When Infinity Ward imploded recently - and the majority of its top staff were fired or left - there was a lot of press attention and surprise.
Yet the reaction from most people, like me, who are ex-mainstream industry (and many who are still in it) was to say: “Whoa, so it’s no different for you guys?”
The Call of Duty franchise was a license to print money, but apparently even that cannot persuade management that there are some game development staff who are literally worth their weight in gold.
Some of that sounds a lot like my military experience, when it was hell. Seriously, a lot of the same peer pressure exists, at least in the Air Force in some career fields.
The one worry is that eventually, either indies would get oversaturated, or they’d start to cannibalize the mainstream market.
As producer Bruce Dickinson once said (yes, the Bruce Dickenson), like the rest of the industry he puts his pants on one leg at a time, except that once his pants are on he makes gold records.
I work in consulting, mostly in business intelligence and management area.
What is described here is THE SAME thing that happens in my field.
The great consulting companies all have huge turnovers, fail to keep the best and overwork all (even the managers) to exhaustion in a clearly contro-productive spire.
I am now a manager for a smaller consulting company and i hope to make the life better for my employee and for myself while still making a profit.
The problem however is still there: i
f in my company we work 8 hours a day (including breaks for coffee,beverages,talk with colleagues,ecc) we still have to compete with others who work 12 hours a day for a considerable lower wage that obviously can cut a lot bigger margin for dollar spent on personnel.
According to my relations, the same is true with lawyering. (With the added thrill that the big law firms are laying people off left and right due to the recession.)
Absolutely. I also have relations and friends within that profession, and the attitude described in the article is pretty much a carbon-copy of their lives - though with the difference that these guys at least tend to get paid extremely well (of course, with the high pay follows a lot of status expectations; i.e., expensive cars, boats, homes = often heavy debt to add to an already massive student debt).
If this is actually a problem, then the basis of Cliffski’s supposition (that experienced guys who burn out are worth multiple times the young, fresh worker’s productivity) is false. If you and your 5 more experienced, less overworked guys can’t be competitive against the other guys and their multitudes of dudes putting in 12 hour days, then it’s not particularly true that experience and expertise is such a big shift in productivity.
I suspect this is actually the case, perhaps not because the experienced worker isn’t that much better, but instead because the quality thresholds are low enough that the equivalent of 25 monkeys hammering out a solution is more than sufficient. This certainly seems to represent a good chunk of the gaming market where studio after studio hammers out uninspired dross and a few studios do bang-up jobs once or twice to support it all.
I have my own company, we develop software, and this is not a problem from us.
We give quality, and good prices, but we don’t lower ourselves to ridiculous below costs, and ridiculous working practices.
There are people out here that can do something for €300, wen we ask €3000 for “the same work”. Obviously, is not the same work, the quality, experience, etc… what that client will get with us is much better than with the “pirate” (thats how we call these €300/work people).
We have see a lot of “pirates” byte the dust, and my company is still strong.
12 hours programming seems a poor idea. The productivity of a programmer is a Gaussian bell (with two hills), and you are adding hours in the long tail. Worst!, the productivity of a programmer can be negative, he can use 1 hour to add bugs that will take 4 hours to remove. With 12 hours you are not making the morning longer, you are adding more night hours where you can’t even read the text of the screen. Ridiculous.
Awesome article. I have to say I’m glad I’ve never had to work in conditions like that. I wonder if there’s a way we could show those hard-working folks how much we appreciate them, besides buying their games. :)
Just to point out something that may have slipped in my previous reply.
I don’t develop software nor my company does so we don’t have products to ships.
We do consulting work, often for various company in many different fields.
Many clients fail to realize why they should pay a very experienced consultant who works 8 hours and is happy more than a still good consultant who works 12 hours and has a lower wage.
And from their point of view makes perfect sense! why should they pay more or even equal for someone who stays in their office working on their problems for a considerable less time ?
