I wonder how big or small that $10K compared to the game's monthly income. Guess I'd be OK to share the 70% of that with the modder if it'd be up to me (no wonder why I don't get rich huh?).
* 70% was the amount of loading time the modder helped to cut.
This is the gaming industry we're talking about here. I wouldn't have been surprised at "a box of swag" level of compensation. Although given what's en vogue right now, maybe some NFTs would've been more likely (not to mention potentially more valuable, at lease for awhile).
> I wouldn't have been surprised at "a box of swag" level of compensation.
Back when I was learning to find vulnerabilities and report them, I'd be lucky to get a box of swag. For VG companies, the usual compensation was some amount of free in-game currency or premium subscription for N months. That being said, I didn't ask for compensation anyway, so it was no skin off my nose.
The worst reaction was when I told my university that one of their websites had a broken link that gave you a zip of sensitive student information, and they threatened to call the FBI (in hindsight, I was probably talking to someone non-technical).
Yes, but this is GTA V we're talking about. Games like this aren't simply games, they're virtualized social platforms. There are many people who have spent thousands of dollars on that game to upgrade their in-game cars, apartments, businesses, clothing, and weapons. It's also one of the reasons that it is increasingly difficult to come up with an MMO (and GTA V is basically just an MMO with cars and guns instead of horses and sword) with any sort of staying power: your competition is not only much better funded than you likely will ever be, but they have years of content that new players can play through. The long-term players are heavily invested in both time and money and the new players aren't going to run out of content any time soon.
Rockstar makes about $600M annually off of Red Dead Redemption and GTA V. They basically gave him 9 minutes of their net revenue.
$50k and he has a plaque dedicated to him in one of the city parks in the game.
$10k is not nothing. Some companies would have responded to that fix with a lawsuit for hacking. It reads a bit low to me only because it fixes what was the #1 complained about issue from day one for the game, but it's better than a box of swag.
People speculate that the slow loading was a feature not a bug since the app shows ads during the loading. That being said, the fix is comically small that simply the people they have running that part may be the junior developers who don’t know how hashmaps work.
If this was Apple, the response would be much different. Like the M1 DTK return fiasco, the devs complained about the low gift card price and in the end, Apple paid more.
Imagine going through all that effort into finding a critical vulnerability and developing a zero-click PoC exploit to jailbreak the current iDevice line-up and somehow end up selling it to Apple for $10k.
That is pretty much near to what you are seeing here with the effort into discovering this performance issue and providing a fix for it to Rockstar. Oh well.
Inspired by this, I've done the same for Unity 3D compilation and discovered it scanned nearly the entire filesystem for every change, including white-space... although it was roughly fixed in the newest version (which nobody uses yet...)
I'm genuinely surprised they didn't take him to court for "reasons". Games companies are notorious for taking legal action against fans and their beneficial actions
Okay, great. Actually not a PR desaster reaction for people improving a stupid situation for once.
If they now spent that money to let one of their presumably competent developers profile the thing for a few days or hours you could probably cut the loading time again by that much or much more.
This brings me to a general software gripe. Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality? There are many things I don't like about Apple, but is there anyone else who actually cares what they ship?
I can guess that this kind of bug might have been easier to fix by binary patching than in the source.
The bug was probably in a library, or perhaps in a library in a library. Probably written by a third party. Probably you don't have access to the source. Probably they don't care about your performance feature requests, and if they do, the response will be "we'll get that in the next version, next year".
This and other posts have a very negative tone about the state of software development, as if the developers are stupid or lazy for not fixing annoying bugs.
As a developer myself, I can say that this kind of thing is usually the result of the developers being under immense pressure to finish an important project, leaving them no time or energy to even think about minor or moderately annoying bugs unless customers start pulling out their pitchforks.
Yup, my team has a backlog of hundreds of bugs, perf issues, and technical debt that we developers would love to spend months digging into and fixing. There's a high likelihood we already know about any given bug that gets filed.
But that's not what product & business prioritize, so it's not what we do. Occasionally we get thrown a bone and have a "quality week" which is laughable.
And this is at a respected company you've probably heard of and used. It's even worse at the smaller companies I've been at.
It’s all about prioritization. What will our customers be more upset about if we don’t do?
