This could be on the front page.
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Oh, wait. It's well written, so I guess it couldn't. (jk)
Suppose you found a bug in a game that rendered a console unplayable? Suppose it was something akin to the original Myth II Uninstall problem where it basically formatted your hard drive, only worse?
There was a game that was released in the last 10 years that had a peculiar issue toward the end where you could crash the title just before one of the end bosses by doing a manual save just as it was autosaving.
If you did, it caused the console kernel to overwrite itself, rendering the entire unit non-functional.
After causing this to happen once, I was asked to replicate the issue in front of people who made a lot more money than I did. After sixteen hours of play, I, again, saved while the game was autosaving, and watched with everyone else in the room as the screen turned black and the console shut down. Attempting to boot it up didn’t even result in an error screen, it would just power on and then shut back down.
(To me) “You can do this every time?”
“If I want to, yeah.”
(To a marketing guy) “How long until we’re supposed to ship?”
“We’re supposed to go gold in a week.”
(To a developer) “How long would this take to fix?”
“We’ll have to rewrite the entire file structure. Weeks, at least. Probably months.”
The game shipped.
I got fired.TheRealWTF is "We’ll have to rewrite the entire file structure" vs "We just need to put a flag to prevent simultaneous saves".
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Nice find.
This goes to show that the messenger gets shot very often in the corporate world. The bosses may have even deluded themselves into thinking the author was a troublemaker and was trying to sabotage the project. Most people would believe that, too.
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Public void save() {
while (autosaving) {
Wait(1);
}
[....]
}
That took months to come up with!
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My response to the "I got fired" would be something like, "you know, as long as I am an employee then I am covered by NDA so I am not free to talk about this to any news service or reporter interested in tech issues..."
On the other hand, I guesss working for such a company would suck so I wouldn't want to work there any more.
I'm not sure about the laws where this happened but in New Zealand if you speak out about this and your former employer tried to gag you with an NDA you can legally argue that consumer protection takes precedence over NDA.
