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GetWellGamers posted:I did this last time, but I'm going to complain again about your "I want to start in QA" rant. You should make the distinction that Publisher QA is an unloving hellhole whereas Developer QA has ample room for advancement if you do your work. I'm definitely in the latter and can attest to this fact. There have been multiple advancements from the QA department I'm in. Hopefully I'll be one of them... 
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Jun 1, 2011 09:22
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That's the one really jarring thing about moving from a food service job to one in the games industry, that you're shifting from an environment of "DO WORK CONSTANTLY ALL THE TIME OR YOU'RE hosed", to one of "eh, just give good results and you can chill most of the time". It'll be even more jarring to see content played at E3 that I've already been doing over and over again. 
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Jun 3, 2011 06:03
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Clonkers posted:There is a difference between having a laid back, chilled work environment to having a lazy, unproductive work environment. Not saying that this isn't what I'm doing. Given my career, I feel lazy if I'm not doing anything of productivity. But I'm just saying that my previous job was one of constant, never-ending, on my feet for eleven hours a day while still being reprimanded, kind of work. While I may not have the experience you've had with it, I feel I'm in an industry where I can at least actually feel like I'm accomplishing something meaningful and enjoy the work I do. Probably helps that the budget on this game is absolutely gargantuan.
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Jun 3, 2011 08:46
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Watchlar posted:I know it's kinda his thing but please tell your lead character artist there's far, far too much cheesecake in Rift One of my coworkers was getting worked up about this. It goes without saying that the industry needs more opinions like yours and hers to stop with the whole "tight-bra heavy armor" trends. It's looking extremely likely that our entire temp division of QA testers, including me, are going to be bumped-up to full time. Hopefully it'll last a good, long while. After all the stories about most QA jobs involving endless overtime and inevitable layoffs, I feel drat lucky to have gotten in with a great company like this. 
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Sep 15, 2011 07:28
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I don't remember if I mentioned it, but about a month and a half ago I made it into full-time QA at BioWare Austin.  I always feel a little awkward posting in this thread considering I have little-to-no actual dev skills of my own.Out of curiosity, once you've reached a point where the job seems to be stable, where do you go from a position like that? I mean, I don't mind working it as long as I can, but I'd like to be able to move up in some way or another.
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Oct 29, 2011 08:04
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It kinda helps that it's a very videogame-y company name. Almost no one at the last place I worked knew the name when I mentioned getting a job at BioWare Austin, though pretty much all of them at least figured it was a game company of some sort.
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Nov 17, 2011 07:02
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Shalinor posted:... but you will nitpick the crap out of it, and see all the errors that no one else notices, and possibly irritate your friends with exasperated "bu-but you didn't see that?! OMG SO BAD!" comments. Oh no. I've already started doing this lately.
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Nov 18, 2011 20:09
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I'm finding out tomorrow if they're letting my QA contract run up next month, and right now it's really leaning towards me losing this job.  I've gotten a lot of practical experience from the one year at the position, but I have next-to no qualifications of any kind (I wasn't able to complete college due to complications).Would a big-name company referral make up for that at all in trying to seek future QA positions?
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Apr 5, 2012 04:36
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Doctor Fatty posted:Relevant job experience is (almost) always better than schooling. Especially if you're looking for another QA position for the time being. Funny considering that they preside over this company, and someone I know was let go in that same way. I'm not positive how things are going to turn out, but I'm still not getting my hopes up here.
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Apr 5, 2012 05:09
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Yup, looks like I won't have a job in a month.  Any QA jobs around Austin?
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Apr 5, 2012 20:34
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Given the prevalence of contract QA jobs out there, are there still any actual full-time positions in the industry? It would be great not having to rotate out every six-to-twelve months.
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Apr 8, 2012 20:51
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I put up some money when the Kickstarter first started, so I'm eager to see how the project develops. As I'm nearing the end of my contract, I found that I've unfortunately missed the boat on hiring seasons for most QA jobs around Austin (hell, even Zynga isn't hiring at this point), so I've been throwing out my resume to companies I've never heard of. While I was at work, I missed a call, and searching up the number it seemed to be from Sony Online Entertainment. When I finally got the voicemail, it was from the no-name mystery company, and the callback number they gave me was completely wrong.  I think I'd be wise to avoid this one.