You can lessen the problem by reducing your scope or hiring more developers (with caveats), but at the end of the day, a single developer can only do so much work, no matter how competent and motivated they are.
Apple hasn't been a good example for ages now. I routinely encounter irritating bugs that go years without fixing on all my Apple devices. Windows is much less buggy in my experience.
As far as why ship bugs, it's because of the "just ship" mentality that has taken over. It's worth more money to get a buggy product in front of customers than to spend the extra time to fix it. There are few sectors of the computing world where there is enough competition to punish you for shipping bugs. What are you going to do, buy the other GTA game? They're the only ones who can make it. In the worst case, if there is a competitor, they will just buy them and shut them down.
Windows and osx both have their bugs, but trying to find any help in osx is impossible. It's Apple forums filled with users asking each other questions and maybe someone from Apple closing a thread.
Because it is not psychologically safe to do otherwise.
Its likely there are multiple developers who care about loading times but who would fear for their performance appraisal if they said they would spend 3 days improving loading time and then spent 5 days improving loading time.
Don't give that sort of estimate. How could you know? Instead ask for time for discovery and then have a discussion with another dev about the proposal.
When you do go to your manager say something like "With a day's work I'll be setup and ready, and then I say we keep going until I fail to make it faster for two days in a row." Then you didn't fail, you just did what you could.
Companies can and do ship low quality because when you do the cost-benefit analysis, it makes sense to get it out the door, warts and all.
Also, when a company gets large enough, basic things like this fall through the cracks because everyone is tasked with their small part of the project, and likely no one person was in charge of getting the load times down, or else they were and the load times were within “acceptable tolerances”. Maybe they even created a JIRA ticket to track the work to fix the load times, but once the product shipped, the priority of that worked dropped and it was never looked into again.
I'm growing tired of seeing these asked again and again, generalities that are more rant than questions. Is it a sign of age? Anything not narrowly focused on the subject at hand now puts me off.
You can probably come up with a few theories, but what would be actually interesting is a study into the reasons the huge Rockstar dev team let that regression slip by. Do they do that kind of things in video game companies? Something akin to incident retrospectives?
> This brings me to a general software gripe. Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality?
Modifying the very subjective "unacceptable" adjective of your question into a more objective adjective like "low":
Because the market is not able/willing to pay for higher quality products. There are amazing high quality products (software, and hardware) for Medicine, Space and other domains. Real High quality software costs money; more money than what the average consumer would be willing to pay for it.
Would you be willing/able to pay 10x of what you pay for all the software and online services that you consume?
To all the people saying 10k is low. What he did and the way it got acknowledged can net him millions of dollars in the future income. He could start a company saying that "from the guy who reduces GTA V loading times 70%". I think that what he did is amazing and I'm sure it is not the last time we hear from this guy.
This. People underestimate the value reputation like this can have in the industry. And anyway, the guy is smart, he just has to work on his monetization strategy. The business model where you do things for free in hopes that some kind corporation will pay you just doesnt work.
> What he did and the way it got acknowledged can net him millions of dollars in the future income.
I think people over estimate how valuable reputation is. It can open doors but that is all. Being the guy who reduced loading times in GTA may get some VC interest but that doesn't automatically equate to making any money. It may get you a job and get you paid a few thousand more than usual. But honestly, I've never seen one of these famous devs make lots of money. They'll get offered CTO roles but that's been the max.
Indeed, look at the bevy of Twitter posts from authors of a given tech/stack/framework being turned down by companies to work with said tech because of "lack of experience".
The guy who decreased GTA loading time by 70% understands the difference between O(n^2), O(n*log(n)) and O(n). That's exactly what a big company is looking for, not a successful product.
The other person was much better match for a small company / startup.
> The guy who decreased GTA loading time by 70% understands the difference between O(n^2), O(n*log(n)) and O(n). That's exactly what a big company is looking for, not a successful product.
I haven't been at any that have cared (none of my past jobs' have been FAANG, but several have been in the over 10k employees size.)
*SOME* potential colleagues care, and a VERY FEW managers care that you know that, but I have found that to be the exception.
I was working on the Google Ads backend, and we had a strict 20ms timeout. The managers didn't care about the algorithms themselves, but my change had a 0.1ms impact on latency in the experiment arm, for launching that you need director level exception approval.
