Relative Engine

I was actually enjoying the last weeks, doing nothing, getting paid and I asked around if this is normal, and... some said it was normal. I doubted. I don't know exactly how to begin this, but I think I'll start with some details regarding my progress in those 3 trial months.

First off, when you tell people you got hired in Ubisoft they're like "great man, awesome!" although they don't know anything about Ubisoft ROMANIA. To say the truth, I myself have thought that. My biggest mistake was to consider them truly professional.

What did I expect to happen in the first day ? Someone to show me the company, tell me whose my boss, who do I have to report to, who are the people that I'm going to interact with, what departments there are, where's the bathroom and so on. What happened ? I had a chat with the technical director (that I first thought it was going to be my future boss) and was dispatched to a different project and had to wait 2 days for my computer to arrive (they said that they weren't announced that someone new is going to come).

Next, I expected someone to show me the documentation of the project (there wasn't any), coding standards, explain me the engine & game & so on. None of that happened. The lead told me to just look on the code and figure stuff out. I did that. The code was pretty huge at that time (around 10 MB, or 300 000 lines of code). My RE2.X has around 1 MB and 35 000 lines, and even I don't know ALL the lines in there. At first, I was a bit shocked to see that he tells me to just look at the code and later to Debug it and process each step with F10/F11, it takes hours just to enter the main loop by doing this. After a few days I came to his desk and told him that I haven't understood the game in the sense that I haven't understood ALL of it, I can't say that I understand something while I still have blank parts, and he didn't specify WHAT exactly from the game I need to know better than other parts because it's irrelevant for one man to know it all, and let's face it, they don't know ALL the lines there either.

The code written by the majority of the programmers doesn't have even one line of comment, besides not having technical documentation or technical standards for implementing something and about the coding standards... well, I asked 2 times where they were, and my boss said that they're there (referring to the local network) but I was unable to find them the first time and that's why I asked the second time, DUH! He once said that they're not wasting time on writing documentation, well... they don't waste time on having one more member on the team either.

I then told him that I want someone to explain to me (in words) how the engine and game work, and he repeated to me that all the code is there, I should be able to understand it just by looking at it (although I already told him that that doesn't work for me). Pissed off by my attitude he told me that other people were in exactly my situation and they managed to figure it out, but... why didn't he told me how they did it ? I already explained to him that I'm not like those people.

We also argued a lot about how code is written, because I had a "One-Man-Army" technique and he was having that "Professional Company" technique. He was saying that it's best to rewrite code for each project, rather than use code that you don't know if it will fully work on a new platform/console/system. Although he recognized that he used pieces of code from other projects in the company. Also, I was a bit shocked to see specific code for every little shit and not a generalized method to suit all needs (like I'm doing in RE), it seems that the mentality of writing code is just to see it working, anything else doesn't matter (this explains the lack of documentation). Another thing, about events, I was amazed that they have an object EventID and an object EventData, where in my logic I would have an object Event and inside I would have ID and Data, I asked why ? He said that it was logical that way, I said that it was logical in my way and asked for more details/explanations. He said that if I want to work in that team I have to do like that.

Now then... wouldn't it have been nice to tell me all these things at the beginning ? about mentality and standards and relieve me of the stress of asking about it ? I even think they decided to kick me out because of I got them mad at this point just by asking some obvious questions.

Anyway, I received my first task, doing a memory manager. Although not knowing too much, and besides already being a memory manager in the project, and besides not telling me exactly what I need to do (he only explained to me in words what that code is supposed to do, not the technical details) I managed to do it, although in a project that huge there were thousands of allocations and deallocations and it worked pretty slow. In the debriefing at the end of those 3 months, he (actually his replacement, the boss was in holiday then) said that I finished the task in 3 weeks when I did it in 3 days actually. Then I remembered, after 3 weeks there was a compilation error with the editor project (the .sln I mean), because they use an #include scheme different from what I ever used. How was I supposed to know that my code had to compile with another project ? No one said anything about the editor, or about the #include scheme.

After this, weeks and weeks passed by and he didn't gave me anything to do, and at first I was pissed about it (I hate just sitting around doing nothing), and I was also looking through the code occasionally, but got bored of it after a while. I didn't knew if I was supposed to request a task or not, no one said anything, it was as if we understood each other just by the looks of it and I hated it because the lack of communication can lead each party thinking differently regarding the non-verbal communication. Then I said to myself : "let's see how much they're going to let me not do anything". Well... about a month.

Then, he came by my desk and asked how I'm doing, and I was like "about what ? the code ? well, I found out some stuff but the rest remains a mystery", then he said that I need to do some effect in front of the plane (yeah it's a plane game) and I was numb because he could just render an imported model from 3DS Max for that, why do I have to write code for rendering some cone ? He said that this is the way to do it, because the cone will be changed (you could do it in an animation though). I said ok, and asked where must I write the code for this, and he wanted to show me the place in the project for just that but he didn't knew where exactly and left for his desk. I was expecting to come back and give me more details about it. The next day I started to ask people around about the special effect system and the dude that made them explained it to me in a plain way, as if I already know the system. To be more exact, he explained from the point of view of a person that already knows the system and just refreshes his memory.

Ok, continuing with my "second task", after some investigation I awaited the following details that he said he was going to give me... there were none, he didn't reminded me about any task until the end.

Some time later I thought about optimizing that Memory Manager, making it faster & shit. I didn't even knew if I had permission to do that or not, he never said anything about the way things should work in the team. Was I supposed to know that ? Again, that non-verbal communication took place, and they seem to love it. I eventually optimized it, it worked faster. I asked him If I should check in the sources, he told me to send him a local mail so that he can take a look on the code. He never replied to the mail nor said anything regarding that.

My contract expired on 14th August. A week sooner I was asking the Project Manager (because my boss was on holiday) if they were going to continue my contract or not, because no one said anything and I was worried that I was going to come to work and I wasn't going to be paid. I heard that they do this quite often, not tell you about the situation of your contract until after it expired. So, after a second talk with the Project Manager I was told that they're going to give me a feedback on the trial period, and so it happened.

On 14 august, they debriefed me, told me that they gave me 3 tasks (3 ?, I only knew 2, well, supposedly, the understanding of the code was the first), and that I didn't accomplish them satisfyingly. Regarding the third task, I was quite amazed because I knew that I was willing to do something but I never received any more details . The replacement dude said that when we had that little chat with the "How your doing?" he considered me incompetent and thought that I was unable to complete the task, so he gave it to someone else, and marked me as if I didn't do it (and never told me anything about this either).

The Project Manager was a bit sad because of my leave, he didn't knew a thing until the last moment, how much lack of communication can there be ? I wanted to tell him this whole story if he would only ask why.

Anyway, I'm happy that I found out how things are done in the "industry" (the ROMANIAN industry that is), not that I advise anyone not to go there or anything, but in my case, it was just as if they didn't wanted me there in the first place. They probably need code monkeys.