Just to tick this truth.
If you are a programmer and have a pulse then you can get a job in the Bay Area. Games are a choice and increasingly a less attractive one for engineers there are far more jobs in other areas of tech.
Truth. But deadline crunch also applies to Non-Silicon Valley Tech. Defense Industry tech. Or Systems. ANYTHING involving trained professionals who engage in project-based work. Lateral moves or movement within your skill set is the best way to find a work-life balance. The skill sets and training demanded are MUCH larger than Games.
A trade union is not the same as professional licensure. Licensing for physicians, lawyers, certified public accountants, or other medical professionals such as nurses is done at the state level, which sets the criteria for education, experience, continuing education, etc. Other jobs in the same fields may not require license or certification, such as paralegals for example. You can declare yourself a paralegal today, have some business cards printed up, that’s the benefit of no barriers to entry. But that’s also a downside, you have no idea what someone holding themselves out as a paralegal knows or has experienced.
As far as trade associations for professionals, membership in an organization such as the AMA or ABA is optional. In contrast, every attorney is a member of their State Bar. Not optional
That said, some attorneys are unionized, I am aware of some who are members of government employee unions. But that’s a function of the job they occupy, not of their status as an attorney.
This is really interesting. Yeah I think we in games complain about crunch so much we forget other businesses have similar issues.
Yeah, you’re on salary, and projects have deadlines. No one wants to work with the guy who says, “Hey, it’s 5:00, I’m out… good luck getting this stuff done, guys!”
I think the frustration is amplified in games in a couple of, if not unique, at least notable, ways.
Pay is almost universally lower across the board in that industry than in others for similar skillsets/years of experience/etc. Job security is, almost as a function of the field’s operating mechanism, extremely tenuous for many employees. And the crunch is more or less built in and assumed, to the point that it sometimes feels to me like no one involved in the higher levels of decisionmaking has even heard the words “project” and “management” in that order before (Chris Roberts, anyone?).
AKA, it’s sort of all the possible crappy features of a salaried job, lumped together, maximized, with virtually no payoff apart from whatever dopamine drip you get from being able to say “The lamba functions I coded last week were featured in Assassin’s Creed: Origins” as compared to, I dunno, Library Backstock Checker 19.2.
Yup, I work in enterprise software. Guess what I woke up to at 6am when the servers were melting?
I haven’t worked a standard 40 hour week very often. Hell, my last job, I only did it once over 10 years. Granted that was usually he 50-60 hour range. 100 Horus is insane, and there is no justification for that.
It’s all a scale. If I’m salary (as I am) and I need to work an extra 30 minutes or an hour at the end of my shift, or pop on a call or answer emails for an hour at home, that happens. Just deal with it as best you can. There is a difference in degree that is important though. There is reasonable and unreasonable demands.
The 100 hour crunch far far exceeds that.
I’ve done it a few time for Defense Systems. I’ve done 80 quite a few times. I’ve done it in crapholes abroad and then had to go sleep in a tent where the power would go out as the generators quit from overheating. :) And breakfast was deep fried meatballs and powdered eggs fluffed out by local workers.
If I could have done it in San Diego in an architecturally zen studio with sushi available 24-7 for delivery and at industry premium salary I would have lept at the opportunity… :)
{Inserts Weird Al First World Problems video again}
Yeah and as I mentioned by PM. With games it is also very common when finalling for developers label some bugs as KS for known issue. They get marked as resolved but not fixed and you move on. The game simply ships with the bug. That works for games but I doubt it works for other fields where the software actually matters… like medicine or defence. :)
We have crunch too, mostly around system changes, large industry changes, that sort of thing. It’s not as ongoing as gaming though, even though I often work over 40 too. We also have paging to address system issues.
The thing is though, the only thing that keeps the other industries from considering unions for professional employees working the systems is the working conditions are not really that poor. If that ever changes, unions would look more attractive.
Nurses have unions. They’re highly skilled and hourly. It’s not really about… skill level for these things. And for gaming, I think it would be less about pay and more about humane working conditions.
Yes. People get exploited everywhere and all workers should be aware that it could happen to them. However, this all started off as Rockstar Games had a deadline and asked for some crunch time from developers.
Yes. 100%.
In the circumstances I described above, I took working crap conditions because the pay compensated for such conditions.
Yeah, so to try to keep up with as many of the threads of discussion here as possible:
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No one is complaining about when salaried employees work a couple hours extra a few days a month. That’s not remotely the same as 100-hour weeks. Even a 60-hour week or two just before launch or when you hit some unexpected setback… it happens (although I don’t think anyone should get fired for putting in less).
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@Navaronegun, not all game studios are in California, most of them don’t pay exceedingly well for the tech sector, and maybe a handful have fancy catered lunch rooms. I have been through serious crunch and never worked in place that matches any of those requirements.