My tech lead actually helped me by saying that the trick is that instead of trying to speed up my own code base (which was really hard), it's easier to find something to improve outside my change to balance for the 0.1ms impact inside the same experiment.
I'm very sure that the GTA devs understand the difference between O(n^2), O(n), etc. They just didn't catch this particular way in which the compiler/standard library changed the complexity time dramatically. The reason for why they didn't catch it is up for debate, but it's surely not because they don't understand basic "Big O" concepts.
edit: actually, nevermind. I realize you're probably referring to the hashmap lookup part, rather than the strlen() part?
I was writing about the person who couldn't ,,invert'' a binary tree. It's totally fine, he can be a great programmer, even a great CEO, he's just probably not the best fit to Google SWE role.
Most likely because the bottleneck for loading was somewhere else when they tested it originally quite likely the slow HDD of the consoles of the time.
GTA V came out 8 years ago, it had to run on the base PS4/Xbox One not to mention the PS3 and 360 these were the systems it was first validated on.
It also had much much less content at the time.
As the game released on PC and the amount of content grew the loading times didn’t regress but they also didn’t improve.
So when your benchmark is a console that loads a game in 5-10 minutes no one probably spent any time investigating what the bounds on a modern PC with PCIe storage should be.
He later walked that Tweet back and said he shouldn’t have sent it. Seems like he has a very strong skill set in building projects, but Google needs more focused skill sets for lower level developers, so just wasn’t a good fit. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...
The example of the OP also reminded me of Max Howell, but the only other similar story was the one of the guy who was prompted to implement fizzbuzz, and attempted to do so in Tensorflow[0]. In the latter case, I can totally understand that he might've been turned down with such a cocky (though funny) attitude, if the anecdote is true.
Are there other notable cases of people who got turned down in spite of - or because of - their extensive knowledge in a case like this?
It's not a miracle, this programmer was just smart enough to see something that nobody at Rockstar had seen. Or nobody in the engineering org cared to look. These could both be good reasons for somebody higher up to hire a "star consultant", no?
> It's not a miracle, this programmer was just smart enough to see something that nobody at Rockstar had seen. Or nobody in the engineering org cared to look.
Or more likely, no one had time to look. I keep see people acting like not fixing something is because the devs don't care. More often than not it's because we're being told to do something else instead.
Sure, I'm not saying the Rockstar devs are stupid. I was addressing the idea that it was some kind miracle that happened here, rather than just competent engineering.
"I don't have time to do it myself" is probably a very common reason why consultants are hired.
Do you honestly believe that the person can look around any code base and find significant speed increases? Do you think he can significantly increase the speed of Firefox, or Excel, or SQLite? Maybe he is the solution to Mozilla's woes—just hire him for a month, he will increase Firefox's speed by 70%, and everyone flocks from Chrome to Firefox for the increased speed. At least, until next month that Google hires him and he increases the speed of Chrome and everyone flocks back. With such a valuable resource, it is unethical to monopolize—there should be a waitlist so every company can use his genius. By the decade's end, every piece of software will be running more than twice as fast.
Or maybe this was a case of a rare low-hanging fruit lying around for someone to find. Maybe the entire software industry is not one giant low hanging fruit waiting for the right genius to emerge and pick.
I don't see how you think that's what the parent commenter is believing. For starters, the modder didn't make "GTA V 70% faster", he made one small (but noticeable) part 70% better.
And yes, there are many code bases where performance isn't prioritized in all areas, and one totally can expect a skilled engineer coming in to look at performance to find nice speed increases here and there. Not because they are magically better than everyone else, but because a) they are given the freedom to spend time on it where nobody else has been and b) because they are possibly more familiar with approaches and tooling than a dev that hasn't had the opportunity to prioritize performance. All your examples likely do have such people available, and thus bringing someone in is less likely to find something really juicy, unless they have some blindspot. Large game projects for sure have performance experts, but maybe they primarily spend their time on in-game performance and initial resource loading was a blind spot. Maybe that's a common blind spot. And outside games that's commonly waaay worse - performance isn't prioritized, and to be fair the fact that slower-than-necessary software usually sells just as well makes that understandable economically for a long time. But also makes it difficult if it gets to the point where it should/must matter.
