As an engineer who has worked with and led offshore teams, I bid farewell to Halo. The time is over.
I have seen some of the worst code from offshore teams. Not saying everyone is like that, nor am I saying you have to be in these countries to make food code. But, I know how they drive the people over there, and I know what their company’s priorities are. Get the next contract, do the minimum to maintain the contract. Lowest bidder, and for the companies you get what you pay for.
I now have zero expectations for Halo. It’s too bad because the open world in Infinite was a lot of fun, but of course they wanted season passes and live services, and gamers are obviously surrounded by those. Plus with Microsoft if it isn’t extremely insanely profitable then it’s not worth continuing. Moderately profitable won’t cut it for them.
So, so long halo, it was fun, but I’ll have fun replaying the originals.
My heart goes out to the few engineers left who will now be babysitting contractors full-time.
I did that job. I lost all of my engineering time to them, a team of “senior engineers” who I had to teach git, pull requests, basic unit tests, developing along non-happy paths, deployments, and getting nothing but pushback the entire time.
Me, PR comment: “Hey this is going to throw an exception. Can you handle that?”
Them "It won’t throw an exception "
Me: yes, it literally will, look, if that’s null it will throw. Look it’s fine, just handle it gracefully, I’m. Not saying it’s bad that it will throw, just make sure the app doesn’t crash
Them: This is a waste of time, just push the code.
Just constant battles like that. Like I said it’s not their fault, it’s the culture differences of development, but man does it fuck up a software application.