this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Oh, my sweet child, no they don't xP
I mean, the devs and server techs know what's going on, its the execs and middle managers that need to get a live service on a shoestring budged to make the shareholders happy that you made them 25% more profit than last quarter.
Well that's the thing: they would need to hire actual server devs and techs in order to have somebody who knows what's going on.
Having done both sides, I can tell you that front-end development in gamedev does not in any way form or shape prepare somebody for designing good backends at any level (code or systems architecture), designing multi-tiered systems or even to just design good comms protocols - they're pretty much opposite sides of development, and not just in a physical or systems structure sense.
I mean, you're not wrong but I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. Yeah front end and backend development are very different skillets, but my point is the people working and coding and making the game generally do actually know what they're doing, but its middle managers are given orders from on high by execs, most of whom probably haven't touched a video game ever in their lives, keeping the board of directors happy with quarterly profit increases.
I wasn't talking about the horizontal divide between front end and back end devs, but the vertical divide between management/executives and the devs and techs.
I agree with you.
My point is that it's not uncommon for the higher ups (and even middle management) to think that making games is making the fancy stuff you see on the screen and not understand that as soon as it involves networking it's a whole different ball game with a different skill set and considerations: due to thinking that "games developers" should be able to do the whole "game thing" (which in a game with networking is not just frontend but also backend) they won't hire the people who "work and code" backend stuff and hence know how to do the backend.
In fact in my experience even the people who "work and code" frontend stuff tend to, until they actually try doing it, underestimate the difficulty of backend development and differences between that and what they do, hence overestimate their capability to do it.
The point being that they might not have the people who "work and code" in that specific domain because they didn't saw the need for different specialists than the ones they already had hence never hired them in the first place.
I see, so the angle you're going for is that basically hiring practices don't prioritize the skills needed for backend and think frontend devs can handle full stack. Even then the front-end teams do know that the backend stuff is important even if they don't have a full understanding of the scope of complexity that goes into the nitty gritty of backend dev.