> Do you honestly believe that the person can look around any code base and find significant speed increases?
In my experience, YES! It is often the new set of eyes (especially if they are on a a smart head with lots of time, energy and will available) that finds new solutions, optimizations and bugs we never thought about. And the people I work with are the smartest people I have ever met and that still is nowhere near enough to ensure that the large scale software projects we work on have had all the possible large optimizations done already.
Yeah, the answer in this case is that there was some low hanging fruit he was able to find. There's not always a simple solution to latency and performance problems.
Opening closed doors is frequently THE thing that changes a persons circumstances. Anyone who's been ghosted by an application process can attest to that. You can (interview) prepare all you want, but if you can't get in front of someone it won't matter.
Additionally, their bug bounty program, like most/almost all, is designed for reported security-related bugs. They made an exception here, which they had no obligation or expectation to do. I'm sure the modder wasn't anticipating any kind of financial compensation when they embarked on this.
I don’t think this point is valid anyway. He got exposure prior to actually got the acknowledgment and money. And he probably won’t have got either if the story didn’t get so viral.
You will never get rich working on a salary because of progressive taxation. Different countries are also legislating to tax your business the same as employment on a whole revenue if you want to go self-employed (for example changes in IR35 (it already passed and goes live this April) regulation in the UK will make it next to impossible to run software development as a small company, as all the money you receive from clients will be taxed on the whole without realistic possibility to deduct business expenses. You also have to pay national insurance and employer's insurance that means you'll effectively have to part with over half of the revenue). I think it's a cool entry in the resume, but won't get much money flowing in.
I agree with you, but for a different reason. I struggle to put a value on how much money he "should" get, since I have no way of knowing how much money his work will save, or make, for Rockstar.
Loading times in GTAO have been slow for years, and despite that it's been hugely successful. People (e.g. me) have bought multiple copies of the game, on multiple platforms, despite knowing it loads slowly in multiplayer. I'm not sure I would have bought more copies, or more DLC, if it were any faster. It's entirely possible that people don't care enough about load times enough to not give Rockstar their money. So how much is it actually worth to them?
I'm not saying $0. I'm not saying $10k. I'm saying I don't know, and I suspect nobody else does either, as of right now. So, for people saying he should get more money, what is the basis for determining that value?
How is this different from the meme about designer not getting paid but instead being rewarded "with exposure"?
What he did can, maybe, potentially, eventually, net him a lot of money if he does this and that. Sure, but maybe he doesn't want to start a company and spend his time looking for customers? Or maybe he has an actual need for real money right now and not hypothetical money in the future?
What he did was worth a fuck ton of money to rockstar, so yes 10k is very low, and the fact that he might maybe make up for it in the future if he lives like you want him to does not change that.
In my opinion the only argument that can be made for that 10k, is simply that rockstar never asked for any help and never had any bounty open, so anything they want is fair.
As a developer almost anything you do is worth far more than what you are paid for. I agree "exposure" is never a proper payment, but I think acknowledgement from Rockstar is a bit more legit along with the 10k cash, which I bet he never imagined he would get.
> What he did was worth a fuck ton of money to rockstar
[dubious - discuss]
Remember, this is an 8 year old game that has already been purchased by 2% of the global population[1]. How many people do you think are gonna go out and buy it - or spend more on microtransactions - because it loads faster?
> How many people do you think are gonna go out and buy it [...] because it loads faster
Probably not a lot, although this game is still selling at a staggering 20M copies a year, so there is probably something to be said here.
> How many people do you think are gonna [...] spend more on microtransactions - because it loads faster?
Probably a lot. GTA is raking an enormous amount of cash from microtranscations, more than 500M$ a year and it is still growing.
That 2% of the population already bought the game is irrelevant, what really matters is what percentage of the current player base will come back, or simply play more thanks to this patch?
Even if you think it's just 1%, that's a huge boost in mostly recurring revenues, and I would bet hard that there isn't just 1 gamer over 100 that would be bothered by 3-7 minutes loading time to the point of not (or barely) playing anymore, I know I cannot stand that.
You can also do a search on the GTA Online subreddit for anything related to loading complaints, you will drown in results.
So yes, I think this is worth a fuck ton of money.
