Rogue Programming

Gamasutra had an interesting article today titled Gaming the System: How to Really Get Ahead in the Game Industry. I found it probably had more to say about the political dysfunction that can often accompany game development rather than a how-to on being successful. To put it another way: if you find yourself having to follow the sneakier guidelines in this article too much, then you might want to consider a change in where you work.

The programming section is titled "Just Do It" and does have some truth to it. One of my leads and I came up with the term "rogue programming" for what he describes, which was half-joke, half-serious. Here's a quote:

As a programmer, it's not uncommon to see problems that you think should be fixed, or to see an opportunity to improve some piece of code, or speed up a process that takes a lot of time. It's also not uncommon for your suggestion to be ignored, or dismissed with an "it's not broke, so let's not fix it" response...

What should you do? You should just do it -- on your own time.

This is advice which is fraught with a lot of risk, because here's a hard-earned lesson for you: you don't always know best. I know, I know, you're superstar hotshot programmer, and you see something that is broken, so it must be fixed. Sure it is not in the schedule, but it'll just take a few hours, what's the harm? The code base will be so much better when you're done, or the artists and designers will have a feature they didn't have before. How can that not make the project better?

Let me give a cold-water splash of reality: when it is all said and done at the end of the project, you're going to ship with a lot of broken code. I'm not talking about obvious bugs in the shipped project, I just mean nasty, hack-filled, just-get-it-out-the-door brokenness in the code base, and some of that code will be code that you wrote. If this wasn't true, then a long-lived project like the Linux kernel wouldn't still have thousands of developers contributing to it -- obviously, there is still stuff that is "broken" and can be improved!

So in the big picture, a single section of brokenness is not going to make or break your project, and usually, there are bigger fish to fry on any given day, and its best to fry them. Because if your project is cancelled because a major feature was late, will it matter that you cleaned up the way you calculated checksums for identifiers?

That said, if after all of this, you still think something is worth doing, let me tell you how to successfully rogue program:

First, and most importantly, let's define "on your own time." On your own time means you are hitting your scheduled work on schedule, and that will not change if you fix or implement this one thing. If you're behind on your scheduled work, then you really shouldn't be doing any rogue programming. Whether not impacting your schedule means you work a saturday, do some exploration at home, or just have some slack in your schedule you'd like to exploit, if you don't complete the tasks you are supposed to be working on, you've done more damage than whatever improvement you're working on the side could benefit.

Additionally, you need co-conspirators. These days, programming is very collaborative process, and for the most part, the cowboy mentality is a dying thing. If you talk to your lead or other engineers about a problem ("Hey, X is pretty f'd up") and no one else agrees, or you can't make the case, then hey, maybe X really isn't that important! You really want to be working with a group of people that you can convince with sound arguments that something is a problem, and a lot of the time a little discussion about a problem can turn into a scheduled task -- and no rogue programming.

Often you'll be faced with something that everybody agrees *should* be done, but there's no time to do it. In these cases, I've found with good leads (which I've been blessed with the last few years), you can get tacit approval to do something "on your own time." This often takes trust -- I wouldn't recommend going off and "just doing it" until you've earned that trust.

If you've gotten to this point, you're in pretty good shape to go off and do some "rogue programming" -- because at this point (and this is where the joke comes in), it really isn't rogue at all.

Now if you're at a company where you constantly feel like you need to "go around people" to "just do things," then maybe you really do need a change of venue, because that is not a healthy team. I happen to know someone who is hiring.