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Game Developer Now Offering Employees Overtime
Via Joystiq comes a story from the European game development website Develop, saying that the UK developer Free Radical will be offering employees overtime for crunch mode sessions. "Steve Ellis of Free Radical says the days of 'bonuses that pay off your mortgage are long gone' and that they've 'decided to start paying people for the work that they do -- even when that work is outside their normal hours.' Ellis says that the industry as a whole will eventually go this way, but they prefer to do it sooner rather than later. Although there are so many companies who are guilty of not paying their employees for working extra hours, EA gets picked on more often than not because of the infamous EA Spouse saga."
This model might work for the "kids" of the gaming industry that recycle developers like toilet paper, and treat them the same.
I suspect that the big names, companies like iD, Raven, and SplashDamage will continue on a by-project basis, simply because their teams are so radically different.
Interesting idea, though, and it definitely helps bring 'game developer' closer into the fold with 'real' jobs, giving it more weight with skeptics who don't understand the industry.
I don't know, but I think Developmag.com could remove a few more lines of content, and shove a few more ads on the page.
11 sentences to 14 ads is just too small of a cost/income ratio (yes, I counted).
</sarcasm>
how pathetic must you be to work overtime without being paid for it. I'm moving into the 20th year of my career, mostly software development, some IT work. NEVER worked overtime without being paid handsomely for it. Remember you anti social youngin's, you have to STAND UP FOR YOURSELF OR THEY RUN YOU OVER.
Idiots
Current employment law allows employers in the US to exempt pretty much any and all employees who work with computers from overtime. If you were not exempt before 2004, the revisions made by Congress pretty much assured you are now.
We don't buy slaves any more, we rent them.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
which putts it totally at odds with why overtime was first introduced. During the great depression, overtime was introduced to pressure employers to hire extra staff rather then simply working the ones they had into the ground.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
If it gets games out by their release dates great! But I'm not shelling out 90 bucks a game!
It'll likely lead to saner game release schedules. Instead of saying "Oct 9th 2007, no matter hell or high water", it'll be "forth quarter 2007, probably".
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
It may appear that way, but IIRC several surveys have shown far and away the opposite -- the quality of work you get after a certain threshold (somewhere in the 40-50 hour range) goes down so rapidly that you're substantially better off throwing more people at the problem than more time. This is more applicable in large organizations where the additional people are already on staff, of course, but ramp-up on projects is generally swift enough for anyone you can hire from within the industry (especially now that middleware technologies such as the Unreal Engine, Havok physics, etc. are becoming so prominent) that even hiring new people from outside the company can be much more cost-effective than trying to double the hours of the people already working for you.
[Overtime's quality of being cheaper than hiring more employees] puts it totally at odds with why overtime was first introduced. During the great depression, overtime was introduced to pressure employers to hire extra staff rather then simply working the ones they had into the ground. Overtime still works that way, just not in the way that you expect. It is cheaper still to hire more part-time employees and refuse them both benefits AND overtime. Overtime contributes significantly to this equation; as it is possible for a part time employee to be paid overtime on a short term basis without running afoul of federal laws that would change their status to full time. The resulting expenses however cause any employer of part time employees to be downright paranoid of you "going over" at any time, usually to the point of pushing you out the door as soon as you get close.
Mind you as I say this, I'm not against overtime laws or want to remove them in any way. However, overtime is helping to create more part-time jobs. As I said though, the solution here to create more full time jobs is not to remove overtime but rather to further increase the pressure by requiring benefit packages to be extended to all employees regardless of the hours worked. Most benefits require some employee contribution, such as insurance fees, premiums, 401(k) contributions, etc. Or an employer could simply raise their payroll, and get rid of employer tied benefits altogether, a more reasonable approach in my opinion.
~Rebecca
t may appear that way, but IIRC several surveys have shown far and away the opposite -- the quality of work you get after a certain threshold (somewhere in the 40-50 hour range) goes down so rapidly that you're substantially better off throwing more people at the problem than more time.
Thanks for posting that. I agree with it. I think (hope) I write well designed, well documented, well tested, usable code. But honestly, my employer probably gets 5 hours of solid work a day from me and then my concentration starts to rapidly deteriorate.
