Oh what a grueling task it is to click "delete", taking precious seconds out of your life, all 3 of them. I can confidently say anybody who is so easily offended by the first-worldest of all First World Problems as "accept a free toy in exchange for additional pestering about more toys that are extra cheap", is probably in no position to raise children. Because you DID give explicit approval as a customer, when you accepted the freebie.

I don't think that's the whole issue itself. I've removed myself multiple times from their 'newsletter' and i still get their 'Exclusive discount' and i keep deleting emails. But others are getting 5, 10, 15 copies of the same email.

Something is bugged and needs a fix. Actually there's other known bugs stuck throughout the site, like when you make a new thread the underline is missing for the left side of formatting.

Hate to suggest, but i bet some their databases/tables have some corruption and needs to be manually sifted through, fixed, and then probably ported to a different file to make it clean. And i'm not sure what the technical qualifications are needed to do that, nor how long it would take.

A fair point that some have it worse than me, but I guess doing even the slightest hint of computer labor equates to neglecting children now, so the world really is doomed.

It could be far more helpful if GOG staff could at least explain what is messed up exactly. Would there be a volunteer who might be able to help for free if its internal staff isn't skilled? Possibly. Everyone will benefit if aggressive spamming stops for good.

I'd have been willing to help before, and i'd probably be willing to help now.

But on their end it will be a hard NO as it would provide access to their database and systems. I'd understand that from a security standpoint, but the alternate is... slowly decaying. Or hiring more people, which they don't seem to be willing to do.

I'm not sure about the economics of GOG's operation honestly. I think it probably takes a lot of customers buying a lot of games to make the operation profitable even with a modest number of employees.

For example, I'm probably one of GOG's biggest customers and the income I generate for them is still a small fraction of an employee's yearly salary. Heck, they'd have 1000 customers like me and that still wouldn't cut it.

I'm sure making an operation like GOG's profitable is a non-trivial undertaking that requires plenty of smarts.

However, the two things I'll point out that I know about:
- They seem to have focused A LOT on Galaxy and the support for offline installers has been worse off for it. To me, this indicates that either they no longer care about offline installers or that Galaxy is not a profit-generating product and substracting the expenses it generates to the extra income it generates puts it in the red and takes away from the rest of the platform
- A badly implemented buggy platform will generate a lot more long term maintanance overhead (both in development and customer-facing tech support). I sometimes look at their job offerings (not that I want to leave me job as I'm very happy where I am, but I want to know what tech stack they are using) and I see that php is still the main language for their backend. Sorry if I come off as judgmental, but I think that in 2023, they are unlikely to find a lot of quality talent that will put their platform in a good place if they are hiring php devs. I'm sure there are still highly skilled php devs out there, but on average, I think people still doing php as their main jam haven't kept up with the times and are unlikely to be that invested in their career

However the reason though, the one thing I do know is that my confidence in the platform has been shaken lately.

I think its complicated. Often, I wish your average end user was more invested in computing, but I also often think that technology professionals should be more invested in your average end user.

I think for some things like security, technology professionals will never be able to solve those problems completely for their users and people will have to get more savvy about that.

At the same time, I think the software industry, at all levels, is highly complex and I believe it is important for technology professionals to be highly empathetic for their end-users and make things as simple for them as they possibly can (which they often don't do).

So I think the mindset that users lashing out against extra complexity are lazy is faulty. I think things should be made as simple as functionally possible for the end-user.

GOG are hiring https://www.gog.com/work

The good news is that one of the jobs got added within the last few days (front end)

Which has the description that implys working on the website "development of our store application" , which is good because the codes a mess. I hope to see a v3 soon :)

I'd actually nearly apply but i dont meet minimum requirements

on the above job link they quote as having 35,000 microservices a second (on peak) sure those are mainly just clicks, but even if 10% are transactions its doing fine.

Having gotten right back into gaming in the last 2-3 months and deciding that i liked GOG the most from the other platforms i tried (Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, EA, Battlenet etc) it blows my mind at how terrible it really is.

Not that it matters to most users but the coding of the website, sticks out to me as a major, its patches over patches and a mix of old and new code, they even reload the same things multiple times (so unnecessary calls and load to their servers). I expected an absolute polished platform for the products they supply and the time that they have been around for. Their job ad quote may have "We care for SOLID code" its just a pity they dont use it.

The lack of customer interaction shocks me as well. I dont expect them to reply to every thread or post, but they do need to show that they are at least reading posts. The forums more look like a complete face for them to make it look like they care by giving the user an area but the reality is they dont seem too.

I would say their customer service has probably saved some users from leaving completely, but id say the ones that havent returned would be a higher number.

I plan on sticking around, but not as much as i initially thought, i also dont like back to back sales forced upon me, not that they force me to buy but it just gives me burn out, i feel they could improve by cutting sales back to even just one weekend sale a week and then special ones (ie winter sale etc)

I suspect GOG staff spend a lot of time dealing with issues, whether that be for customers or the website or Galaxy etc. No doubt that is why they elected for the buffer of a bot.

