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Crunch Tactics a Symptom of a Larger Problem?
An anonymous reader writes "One of the brave few: hot on the heels of the recent lawsuit filed against Vivendi Universal for back wages due to a developer who was allegedly asked to alter his timecard, Rob Fahey of gamesindustry.biz
has taken the bold step of taking the position that the insane hours game developers are routinely asked to work are might not be in the industry's best interest, and in fact might be less profitable than planning projects well."
Yeah, who would have ever thought of that? The fact that this statement is seen as "bold" should be indication enough that something is amiss here.
Anyone who has ever worked as a programmer can tell you that as a deadline creeps up they usually end up working more hours. Spec's change, deadlines get moved up and back, other developers quit, etc. In the video game market, where you MUST hit certain deadlines such as christmas, or before a certain quater to make your company look good for stockholders this is always going to exist. Unless you give yourself an extra 6 months to a year of slack time, you are always going to have suicide hours near deadlines because shit always happens.
I'm not a professional programmer, but EVERY book I've bought mentions the coders that stay up all night with coffee/jolt just so they can continue to code. Are you telling me that none of it is real???
I guess it's a job like any other, but it would be better working overtime coding a cool game than, say, the next version of MS Word.
I don't think that poor management is the problem here like the author indicates. These companies are working at a backbreaking rate so that they can remain competitive. It's not like EA can afford to cut their development time per day and only put out a football game every two years. Software companies drop off the map very quickly if they don't keep putting out new products that are popular.
There might be ways via management and planning to reduce the time it takes to create a piece of software, but that won't lead to shorter work days for the programmers. It will merely lead to more projects being completed in a year with programmers still working 12 hour days. As long as the other guy has workers that are willing to work 12 hour days to achieve goals, you can bet that you will too.
I thought this was addressed in the Quality of Life white paper?
Anyway, this was brought up at the June Dallas IGDA meeting. Several producers discussed ways that they avoid crunch time. Tom Mustaine, a friend of mine, told about how he schedules three-day workweeks (!). While sounding totally insane, when crunch time rolls around, they just go to a normal five-day work week and finish what they need without killing themselves.
There's also much to be said for the effect on quality when quantity of hours are worked. In short, the longer you continually work, the more mistakes are made. What happens is that sometimes you lose more time fixing those mistakes than instead just going home and getting enough rest.
The game industry is finally coming to terms that the long work hours caused by inadequate planning and management is driving away many talented workers and programmers.
Software company failures are not typically due to the frequency of release of games.
The first and foremost reason a game company fails is that it failed to release its first game. This is often due to poor planning (business, game design, project management), and secondly to lack of resources/talent.
The second reason a game company fails is because it releases a bad product. This can be a product that's very unfinished (rushed out), very bug ridden, or just not what game players want.
Crunches usually happen because of external influences - trying to meet Christmas retail season, trying to get a playable demo ready for E3, or trying to meet a publisher deadline for a milestone.
Anyway, game developers I've worked with were usually as committed to their game development as they were to their spouses (those who were married), or sometimes more. They _want_ to get it done. It's not simply a boss behind them cracking a whip.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I notice already a few comments along the lines of "thats just how software development is; specs change, shit happens". But this is true of any venture in engineering, even the arts. Its about time more emphasis was placed on trying to change things for the better. The software industries need for change is great; 80% of software is either late or fails to meet the initial specification. Its clearly unacceptable, as are the crazy hours demanded. Hopefully as we in the 2nd wave (really) of software development get a bit older it will be increasingly less than acceptable for team leaders to tell us we are 'flying to Australia' (presumably Aussie coders fly to Europe or else have a relatively cushy time!). What has to be lost is the frankly self-defeating and immature hostility towards management. Sure, bad 'PHB' management is the pits. But as anyone who has worked on a project overseen by a skilled leader will know, good management makes things an awful lot better than would otherwise be the case. A bad manager makes you work, a good manager works for you. Sounds trite, but I really do believe that.
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The author's point is not that the games industry needs to eliminate crunchtime; crunchtime exists in almost any product-based situation, especially when it comes to computer products. Software development, games, and 3D animation are three that come to mind in that catagory and all of these require crunchtime when the deadline looms near. The issue here is mis-management from the start to finish, in which the project manager actually plans 12 hour shifts for everyone which naturally spills over sometimes to 14 - 16 hour shifts, that extra 2 - 4 hours going unpaid. We've all played video games and I think we can all tell when a video game was rushed to completion, Driv3r being a newer example; rushed games are obvious and the resulting morale drop from not only having busted your ass for the last 3 - 6 months on a game, only to be pressured by the publisher into a release date, then releasing an incomplete game which proceeds to bomb with reviewers as well as in sales. Whats the drive to really make an innovative game next time, knowing your publisher is going to knuckle you into the same situation again and again?