Very often the client manager isn’t capable of seeing any difference in skills in any case and certainly wont appreciate the benefits of having an happy and satisfied consultant nor he cares at all as long as the short term assignment get done.
Sadly, this seems to be true of a lot of “fast-paced” industries. Certainly my friends who are corporate lawyers or IT consultants tell similar stories about their professions.
Not even indie developers are immune to questionable management decisions. I have a friend who has been doing contract work for one for a while now and, AFAICT, his boss’s basic attitude is everyone will quit on him someday, so he has to work them to the bone until they do - thus becoming a self-fulfilling prediction. Then he has to spend time & money getting their replacements up to speed and hope he gets something useful out of them before they quit in disgust - and so on and so on. He doesn’t seem to see his employees as long-term investments, but as short-term resources to be exploited ruthlessly until they’re wrung dry.
As Dad always said, work smarter, not harder!
…usually said when I was being sent to do his chores while he read the paper.
Stories like these make me love my software development job. I don’t care what industry I work in, I love programming, but I also love going home at a reasonable hour and enjoying the weekends with friends and family.
Me too. I’m in a small incubation at a high level in Microsoft, and there are a LOT of very senior programmers here – guys with 20 or 30 years of experience, families, and consistently reasonable working hours. (Most people here periodically burn the midnight oil, but it’s out of passion rather than obligation.)
So there are some places that have reasonably professional management of senior people. Just maybe not in the games industry…
I think the guilt tripping and peer pressure to stay and work late hours was sometimes worse than actually working them. I knew that staying until 10pm or 12am or 1am wasn’t gonna get me significantly more work done and it affected my relationship, but I did it out of some sick sense of obligation. Once we became required on a project to work more than 8 hours, I didn’t become more productive. I knew I was gonna be at work for 10-12 hours so I paced myself even more, to keep from completely burning out. Is this wrong? Probably, but after awhile I knew I had to take care of myself.
I’m in a weird position right now, having been unemployed for several months, I’ve interviewed for non games stuff and even contracted on non games work and admittedly I was less interested in all of it. But on the other hand the idea of ever working crunch again just makes me ill to think about. Knowing exactly what time I’m leaving work every day was pretty awesome.
Once we became required on a project to work more than 8 hours, I didn’t become more productive. I knew I was gonna be at work for 10-12 hours so I paced myself even more, to keep from completely burning out. Is this wrong? Probably, but after awhile I knew I had to take care of myself.
IMO, if you can trust that it’s only going to be for X amount of time you CAN put in the extra time and get more done. Short term. However, if you’re at one of those companies that will turn on crunch for 8+ months or whatever, yeah, fuck it, pace yourself.
I learned after the first project I was on to never trust what I was told was “the final day we have to get everything done”. Because invariably this day would come and go and no one would say anything and we’d keep going for another week or two weeks or whatever with nothing being said. I do agree with you that if I could trust that it really was only a few days then sure I might be more inclined to work harder, but at this point my trust has been broken.
I like having finite deadlines, I like knowing when things are supposed to be done. I will work to meet deadlines. But when you continually give me an end date that is a false promise in order to exact more work out of me, I will learn. Sometimes it was my bosses lying to me about end dates, and sometimes it came from the publisher or whatever. Inconsistent timelines/schedules were one of the things that frustrated me a lot.
The only thing I disagree with in the article is the way it paints the whole industry with that brush by implication. There are certainly bad studios, but if you go into it with your eyes open it’s a lot easier to avoid those deathtraps now than it was 10 years ago, I think.
Let me be on the record for stating that Robot Entertainment has a very healthy, sensible, sustainable philosophy towards work-life balance. :)
Personally I don’t want to work somewhere that people punch in at 9 and leave at 5 and leave their job at the door. There are people who are good who do that, and that’s cool for them, but I love this job and frankly, it’s a calling. I’d be doing it even if I weren’t paid to do it. I want to work with like minded people who truly love making games.
Repo’s comment about people working late out of passion resonates well with me about that – there are ways to be productive about that passion without all the downsides of an unhealthy work culture.
