You’re making assumptions that I’m some young kid, naively thinking I can change the world with overly simplistic ‘solutions’.

I’ve been in this career for a decent chunk of time, and, more importantly discussed these issues with others that have been here 40+ years (my company has been around for 100+ years). They feel the same.

You see it over and over again, management makes a short term cost saving decision, gets promoted or leaves to a new company and the rest of the people spend the next 3 years dealing with that decision. Things that used to be fixed in 2-3 days now takes 2-3 weeks. Projects that used to be completed in 4-6 weeks now take 4-6 months, etc.

These are things that I’ve noticed after 15+ years in the job and things that my 40+ year co-workers agree with and things the next two levels of my own management agree with (both 30+ years at the company). Hell, these are things executives I’ve been on better terms with have agreed with in the past (only to get let go after failing to implement culture changes).

My experience with executives is that they don’t necessarily want yes men, but there’s a range of acceptable criticism or feedback that they’ll accept. As long as you’re within that range, it’s fine.

If you try to address fundamental problems that might require real change… well those people tend to get suppressed.

They’ll happily take feedback on meeting structure or project planning or whatever. But try to do a retrospective on what the true longterm costs of their decision to go with the cheap, but unreliable solution and they’ll blackball you.

I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.

How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?

Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they’re considered a failure. There’s also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).

AAA games are legitimately worse now than before, but the gulf isn’t as big as people are claiming.

And then gives him a ‘replacement’ family in compensation and somehow we’re supposed to believe it’s all better.

I remember sitting in Sunday School as a kid and everyone around me is talking about how good a story this is and how Job ended up even better off than he was before, but all I could think about is God deciding to murder my family and then thinking that some strangers would just replace them.

It’s just so… alien. Creepy Eldritch being playing with humans like we’re dolls. It was terrifying to me and I couldn’t understand why the people around me didn’t see it that way.

This is why I think it’s funny people still believe ‘the Internet is forever’. Data disappears all the time. If you really start paying attention it’s scary how ephemeral the Internet truly is and how much is lost all the time.