The big game publishers are reaching the point big music publishers reached about a decade or so back with music: their very presence hurts the overall industry due to their pump-em-out-n-release-an-expansion attitude, EA especially. Perhaps it is nearing a time where like-minded people need to stop buying games and their expansion packs from companies such as EA, Vivendi, etc. Now that it has become as popular as its music & movie siblings, we can expect more and more re-releases of games redone for new engines & systems, more (potentially crappy) sequels, and more branding (street fighter, resident evil, etc).
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Yes, I understand that overtime is needed at time. I really do love what I do, so I don't mind the all night code jams (which are only fun when you look back on them). What I don't like is the fact that many companies take advantage of this fact to set absurd timelines (I'm not going to name names, but they know who they are).
Add the extra 6 months. Need a new NFL game every year? Then hire two teams and give each a the time they need to make a good game. Not only will your employees live longer (and be happy), the end product will improve (remember less returns == more money).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
The problem is much more common and much more widespread than this.
A good friend of mine works for Motorola as a developer.
He is expected to work more hours than I would believe if he wasn't at work every time I call him.
He works nearly every weekend, all weekend, frequently comes home around 2-3am (gets to work 8:30am I think) on any day, etc.
ALL WITHOUT ANY OVERTIME OF ANY KIND!
He likes to say he's "allowed to work all the time".
I tell him it sounds more like he's forced to, but he corrects me on that saying it isn't true. When I ask him if he'd get fired if he didn't work those hours they're "asking" him to work, he says "yes" without hesitation.
Sounds forced to me.
He says that Florida has some law that allows this behaviour of "non-exempt" employees. Yeah, stupid term - I have no idea where they came up with it or what they are not "exempt" from.
Another example is my uncle... who works for NCR as a hardware field tech.
He works 2-4 COUNTIES away from his home, while people in those counties work in HIS.
He has also been forced (for years) to falsify his timsheets to show 40 hours, even though he typically works 70-90.
He also is forced to work 10 days, then take 4 days off (this would drive me nuts, but at least they give him time off, unlike my friend above).
Both situations are 100% due to poor planning by idiotic management (I worked in one of these companies for 8 years, I know).
This also shows that it is not only not limited to the game-developement world, but not limited to program developers.
This is a growing problem in this country, and it is due to our rewarding people based on their B.S. skills rather than their _real_ skills.
It's that way in big companies, and it's that way in our government.
Unfortunately, I have yet to hear of a way to remedy the situation... it's in our culture.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
The real problem is supply and demand for workers. Many, many young programmers really want a career in game development. It sounds fun, exciting and creative. So there's always other programmers willing to step in and work for lower wages than what they'd be making doing mainframe apps or something. This creates some problems - wages are held down by huge labor supply, and the most experienced qualified programmers and project managers go to some other field where they can make real money.
Isn't a good solution to most of these problems to hire more good quality people? The game industry JUST seems to be pulling out of the old "hire straight out of college" binge because with all the competition they're starting to see games flop...horribly. Does it cost more money? Probably. Will it save you money in the longrun? My crystal ball points to "You bet your ass it will". Quantity + Low Quality + Crunch Time Quantity + Good Quality + No Crunch Time
Could apply to the music business or the game business. It's the conglomerates(sp?) utopia.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
'if you give yourself an extra 50% more time, the project will consume those 50 and still have crunch time'
this is bs, of COURSE if your staff is already burned out from the previous crunch time, for the first half of the schedule they'll 'recuperate' and not be very productive, which means that by the end they'll likely be a bit behind. Also a good project has a very 'tight' schedule (not tight = no time, tight = many meaningful milestones, possibly on a weekly basis)
If your work force is not exhausted, on the other hand, you'll see that if you do your scheduling well (adding buffers and so on) more often than not you'll be bang on or even early. In video games development you'll always likely be bang on because there are always a lot of 'nice to have' features you can work on if you're early.
The problem is how to go from an exhausted work force to a happy work force: you do this by having everybody basically take a month off after your last insane crunch spell and making it clear that from now on they will NOT BE ALLOWED to work more than 9 hours a day, and that if the deadline is not hit at the end they will NOT GET their bonus (which should be made a significant % of compensation).
All of this will definitely encourage people not to kill themselves, to have a life, and to be happy productive coders for many years to come. In the end it would also save the companies money, because they wouldn't have the staff turnover problems (with retraining costs etc.) they have now and so on and on.
