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: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)