I’m pretty shocked at all the defending of the game company here, honestly. Highly visible bug, affecting high percentage of users, relatively simple fix. I take pride in the software I wrote and would be personally very embarrassed if I caused this AND didn’t fix it for years. I guess companies don’t have feelings and can’t feel shame but I would personally feel shame as a supposed professional!
There are a lot of excuses for why this wasn’t fixed but no great reasons.
The idea that screwups are "shameful" is poison in any organization. I fight it in the companies I work for, I fight it here.
Bugs happen. Serious bugs happen. They will always happen. Shaming people for bugs undermines institutional robustness against bugs because it incentivizes people to hide mistakes. Furthermore, companies with blame-n-shame culture typically fault users when those users make inevitable "mistakes" statistically guaranteed by bad UX design.
In contrast, transparency is good, acknowledgment is good. Rockstar acknowledged fault and rewarded the reporter, which is difficult. That's a positive institutional arc I'd like to encourage, at Rockstar and in the wider industry.
If you stop at "embarrassing", I'm with you. But when you proceed to "shameful", that's quite different and we part ways.
Just to clarify my point: The bug was a screwup. We’ve all done screwups. My worst bug was an amateur hour royal screwup that resulted in DDOS. Nobody should be shamed for bugs, including serious ones that get to production.
Not fixing a serious, visible, known bug for six years is what’s shameful. There is nothing positive about neglect like that. It’s kind of admirable that they actually rewarded the guy but it shouldn’t have even got to that point.
Totally agree you should not shame for bugs. The shame is for ignoring this bug until one of your customers finally had enough and fixed it by patching the binary. If it was my company I would feel ashamed.
I haven't read all the comments on these articles, but I haven't seen anyone claim that the bug shouldn't have happened, that anyone should lose their job, that no one "good" makes those sort of mistakes, etc. But this was a bug that lasted long enough and irritated enough customers that one of them finally diagnosed and seemingly fixed it without ever looking at their source code. That's one hell of a process failure. And splitting hairs over whether we would feel professionaly "embarrassed" or "ashamed" in a similar situation is pretty silly.
Managerial problems that allow high-impact, low-fix-time, high-prevalence bugs to exist for 7 years are shameful and are in fact poison to an organization themselves.
Don't mistake the shaming for really being about the bug itself here. The problem isn't the bug, it's the organizational culture that allowed such a massive, easily fixed, widely encountered bug to persist for 7 years in a game that has made them $6 billion dollars over the last few years.
There are a lot of excuses for why this wasn’t fixed but no great reasons.