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Apr 25, 2012 02:00
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On a separate note from this Diablo 3 DRM conversation, I have a QA-related question for others who have been in a position where you need to coordinate with a team on playtesting multiplayer content: is it common to end up in uncoordinated teams that constantly have trouble dying to the most basic of challenges, and never knowing if your content is properly balanced for end-users? I really hope that's not the case. Because it was loving infuriating to never make a real dent trying to beat this stuff, influencing the devs to tone down the difficulty, then reading from players that the content was too easy. When I play group content in Blizzard games for example, I always get the impression that, aside from a few missteps (Cataclysm Heroic Dungeons), the content had a massive amount of playtesting put into it in order to give it the right balance of challenge for your average player getting to that point.
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May 16, 2012 06:15
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OneEightHundred posted:Anecdotally, a considerable chunk quit because they felt that Cataclysm was severely lacking in endgame content. The fact that it broke sales records and then went on to have a pretty heavy playerbase decline would support that, though stronger competition (mainly TOR) is another factor. Additionally, despite an effort on their part to create a more even difficulty curve for players, there were a couple of major screw-ups that seemed to cause a lot of subscriber fallout: Level 60-80: 70-80 isn't too big a deal, but 60-70 is a miserable slog that is completely inconsistent with the leveling experience thus far. Heroic Dungeons: I mentioned this in my last post, whereas the normal difficult of these dungeons are generally a reasonable challenge for players who at least know how to use their classes, the Heroics are full of insufferable bullshit design; instant-kill mechanics abound and massive spike damage AEs that make healers life hell. You would never want to do these with your average LFG players. e: Juc66 posted:so ... my mind's been wandering a bit today. Did I hit on what you're looking for? It's funny because we were part of the same company, but different branches. The issue was that our team had trouble just doing some of the normal difficulty content. The weirdest part of it was that I seemed to perform the best/lasted the longest without dying on most occasions, but I got the impression that I was being singled out early on as the weak link due to not having much experience in the game's genre. On higher difficulties, they literally did want us to be able to complete the content, and seriously told us to report it to them if we could.
miscellaneous14 fucked around with this message at 06:46 on May 16, 2012 |
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May 16, 2012 06:39
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Juc66 posted:Ah, you were on sweater then? You're probably talking about a different branch. I actually try to avoid disclosing which one I worked at, considering managers there would often threaten to sabotage your career in the gaming industry if you let out any sort of insider information. 
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May 16, 2012 07:08
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At my last job, my team joked that one of the art designers would come in looking for blood after the twentieth time I got out of one of the game maps. Also, getting excited for a short QA contract at a dev in crunch time probably isn't much to be excited about, but that's how it is right now.
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May 18, 2012 21:45
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GetWellGamers posted:What makes QA motivated is seeing the results of their work. Regressing bugs and seeing textures re-aligned, props re-lit, AI behaviors modified to be sane, that's what helps. Seeing a difference makes QA motivated, because they want to keep making a difference, they want to be able to say to their friends after launch "Oh man, this area was all screwed up before I got to it, you shoulda seen it" and stuff. This is 100% right. Having an actual visual impact makes a lot of difference. This is why it's so goddamn frustrating to see bugs closed WAD for no given reason. I always flipped out when this happened, and fortunately the superiors took notice and put the issue back into the pipeline. What was really awful though, was hearing about how one of the embed teams took credit for a massive exploit a couple of other people on my team found. Like, claim that they found it by themselves. mutata posted:All projects need a skilled baby-killing squad. On this note, one of the best supervisors we had always told us "the unfortunate thing about QA is that it's your job to tell the designers their baby is ugly".
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May 19, 2012 12:38
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And of course, it's always really easy to tell when QA isn't managed well/doesn't exist.
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May 19, 2012 21:07
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One of the girls at my last job was full-on obsessed with it. Like, ponies all over her desktop, wallpapers, t-shirts, and always browsing relevant (non-disgusting) websites to the show. There were a few others, but she was probably the biggest fan in the office. I need more TF2/Valve memorabilia for my desk. All I have right now is just a plush sticky-bomb. e: Game Jobs Megathread #3: Pimp My Workdesk!
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May 19, 2012 21:51
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The new QA job seems really nice so far, much better than the last one. There seems to be less tension between the devs and QA, at least from my first impression. I'm hoping my short contract there gets extended, I probably wouldn't want to go back to the last one after this.
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May 22, 2012 02:39
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Tuesdays is always game dev night at Mister Tramps in Austin, and I went to talk to my own coworkers at BioWare about the layoffs. It was incredibly tragic, so many people there, and a few of them looking like they were gonna break down. They cut a ton of extremely valuable staff there, including someone who had apparently just started yesterday. And apparently Greg Zeschuk is going back to Edmonton, still with the company. How that is I just don't know.
