MY uncle works at Blizzard too

What is this, I don't even

Ok so there's this guy Jason Hall calling himself "Pirate Software". He calls himself a game developer who worked at Blizzard. Aside from working on a kind of Undertale-clone, a project he started after he worked at Blizzard, he's livestreaming a lot, mostly playing games. Most of these games came out after he worked at Blizzard, though some did not.

So then another guy named Ross Scott who runs a YouTube channel called Accursed Farms, who is not a game developer and who did not work at Blizzard, started a campaign called "Stop Killing Games". The goal of this campaign is to try and stop the trend of more and more games being only temporarily accessible, as in your purchase evaporates into thin air after a few years, sometimes even less than one year. Among other things the idea is to enact legislation that would require companies to allow third parties to host their own servers to continue playing their games, should the company decide to shut down their servers. You know, the thing that was the norm for decades until quite recently.

That campaign was floundering for a while and it didn't look like it would succeed. PirateSoftware made several videos and comments about this initiative and strongly opposed it, in fact he stated that he wished it to fail. His reasoning was a handwaving "can't be done" and "you can't expect companies to pay for the servers forever", completely misrepresenting what the initiative was asking for. Before making these statements, he was at some point working at Blizzard. After PirateSoftware worked at Blizzard, but before the present day, the campaign saw a massive uptick in signatures.

Oh by the way, if you live in the EU you should absolutely sign the petition

So anyway. PirateSoftware, aka Jason Hall, used to work at Blizzard. Then he made many statements about this pro-consumer campaign that were patently untrue, or at the very least, reaching. For example, the campaign specifically states that they do NOT intend to force any company to keep their live service game and its servers running indefinitely, yet PirateSoftware claimed that StopKillingGames wants exactly that. Ross responded to the criticisms and debunked Pirate's claims This caused what can only be described as a meltdown and a doubling down by making even more absurd statements, including saying that the creators and supporters of StopKillingGames could "eat my ass, the whole thing". Nevermind that the existence of things like OldUnreal or Planetside Forever show that preservation is possible, even for live service games like Planetside. Nevermind that this wasn't even the focus of that initiative to begin with, since there's also a lot of single player games and non-live-service games that simply cease working for no valid reason.

But we're not here for that. Aside from the fact that he did in fact work at Blizzard (as a QA Tester), he alleges that he hacked power plants for the DOE. So, you know, a coder and a hacker, of course.

Unfortunately his github is a desert but he still made the mistake of showing some of his code.

The code

This has been analyzed multiple times including in a video by CodingJesus (a somewhat unfortunate name in my personal opinion, but apparently not chosen to imply godlike skill but rather based on appearance). And all of the points he raises are valid. Now just to be clear, I am not the cleanest coder myself. My PR to dosbox-staging got a LOT of review comments, 99% of them excellent suggestions for improvements. I also got lots of encouragement along with those comments, and there were only one or two I didn't concur with because, well, there certainly are some things that are a matter of opinion. But this stuff is not. Magic numbers are bad. Code that is not the least bit self-explanatory is bad. Not using iterators or even a loop is bad.

Again, this would not be the end of the world were it not for one problem:

The guy doubled down yet again. You see, self-explanatory code is apparently bullshit that needs to go away. Magic numbers are fine because he knows them, and that's enough. Bad code is fine if you're the only one working with it. And my favorite: This isn't C++, it's GameMaker and its own scripting language.

This is of course nonsense. This is bad code no matter the language. Patterns are a thing regardless of syntax. There's no magical "missing context" that makes him right.

The problem

The problem is not the code. I mean, the code is terrible, but that could be fixed if the guy started doing things like learning from others and reading books about software development. The real issue is that we are dealing with an imposter, who managed to amass a sizable following online, mostly impressionable youngsters who believe what he says. He also has a radio voice which he uses to great effect to sound like he has something to say. (Allegedly he's using some tricks to make his voice sound deeper, and when people called him out for how different his voice sounded in a live interview, he claimed to have gone through "second puberty").

But most importantly, he worked at Blizzard. Did I mention that?

The biggest damange these people do is if someone else has to work with (or worse, for) them. Not only does the project turn into a pile of dung, but such a person makes coworkers life hell on earth. I have worked with people like that, a guy who claimed to know everything, be everything, but he couldn't even do proper exception handling to save his life. Another guy was bragging to be the best Java developer in the company, but failed to add a button to a GridBagLayout in Swing. These people not only create a toxic work environment, they not only cause massive amounts of wasted money or even the death of projects, products or entire companies, but they also make others doubt themselves and their own skill.

Not only are they imposters, but they instill imposter syndrome in others.

The solution

Stop interacting with these people. Don't argue with them. Don't respond to them. If they are your coworkers, and you can't get management to do something, quit. There's other jobs out there, and I highly doubt that a place employing incompetent people like that would pay very well anyway. If you can't or don't want to quit, and your workplace is big enough, maybe transfer to a different department. Whatever you do, don't try to "see both sides" or even try to convince them. This is not about what's right, it's about them being right.

Isn't this harassment

Jason Hall claims to be something he is not. He is factually incorrect about both stopkillinggames as well as programming in general. There is a lot of both-siding going on that rubs me the wrong way. As much as people like him like to be a victim, they are not. Free speech doesn't mean being free from non-flattering responses. Of course I don't condone harassment of any kind, nor should anyone go to his social media and post nasty comments - that would be water on his mills.

On that note, Jason claims that the games he worked on are being targeted by review-bombs. Would you be surprised to learn that this is not true?

Who are you to talk about this?

I have 24 years of experience developing safety critical software and designing systems that keep people alive. As in, actual coding, not just QA. And yet, getting started contributing to a well-known OSS project was still humbling in all the right ways - also because it's been a good 15 years since I did C++, but I can't really hide behind that for a good number of comments.

Even if you're the person with the most experience, let a rookie review your code sometime. They may well find stuff you can still improve. And if you are the rookie in the room, do take constructive feedback but don't take shit from others. And if you make mistakes, own them. We all make mistakes. It's only bad if you make the same mistake over and over, or you double down on it.

But what do I know, I didn't work at Blizzard...