Game Developers Sound Off On 'Quality Of Life' 67
simoniker writes "At the recent WIGI Conference in Dallas, a number of game industry veterans discussed the ever-problematic issue of 'quality of life' in the game industry, or, as moderator and The 7th Guest creator Graeme Devine commented: "What does that mean to most of you? Well, it means crunch." Aspyr's Lori Durham suggested of the issue: "You won't always have a perfect balance as far as how many hours you're outside of the office, and how many hours you're inside the office", but, for game developers: "As long as you feel good about where you are at that moment, Durham thinks that's what matters.""
Re:Crunch (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry I'm not first... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sorry I'm not first... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sorry I'm not first... (Score:2)
This is not unique to game developers (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, the conditions are nearly the same across the entire American culture. Everyone is always in crunch mode. I can't think of any development position I have ever held that wasn't mostly in crunch mode and I have never worked in game development. If you're working for the man then you are going to have to work overtime without pay and all sorts of things like little to no vacation time (at least in America where it seems the worst).
The main thing with developers is they lack skill and/or experience and end up reworking code all the time or debugging like crazy because they can't figure out why something doesn't work. That is what really puts the pressure on them. It's especially difficult when you realize you made a mistake and have to redo days or weeks of work or you neglected to put enough debugging information to make problems easy to spot. That is painful crunch mode. As you get better and get more experience you make less of those mistakes (if you're smart) and although you're still in perpetual crunch mode it doesn't feel as stressful.
This is not unique to software development either. Almost everything is like this.
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:2)
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:5, Informative)
I was in the game industry for 5 years. I have put in upwards of 110 hours in a single week, not counting an hour for lunch or a half-hour for dinner break. Now when you realize that 18+ hours a day for MONTHS on end is normal in the game industry, well, they might have something to complain about.
I have some former coworkers from that studio who have moved on to positions with other large corporations and they may wind up doing 60 hours weeks for 2 or 3 weeks. But nothing like the death marches we regularly endured.
I'm currently with a smaller company. Any overtime has to be cleared with the president of the company. Most folks who work here haven't seen any overtime in over a decade. My brother (who worked at the same game sutdio) works for a medium size corporation now, and he hasn't seen overtime in over a year. And then it was only one 50 hour week.
Once people realize that overtime is something that should be RARE rather than the norm, and start calling their boss on it, corporate America might just get the hint. In the meantime, enjoy your hours upon hours of being worked to death to pay for someone else's vacation home.
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:2)
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:2)
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:2)
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:1)
Not with an abundant labor pool and the majority of companies in the industry having the same policies, it wont. This is why we need unions.
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:1)
To anyone who thinks "Well I don't see what the problem is; I don't work that hard." - you're in the minority. Count yourselves lucky, the majority of us are bound in contracts that don't allow overtime and have management that simply expects us to work late to hit deadlines. Management sets the deadlines and we have to get them done and if you can't get it done during work hours
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Labour did not invent the 40 hour work week--in fact, they opposed it because they were paid by the hour. For 150 years companies have been doing research into the optimum work week, and they keep coming up with the magic number 40. When you go over this number, errors due to fatigue cancel out any productivity gained. You can exceed this for short durations, but the gains decline rapidly. It seems that every generation insists on learning this again the hard way. Companies get around it by literally cycling through employees; they get a lot of kids who aren't burnt out, but most of them have don't stick around long enough to gain much experience.
Of course, there are the other costs as well. The other team at the first company I worked at had six married members when the project they were working on started. By the time it was done, all of them were divorced. I worked long hours on a project for a dot com back in 2000. The guy I worked with, a good friend of mine, died last year of congestive heart failure, caused by chronic stress. If you're working 60 hours a week or more on a regular basis, your boss is an incompetent boob. Your job isn't worth giving up your life for, figuratively or literally.
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:2)
Monday - 24 hours
Tuesday - 24 hours
Wednesday - 24 hours
That's 72 hours.
Where the hell did you get 28 hours from by Thursday morning?
