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Work Environment for Game Developers Must Change
Christopher Reimer writes "C|Net is reporting from the GDC that the video game industry will have to improve its work environment as the working population gets older and unionization becomes an issue. From the article: 'Numerous studies have shown that developers and other workers putting in 12-hour days routinely make more mistakes as the midnight oil burns, said Francois Dominic Laramee, a freelance game developer and author. That means any extra productivity is eaten up by hits to product quality. "If your company is in crunch mode, drunken zombies may be checking your code right now," he said.'"
That may be so, but videogame developers are often the only ones that speak out. I agree that high tech workers don't really need to be unionized, but that doesn't mean that companies should be allowed to run roughshod over the developers. I personally know several people who have worked both in video game testing and development, and conditions are often very, very bad. They may not need unions like laborers, but they deserve the same humane working conditions of other fields. Having to work 18-20 hour days for several weeks should not be allowed.
You're making VIDEO GAMES. It's not like you're digging ditches for a living.
:)
As a lead tester, I worked 28 days straight for one project because my supervisor insisted, never mind that was in violation of the six-day work policy and management was looking the other way. On several occasions, I had to work a 32-hour shift to beat a deadline. I usually get hit in my performance reviews for not working enough hours. Go figure.
Knowing video game workers, they would probably start a guild instead of a union.
Hell, all the programmers' jobs you're trying to make better would rather be working the 12 hours at the competitor than not working at their newly out-of-business game shop.
Now, there are questions of these longs hours affecting quality, as you said. The real question to be answered is: in that last hour, is anything productive done? Of course the coders are not as fresh and productive as they would be a lower schedule, but as long as more good coding is being done than mistakes being made, it could still be worth the work.
All that said, I'm sure there is room for better management of the projects.
That's standard everywhere in the tech industry. If things go bad for one of our customers, I could be up for 48 hours or more. When I started in the industry, I went nine months without a day off. I've never taken a vacation in my life. I typically work 16 hours a day, including weekends. I might get paged at 2am one day and not be able to go back to sleep until 4pm two days later. I may have to be up on an emergency all weekend, then go to work that Monday.
But that's life. That's how things go. I wouldn't mind being paid more for what I do and the time I put in, but hey - the industry blows right now and I'm happy to have a job.
But those long shifts look good for the middle manager reporting up the chain. "We're doing everything we can, boss!"
You clearly don't work in the field yet. Trust me, no employer will complain if you log some extra hours because you're in Deep Hack Mode. The problem is that you'll be asked to be working 12 hours days when you're not.
Not to mention that if your employer gets the idea that you "want to" work all those extra hours, they'll cheerily push you even further than they would have before. Employees train their employers in what to expect from them, and while it can be tricky to do, you ideally want to let your employer know that while you're flexible, you also have limits. Sitting and working 12 hours a day without being asked to tells your employer "I have no life, and I enjoy being here, and I enjoy doing work" - forget about ever leaving that office once your employer figures this out.
I worked for a major game publisher in New York for several years, and there was this constant push-pull between employees and bosses. Both sides would be trying to stake a few extra minutes out on either side of working longer vs. leaving early. Of course, in the game industry when I say "early" I mean around 8PM. We'd constantly be trying to sneak out around 7:55 or 7:50, and in turn our bosses would routinely throw four hours worth of critical work our way at 7:30 in order to keep us there, when they could have given us that same work at any time earlier in the day. I became convinced that it was done on purpose to get us accustomed to long hours.
Over a period of time, I saw my earliest clock-out hour move, on a permanent basis, from a fairly consistent 7PM to an optimistic 9PM even during non-crunch times, with many nights during crunches much later than that. It happened over several years. Before I was hired, I was told "sometimes we work until 7 or 8", and when I first started there, indeed we all left at 7 on the dot. Then during crunch times it would be 7:30, then 8, and a "two steps forward, one step back" pattern emerged, where we'd never quite go back to the way it was before when the crunch was over. After you've been working until 8 for a while, 7:30 no longer seems so bad... similarly, after working until midnight for two weeks on end, leaving at 10PM feels almost like a break. Of course it wasn't, and everybody at the company broke down after a while - the turnover rate was conservatively around 50% from the time I was hired to the time I left. Almost nobody at the company I worked for was over 30.
This is the reality of the industry, and it's causing problems beyond simply a lack of productivity. You've got an entire industry of people who work at one company for a couple of years and then move on. Nobody ever develops a sense of loyalty, or history; people work on game sequels without ever having even played the original, they come up with new game designs and concepts that they don't even realize have been done a thousand times before. It's part of the reason for the buggy games, the lack of original concepts, it's why a one-time great company like Acclaim can fall so hard, so fast. (For the record, Acclaim is not who I worked for.) It is seriously hurting the industry as a whole and has definitely had a hand in bringing down several publishers. It's partially responsible for the consolidation we've seen in the industry over the past 5 years or so. (Of course, many other factors are involved in that too, but the lack of experience throughout the industry coupled with a high turnover rate and low productivity from unhappy, disloyal workers does not help.)
People who are outside the industry seem to have a hard time understanding how pervasive a problem this is. It isn't just some companies and it isn't just some jobs. It's all game developers and publishers, and every position, from the company CEO's on down to the product managers on down to the designers, coders, and illustrators. It's everybody, in the entire industry. And it's an industry that's losing a lot of good people every single day because of it, who are then replaced by young
Amen brother. Actually, FDL (in the article) has been my editor for two books now and we've covered this very topic before. Every quality assurance textbook screams that productivity dramatically decreases after 10 hours to the point that it costs more to correct the mistakes they make than what you gain from making them slave away.
I miss the game industry, but I wouldn't ever go back to it until I found a company that didn't force the 80 hour workweeks. I've only found one company (Gearbox) that seems to get it. They normally work a three-day week and when crunch time hits, they move to a five-day workweek. They were still able to get their title out on time and they were able to keep their employees sane.
The solution to working conditions is obvious, it's just that few are willing to take that bold step of saying "Stop the madness!" and cutting back hours.
If you think your situation is "standard" and you are happy with it, you have a great deal to learn about a healthy employer/employee relationship. It is attitudes like yours that allow such treatment to continue.
Overtime happens, yes. But I've been working in the software (not games) development industry for about 7 years now, and I've only had one employer that asked me to work unreasonable amounts of overtime. I define "unreasonable" as regularly having to stay more than an hour late, and working weekends for more than 2 weeks in a row. Turnover was high, and I made it clear to my supervisor that if things didn't change I would be the next to go. They were having trouble finding people to fill open positions, and quickly stopped asking us to come in on weekends because they couldn't afford to lose more of us. I still left the job a couple months later, but mostly because I got a much better offer.