When I work a marathon session to get something out the door, more than half the time I end up kicking myself because of bugs I missed or crucial design flaws that require rewrites from scratch to add new features. One of the best features in my current job is close work with tech support. Our support staff (1 guy, it's a tiny company) couldn't program to save his life. But I take database changes, end user typical use cases, and sample GUIs to him and we spend at least 20 minutes every day discussing new features and fixes. We figure things out in a ten minute chat that I could spend hours chasing the wrong way on my own.
This is one of the problems with allowing businesses the level of freedom that they have over compensation. Sure minimum wages and similar mandates tend to be problematic when not thought through, but so is the idea that an employer should be allowed to require constant overtime as well. Burn out is a serious matter, and as is killing morale. There just aren't many industries that have workers that thrive by working constant overtime because the business model was messed up.
that was a pretty poor modding of your post.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Absolutely. I know from personal experience I've spent hours on a problem working late and fixed it in 5 minutes the next day. After an 8 hour day you;re not going to get a lot from an employee.
In response, Electronic Arts stated that it has agreed to reduce the company's cats-o'-nine-tails down to only seven tails.
I was looking for a new position about a month ago. A coworkers had moved to a higher paying position with a web consulting shop down in San Diego, and got me in contact with management there. They pay all their developers salary + overtime, and they seem to tend to hire people with as little as ~2 years of LAMP development experience.
Being a web consulting shop, they're always on tight deadlines, so they push their employees pretty hard. But at least they get payed for it.
And I'd like to pay even less than today, so please outsource all game development to Vietnam so I can pay $30 instead of $50.
^_^
You don't like working conditions at company X? Go work for company Y!
Why do you believe company Y is different?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
1) I work at "company Y". I don't do 85-hour work weeks. Hell, 45-hour work weeks are a rare grind.
2) Get/talk to some friends at different companies for God's sake. They can describe what's out there if you're scared and can often hook you up with a better job.
3) I read the ads on Slashdot. (Sorry, too easy!)
Where I work there are numerous people who work hours from home. There are those who go out of their way to let others know of "all the work they do" beyond what is called for.
There are many reasons for this, right or wrong.
1. Perceived (usually true) method for advancement, management always loves ass kissers and putting in extra hours or staying past five are common ways to show it
2. Don't believe in self. Then there are those who don't believe they do enough because of lacking. To make up for it they put in hours over what others do. For the most part I wish they wouldn't as I usually end up fixing it
3. Did I mention ass kissers? In my industry its a near requirement. Get the title of "Manager" regardless of what you do and its EXPECTED
4. People who cannot manage their time
5. People with no life. Don't under estimate their numbers. With blackberries some feel as if they have to show they are doing something
6. Blackberries. All by themselves, these insidious items and work provide laptops give employers the expectation you will work from home too
Hell, up until this year we were REQUIRED to work 42.5 hours a week. It was written in stone.
People bury themselves under mortgages, hideous monthlies, and cc bills. (monthlies == phone bills, cable, dsl, satellite, lawn care) and waste money on coffee shops, eating lunch out every day (many times with management) and trying to keep up with the Jones. Also factor in the fear of having to change your job. Its a big fear most don't want to go through as many lack the confidence they could get another job that pays well.
So you may see it as pathetic but its part of business that many accept and perpetuate.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I used to work in AAA game dev, now work for myself. I'm not sure paying overtime is the solution. If I'm paid by the hour and I have a bad ass bug, yet I have a brainwave and fix it in 20 mins, I'm going to avoid checking it in, chat on msn, play peggle for 3 hours and pocket the 3 hours extra wages. Who is going to know? I'd be very surprised if this doesn't lead to longer dev times, rather than shorter, its all about incentives.
If there is more cash available, the solution is good, regular bonuses, and higher salaries. The problem is the management obsession wit bums on seats and hours clocked in. Coders and designers especially are knowledge workers. It's to do with clear thinking, experience, efficiency and inspiration. you can't chain someone to a desk and expect them to produce a linear amount of results per hour. Coding and designing is not bricklaying. Management panic that they can't tell if a game coder is working hard or not, or whether he good at his job or not, so they settle for the one metric they understand -> hours worked.