They also appear to be doing things to give the impression that all is going well or at least advancing, hence the new aspects to browsing the store, and the very irritating popups we see now and then.

In reality, I would have a guess and say the additional stuff is likely complicating things at the very least, and that has been happening for a good while, and overall has become somewhat of a mess now, and needs a real big overhaul, but that causes other issues and is likely never a good time to implement from their perspective. So they keep patching things, where they can and where they understand what is happening enough, which comes across as them in all reality, struggling to do so.

Maybe GOG lack real expertise, or simply don't have enough staff with that. For sure, any kind of real support for Linux for instance, seem to have fallen by the wayside. I got two duplicate emails again today, so clearly they are still struggling at fixing that or finding the time to.

Like any business I suppose, it is all about cutting costs wherever you can, and even though things aren't perfect, if they feel they are getting by and making enough profit still, then upper management probably don't really care about the issues we are experiencing ... or perhaps not enough to change the current agenda.

Perhaps GOG are saving up for a major overhaul, because in all likelihood it will be costly.

Yeah, judgmental and not very knowledgeable. PHP is the most widely-used server-side language used on websites by a pretty wide margin (77.8% as of now).

I think php is more popular with smaller websites (though hugo might be starting to eat its lunch there) that need to be setup quickly and some larger legacy projects that still need to be maintained in some companies. It has a market though not one I'm really interested in.

I think doing a greenfield larger application in php that will have to be engineered by a team in the long run is doing a disservice to your employer though. They'll have a hard time finding highly skilled labor willing to maintain it afterwards.

Anyways, I don't intend to start a language war with you. All I'll say is that whenever I joined a company that had some kind of php codebase (2 places so far), it was always a legacy codebase initially done by someone working on the cheap that the company was trying to transition away from.

I'm all for using different languages to fill different needs (ex: golang for command line tools & python/golang for devops integration, javascript for lightweight rest apis and frontend development, python/julia/r for data science and python for quick prototyping, scala for big data, C/C++/Rust for games or system programming, etc). I just can't find a niche (outside of a quick, cheap website that will be replaced by something better if the needs expands) that php shines in. But if you think of something, enlighten me by all means.

Edit: Actually, make that 3 places. I remember an old legacy application in Drupal another team wanted to deploy that the IT department just refused to greenlight, because the tech stack was too dated and it was a security hazard. The initial developer that built the project had left and they couldn't hire anyone to modernize it, so they had to redo it from scratch.

I'm telling you, it's a mistake to assume that you can make something in anything you want and that you'll assuredly find takers willing to maintain it afterwards. Skilled developers have plenty of choice. If they don't like your stack, they won't learn it just to work for you (unless you are willing to pay them an obcsene amount of money for the sacrifice which I believe banks are doing with their legacy cobol codebases, but not everyone has that much money), they'll work elsewhere. There is so much to know and so little time, you want to focus learning what you think are winners, not lemons.

How many of those are Wordpress sites? Please share your expert knowledge.

Um. PHP is very widely used, PHP developers are not hard to find. The actual problem is not religious opinions about programming languages, it's the "need to be in Poland" aspect, or at least I haven't heard that's changed. I see they list "fully remote" as a possibility, but even if they're now allowing non-Polish employees, you'd still have to deal with a Polish salary, which wouldn't be that attractive to someone used to US salaries for example.

I already provided a link, go ahead and click it. They share their methodology.

Ok so pretty much as I thought.

I think sticking to the same picker for 10+ years is far more religious than having a career plan where you continuously try to single out best of breed technologies and then filter for potential employers that match, but we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

They are hiring 100% remote now.

So it is a combination of their leadership, salary and tech stack not matching with available talent at this point.

Edit: They posted salary info and assuming the amount is monthly, the top of their salary range for the senior position is 91396.92 CAD. Not quite enough for a principal/architect/staff software developer, but they should still be able to afford a solid developer for that figure, in my area anyways.

Last i'd checked, nearly all their jobs required you to be in Poland...

Though it seems they've relaxed that (a bit, but doesn't seem very specific on which ones can be). Not that it matters, what i'd been qualified for 5-10 years ago i doubt they'd look at today.

Speak polish, no, Google tools no thanks, art team lead nope, not an artist here unless you want stick figures.

Benefits... ... rrriiiggghhhttt..... Next thing they are going to be 'people-kind' like a certain Canadian Prime Minister tries to use terms or LatinX (that no one is adopting). Makes me want to pull up George Carlin on his Political Correctness rants. All nice, but under no terms would i be moving to Poland. So I'd never be able to take advantage of these. And I'm too tired to learn Polish.

Job Requirement 'Thirst for change, growth and progress.'... How do you even measure that?

'A passion for games and the gaming industry.', while a nice sentiment (much like 'thirst for change') it doesn't mean anything. Someone who has no gaming interest can still do decent programming work on tools and website stuff.

Remuneration/Wage in Polish currency... Yeah that doesn't suggest much in a US position at all.