8 hours per day? Or are we talking about a flexible structure but still 40 hours a week?
I assume most of these cases are 8 hours a day. That’s what it is at Vodeo, though we’re also fairly flexible with hours.
I worked 4x10s for years but for a telco not game dev. It was awesome. The wife is at a hospital and has 3x12 which is even better.
My experience as a knowledge worker has always been that I may be at my desk for 40 (or 50, or 60…) hours, but most weeks my job actually gets done in somewhere between 25-35. Hopeful that this movement continues to gain traction; it’s been the subject of a couple news stories outside gaming over the last couple years as COVID has forced companies to rethink their labor practices.
Work from home has changed a lot, at least for me. I feel less and less constrained by a 40-hour week because I don’t feel the peer pressure of everyone being in the office together from 9-5 (or more likely 8-6), so I work as much as I need to and don’t spend time sitting at my desk browsing the web so I look busy.
Amen. Unfortunately, there is still a very strong tradition among middle management in particular that time at desk = work, regardless of what is actually done. That, and the need of these parasites to wield petty power over others means all too often you wind up wasting a ton of time to satisfy the bean counters.
Oh man, so much this. I have always wanted to be somewhere where it’s actually not about hours * (butt + chair), but no matter the talk there’s always been that expectation that no, you’re physically at your desk for 40 hours.
Full-remote, I can get up and take a walk or do some light exercise or just fuck off for a minute when I have to without worrying about how it looks to the rest of the office. If I finish my task at 3 and my brain is donezo – not unusual! – I can just go into “keep an eye on Slack” mode without spending two hours reading xkcd archives or whatever.
My productivity hasn’t changed – given the output of the engineers around me I am perfectly confident in my output, heh – but I’m a hell of a lot happier outside of the whole COVID isolation thing.
No freaking joke, man. Luckily I’m in a job market such that I can easily and confidently give the proverbial finger to all those workplaces and find one that treats me like a dang human.
At lots of places I’ve worked there have been couches and lounge chairs that I guess are ostensibly meant to be places where employees could go and rest if they need to. But nobody ever uses them. I certainly would never dare lay down on a couch at the office and take a 20-minute nap, no matter how terrible or tired I’m feeling, but you better believe that I’ll do it at home if necessary, and I’m all the better for it.
I’m quite happy to be in academia at this stage of my life, the last bastion of utterly unsupervised and unassessed labor where ultimately no one really knows, or seemingly cares, whether you do your job! Or, for that matter, what constitutes “doing your job.”
I am joking, well, partially; everyone I work with has such an internal motivation to do the best we can that it works out well, but I get a kick out of the complaints I hear from colleagues who never worked outside off the ivory tower. They do not know how good they have have it.
This, this, a thousand times this. I have literally been taken to task for chilling in the cafeteria for a meeting because we didn’t look like we were working hard enough or whatever.
Unfortunately, I think that’s changing for the worse. I’ve seen job postings (admittedly for community colleges) that state explicitly the job hours will be x to y. I have not applied for those jobs.
Anecdotally, a former colleague at a 4-year college has stated with me that a new department chair has started instituting something similar there with a faculty member she thinks isn’t in the office enough.
I’ve also noticed at a past 4-year the ethos that meeting required posted office hours wasn’t “really” enough. They thought you should be in your office as much as possible for any potential drop-in students.
Also agreed, these things are for show. I worked somewhere where management would scold people for using the beanbag chairs / ping pong table but would also make people use them when prospectives came in to interview.
I had one job where they told us we couldn’t eat at our desks because it could look like we just sat and ate all day and didn’t actually work. We were like, “The owners understand that people eat food for lunch, right?” Stupid.
Yes, things are changing in schools, sometimes for the better, especially as teaching and classroom work becomes more common, sometimes for the worse, as corporate Dilbert-ville mindsets take hold.
Luckily, at my school, we realized that being available for students meant actually being available, not sitting around in offices no one visits. For instance, nearly all of my office hour stuff is done by appointment over Google Meet. If a student wants face to face meetings, and we aren’t doing remote instruction like we are right now, sure, I will meet with them. But my division, as part of our being able to inhabit a really cool historically protected building, has shared offices, and the tech is somewhat underwhelming to say the least. With remote meetings for students I can do much better one on ones, share docs, and schedule them far more flexibly. I voluntarily will meet in the evenings or on weekends this way, lots of times, rather than say between noon and one every Monday or Wednesday or whatever.
I really do hate it though when administrators act as if we can actually get anything done in our offices. It is pretty much impossible even to do grading in shared office spaces, at least for me, and course development and prep is out of the question.
I’m working in a restaurant and I actually like getting the double shifts, like 14 hrs at work (with paid breaks) which lets me rack up the hours (I do get paid per hours) but keep the days if that makes sense.
Just want to say that I appreciate your understanding of the need to be flexible with scheduling. My wife is currently doing grad school in the evenings while working a full-time job that’s hard to step away from during the day. So she’s had issues with professors who insist on working very strict hours(to the point of stating up-front that they will not check their e-mail outside of the hours of 9-5) and holding very strict office hours only during the day on weekdays.
Also, there is a trivial way to game that system and pay the original creator effectively nothing on transfer.
Well, I have the oddly old-fashioned attitude that I’m there to help students accomplish their goals, and to a large extent the most important things I do involve talking with them and facilitating their journey. I’m too old now and too aware of my own limits to be egotistical about it!
Three Star wars games coming from Respawn. The sequel to Fallen Order, an FPS, and a strategy game made in cooperation with Bit Reactor, the new studio created with ex-Firaxis folks.