happy employees stay
unhappy employees leave
It takes years and costs a fortune to teach new guys how to do the old guys job.
Thats one (of many) reasons to keep the staff happy.
This is not the norm. Are there companies that do extended crunches, yes. But alot of the big companies now have to keep track of hourly work pay overtime. Both Actiblizzard and EA are like this now, two of the biggest companies out there. Personal experience has been moderate crunches now and then, a lot of it is what you’re willing to put up with. Mandatory ten hour days are a thing of the past, studios are very afraid to use the word mandatory here in california, or they would find themselves getting sued very quickly.
I would have to agree 40-45 where I work too, unless it is crunch time… then a bit busier, but nothing crazy like 70 hrs a week.
Working in the UK industry I’d say my experience, and that of the people I’ve spoken too, has been that 60+ working weeks are the norm whenever anything doesn’t go perfectly to plan. I know of several stories of the 60+ weeks going on for months and months. I’d say there is definitely a macho culture contributing to this occuring, testosterone pumped programmers daring each other to sleep less and code more. For the IDGA president to be saying this is a good thing? The man has lost all credibility in my eyes. How is the industry supposed to keep talented people? How is it supposed to support people with families? How is it supposed to support peple who aren’t a little unhinged?
The bitterness the 60 hour week swiftly engenders in the workforce can turn office life into a nightmare for people working there, a nightmare they bring home with them when they leave the office.
That sounds like what I dream about for retirement.
How is the industry supposed to keep talented people? How is it supposed to support people with families? How is it supposed to support peple who aren’t a little unhinged?
It’s changing, slowly. The demographics in the industry are skewing more and more towards guys with wives and kids. Guys who want to go home at 5pm and spend time with those wives and kids. It’s not all high school drop outs who love computers anymore and will become less so over time. Even the young kids I work with tend to have priorities these days outside of work. They want to go clubbing, not sit at their desks all night.
These older developers tend to advise the younger hires to take a healthier outlook on life. It’s no longer looked upon as cool to stay up all night working on stuff “just because”. It’s now looked upon as odd and a little sad.
On a slightly related note, in California, as per AB 10, a computer professional is exempt from having to be paid overtime if they: are paid on a salary basis; earn not less than $75,000 per year; are employed full time; are paid at least once per month; and in an amount not less than $6,250 per month.
This has not been my experience. The pressure is still from the top. Maybe it’s different here in Montreal, people do take their personal time far more seriously than other places. You still get kids who want to prove themselves, but I doubt that’s uncommon in general. Who doesn’t have an urge to prove themselves straight out of the gate?
But as people like me move up, and train new people, this should become less. I am already telling the people below me: Prove yourself by using your brain, not your time. Find clever ways to deliver goals, don’t try and do it by killing yourself. And there are more and more people like me.
But it really takes people willing to tell the people above them to go suck it. They may not like it, but I continually deliver, so how do you argue with results?
5pm? Luxury.
Seriously tho, like people said it’s nowhere near the norm, in the US at least (I’ve heard nightmare stories about the UK). At three studios over the past 8 or so years I’ve averaged 9 months regular hours to 3 months crunch. The thing is, crunch no longer just occurs at the end of the project, it now happens in the 3 weeks before you release a demo, the 3 weeks before an important milestone, the 3 weeks before a prototype that needs to be presented to corporate, etc.
As some people have pointed out, crunch isn’t all bad. The game industry is chaotic and complicated, things almost never work out as planned. When that’s the fault of production and scheduling, then yeah, there’s issues. When a studio is working a game that’s completely doomed and everyone is forced into mandatory crunch to try and “save” it, then yeah, that borders on the criminal.
But when a studio asks that everyone puts in extra effort for a couple of weeks to really polish the hell out of something that’s going to be presented to the public, that’s not a bad thing. We all want to produce the best shit we can. And I disagree about companies trending older these days, I’m seeing the exact opposite. I’m seeing (and again, ymmv) a trend away from people who are more interested in clocking out at 5 to go see their wife/kids, and towards hungry-ass passionate lifers who eat-breathe-live-sleep games. And that’s not a bad thing either. Spending two years of your early 20s working your ass off on a game that your 30-something lead or project manager doesn’t really give a shit about is devastating and soul-crushing. Working with hungry-ass kids who are constantly trying to one-up each other in a friendly rivalry way is freakin awesome. Everyone just keeps trying to get better and better at what they do.