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:1)
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:2)
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:2)
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:1)
I make a good living for the area I live. I'm comfortable.
It would suck if this wasn
Re:This is not unique to game developers (Score:1)
I know this now echoes a few posters views, but I don't think thats accurate. Totally depends on your industry and corporate culture, and I don't think this kind of required overtime is anywhere near the norm. I've been full time programming for 6 mont
Quality of life (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems that with the general IT population getting older, even in the USA people start to realise that spending 16 hours per day in the office isn't improving their life. Also it seem to me, that people aren't really more productive than people who just spend 9 hours per day. The excess time is usally spend in goofing around or creating problems, which will take time the next day to fix.
Re:Quality of life (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true. It is rather interesting that as you go from 40 - 45 hours a week, there are HUGE productivity gains (the 5 hours is all productive - vs. 15 of the first 40 hours are meetings, overhead, waste) so you see a huge 20% gain in productivity... Wow - if I get that with 5, what do I get with 10 or 20.
Well, what happens as you go from 45-60 hours a week, you start seeing bad effects with people spending more "Work" time doing their chores, longer lunches, dinner gets in there too... Then what happens that is even worse as you go through 60 hours to beyond is that preventable mistakes start happening. I am tired and make a mistake that takes days or weeks to debug and fix (even assuming it is caught and doesn't ship) and my ACTUAL productivity measured in debugged LOC/hr starts to plummet until sometime above 80-90 hours a week my productivity can actually become negative.
These are all longer term results - you CAN drive a developer for a week at 80 hours... but if you try for a month - look out for failure as his life starts to fall apart, health suffers, mistakes are made, and they leave for a better life somewhere else - with the mess in your lap.
By the way - I often wonder if this is the classic difference between young guns that CAN work longer hours for longer periods of times, and seasoned vetrans that don't seem to go over 60 hours, but are still effective (don't write as much code either - but what they write works better)
Quality of Life (Score:1)
I think that one of the other p
Re:Quality of Life (Score:1)
Re:Quality of Life (Score:2)
Where do you work, are you hiring and could you use someone with a background in security (making and breaking) and 10+ years of experience in pretty much any useful programming language (Assembler 80x86 and a little ARM only) except ABAP?
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? (Assuming the guy means not like perfect to within a Planck constant, but a more normal kind of perfect.)
What's really so damned unique about the game industry that makes it need 110 hour weeks? What's really so damned unique about the game industry that it makes it immune to the productivity nose dive that occurs after just a few 60 hour weeks?
The real problem here is the fundamental assumption that there's something inevitable about this way of life. But somehow, almost nobody else needs to do this. So what's unique about the game industry?
High stakes? Competition? Tight cycles? Winner-take-all market? High quality requirement? None of these are unique to the game industry, not even in combination.
My personal opinion, informed on experience, is that the software industry in general is not unique. It is not immune to extremely-well-documented productivity declines that occur with excessive work weeks. It's just really, really hard to measure productivity, so people substitute time measurements instead as the nearest measurable quantity and never ask what it's measuring. The whole software industry has this disease; the game development community has an especially acute case, brought on by ignorance, pigheadedness, and (perhaps more important) the "need" for all these hours being determined by people who probably don't have to work them, or have no reason not to and can't imagine why anybody wouldn't.
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
1. Management push. Almost everyone is young in games development, and many managers have come from the trenches with little or no management experience. When someone inevitably yells SHIP and the game goes to Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft for testing, there is a chanc
Re:Why? (Score:2)
But geeks and nerds like to geek out and have long evening coding sessions. It's what they did. The geek macho could, at any rate. And it's that geek macho which has penetrated and stuck in the software dev biz.
And even if I'm wrong, I prefer this explanation, 'cause I can't think of
As someone headed for game developement... (Score:2)
Re:As someone headed for game developement... (Score:2)
Re:As someone headed for game developement... (Score:3, Insightful)
and that's all well and good while young and single.
