> to it I'd add that this is also the difference between the $20/hour programmer and the $200/hour programmer
You could have a hundred "$200/hour programmers" on the team for this app, but if management says they need to ship three weeks early to catch the buzz, or something like that, it doesn't matter. We can't say the developers were bad. I mean it's possible, given how poorly the game handles network disconnections, among other bugs. But unfortunately we don't live in a utopia where the guys writing the code get to decide when they want to release. Or if features get added in the last minute. Etc.
We totally do get to say that in this case. This game inherits issues that have been present in Ingress for years. Years! Ingress gets away with it most of the time because it's not operating in a worst-case scenario where the backend has to suddenly scale from limited beta to millions of active users, so fewer of these bugs present. The actual architecture work underneath is poor; client code should not crash, softlock, or lose frames because of a temporary connectivity issue.
But TBH, that is probably not about how much the engineering team is paid, it's about what culture they have. Nintendo's console development teams would never ship something with this many catastophic bugs. Niantic has probably decided that the way they're doing things is "industry standard" (within the context of mobile and their particular silo) and does not need substantial improvement.
Edit: How poor is this code, you ask? It does not let me rename my Pokemon. A race condition occurs where it tries to pop up the Android keyboard and close it at the same time.
so many HN replies say 'you're wrong and you implied <what-you-didn't> therefore should feel bad'. yet this did not. well said, agreed. you added signal.
in many situations, an owner/manager/lead is making decisions where, frankly, the company has no revenue so they know their ostensible default spending path is equivalent to a ticking time bomb.
or... they don't truly know whether or how well the engineer can deliver, yet they do know for sure definitively what their dollar spend will be. thus, the results we see.
You could have a hundred "$200/hour programmers" on the team for this app, but if management says they need to ship three weeks early to catch the buzz, or something like that, it doesn't matter. We can't say the developers were bad. I mean it's possible, given how poorly the game handles network disconnections, among other bugs. But unfortunately we don't live in a utopia where the guys writing the code get to decide when they want to release. Or if features get added in the last minute. Etc.