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Just because non-game tech workers aren’t unionized doesn’t mean they shouldn’t or can’t. In fact, I think one reason they’re not is that they are an industry that arose during the waning years of unions culturally. So @Timex makes an interesting argument about skilled vs. manual labor that’s worth considering, but I also think there are other factors.
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On that front, I’m in no position to control this, but I would say that a game industry union is a good opportunity to consider how a modern, high-tech union might operate, in contrast to manufacturers’ or teachers’ or teamsters’ unions. I don’t think Jimmy Hoffa had to protect his guys against companies firing them due to social media outcry.
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“Just leave the games industry if you don’t like it” is an awful answer. First, some fields of game development have an easy time doing that, and others don’t. Second, the game industry is burning out and squeezing out their most experienced and creative people in this way, which is hurting future projects and teams as well as allowing them to perpetuate the exploitation of inexperienced and enthusiastic rookies.
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@Rod_Humble, yes, other industries have crunch problems. But we’re also a creative industry with a fan culture, which leads to other issues like online harassment and fan uprisings which lead to firings like the Guild Wars situation (I know we can and have debated the nature of this), which unions could protect developers from.
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Also, Rod, I’ve heard that “games are going to start working like films” thing for… a decade and a half? That said, maybe it’s true, but then I would be curious to know how you would envision it solving the problem. And also aren’t a good chunk of game developers more like the 3D artists in the film world, not the directors?
Just to be clear: We don’t know how many 100-hour weeks, but the article says they’ve done them multiple times throughout 2018. And it seems a safe bet that they’re not doing 40s the rest of the time.
The company has also said in the past: “There is simply no way Rockstar could continue to produce such large scale, high quality games without this.” That’s not a “whoops, we miscalculated a bit on this one project!” That’s cultural.
Right, and part of my point is that they absolutely pay top dollar and have guys in jetpacks delivering sushi. :) They are that caricatutre. :)
Not sure this is true. From a Glassdoor review of their benefits from 2017:
“Good health insurance, gym membership, fully stocked kitchen (although they never buy enough snacks), extensive coffee and tea station, good 401k and PTO amount, weekly bagel breakfast, monthly birthday lunch, occasional swag, employee discount, can get copies of games (although a pain since the woman who guards them likes to tell you no for some reason).”
That sounds mostly like the situation at my mid-tier, modestly successful, 60-person game studio in Colorado. Someone else says “They pay for dinners on nights and weekends.” I would hope so!
No mention of Jetpack sushi.
(Also, I always appreciate Weird Al, so thanks for that.)
I think part of the reason gaming remains as it is today is because so many employees in this industry have convinced themselves that what they do and how they do it is so ultra special they refuse, outright refuse, to do any sort of comparison to other industries. Gaming is such an ultra special industry that they have to list out out a 100 reasons why they’re so different from this industry or that industry or this one over here, as if they’re the only ones that have to deal with an unreasonable customer base, and therefore remove themselves from the experience of all the other workforce groups, ALL of them, and then they’re like what now…
It’s going to remain talk and nothing but talk until the bulk of this group at least takes the first step in admitting that they are workers in an industry. And while all industries and markets are unique, there is commonality.
Stop trying to recreate things from scratch. You can’t ask how unions can get started and dismiss all the industries that already have them as not similar enough or look at the ones that don’t have them and not really, really listen as to why they don’t have them.
I’ve worked in an union before. I don’t have a union right now, and here is the important part, I don’t feel like I need a union right now. We’re surrounded by other unions though, so it would not take much to get one going if it ever came to that. It just hasn’t.
This. All of it.
Thanks, Pasquale. It’s interesting that the horrors and costs of unions in the film industry (from a production perspective) are some of the things I often hear referred to in arguments against unions in games. They slow everything down, soak up money, put pointless restrictions in place, etc, etc. Then again, it’s always schedule and money arguments, never arguments about creativity or health or life balance… Makes you think.
I think the biggest issue to me, is that crunch in other industries is usually the result of a problem. I’ve worked much more than 40 hour weeks, in a project that was months late, a result of someone somewhere fucking up, code having to be rewritten multiple times, etc. Problems.
In the making games business? It’s like “crunch time” is standard in every project, no problem required…
Are you taking this from what I said? Or have you heard this somewhere else? I made references to the non-game tech industry and the film industry in my comments. Things like the Guild Wars situation have recently played out in the comic book industry.
We are a creative enterprise that is also a highly technical one. (We’re “making operas out of bridges,” as Frank Lantz says.) That’s relatively unique. But I never claimed it makes the industry impervious to lessons from other industries. On the contrary, I recognized in the OP that other industries have unions and asked for people’s experiences in those situations in order to learn about them.
So who exactly are you arguing with here, or am I missing your point?