Yes, and when you hit 35, you'll be replaced by someone else.. who is young and single.
You're a fool for accepting those working conditions.
Quality of life doesn't depend on work hours (Score:3, Interesting)
If I had to, say, bag some handbills for 40 hours a week (aside of the most certainly crappy pay), it would put more burden on my quality of life than those 7x18 weeks in a job I did enjoy very much.
Just managment babble (Score:4, Insightful)
Work is not 'fun', it's not for 'play', it's certainly not a 'life'. It pays the bills, that's what it's for.
Re:Just managment babble (Score:2)
Re:Just managment babble (Score:1)
Re:Just managment babble (Score:1)
Passion is for crybabies and sissies in relation to work. You go to work, you get the job done, you leave... rinse, and repeat. Your 'passion' should be used for YOUR LIFE. Unless you just like being reamed in the ass after you've given your 'job' all your passio
Re:Just managment babble (Score:1)
Wow. Strangely, I find myself agreeing 100% with this.
Example: Daikatana? Battlecruiser 3000 A.D.? Games built from the "heart" of "passion".
Katamari Damarcy? The general impression I get is "uh, yeah, I guess we had fun? Maybe at some point? We weren't tortured, really. And yeah, the game's kinda cool, isn't it? Anyway, work work work".
DOOM? I get that "yeah, we were friends and had fun together - but that thing wasn't passion. That t
Re:Just managment babble (Score:1)
Re:Just managment babble (Score:2)
As for myself, I'm not a workaholic. I have had a policy from day one of not working overtime on a routine basis and not working unpaid overti
Re:Just managment babble (Score:1)
Woah, I really feel sorry for you!
Regardless of the hours issue, treating your job as just something that pays the bills is wasting those 40 hours a week and up to 20-30% of your entire life.
Put your heart into your job, make it fun and your quality of life will go up a lot more than simply restricting yourself to an exact 40 hour week and paying your bills with it.
35 hours or strike (Score:1)
I don't mean to troll, but see, here in France, it's work 35 hours a week (at worse 39) or it's the strike. And the problem for me is that I'm planning on moving to the US, and I find it quite scary to think that I might have an over-40 hours a week job.
Re:35 hours or strike (Score:2)
So you get all the benefits of low hourly wages, no benefits, and you're replaceable, too!
Re:35 hours or strike (Score:1)
Seriously, you guys are getting screwed. So a 35-hours job in the US is a part time job? lol, that's quite funny, and at the same time scary.
I only hope one day you guys will wake up and do quite what we did during the last 150 years or so, and fight in order to bring the weekly work time from 48 hours to 40 to 39 to finally 35 (although the 35 hours have always been controversial and are kind
Re:35 hours or strike (Score:1)
Well yeah, unfortunatly you can't keep that kind of advantage unless you keep fighting, and that mostly means having the Democrats to do something to compensate the efforts of the Republicans to exploit you better.
And that's why in France the 35-hours are being rolled back, that's because the right wing has been having the power lately.
Re:35 hours or strike (Score:2)
Re:35 hours or strike (Score:2)
The great thing about working in a country with as low an unemployment rate as the US is that you have no shortage of jobs to pick from if you're qualified. So, you can work as long or as little as you like, and take whatever job you like. The government doesn't put a gun to the head of e
Re:35 hours or strike (Score:1)
lol great idea. by the time i'll move to the US i'll be a sysadmin, so no, I won't work for McDonald's in order to work for a decent amount of time.
So, you can work as long or as little as you like, and take whatever job you like
Wait, do you mean I can be a 35-hours/week sysadmin??
"going on strike" is just another way of telling your employer that
BTDT (Score:2)
Game companies sound like lousy places to work on that basis, but that's to
Some of them are blind to it (Score:3, Informative)
I guess denial is how he copes?
Or maybe he was just screwing with me. :-P
Really? (Score:3, Funny)
Basically, "crunch time" looks to me as the game developer saying to itself and its emp
What do you expect...? (Score:3, Interesting)
younger minions (Score:1)