It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn't work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging.

Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

I'd rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game.

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!