…so close.

I had almost all of yesterday off. Then, at 11pm, I get an e-mail about a bug that apparently, no one else is willing to touch, because it’s part of the stove code, and since I was pretty much the only person to deal with that, I’m the only person willing to change it. Not that I don’t understand the reason why the other OE’s would be unwilling to mess with it, but basically, it meant that around midnight last night, I knocked down days 35 and 36 in one go.

Fortunately, the bug that I’d been called in about – one of the other guys who was there happened to figure out a 100% reproduceable case for it, and of all things, it turns out to have been crap legacy stuff I hadn’t rewritten from scratch this year – one of the only places I trusted the older code to work properly. So of course I got fucked.

But then another bug came in at 1 fucking 30 in the morning, just as I was about to leave, that was convoluted enough that I had to stay, as again, no one else was likely going to be willing to touch the code. So, I fixed the problem, then helped a coworker look at another problem, and finally left at about 3:45.

Whee.

Here’s the problem. QA ramped up weeks late on our project. At some point, management knew that we’d been short-shrifted on QA, and only now was it finally starting to actually behave like a proper process. At that point, they should have known that we would be late. After two weeks of completely crap QA, the amount of work we had left clearly hadn’t decreased by two weeks, and the critical holes in test (like the *complete* lack of a test plan for the food system) should have made it clear that we were *way* behind, and not at all due to the development team.

Yet, the decision – the conscious decision – was made by someone at that point to compress the necessary 5 or so weeks of bugfixing down to the two or three we had left. Fully knowing that the crunch that would ensue would be *insane*. And surely enough, it has been. I don’t mind the crunch, much, when I feel like I’m in it for some good reason. But this is basically EA sacrificing the developers because their QA system fucked up, and they still don’t want to miss their ship date.

So, all the hullaballoo about how after easpouse, they’d get better, or change their ways, is all bullshit, when it comes down to it. Even when they *know* they’re going to be intentionally screwing over a bunch of people, pushing them to burn out, they’re simply going to do it because the bottom line matters more than their talent.

Well, that’s fine, if people want to live like fucking dogs, but it’s not for me. I’m putting together a resume, and will be looking elsewhere. Maybe I won’t have the job security, maybe the stress, and the crunch, will be even worse – if that’s the case, I’ll simply look elsewhere. But really, it’s quite amazing how all the goodwill I can have towards a company can be blown away in just a few short weeks, when you know that you’ve been intentionally screwed. Fun stuff.