Discussion about the findings two weeks ago: Tell me that is not cool.. being able to say you had that much of an impact on million of players across the globe. As someone searching for employment in the Midwest, I feel your pain. He got paid a good month salary for spending a bit of time fixing an issue (which is tricky but not extreme if you know re). Nice that they acknowledged and awarded as opposed to some companies that try their best to push a security disclosure out of scope and not pay out a bounty [0] [1], That's fantastic. GTAV is the most profitable entertainment product of. Ya know on second thought, it's so unbelievable that he did this whole thing that I wouldn't be surprised if someone reading his resume thought he was bullshitting. I’m genuinely surprised they’d implement his findings. Yet, instead they took years and failed to fix it. You and I have no concept of how different their lives are. It is a common misconception that the victim can "press charges" against someone for a criminal matter. I wrapped my progress notifier in a throttler, which I frankly should’ve done much earlier, and that solved it. Literally anywhere else outside of US that kind of salary makes you "very very wealthy". Running a profiler would have taken them significantly less time than the author. You will get dragged mercilessly no matter what you do. Early life and education. This can result in severe consequences for the developers who worked on this particular part of the codebase. I mean someone probably looked at it briefly and said it was unfixable. If the developer had offered a two day consultation for $80.000 to Rockstar they would most likely have declined and said, sorry, for that money we can hire someone else to do a lot more performance improvements. Better than nothing I guess, but suggesting that it's OK to exploit people because of where they live is kinda crass. Two of them with PhDs in big data analytics and working in the industry. I think you're onto something. And working with any engineers in the London office was a massive pain as anyone without family commitments worked in London for a year, and then transferred to the US for a massive salary bump. And yes, I think it should be obvious that very long load times has made a significant number of people spend less time and money than they would have with fast load times. You live in a bubble made out of solid stone granite. They probably just didn't have anyone working on it that had the knowledge (or incentive and/or permission) to fix it. The rapper has made his fortune thanks to his three chart-topping studio albums - 'Baby On Baby', 'Kirk', and 'Blame It On Baby'. Nope, they took my Irish salary and converted it to GBP, and that was it (this was post Brexit, btw). It’s now the 3rd best selling game of all time, behind only Tetris and Minecraft. There is simply no getting around this. If they were so careless they'd just lift the fix and ignore the author. They split for good in early 2021. I lived in the UK with all those things you describe, but I still made a point of billing my Bay Area rate because that is what the work product of a software engineer is worth on the market. No it won't. To you it's just a game, to Rockstar GTA is literally a multi-billion dollar product with a household name that politicians talk about. 20? They still made like a billion dollars in shark cards so apparently all the people buying shark cards didn't give a shit about the load time issue and that's the real problem. Just today I improved performance of an enterprise system by over 15000% by commenting out a "sleep(1);" line I used to debug a race condition! 1pm - 4pm, Jealous The game is played by millions of people, we don't need to wonder if there were a lot of more important bugs, this has been by far the most complained about issue for many years. Filter on the UK: My entire network makes more than that in Dev and Arch roles in that part of the world. They had to be shamed into it by a third-party developer pointing out their "could be fixed in a day by a single developer" tier mistakes. $200k in today's dollars approaches what would have been called "middle class" a few decades ago, when there was one. It has been followed since then, and Americans now are routinely persuaded to vote against their own interests. If you make a mistake = shameful, you probably aren't going to meaningfully decrease the number of mistakes made, but you will ensure that no one wants to admit they've made one. Profitez-en et réglez vos problèmes financiers et obtenez plus facilement ce que vous voulez à Los Santos et Blaine County en achetant des packs de … I'd say that by talking about mistakes without blame, I think we actually avoid people making mistakes because folks can learn from other's mistakes, and see them as something they could just as easily do, and so internalize the lesson. If you looked into the technical details [0], and surrounding context, you would understand why your comment isn't particularly insightful. The extra time can now be spent playing the game instead of waiting, increasing revenue. I think "embarrassing" could still be the correct word. Actually, I have no intention to "retire". If the author of the bug fix is indeed from Latvia (.lv), the median annual income of a senior software engineer in the Baltic states is currently around 30K-40K after taxes. The egg that's on Rockstar's face has more to do with how much money they likely left on the table by not diagnosing and fixing this issue early on. Just to give an extreme example: if Jeff Bezos uses half his income this year to build the largest estate the world has ever seen, he's still sitting pretty on the rest of it and has the largest estate the world has ever seen. I’m pretty shocked at all the defending of the game company here, honestly. > I'm a lead C++ programmer in the UK and I don't make that much. Some with plenty of cash are even simply limited by the tax laws how much they can pay. Not multiplying one's salary by 3-6x could indeed be described as quite financially irresponsible, and the alternative has to be pretty important to pass on that. "They had never gotten any programmer with the requisite expertise to take a look at the code in nearly a decade of opportunities" sounds more or less like a verbose phrasing of "They didn't care.". Most of the time when people simply use "press charges" this is what they mean. This example will be ammunition in internal debates about how much to weigh product pressure vs engineering suggestions that improvement is technically possible; the next time an eng says "let's look at this slowness one more time, it may be fixable more easily than you think", they might be listened to. Premature optimization is the root of all evil and it makes all sense to dedicate all your optimization on the 1% of code that actually matters the most - but this was the 1% that obviously should have been the target of optimization and was not. These things get lost in the shuffle. When talking about these super high SF salaries, folks are talking about _gross_ salaries. Or third option, you mean <£100k of salary + bonuses? Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming. If a consultancy was hired to fix the performance problem the cost would run over $1M. If the fix had been some super application specific super obscure thing, we would all understand. But you don't have a moral right to get more money for the same effort just because your client is rich. I know senior programmers working for Faang companies in London and they don't make this much. Looking back, I realize it's wrong to assert opinions as facts with no basis at all. Getting to that point is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, though. You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while. I’m glad he got anything at all. But there is so much more opportunity to create and capture real wealth than you might imagine. That’s why you sometimes need a task force of as few people as possible. Seems most likely that they had just never dedicated the time to investigating the slowdown. PPS Ofc YMMV... circumstances, personality, ambition, etc etc. I suppose you could keep everyone on as contractors, paying them standard rates but going to them directly, not through an agency. Bugs are inevitable. That's awesome! ", "There's always money in the banana stand.". $10k isn't massive and we can quibble over the reward amount, but its delightful that companies are rewarding people at all for fixes like this. I think "shameful" is really more appropriate. That is, the problem is that no one bothered to look into it, despite good reason to do so. If this is you then YOU ARE WEALTHY. There probably is a story behind it. Don’t let em trick you into thinking id ever have a problem with you. I don't work at Rockstar so it's true I have no idea how this bug was handled. There's a race to the bottom wrt exploitative commodification of developer talent as the 3rd world comes online, and I find it abhorrent. You might get rich, or if you are very sick, you are bankrupt. The incentives are all towards sweeping mistakes under the rug. The described problem doesn't stop people buying shark cards, the fix is not new content and players leaving the game because of it don't affect the bottom line significantly. Turned out the SDK we were using tried to update the progress bar every kilobyte or something like that, and our near-gigabyte sized packages filled the message loop with a bunch of pointless updates (30.001% -> 30.002% but both displayed as 30%). To flip this around, if this guy lived in Haiti would you say it would have been fine to give him $1k because welp, cost of living is even lower there? And splitting hairs over whether we would feel professionaly "embarrassed" or "ashamed" in a similar situation is pretty silly. They should be given credit for finally fixing it, but nothing more. Think of all the mods that exist just to fix bugs in say Skyrim. Right. Oh my good lord that was a serious eye-opener. 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