Odds of this happening? pretty close to nil, also because there is some perverse 'you're not a tough guy coder unless you can go 48 hours on mt dew' psychology at work here as well...
-- the cake is a lie
" ...the insane hours game developers are routinely asked to work are might not be in the industry's best interest, and in fact might be less profitable than planning projects well."
Well DUH!!!
Lack of programmers who want in isn't the problem, lack of an ability to keep them in might be.
You are touching on an important point, but are missing the core: The pay is crap. Game programmers work startup-type crunches (sometimes for years) without the same dream of a payout as a reward. Working in the industry is supposed to be it's own reward, but that doesn't do it after you get a good idea of just how fucked up the biz is.
And so the best programmers are payed crap, despite being in a very competitive field with not nearly enough qualified people, because there is always some young fool behind you who is willing to pick up your rifle when you fall...
It'd be a lot better if:
1)there weren't so many hard core game idiots (with dreams of turning out more crap) dying to get into the industry in much the same fashion as the girls from oklahoma getting off the bus in hollywood.
2)game programming wasn't regarded as the most manly of the programming fields (along with kernel programming among slashdot losers) - then those macho retards would go somewhere else.
A bit touchy are we? Java people are so damn defensive you'd think they are a minority. Now granted there *are* a lot of stereotypes... Unfortantely for you, most of them are pretty correct.
Before, I was unconsciously was thinking console and A-title PC game industry...
I find most non trivial coding tasks take somewhere between 2-8 uninterrupted hours of coding. Given a task I could accomplish this in say 6 hours. I could start at 10pm and work till 4AM or I could try to fit it in an 8am till 5pm day.
... Ok well great it's 4pm and things are once again flowing but suddenly coworker X shows up and would like to know what this speck means so... Ok great it's 4:15 and I am back at my desk but dammit the code is not compiling and I can't remember what that pointer was doing anyway. Hmm, well damm it's 6pm and I am still not done well it's close I could stay here and finish or go home.
Now I get in at 8ish and start up my pc check my e-mail open the project read the documentation and wow it's 8:45 time for the morning meeting. Great now it's 9am and I am ready to go... Great work till 12:00 and hmm hungry time to grab some food. Cool well join a coworker or 2 and well it's 1:00 and I am back at my desk ready to finish up but... I only really worked from 3 hours but now I can't remember what I was doing
Now I could go home come back the next day and spend the rest of the day hoping to finish. OR stay here till it's done in 3 more hours? Well if I go home chances are I will spend most of the day finishing up.
The real reason why coders code at night is they can spend as much time as they need coding while being left alone. WHY? Well think of it this way after every interruption you have to remember not just what you where doing but why you where doing it and more importantly why you where not doing something else. So 6 uninterrupted hours at night tend to be worth 20 normal workday hours.
What's interesting is that the movie biz is heavily unionized, so the movie studios can't really take advantage of the impulse to hire cheap labor and work them to death.
In response to that, the movie studios have had to develop project management down to a fine art, because that's the only way they had to cut labor costs. It has the pleasant side-effect of making it more cost-effective to hire talented workers and treat them well.
Things will only get better for game programmers when the gaming companies can organize their projects as well as the studios do. What will be interesting to see is what it takes to make that happen. Inefficient companies going out of business, and successful ones leading by example? Or external pressures from workers suing or organizing themselves? I'd believe either.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
For startup game dev houses making an original title, this is true.
The second reason a game company fails is because it releases a bad product.
yes, it all works through the amazing blue faeries that make sure that companies who release bad products go out of business. You can sleep well at night knowing that capitalism works.
Actually, for startup game dev houses making an original title, you are right. For the other 98% of game dev shops stuck working for the man, they fail because they don't bring in more business. Either they suck at delivering on time the shovelware crap that publishers order up, or they don't have good contacts, or can't close a deal, or don't have agents that grease the palm, or they haven't sucked enough dick.
Looks like this guy, and some members of IGDA, might have read the Mythical Man Month, and perhaps even The Deadline.
Come on. We should all know this by now. The extra hours are turning into people too tired to notice obvious defects, just plain crappy games, and an exodus of experienced people from the industry. It's not a shock-- the entire computer software industry knows this except, apparently, the people who run game companies.
Hell, they know it too. But then they fuck up their schedules, fail to design, hire rookies on the cheap, and try to make up for it all at the last minute when they realize "oh crap-- how am I going to make up for the dozens of major mistakes I made over the past 2 years, in only 4 months?".
The video games industry is notoriously bad at what it does. Eventually, it will stop sucking. It's clearly going to take a while.