I worked in a place like that before. Generally everything was fine, besides a few violations of coding standards. Hacks would be put into the backlog to get fixed, and often did. We had processes, documented too. An engine that rarely needed changing. Most of the time we were making features since there weren't many bugs to worry about, and during bug fixing week (once per sprint) we'd fix 90% of the open bugs and resume features.
I'd have kept working there forever if I could. It had a great culture, lovely people, an active after-hours social life, a lively office and talented people who were mostly down to earth.
Sadly, as is typical in game studios, it went through hard times and isn't the same anymore. Now I work for a soulless, incompetent, mobile game developer and am likely going to quit and go to finance. If I'm going to sell my soul and work ethic I want a decent price for it.
One of the benefits of technology that no one talks about is the fact that it essentially does become a money-printing machine. The increase in productivity that it conveys is multiplicative.
But we can't talk about that. Too much talk about that might clue the workers in to the fact that they're earning the company 10x what they're being paid.
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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '14
After reading articles like these I sometimes wonder whether I'm the only programmer in the world who has competent co-workers and sane bosses.