesson of the summer: If you are ever offered a choice between two jobs, and one is working on boring crap in a stable environment with people you like for fair pay and the other is to build cool stuff under trying conditions where part of your compensation is getting to work on cool stuff, well run from that job. Who you're with and not hating your work life is way more important than the specific task at hand. And only ever let anyone buy you out of that with filthy lucre for a very limited time for a specific reason. Taking extra money for work you hate eats your soul over time. People who think you should thank them for letting you work there for sub-par money are trying to kill you. (Pro sports teams devour interns in this way as well.)

I hope they went on to fulfilling lives.
posted by Cris E at 2:52 PM on June 13, 2022 [4 favorites]