Oh, yes. I’m still sore from finding out at my first full-time job that you had to be there longer than 40 hours because of lunch, and you can’t just skip it and leave early. I can keep a lid on about it better than I could back then, for better or worse.
During Go-Lives we can easily have 12 hour days, if not longer. You really have to be there for the 12 because part of the intent is you are covering your group at any given time in case someone needs you, and you work on weekends or you may be on call aka be near a computer. Those can be rough weeks, even more so if there really is a problem, but we’re talking 1 week if things go well, 2 weeks if thing are according to plan, longer if things are bad.
Implementations, like a new system, a new clinic, or gosh a new hospital (I’ve done that twice), getting those up is a long project and the Go-Live is weeks long. The biggest difference here is… there is an ending, a light at the tunnel. There is clear reason why you’re crunching or not getting rest or days off. It will end. Even the worst case scenarios, there will be an end. The worst Project Mangers in the world could not give you an endless crunch. I know because our team started that way. We went through… i want to save 5 Project Managers on one project, the DUI guy mentioned somewhere else was one of those as was the lady that sent the laptop back to use that look like she took a bat to it, and we still met the deadlines and cleaned up any misses in a reasonable time.
Gaming seems to just excuse the problems permanently, treat their chewing up of new employees as some sort of twisted right of passage, and because that’s not insulting enough, play lip services to changes they don’t intend to make.
I try to structure my work like this, do something useful, and focussed, for a couple of hours, then just stop. Better than pottering around nibbling at the task for many hours.
edit: apparently in France their work culture is much closer to this, in that they spend most of the day doing not much, then get super focussed and produce quality work.
Or vice versa, work and then lunch.
And really long lunches, relaxing lunches, where the social aspect is more important than the food…
Since going remote a few years ago I’ve also drifted in the direction of trying to stick to intense bursts of work in well defined periods. When done well, you achieve in 5-6 hours what used to take 8+. If remote work is not managed well, you work 24/7.
I used to work for a French company, the main thing I remember about differences in culture was that it was not uncommon at all to have beer or wine with lunch.
My experience with the French is that the biggest difference between them and us in the US regarding work is that they just don’t care about their jobs nearly as much as we do. Work isn’t the most important thing to them and it’s what they do in between and to facilitate whatever their hobbies are/travel/etc.
It’s very enviable IMO.
I don’t know where exactly to post this but this thread seems to cover game related news.
Activision claims Netflix induced Neumann to breach his employment contract while the CFO was actively involved in negotiations with the streamer on the gamer’s behalf. This marks the third major entertainment company, following Fox and Viacom, to allege Netflix is illegally poaching employees.
Neumann had been with Activision Blizzard for just 18 months when, in late 2018, the gaming giant revealed via securities filing that it was putting the executive on leave with the intent to fire him. Netflix, which is known to be ruthless when it comes to saying goodbye to veteran executives, later revealed that it had hired Neumann to replace longtime CFO David Wells. Prior to joining Activision, Neumann held senior roles at Disney and Providence Equity Partners.
I’m so happy to be working for a director who firmly (and correctly) believes that “butt in seat” time has a weak-at-best correlation to a software developer’s output.
This is common a my current work in Portland. In fact almost all work parties, during work hours even, involved beer.
Oh sure, when I was at Microsoft we had a fridge full of beer for after hours (ha ha) drinking. This other company though, it was pretty much every day. That’s just lunch.
Polygon comes in hot with a take.
Their Edgelord marketing had less to do with it than the real marketing tool they put to work way back in 2015-2016, in the form of Witcher 3 and its phenomenal DLC. I think the word that stupid idiot at Polygon is looking for is “reputation,” or even “track record.”
That’s just part of the never forget, never forgive part of the “discourse” that is modern media today. She basically has never forgiven CD Project for the trans poster incident, then looked for further reason to continue to never forgive, discovers that voice is tied to gender, and so can point and continues to never forget and never forgive because she’s proved to herself the original criticism had been on target.
She also gets mad that they made a Haitian aesthetic gang are actually Haitians instead of white guys with dreads. If she thinks CD Projekt would have been better off with going white guys with dreads, she isn’t really be honest with how this “Discourse” actually works, and whatever social commentary that could have been had would have been swamped with calls for representation and accusations of cultural appropriation.
Yep, the game is being hyped and CD^PR defended because they did a great job in their last game, not because any ‘edgy marketing’. But you don’t want to bring in common sense into the discourse, there are clicks to obtain.
That’s all they do, and it’s often clickbait for a certain audience…
…which, just to mock their terrible and reductive “edgelords” moniker, I’ll call (in an equally terrible and reductive manner) “wokelords”.
Hopefully I don’t open any can of worms with this comment, but I never understood the uproar (read: a Polygon article) over it to begin with.
Like a lot of things today, it’s understandable and justified to be upset about insensitive things. But in today’s world everything is turned up to 11 because everything is binary, so there’s no difference between a small and a large problem; problematic things are all problematic together, and it’s Normandy Beach and one step back anywhere is disaster everywhere, so up to 11 the fury goes.
But sure, “edgelord marketing” is something a Polygon writer made up because they want to be mad about a new video game, and not something worth talking about and taking seriously because trans people (who already deal with far worse problems than any of us do on a daily basis, especially those in parts of the world where “existing as a trans person” is basically illegal) should actually be concerned about how a major video game publisher is talking about them and depicting them in a tentpole AAA release.