Niantic - offer to help you

Niantic,

As it seems you are for some reason unable to help numerous people in my local community, I am, with this message, offering to help you.

I am offering to spend a week in the start of January delving into your source code, and working out what is so broken as to stop several of my local players playing the game. I will sign any reasonable NDA for your code security. This should benefit you by fixing some of the bugs your developers have seemed to be unable to fix, or maybe are just unaware of.

My usual contracting rates are around $1,000 a day, I will waive these for you. I will charge you nothing.

My background is 10 years as a professional games developer, followed by 10 years working in high scalability high volume software, where I cofounded a company as lead developer and architect, which has been investment funded to over fifty million dollars.

I know my stuff.

To be frank, I'm really pretty angry at you that I'm having to make this offer. You are a multi-million dollar company, but you seem unable to act like one. You should absolutely be embarrassed that anyone would even make this kind of offer, but I am so so so fed up with your repeated failures to help my local community, that I am willing to spend MY free time helping them, and as an aside it will help you too by fixing some of your bugs.

I'm sure you can link my email address to this account, so please contact me by email if you wish to discuss this further.

Comments

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    Cant u apply for a job instead to them?

  • Yeah, I already have plenty of work with the company that I'm working with. I have a couple of weeks off at the start of Jan.


  • Whilst I respect where you're coming from, I can do it. I've done this kind of thing before. Example: A company with a AAA PC game had a problem with their game's frame rate. I jumped into a completely unfamiliar codebase, and optimised their graphics engine by almost double in 3 days. If you have a specific goal, it can be done. I'm not planning on learning their whole system, just generally a) The parts involving login, b) some issues involving account flags that seem to be broken for some users. They're really quite specific problems, and easily solvable in a week.

    You're right about angry volunteers. I wouldn't suggest they let me just make random changes. I'd suggest they let me poke around in a cloned setup, so I can force a login from one of the broken accounts into the account clone, let me step through the login process, and then tell them what to change to fix their problem. They can then evaluate the fix I present them.

    And I wasn't going to lie about my motivation and how I feel about it. Wanting to fix a problem because I'm angry at them is a valid reason. Lying about my reasons is dishonest, and why would they want to let someone dishonest have access. I'm not saying they're going to, I'm saying I'm offering to help them, I'm being up front as to why, they can take it if they want it. I can do no more than be honest with them.

  • They're really quite specific problems, and easily solvable in a week.

    If that were the case, they would already be solved.


  • After releasing clients that respected Apple's guidelines regarding modern iPhone notches, they released a version that didn't. I'ts been several releases since then, the problem is massively obvious to anyone who plays on an iOS phone, it should be easy to fix since earlier releases DIDN'T HAVE THE PROBLEM.

    It is not fixed.

  • If they let you in, itd sure be nice if someone could make the virtual compass rose follow the direction of virtual north on their virtual map.

    For some reason, redacted, pokemon go, and google earth are able to do that just fine, but the developers of prime are convinced my phone needs a magnetometer for that to be possible.

    Also, if they think a compass rose for a map needs an actual compass before it can point at the correct end of the map, I wouldn't count on them being smart enough to take any good advice, free or not.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭


    You'd think.

    But it took them the best part of a year to even start looking at the speedlocking problem; and there's other stuff that looks like it should be able to be sorted in 10 minutes if they actually looked at it (comm scrolling to the bottom all the time, and our friend Gesterwind's compass problem). So it really seems like the developers don't have enough time to fix all this stuff.

    So I'm with Michael here. I've dreamt about making the same offer myself, although in my case it wouldn't be a credible offer because I'm not a mobile developer. However, just having a fresh pair of eyes on a project can sometimes help root out the bugs. Or maybe the way I play just triggers a bug that the developers never see and therefore running a debugger on my specific instance of Ingress Prime is the only way to spot an annoying bug.

  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭✭✭

    A version of Parkinson’s Law applies (there must be a name for this…): The list of tasks that need doing for a non-trivial software project expands so as to always require more resources than are available.

    Users tend to understand that tasks that they feel to be “difficult” or “hard” will take a while to get done, if ever. Similarly for tasks that they feel to be “low priority.” The occupational hazard you face as a developer is finding yourself in a situation where you don't have the resources to address all the tasks that the users deem both “easy” and “high priority.”

  • Speaking of resources, would any of us be terribly surprised if we found out that the Ingress dev team was down to Brian Rose, two programmers, and a sock puppet? Given the way everything else Ingress has had resources diverted away from it, this wouldn't be a shocking revelation.

  • It would not surprise me, as that's exactly what it feels like.

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