Timely article considering the spate of complaints - Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them

[MissMeYet]

Timely article considering the spate of complaints - Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them

Spare some thoughts and love for the worker developers:

"Among video game developers, it’s called “crunch”: a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family and even food. Crunch makes the industry roll — but it’s taking a serious toll on its workers."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/...ight-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

 

[Rob At Work]

This is not just limited to Devs, don't make them out to be special

Basket cases the lot of 'em

 

[Shadowdancer]

In every other industry, "crunch" is called "bloody incompetent management". The games industry is the one that's proud of it though and finds enough sucker employees who take it.

 

[Nerwan]

The problem with crunch is that tired people make more mistakes and in software development terms those can be more costly sometimes than the bug being fixed. There comes a point when working harder becomes counter productive. Where I work now doesn't believe in crunch and I have to say it's a much more enlightened culture and we make fewer mistakes. It's basically a failure of project management in my view. If people do it for a few days to get over some very important business deadline then it's ok. Beyond that and I think it's a sign that things are being run badly.

EDIT: Wonder what FDev's policy on crunch is.. lots of companies take different views.

 

[KING5TON]

Is crunch time written into Dev's contracts that it's mandatory?
If not then it's up to the individual devs to decide if they want to do it or not.
I'm pretty sure that they won't get sacked for not doing optional overtime.
Employment laws are a thing. Maximum working hours is a thing.

I'm pretty sure that devs aren't chained to their desks and whipped to work harder, they make a choice to work longer during the "crunch" because they want their game to be better which is fair play.

 

[Flavourless]

They get time to sleep and have bathroom breaks?? They don't know they are born!

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Heh, I couldn't be a Dev.

I can't do that sort of 'crunch'.
My brain stops braining after about 12 hours of up time.

I struggle with my rather pathetic job.
I finish at 10pm on Wednesday, and start at 7:30am Thursday.
I can barely cope with that. Lol

In an ideal world, I'd sleep as much as my cat.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Nerwan]

I'm pretty sure that they won't get sacked for not doing optional overtime.

True, but you feel like crap walking out the office past everyone else who's staying til 10.. And people do notice. It's the kind of thing that a very competent employee can get away with but a more novice employee might find leads to their redundancy in the next round. Very hard to find any legal redress against that.

Employment laws are a thing. Maximum working hours is a thing.

Not in the US where most games companies are.. and you can be fired for no reason there too I think. Even in the UK lots of people work past the EU working hours directive (which I assume will no longer be a thing soon anyway)

 

[verminstar]

This really isnt a new phenomenon...I remember working 110 hours a week and sleeping in my car to save money on hotels just to get time sensitive contracts finished on time. All the pity I got was a microwave dinner fer one and a back seat filled with empty red bull cans, and was maybe lucky enough to see my daughter once a week still awake cos I got home before her bedtime.

At least the devs are inside a nice warm and cosy office environment...my old job was an outside only job which meant many long hours and nights blowing on numb fingers and being so cold and exhausted, I thought I would pass out.

And Im supposed to feel sorry for them? Hahaha thats funny it really is...couple days of actual hard graft would soon sort out the men from the boys where ye go home with blisters on yer hands and skin so hardened, ye need wire wool to scrub the dirt out ^

 

[Shadowdancer]

Is crunch time written into Dev's contracts that it's mandatory?

It's a weird social (not legal, at least not in places with employee protection laws) contract. You see, you don't go into game development for the money or because you're good at it and deserve payment, but because you do it for the love of the art. And if you insist on psychically, physiologically, morally, and legally acceptable workplace conditions and business hours, you get mobbed out because you're not a team player.

 

[VR andysonofbob]

Jim Sterling - always a good watch. Adult language.
[video=youtube;Z8RCV0UWJgE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8RCV0UWJgE[/video]

 

[RidingTheFlow]

Is crunch time written into Dev's contracts that it's mandatory?
If not then it's up to the individual devs to decide if they want to do it or not.
I'm pretty sure that they won't get sacked for not doing optional overtime.

Oh, you won't get sacked for not doing overtime. You will just be on top of next redundancy list (for other reasons, really-really).

