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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 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!
But I digress. Last night I stayed up all night to code. Any coder who has a project he or she enjoys to work on will want to stay up to work on it. But when it's work and you're there for like 15 hours a day and not getting overtime, then I have a real problem with that. You'd think it would be, but game programming is sometimes completely mind-bending. There's lots of parsing, data management, bug-hunting, optimizing, and deadline-dodging that goes on. It's some of the hardest coding on the planet, as the entire thing has to have a good "feel" and "flow." It's not like you can say "thisGame.feel = great;" There are hours and hours of refinement and tweaking and debugging that go on, all in a very high-pressure environment (especially when you're under a release date or convention deadline). Game coders probably don't have it worse than any other coders, but I'd be hard pressed to say they have it much better.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
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.
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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.
Could apply to the music business or the game business. It's the conglomerates(sp?) utopia.
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'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 best programmers are not paid crap. Maybe by crappy companies, but most of the companies know what the really good programmers are worth, and the best programmers aren't going to stick around crappy companies for very long.
Mediocre programmers are paid a decent amount of money, but not when compared to some of the hours they have to work. Most of these are people who THINK they are the best programmers, but in reality only know basic data structures and algorithms and probably write code that is not reusable or documented well (although they THINK that it is both).
A lot of this stems from current Computer Science departments in Universities. These classes are 75% full of people who don't and probably won't get it. The other 25% (the mediocre programmers) look around and see how much better they are than everybody else, and assume they are friggin savants or something.
The unfortunate thing is that many of these mediocre programmers have the potential to be good/great programmers but they don't get the education and training they need. Instead they just get the idea that they are great and have no need to really learn anything advanced. In fact, most of them don't even know that advanced topics exist.
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