If it helps explain things, the only experience the CEO had before this social game shop was running a literal one-man yogurt shop.
This happened a week before I started as a Senior Software Engineer. I remember getting pulled into a meeting where several managers who knew nothing about technology were desperately trying to place blame, figure out how to avoid this in the future, and so on.
"There should have been automated backups. That's really the only thing inexcusable here.", I said.
The "producer" (no experience, is now a director of operations, I think?) running the meeting said that was all well and good, but what else could we do to ensure that nobody makes this mistake again? "People are going to make mistakes", I said, "what you need to focus on is how to prevent it from sinking the company. All you need for that is backups. It's not the engineer's fault.". I was largely ignored (which eventually proved to be a pattern) and so went on about my business.
And business was dumb. I had to fix an awful lot of technical things in my time there.
When I started, only half of the client code was in version control. And it wasn't even the most recent shipped version. Where was the most recent version? On a Mac Mini that floated around the office somewhere. People did their AS3 programming in notepad or directly on the timeline. There were no automated builds, and builds were pushed from peoples' local machines -often contaminated by other stuff they were working on. Art content live on our CDN may have had source (PSD/FLA) distributed among a dozen artist machines, or else the source for it was completely lost.
That was just the technical side. The business/management side was and is actually more hilarious. I have enough stories from that place to fill a hundred posts, but you can probably get a pretty good idea by imagining a yogurt-salesman-cum-CEO, his disbarred ebay art fraudster partner, and other friends directing the efforts of senior software engineers, artists, and other game developers. It was a god damn sitcom every day. Not to mention all of the labor law violations. Post-acquisition is a whole 'nother anthology of tales of hilarious incompetence. I should write a book.
I recall having lunch with the author when he asked me "What should I do?". I told him that he should leave. In hindsight, it might have been the best advice I ever gave.
This happened a week before I started as a Senior Software Engineer. I remember getting pulled into a meeting where several managers who knew nothing about technology were desperately trying to place blame, figure out how to avoid this in the future, and so on.
"There should have been automated backups. That's really the only thing inexcusable here.", I said.
The "producer" (no experience, is now a director of operations, I think?) running the meeting said that was all well and good, but what else could we do to ensure that nobody makes this mistake again? "People are going to make mistakes", I said, "what you need to focus on is how to prevent it from sinking the company. All you need for that is backups. It's not the engineer's fault.". I was largely ignored (which eventually proved to be a pattern) and so went on about my business.
And business was dumb. I had to fix an awful lot of technical things in my time there.
When I started, only half of the client code was in version control. And it wasn't even the most recent shipped version. Where was the most recent version? On a Mac Mini that floated around the office somewhere. People did their AS3 programming in notepad or directly on the timeline. There were no automated builds, and builds were pushed from peoples' local machines -often contaminated by other stuff they were working on. Art content live on our CDN may have had source (PSD/FLA) distributed among a dozen artist machines, or else the source for it was completely lost.
That was just the technical side. The business/management side was and is actually more hilarious. I have enough stories from that place to fill a hundred posts, but you can probably get a pretty good idea by imagining a yogurt-salesman-cum-CEO, his disbarred ebay art fraudster partner, and other friends directing the efforts of senior software engineers, artists, and other game developers. It was a god damn sitcom every day. Not to mention all of the labor law violations. Post-acquisition is a whole 'nother anthology of tales of hilarious incompetence. I should write a book.
I recall having lunch with the author when he asked me "What should I do?". I told him that he should leave. In hindsight, it might have been the best advice I ever gave.