> is still selling at a staggering 20M copies a year
Looking at their 2020 sales numbers and assuming they will be the same in 2021 is a very bad idea....
> That 2% of the population already bought the game is irrelevant
You have a very strange definition of irrelevant.
> what really matters is what percentage of the current player base will come back, or simply play more thanks to this patch
Indeed, that is what really matters. That was kinda the point of my whole comment.
Your own point, that it's making so much money despite the loading times, is the problem with that theory. If people were so upset by the loading times - why did people keep buying and playing the game so much?
> Looking at their 2020 sales numbers and assuming they will be the same in 2021 is a very bad idea....
Look at that number how you want, they are selling more now than ever, and even if we assume that 2021 will be equal to their worst year, that's still 10M copies of the game. Do you really think that single improvement won't be responsible for an increase of sales of more than 0.0033%?
> Your own point, that it's making so much money despite the loading times, is the problem with that theory. If people were so upset by the loading times - why did people keep buying and playing the game so much?
You seem to be treating "people" as if we are talking about a single person. People are not a coherent set, some have better hardware and have a loading time of 1 minute, some just like the game so much that they are willing to deal with 7 minutes of loading time, and some are so annoyed by that they stopped playing or only bother launching the game if they have more than 1h to play.
The fact that the game is making a ton of money today does not mean it can't make more tommorrow, and it does mean than even incremental improvements are now worth a lot: any improvement that result in 1% more play time probably translate almost directly into 1% more microtransactions. For those people that had 7 minutes of loading time, even if we assume a generous average continuous play time of 2 hours that is already +6% playtime.
If it really wasn't worh anything like you are trying to picture, then they wouldn't have bothered rolling out a patch with that change.
Again, just go look on GTA's subreddit, there are tons of post of people complaining that they are giving up on this game because of the loading time, so despite what you say, those people exists, and it's not just 1 guy.
Big software companies routinely invest millions for incremental improvements that are less significant than this, for product that make less money that GTA Online. I think you severely underestimate what this changes mean over that amount of money and such a large potential player base.
> You seem to be treating "people" as if we are talking about a single person. People are not a coherent set
Nope. We're talking about an extremely large group of people. A few outliers in a sea of lemmings is not relevant.
> Again, just go look on GTA's subreddit, there are tons of post of people complaining that they are giving up on this game because of the loading time, so despite what you say, those people exists, and it's not just 1 guy.
Yes, because people complaining on Reddit obviously means everyone's quitting the game.
It's quite clear that you have no idea how users behave, so... bye :)
To all the people saying $10k is low... how is $10k low?! Even if you're making $120k/year that's a month's salary. For something he did for his own, personal enjoyment, not expecting to make anything.
Considering how much this game made, 10k is nothing.
> Extensively marketed and widely anticipated, the game broke industry sales records and became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history, earning $800 million in its first day and $1 billion in its first three days.
Ah. So we're expecting people - rank and file worker bees - to be paid based on how much revenue (not even profit) their employer (or in this case customer) makes, rather than how much value they provide or another sane measure?
Significantly improving the loading time, an allegedly huge gripe for many players of the game, and given no other dev was capable of improving the load time, that is a huge amount of value provided. And yes, given how successful the game was Rockstar should provide him with a larger reward.
You are right on the cusp of realizing that any company making a profit has by definition underpaid its workers for the value created. You are SO CLOSE to figuring out that all profit is stolen from workers. Yes even the "rank and file worker bees" that for some reason you think don't deserve payment in relation to the company's income.
I realize that. However, I do not run Gamestop, nor any business for that matter. And that still doesn't explain how you expect a company to pay their employees based on revenue, instead of profit or some other measure that wouldn't immediately bankrupt the vast majority of companies. Thanks for playing.
I think they should have rather looked into retention rate before the change and after the change and then pay % of the difference in sales over x years rather just one off go away payment.
The original post where t0st explains how he did it it's fascinating. He improved the performance of a program without even having the source code. I can't image what he could do with the source code. I would instantly hire him as a QA and Performance Engineer or something like that. If R* won't get him, some other company will, and he will earn the money he deserves for sure.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] thread* 70% was the amount of loading time the modder helped to cut.
