An idle question...

[avevale_intelligencer]

I'm not sure what a tier 1 Fortune 500 company is, but is it likely that they would have a senior software developer with a number of servers and a dozen programmers at his disposal with enough spare time, resources and autonomy to decide to develop an MMOG on the spur of the moment?

I ask because this is apparently what has just happened on the MOUL forums. The person in question has a prose style which is somewhat more redolent of a barely educated fifteen-year-old, but I've learned not to judge by that kind of thing. But I would have thought someone in that sort of position would be kept fairly busy earning the company's investment in him by doing what they tell him, not indulging himself like this. I'm loth to call BS without knowing more about the situation, but I'm a touch sceptical.

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Unless it's something like the old Bell Labs I'm rather suspicious as well. (Bell Labs had a reputation for employing high powered scientists and giving them whatever resources they wanted to do whatever they wanted. They got a whole load of interesting results, many of which were nothing to do with the company's focus but which could be licenced profitably. Sadly, since Bell were broken up not many places can afford to do that now.)

[rdmaughan.livejournal.com]

HP Labs at one time was not supposed to work on anything likely to be useful in the next five years, I don't know if this is still the case. The idea was things less than five years away were worked on my other bits of the company and the labs did the further out on the edge stuff.

Having said that I doubt they would expect one of the staff to use office resources and time to design a game unless it was something being developed on the back of it.

[howeird]

When I worked at HP Labs (1990-ish) we had projects with close to immediate impact, some of which started as 5-years-away (such as inkjet ink and color laserjet toner) and some were ongoing (research into the Mach operating system, font readability analysis, and more efficient disk drive file allocation table design). We also had a really fine network for interactive multi-user gaming.

[siderea]

Your question is ambiguously worded. Are you asking if someone so employed would have the time to spare in his off hours, or are you asking if "senior web developer" is a sufficiently senior employee to have the discretionary authority to start such a project as part of his job?

ETA: ... or whether such an employee would be kept busy enough on the job he wouldn't have opportunity to steal time from his employer?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure myself, since all I know about him is what's in the post. It's implied that the resources are work-provided, but I don't know what the company does. I'd have thought a senior software developer would be tasked with developing the software the company wanted, rather than coming up with his own projects, but I could be wrong.

Come to think of it, middle managers in my last job (as opposed to grunts like me) weren't monitored at all as far as I could tell, so I suppose he might be in a position to do it on the sly...

[armb.livejournal.com]

Possible options include:
He's persuaded senior management the company could make money from this game.
He's got permission to use otherwise unused development machines in his spare time, and persuaded some like-minded fellow employees to join him in their spare time.
It's a research or training project, finding out about a new technology of some sort on something that doesn't matter if it fails.
He's about to get fired (or, if an entire team of a dozen programmers are none of them monitored enough for anyone to notice, lose his job when the company goes under).
He's a barely educated fifteen year old making stuff up.

Some of these seems unlikely.

[howeird]

A tier 1 Fortune 500 company is going to be one of the largest companies on the planet, and yes, they would be expected to have senior developers and tons of hardware. Unless they outsourced, which is common enough these days.

Something you're missing, though, is a good programmer is not a drone who only does what she is told. She would be creative, curious about new and better ways to write a block of code, and any managers worth their salt would encourage their best and brightest to play around. Some of the best code comes from unauthorized tangential experiments.

Kind of like writing. If your publisher tells you to work on that trilogy, and you also produce a smash hit on the side, who's going to complain whose time you were on?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"any managers worth their salt would encourage their best and brightest to play around"

Do you actually know any managers like that? Or more precisely, do you know any companies which allow their managers to give that sort of permission? In the past, yes (the first company I worked for actually scheduled several hours per week per person, at all grades, for them to "improve themselves" -- reading periodicals (whether related to their work or not), writing their own programs, making paper aeroplanes, whatever), but these days there are continual reports about employees "wasting time" and the senior management (beancounters, mostly) want everyone to be working 110% of the time only on company activities.

[howeird]

Yes, strange but true there are still companies like that. I don't know about the rest of the world, but US laws have tightened up on who owns what you do in your spare time. Bottom line is if it is done on company equipment, the company probably owns it. The companies which don't want creative innovations outsource to other countries.