Posts by Alan Travis

I caught Disco Elysium fever. No, not the Saturday Night kind. I was really quite poorly

"This struck me as a cool way to start a game. Rather than heading out as someone already au fait with society and its norms, your character is hopelessly lost and so are you."

Such a cool (and convenient for the writers) way to start a game, in fact, that it's been done to death thousands of times, and is such a tired cliché of game writing that it has its own page on TV Tropes, and is considered a sin on a par with "and then he woke up and found it had all been a dream".

Hundreds of UK CSC staff face chop, told to train Indian replacements

Déjà vu

This is all seeming remarkably familiar. Exactly the same thing happened to me a few years back, when the small company I worked for was swallowed up by Torex, and they in turn were consumed whole by iSoft. iSoft decided that we weren't required any more... except they needed us to hang around for six months to train our replacements, who'd been flown in from India.

iSoft, if you recall, were the company that subsequently did such an amazing job developing Lorenzo which, half a decade later, is still the NHS's leading spine-compliant vaporware.

Thankfully there are still some companies out there developing real healthcare software, and actively recruiting developers to do so. CSC employees should feel free to PM me if they'd like a job. :)