Back when I was learning to find vulnerabilities and report them, I'd be lucky to get a box of swag. For VG companies, the usual compensation was some amount of free in-game currency or premium subscription for N months. That being said, I didn't ask for compensation anyway, so it was no skin off my nose.
The worst reaction was when I told my university that one of their websites had a broken link that gave you a zip of sensitive student information, and they threatened to call the FBI (in hindsight, I was probably talking to someone non-technical).
Rockstar makes about $600M annually off of Red Dead Redemption and GTA V. They basically gave him 9 minutes of their net revenue.
$10k is not nothing. Some companies would have responded to that fix with a lawsuit for hacking. It reads a bit low to me only because it fixes what was the #1 complained about issue from day one for the game, but it's better than a box of swag.
And people accused me of "gatekeeping"
Sure
Imagine going through all that effort into finding a critical vulnerability and developing a zero-click PoC exploit to jailbreak the current iDevice line-up and somehow end up selling it to Apple for $10k.
That is pretty much near to what you are seeing here with the effort into discovering this performance issue and providing a fix for it to Rockstar. Oh well.
> The plan? Write a .dll, inject it in GTA, hook some functions, ???, profit.
> The plan? Write a .dll [that fixes dupe checking and adds caching to GTA's json parsing], inject it in GTA, hook some functions, ???, profit.
This situation seems different in that it is purely beneficial to Rockstar.
The 10k reward are a smart PR move.
If they now spent that money to let one of their presumably competent developers profile the thing for a few days or hours you could probably cut the loading time again by that much or much more.
This brings me to a general software gripe. Why do companies seem to love to ship products of unacceptable quality? There are many things I don't like about Apple, but is there anyone else who actually cares what they ship?
I can't speak to code quality, but have you used Pages or Sheets? They're both usability disasters. Apple doesn't seem to care to improve them.
Most people seem to accept the "meh, it's good enough" mantra. Perfectionism is considered a flaw - in programming we dismiss it as "gold-plating".
The bug was probably in a library, or perhaps in a library in a library. Probably written by a third party. Probably you don't have access to the source. Probably they don't care about your performance feature requests, and if they do, the response will be "we'll get that in the next version, next year".
As a developer myself, I can say that this kind of thing is usually the result of the developers being under immense pressure to finish an important project, leaving them no time or energy to even think about minor or moderately annoying bugs unless customers start pulling out their pitchforks.
But that's not what product & business prioritize, so it's not what we do. Occasionally we get thrown a bone and have a "quality week" which is laughable.
And this is at a respected company you've probably heard of and used. It's even worse at the smaller companies I've been at.
You can lessen the problem by reducing your scope or hiring more developers (with caveats), but at the end of the day, a single developer can only do so much work, no matter how competent and motivated they are.
As far as why ship bugs, it's because of the "just ship" mentality that has taken over. It's worth more money to get a buggy product in front of customers than to spend the extra time to fix it. There are few sectors of the computing world where there is enough competition to punish you for shipping bugs. What are you going to do, buy the other GTA game? They're the only ones who can make it. In the worst case, if there is a competitor, they will just buy them and shut them down.
Its likely there are multiple developers who care about loading times but who would fear for their performance appraisal if they said they would spend 3 days improving loading time and then spent 5 days improving loading time.
When you do go to your manager say something like "With a day's work I'll be setup and ready, and then I say we keep going until I fail to make it faster for two days in a row." Then you didn't fail, you just did what you could.
You say unacceptable quality yet it seems everyone accepts it.
Sorry I can't hear you over the noise of our money printer
Also, when a company gets large enough, basic things like this fall through the cracks because everyone is tasked with their small part of the project, and likely no one person was in charge of getting the load times down, or else they were and the load times were within “acceptable tolerances”. Maybe they even created a JIRA ticket to track the work to fix the load times, but once the product shipped, the priority of that worked dropped and it was never looked into again.
You can probably come up with a few theories, but what would be actually interesting is a study into the reasons the huge Rockstar dev team let that regression slip by. Do they do that kind of things in video game companies? Something akin to incident retrospectives?
Modifying the very subjective "unacceptable" adjective of your question into a more objective adjective like "low":
Because the market is not able/willing to pay for higher quality products. There are amazing high quality products (software, and hardware) for Medicine, Space and other domains. Real High quality software costs money; more money than what the average consumer would be willing to pay for it.
