Game Developers Sound Off On 'Quality Of Life'

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.""

Comments

This is not unique to game developers

[Cthefuture]

Alright, I'm sick and tired of hearing about this issue and the overworked underpayed game developers. The only reason this is turning into a big deal is because a lot of these developers are fresh-out kids and have nothing to compare to so they eventually start thinking they are in a uniquely punishing position.

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

[Drogo007]

If you're in a job like that you've got some seriously dysfunctional management.

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

[Thangodin]

I have to agree with the other respondents. I work in the games industry, and I discovered early that perpetual crunch mode does not work. The first company I worked in enforced 60 hour minimum weeks, with 80+ at peak. I clocked over 100 hours one week--by Thursday morning. It took me a month to fix the damage I did that week. I soon discovered that the work habits of everyone in the company had deteriorated to the point that it took 60 hours to get 35 hours work out of people, and if they went did work 40 hours, you barely got 20 out of them. This is called burnout. I remember one guy who was considered a crunch time hero, who wandered in at 11:00, didn't start asking code related questions till 4:00, and left at 8:00 most days. This means he barely put in 4 hours a day.

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:Quality of life

[MerlynEmrys67]

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.

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)

Why?

[Jerf]

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...

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.