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May 23, 2012 04:16
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It's unfortunately criminally-easy to get away with on account of it being so many people's dream job. Even worse in Japan, too. I really hope that one day there'll be a real game dev union that could enforce parity with other equivalent software positions in terms of standards, pay, and job security. But as long as people keep flocking to the positions in droves and sticking with the bad because it's their chance to work with a type of media they love, I don't think we'll ever see much change occur.
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May 26, 2012 07:12
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I'm nearing the end of my second QA contract, and my enthusiasm for the job has really hit rock-bottom. This isn't about the long hours or the repetitive work, I knew what I was getting when I first started, it's the fact that the majority of positions are contract, and even if you're lucky enough to get a full-time position there's barely any job security. Every full-time QA person I've ever worked with has been a victim of layoffs. I can deal with making a non-livable wage, for the most part, I just can't stand this scramble period between contracts where I worry if I'm going to have enough money to get by. I don't get the impression that the industry will ever give a poo poo about it, because the large number of contractors working at game developers are never brought up when the subject comes to job troubles in the gaming sector. My friend got a tech support job at the NCSoft branch in the area, and I'm tempted to apply for the same position. They've been putting him on odd hours, but at least he has an 18-month contract with a legitimate chance to be hired on.
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Oct 13, 2012 02:29
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icking fudiot posted:pretty brutal retrospective on kaos studios. I worked with a few people from THQ's now-closing Phoenix QA branch, who they had sent over to help us with the major testing. They'd been around when Homefront was in development, and mentioned how hopeless that project seemed. This article definitely isn't surprising after what I heard from them. My contract's ending soon, which sucks considering there aren't many leads in this area right now, but at least THQ seems to be doing a lot better with Jason Rubin calling the shots.
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Nov 2, 2012 02:29
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My contract ended recently, and someone at the place I was working mentioned that now is probably a terrible time to look for QA jobs what with all the games being finished and released around this time of the year. Any idea of when things start to pick up again? Also, about how many years of regular entry-level QA are "enough" to start applying for lead positions? That's virtually all there is in Austin right now, and I have about a year and a half of experience.
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Nov 8, 2012 04:52
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:I have irl seen a bug report that had the word "friend of the family" in it. My coworkers at my last job told me of someone who was updating a bug and, in the change log, accidentally copy-pasted "need more boners" into the field and submitted it without double-checking.
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Nov 11, 2012 01:47
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I interviewed for a CS position at Trion today, and I ran into that typical problem where they ask me if I have any more questions and my brain goes "oh poo poo oh poo poo oh poo poo I can't think of anything else". For anyone who does interviews at their company, what are considered good questions for potential hires to ask, and how many questions do you prefer them to have? My imagination went dry after about four and I'm worried that might have botched the whole thing.
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Feb 1, 2013 01:48
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Jan posted:As for questions themselves, I've always personally avoided questions on specific conditions and salary. Those are better left until you get an actual offer, I think. I avoid asking about pay like the plague. The questions I did ask though, were something like: "How long have you been working here?" "What do you think about the company?" "Have you played the game very much?" (this is one I only use for MMO companies) "Is this position focusing on telephone or ticket support?" In general I don't like saying no to them asking if I have more questions, as my best interviews were when I always had a question for them until the interview itself was over. I'm definitely going to write down a few of the ones suggested so far, so this helps. The stressful part of all this though, is that it was my only interview in the last couple months just because the QA/support job prospects in Austin are so terrible right now.
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Feb 1, 2013 02:11
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Apparently Trion is doing mass hiring over the next month, so it's a likely bet I've gotten the job. Here's hoping that if it does come through, it'll actually become a full-time position.
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Feb 1, 2013 21:00
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I interviewed for a third-party QA outsourcing company earlier this week, virtually the only thing in terms of QA that's hiring around here right now. Even though it was the most entry-level job I've ever seen (the pay is 2/3rds of what I made at previous positions, and the person I was interviewing sounded like he hated his life), I still might not get a call back. My unemployment benefits run out in about a month. The QA industry is painful.
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Apr 12, 2013 09:45
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Monster w21 Faces posted:Where are you located? Austin, though fortunately I just got a call back today, so there's that at least. I am hoping more stable positions open up in the area soon, however.