Would you be willing/able to pay 10x of what you pay for all the software and online services that you consume?
https://youtu.be/X5ZpiTGI7D4?t=59
Personally I am not so convinced this persons reputation will earn them millions, but I can imagine it to be a reasonably valuable resume point
I think people over estimate how valuable reputation is. It can open doors but that is all. Being the guy who reduced loading times in GTA may get some VC interest but that doesn't automatically equate to making any money. It may get you a job and get you paid a few thousand more than usual. But honestly, I've never seen one of these famous devs make lots of money. They'll get offered CTO roles but that's been the max.
The other person was much better match for a small company / startup.
I haven't been at any that have cared (none of my past jobs' have been FAANG, but several have been in the over 10k employees size.)
*SOME* potential colleagues care, and a VERY FEW managers care that you know that, but I have found that to be the exception.
My tech lead actually helped me by saying that the trick is that instead of trying to speed up my own code base (which was really hard), it's easier to find something to improve outside my change to balance for the 0.1ms impact inside the same experiment.
edit: actually, nevermind. I realize you're probably referring to the hashmap lookup part, rather than the strlen() part?
GTA V came out 8 years ago, it had to run on the base PS4/Xbox One not to mention the PS3 and 360 these were the systems it was first validated on.
It also had much much less content at the time.
As the game released on PC and the amount of content grew the loading times didn’t regress but they also didn’t improve.
So when your benchmark is a console that loads a game in 5-10 minutes no one probably spent any time investigating what the bounds on a modern PC with PCIe storage should be.
His tweet:
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
Are there other notable cases of people who got turned down in spite of - or because of - their extensive knowledge in a case like this?
[0] https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/
> Does your game take forever to start? Your lazy devs say there's nothing to be done about it? Just give us a call! As seen on hackernews.
Or more likely, no one had time to look. I keep see people acting like not fixing something is because the devs don't care. More often than not it's because we're being told to do something else instead.
"I don't have time to do it myself" is probably a very common reason why consultants are hired.
Or maybe this was a case of a rare low-hanging fruit lying around for someone to find. Maybe the entire software industry is not one giant low hanging fruit waiting for the right genius to emerge and pick.
And yes, there are many code bases where performance isn't prioritized in all areas, and one totally can expect a skilled engineer coming in to look at performance to find nice speed increases here and there. Not because they are magically better than everyone else, but because a) they are given the freedom to spend time on it where nobody else has been and b) because they are possibly more familiar with approaches and tooling than a dev that hasn't had the opportunity to prioritize performance. All your examples likely do have such people available, and thus bringing someone in is less likely to find something really juicy, unless they have some blindspot. Large game projects for sure have performance experts, but maybe they primarily spend their time on in-game performance and initial resource loading was a blind spot. Maybe that's a common blind spot. And outside games that's commonly waaay worse - performance isn't prioritized, and to be fair the fact that slower-than-necessary software usually sells just as well makes that understandable economically for a long time. But also makes it difficult if it gets to the point where it should/must matter.
In my experience, YES! It is often the new set of eyes (especially if they are on a a smart head with lots of time, energy and will available) that finds new solutions, optimizations and bugs we never thought about. And the people I work with are the smartest people I have ever met and that still is nowhere near enough to ensure that the large scale software projects we work on have had all the possible large optimizations done already.
Opening closed doors is frequently THE thing that changes a persons circumstances. Anyone who's been ghosted by an application process can attest to that. You can (interview) prepare all you want, but if you can't get in front of someone it won't matter.
I don’t think this point is valid anyway. He got exposure prior to actually got the acknowledgment and money. And he probably won’t have got either if the story didn’t get so viral.
Loading times in GTAO have been slow for years, and despite that it's been hugely successful. People (e.g. me) have bought multiple copies of the game, on multiple platforms, despite knowing it loads slowly in multiplayer. I'm not sure I would have bought more copies, or more DLC, if it were any faster. It's entirely possible that people don't care enough about load times enough to not give Rockstar their money. So how much is it actually worth to them?
I'm not saying $0. I'm not saying $10k. I'm saying I don't know, and I suspect nobody else does either, as of right now. So, for people saying he should get more money, what is the basis for determining that value?