Crunch is not exclusive to games industry, but its very prevalent in games industry - and movie industry (that's where games industry actually inherited it from). Mainly because:
a) a lot of people working here are younger people do it because they *love* their job - so open to exploitation of their enthusiasm
b) gamedev companies lot more affected by deadlines. You don't miss console submission - this will be huge hit. You reach this several-billion projected revenue on target - or your firm bankrupt very soon.
c) gamedev managers usually terible with planning. Manly because many wild ideas/promises flying around and difficulty of mapping them to actual workhours (before you even know how you will do them)

 

[CMDR Dizzy]

Burn out time in the games industry is 5 years on average so not a long career at all.

 

[Hadarmil]

It's sorta like slave labor - it seems like a good idea but productivity jumped up once it got abolished. Tired workers make more mistakes which translate to more work for the QA team...and then we get the superbugged bull we see coming out of supposedly AAA studios.

A worker that enjoys his work and believe in his job will always outperform a slave.

 

[Zak Gordon]

It's part of the reason why i mostly buy indie/small dev made games these days. The Industry has had a pretty bad track record for far too long, and certainly i'll never consider a game by EA (one of the first widely publicly known about 'bad' dev houses) for those kind of reasons. My last EA game was a Shogun:Total War game i believe? I think SEGA publishes those these days.

 

[dannysquid]

Burn out time in the games industry is 5 years on average so not a long career at all.

Yup. I remember a time when I'd already worked 40 hours and it was only Tuesday morning.

From memory, it's kinda fun for a while, a nice team bonding thing, but it's a very short while. And when I was being subjected to the crunch I was a young person with no real responsibilities so didn't mind the lifestyle of pizzas and bottles of coke and comedy tiredness.

Dunno how games are developed today, but they're undoubtedly a very hard thing to schedule. You're usually trying to do lots of things that haven't been done before. There are unpredictable outcomes.

 

[Red Anders]

In every other industry, "crunch" is called "bloody incompetent management". The games industry is the one that's proud of it though and finds enough sucker employees who take it.

Exactly right. In any work environment I've been in for the last 25 years, a project manager suggesting that staff needed to pull 16 hour days or longer once would be grounds for some serious questions about their competence. If it happened regularly they would have been out of the door.

I do find it bizarre that it's so accepted in the software industry because despite the usual justification I see for it, software isn't in any way a special case - the issue is simply meeting deadlines and there's nothing unique about that. It's genuinely disgraceful that so may employers are willing to put their staff through it time and again and that it's seen as a necessary evil of working in the industry because that attitude makes it a self-perpetuating cycle.

It's also a major reason why the industry loses so much talent through burnout, not to mention that people who simply can't cope with it are seen as weak and don't get hired regardless of their degree of talent. I'd be ashamed to be involved in an industry that basically treats its employees as a consumable product.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I do find it bizarre that it's so accepted in the software industry

It's not so much software generally as the video/computer games in particular. "Corporate" software development is a lot better, at least from my experience and a bunch of people who went through and out of the games biz meatgrinder in all kinds of settings from indie¹ to "AAA" (quite frankly indie seems worse overall, likely not helped by the fact that no indie studio will want to pay an experienced executive producer, but they also really love to play the "teamplayer" card). The "boring" places are mostly making headlines through otherwise hostile workplaces like, e.g., Microsoft quite literally decimating the workforce on each performance review cycle some years back.

¹ "Indie" for this purpose meaning the traditional small start-up/upstart studio with great ambitions and no clue, preferably floating on crowdfunding money, not the more literal "independent of a third party publishing behemoth" that has come en vogue to add a cuddle-factor on all kinds of enterprises.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I think this is a bit curse of creative professions - they produce luxury essentially. What's created is not necessary required for humans to enjoy life. So there are exploiting, high risk, etc. in gaming industry, or in entertainment industry overall.

 

[Arry]

Practically every business has these issues. Granted, it is not the top people that are making the sacrifices, it is those that are expected to meet targets, deadlines or whatever. But then, that is what minions are for and when they burnout, there will be a dozen more, just waiting to replace them.