[vvanders]

Oh it's very much a thing although maybe in different contexts.

My tech director in games used to have a ~40mb static array at the top of main.cpp with a big comment along the lines of "DO NOT TOUCH". When we'd come up on a demo or critical milestone and just could not get everything to fit in the ~512mb of ram we needed because the art team put in too many textures or our new subsystem too much memory he'd go in and knock 5-10mb from it and "save the day".

The same tech director removed mip level zero to get back ~33% of our texture memory. About a week later he told the art team that we'd optimized the game and asked if they noticed any visual differences. The art team said they didn't, about 4 weeks later it got out what he actually did and they were livid.

[mkr-hn]

This reminds me of that episode of Star Trek: TNG where they find Scotty in a transport buffer, and he's shocked to learn Geordi gives accurate estimates to the captain.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/99114/source-of-sc...

[marktangotango]

It's telling junior developers don't click on IBM threads or else they'd be on this sub thread screaming that GP story is horrible, lying, cheating, and immoral. Oh how wayward the younger generations are!