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Apr 12, 2013 19:17
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Christ, I started work at a QA outsourcing company recently and it's quite possibly the worst I've ever worked. Low pay, poor hours, treats you like a child regardless of experience, blatantly distrustful of all staff. Like someone read The Trenches and decided to model their company after it. I'm really hoping better QA jobs start opening up in Austin soon, this is going to drive me to insanity if I'm here much longer.
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Apr 17, 2013 04:36
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I've been seeing a ton of QA listings for big companies mostly in California, which makes me wonder why Austin is so dead right now when it's supposedly a game industry hotspot. Right now I'm choosing between trying to survive a short contract at an awful third-party QA company, or risk going to work for another even shorter contract at a similar place in the hopes that it isn't as terrible. Did Bioware's downsizing and Vigil's closure account for that much of the game industry presence in the area, or are literally all the developers here just in phases where they don't need testers?
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Apr 20, 2013 03:11
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waffledoodle posted:Don't forget about Junction Point, and Zynga not too long ago. Dinurth posted:It has been way more than just Bioware and Vigil, Austin has been getting demolished for the last year. One of the worst cities for game industry layoffs in the world recently. That's true, though I really wonder why Austin specifically has been so bad in that regard. It also makes me wonder if it'd be worth the massive hassle of moving to another city with a more stable industry presence, just for more QA jobs with little pay and nonexistent job security.
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Apr 20, 2013 04:18
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Sigma-X posted:People like yourself can make the jump from QA to Design, but to be that kind of person and have that kind of opportunity means to be in a position where you aren't asking for general advice of an internet forum. And that's the issue, while I enjoy working within the gaming industry, I know virtually nothing as far as actual design goes and so I'm pretty much stuck working in this sector with maybe a hope of being a QA lead one day if I put up with all this for a few more years. I have noticed a lot of engineer listings in the area lately, which I'm thinking might be a good skill set to pursue. Are these positions always in demand, or is it just a temporary spike due to it being an unpopular career choice for students?
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Apr 21, 2013 00:53
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:Three words, daily bug quota. The QA farm I'm working for is doing this. D1Sergo posted:Hire too many testers for a DLC pack, give them a daily quota then bitch when they try to test AI spawning and pathfinding in the co-op levels instead of dogpiling onto a limited number of easy environment bugs. And of course this is what always happens. Bug quotas in general are a loving stupid idea by people in upper-management with no connection to the game at hand whatsoever.
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Apr 23, 2013 03:21
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Jan posted:See, this is why I personally refuse to ever advise people to go into QA. Sure, there are nice places to QA at, but for the larger part, management expectations of what QA performance should be is so disconnected from reality. No one wants to deal with the impact of bug quotas, least of all the developers receiving these bugs, so you end up in a position where everyone hates your guts for doing your job. I've been lucky so far and been at a few in-house QA positions where they didn't do any of this nonsense like bug quotas or refusing to let you take phones into the testing floor (  ), and actually paid a decent wage (for QA, anyway). Beyond just the obvious reasons for why these sorts of things are a bad idea, like quotas encouraging useless bugs like "bush is .2 centimeters above ground", it shocks me that no one in the management process realizes "hey, maybe we'll get better work from these testers if we're not bearing down at them at every opportunity and making them feel like human garbage".But nope, put in your 5 bugs a day or you're getting written up, slacker.
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Apr 23, 2013 03:37
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Juc66 posted:Tell them not to do it, and see if you can get IT to see if/when they're opening those pages and have an email automatically sent to you when that happens. This is a bad idea. Occasional browsing never caused issues at the companies I worked for, it's just problem if there's blatantly no work being done. Sure you could compare it to the actual dev teams who have real goals to reach that require them not to be goofing off occasionally, but they're being paid an actual livable salary and not chump change.
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Apr 23, 2013 05:37
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At least most ice cream cups no longer have the wooden paddle spoons. That poo poo was the worst.
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Apr 23, 2013 23:25
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:Try living on a subcontinent with no decent chinese restaurants. I still remember when my family ordered orange chicken from a Chinese restaurant while they were in the UK, and got strips of chicken breast with orange soda poured on them.  emoticon posted:Reading these last few pages, I'm really glad I am not and have never been in QA. Whatever problems I may have with being a developer, at least my peers aren't assuming I'm a smelly fuckup right out of the gate. While also being paid slightly more than minimum wage with no benefits. That's the best part right there.
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Apr 24, 2013 01:24
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