As an aside to this rambling, people also need to take into account how flexible most studios are with their hours. At most studios, it’s ok to waltz in at 10 in the morning and then take an hour and half lunch, as long as you put in the 8 standard hours. So yeah, you might have to do 12-hour days and weekends here and there, and yeah, that should probably be concretely compensated. But honestly I’ve never another job where I could basically show up whenever I wanted and not have some management douchebag get all pissed about it.
Lol. I didn’t see this before I posted my response, but yeah, you might be onto something there. “Dude, this is SO MUCH BETTER than delivering pizzas.”
Still, I think pushing hard and caring about something enough to put extra effort in is reasonable in any industry. Of course, I’m saying all this as someone who probably won’t have to seriously crunch again til 2010. If we were having this conversation a couple of years ago, I’d probably be clamoring for blood.
Nah, this happens with all kinds of software development, but perhaps with not as great a frequency due to release cycles. I’ve seen it a bunch of times and have never worked in the games industry.
I dunno, I’ve been out of games for four years now, and I have yet to have to even do a soft crunch.
6-7 weeks of vacation? Man, Europe is wacky.
Fixed.
Oh I hear of it in non game software development. Heck I even occasionally experience it myself, though my management has the grace to acknowledge it’s a big imposition and they usually pay some token special one-off bonus to soothe hurt feelings.
I also want to echo what some other posters have noted, there are programmers that completely voluntarily put in the 60+ hour work weeks absent any management pressure to do so and absent any extra pay (salaried people). In my experience they are invariably people with nothing exciting to look forward to at home, either because they are single/childless or because they are married with kids and can’t stand it. They typically tend to get good raises and praise from management, and I can’t begrudge them that. If they donate 20 hours of their life every week to getting ahead as a programmer, well, I guess they ought to. If it means that much to them.
Polish is absolutely not worth overtime unless the company is offering direct compensation for it. I make myself available on an on-call basis for emergencies, and that’s it, during crunch. If bugs need to be fixed, fine, I’ll do it if it’s important, but that’s that. Polish? No. If you didn’t schedule time for polish then you don’t get any.
Don’t justify people’s bullshit schedules by buying in to the “rah rah only you can do it” mentality. Doing it or not starts at the top, not the bottom, and if the top is fucked, well, shit rolls downhill, doesn’t it? But what most people don’t realize is that if the shit doesn’t stop on someone below, well, the people at the top are chained to it.
Let it sail down the hill and it’ll drag them with it.
You know what’s really awesome? Working with incredibly smart people who have years of experience at what they do. People who can show you how to better yourself. People who are secure in their skills, so they don’t feel the need to one-up you.
I think that half the production talks I went to at GDC this year featured a producer speaking out in defense of crunch. Here are the bullet points from Rod Fergusson’s Gears of War talk:
Managing Crunch
- I believe that crunch is necessary in a creative medium
- Crunch should be driven by the ambition of the team and not the inaccuracy of the schedule
- Gather feedback from the team on how they want to crunch
- Crunch a little each milestone to avoid bigger crunch at the end
And here’s Allen Murray on Bungie’s production of Halo 3:
Planned Crunch
- Crunch is a tool that can unite or divide the team
- How you communicate a crunch is vital to its success
- Communicated in advance
- Scope defined and understood
- Definitive end
Both talks ended with recruiting slides inviting people to send in their resumes. Which I guess just shows that in the current economy, employment in the game industry is a buyer’s market.
Yeah, but someone who is happy is far more likely to stay in the organisation and it is rather costly to replace an experienced developer that is familiar with your codebase and processes.
I wonder how this discussion changes as people feel more ownership over the game, both creatively and finanicially. In other words, I would bet the attitude towards crunch changes a lot as people feel more or less like there’s a direct relationship between how hard they work, the quality of the resulting game, how well the game is received, and how well they are compensated. This gets to the indie thing cliffski mentions above, as well.
For me, I’m very bursty and ADD, so most of the time I’m working long hours I feel like it’s reasonable and self-inflicted because I slacked a bunch of the other time. I don’t judge other people who work different patterns as long as they’re getting cool stuff done (in fact, I wish I could work the steadier way). That said, when my name is on something, that’s a very strong motivator for me to push hard as the end nears…that’s just an example of the “ownership” thing above.
Also, goddamn, pulling all-nighters is way harder at 38 than it was at 23.
I agree with the comments that the newer kids are more balanced about this stuff. As long as they’re doing kickass stuff, that’s great.
Chris