What he did can, maybe, potentially, eventually, net him a lot of money if he does this and that. Sure, but maybe he doesn't want to start a company and spend his time looking for customers? Or maybe he has an actual need for real money right now and not hypothetical money in the future?
What he did was worth a fuck ton of money to rockstar, so yes 10k is very low, and the fact that he might maybe make up for it in the future if he lives like you want him to does not change that.
In my opinion the only argument that can be made for that 10k, is simply that rockstar never asked for any help and never had any bounty open, so anything they want is fair.
[dubious - discuss]
Remember, this is an 8 year old game that has already been purchased by 2% of the global population[1]. How many people do you think are gonna go out and buy it - or spend more on microtransactions - because it loads faster?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/take-two-ceo-grand-theft-aut...
Probably not a lot, although this game is still selling at a staggering 20M copies a year, so there is probably something to be said here.
> How many people do you think are gonna [...] spend more on microtransactions - because it loads faster?
Probably a lot. GTA is raking an enormous amount of cash from microtranscations, more than 500M$ a year and it is still growing. That 2% of the population already bought the game is irrelevant, what really matters is what percentage of the current player base will come back, or simply play more thanks to this patch? Even if you think it's just 1%, that's a huge boost in mostly recurring revenues, and I would bet hard that there isn't just 1 gamer over 100 that would be bothered by 3-7 minutes loading time to the point of not (or barely) playing anymore, I know I cannot stand that.
You can also do a search on the GTA Online subreddit for anything related to loading complaints, you will drown in results.
So yes, I think this is worth a fuck ton of money.
Looking at their 2020 sales numbers and assuming they will be the same in 2021 is a very bad idea....
> That 2% of the population already bought the game is irrelevant
You have a very strange definition of irrelevant.
> what really matters is what percentage of the current player base will come back, or simply play more thanks to this patch
Indeed, that is what really matters. That was kinda the point of my whole comment.
Your own point, that it's making so much money despite the loading times, is the problem with that theory. If people were so upset by the loading times - why did people keep buying and playing the game so much?
Look at that number how you want, they are selling more now than ever, and even if we assume that 2021 will be equal to their worst year, that's still 10M copies of the game. Do you really think that single improvement won't be responsible for an increase of sales of more than 0.0033%?
> Your own point, that it's making so much money despite the loading times, is the problem with that theory. If people were so upset by the loading times - why did people keep buying and playing the game so much?
You seem to be treating "people" as if we are talking about a single person. People are not a coherent set, some have better hardware and have a loading time of 1 minute, some just like the game so much that they are willing to deal with 7 minutes of loading time, and some are so annoyed by that they stopped playing or only bother launching the game if they have more than 1h to play.
The fact that the game is making a ton of money today does not mean it can't make more tommorrow, and it does mean than even incremental improvements are now worth a lot: any improvement that result in 1% more play time probably translate almost directly into 1% more microtransactions. For those people that had 7 minutes of loading time, even if we assume a generous average continuous play time of 2 hours that is already +6% playtime.
If it really wasn't worh anything like you are trying to picture, then they wouldn't have bothered rolling out a patch with that change.
Again, just go look on GTA's subreddit, there are tons of post of people complaining that they are giving up on this game because of the loading time, so despite what you say, those people exists, and it's not just 1 guy.
Big software companies routinely invest millions for incremental improvements that are less significant than this, for product that make less money that GTA Online. I think you severely underestimate what this changes mean over that amount of money and such a large potential player base.
Nope. We're talking about an extremely large group of people. A few outliers in a sea of lemmings is not relevant.
> Again, just go look on GTA's subreddit, there are tons of post of people complaining that they are giving up on this game because of the loading time, so despite what you say, those people exists, and it's not just 1 guy.
Yes, because people complaining on Reddit obviously means everyone's quitting the game.
It's quite clear that you have no idea how users behave, so... bye :)
> Extensively marketed and widely anticipated, the game broke industry sales records and became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history, earning $800 million in its first day and $1 billion in its first three days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_V
The guy might have a miserable life if he is put to write C++ code under the Unreal framework under death-march after death-march schedules.
70% loading time fix = 10,000
This gives me hope that any incumbent could be easily usurped by a software company that values good work