It's a deeply flawed method, and paying them for the extra hours just penalizes those who are more efficient and get stuff done faster. Pay people by results.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
so why wouldn't it work for "big companies" ?
one reason I can think of is that they will still attract people to work on the great titles, and wont have to compensate with hourly overtime (the resume building experience would be enough for some developers..)
still, even with this, I can't think that retention will be all that good. what developer will want to _stay_ at a company that doesn't compensate them? one who doesn't care about money (or security for their family, etc..). single people will be most likely to go for these "companies without overtime", as will people who just love it and/or don't care about the money...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
I dunno. I sometimes think that companies that offer overtime pay you less to compensate for the wage difference. I would rather get paid a monthly wage that is quite good instead of overtime. That way I can work harder at work so I dont have to stay after hours and still get a nice pay check.
There's quite a lot of demand for good programmers at the moment. If you have trouble finding a good job with decent hours, you're not searching hard enough or you're simply not a good programmer. (And even bad programmers should be able to get a job these days.)
The problem with the EA Spouse story is bad management and bad planning, and the programmer nevertheless obeying these bad managers. Don't. Quit. Get another job, start your own company, form a union, whatever. Working 13 hours a day every single day for no extra pay to fix the fuck-ups of better paid people is simply insane. I'd rather work at Starbucks.
It's harder to actually find another job than to say "find another job". Especially when you're working that many hours a week. First of all you have to find another company that wants to employ you. There's an interview you need to find time for. There's the psychological aspect to split from people you work with and stop mid-project.
I mean really all you should do is refuse to do overtime, but it's extremely hard to say "no" when everyone else on the team says yes. Human psychology isn't going to let us.
First, drop your hours down to around 35-40 a week. If they fire you, take unemployment.
If you're willing to give up your life for a crappy 85-hour job, there are plenty of employers who want to talk to you. (I'd be one of them.)
Here's where having friends in the industry helps out; in many cases an interview is just a formality because someone else good can vouch for you.
Or, start taking honest-to-God, OOO lunch breaks and do some interviews over these.
Here's where you need to grow a sack and treat your job like a bad boyfriend/girlfriend. There will NEVER be a perfect time to leave your job, so just pick a time and a way and go through with it. Two years from now you won't even remember what you were working on when you left (and neither will your coworkers).
Lemmings. On second thought, maybe I wouldn't want to hire you; I need people with backbones.
Oh, but I have. One time it wasn't a game company, but an insurance company. I was working extra hours every day, not working out anymore, eating like crap at my desk, driving in on weekends, etc. However, the pay and benefits looked decent, I was getting great progress reports and on paper, anyway, there was the opportunity for job enhancement. I was in the middle of the second phase of a change control system project when I realized that if I completed it, the company would tie me to the final product for as long as they possibly could. So...one day I gave them two weeks notice and went to work for a software body shop that was looking for new blood. That lasted for a while through the 1990s, but I got worried that the company didn't have a future (it eventually tanked during the dot-com bust), so I quit again, moved to another state (still without a definite job) and ended up someplace where I made an immediate difference.
So...while "go to company Y" may not be the complete answer, the courage to try to find "company Y" and the skills that allowed me to score the next best-looking position have been extremely useful in my multi-company career.
Wow. It took you three years to find the essay and still all you can manage is knee jerk testosterone fairy tale rhetoric? You have the power to google: use it.
(This is "ea_spouse", by the way.)
No, neither of your conjectures are or were correct. This happens to the best in the industry, which is one of the reasons why you don't see a lot of the very established industry personalities talking about it. It isn't something any of us are proud of, but we are still in the process of fixing it. In this particular case there was a lot of history -- very common history -- having to do with financial stress from prior project collapse, EA bringing in a crop of people from that collapsed project (also common), and offering a contracted "signing bonus" in lieu of relocation assistance because in any place other than Los Angeles the commute would have been reasonable, but relocation assistance is based on miles traveled, not hours. So there was a contract for a period of time that could not be exited. And when people get in these situations, do they leave as soon as the contract is up? They sure as hell do. The ability to get another job is not the issue. It is that this situation is not acceptable regardless of whether people can exit it (which they do, constantly, and if you think this level of turnover is either efficient, healthy, or financially advantageous to the company you need to go back to school).
What the knee-jerk "me me me" responders to this issue don't realize, or refuse to realize, is that exiting the situation addresses the symptom but doesn't provide a cure. Frankly paying overtime does the same thing, but the critical difference is that once a company is actively tracking hours and paying overtime, it has the incentive to plan better and make it such that the overtime situations happen as infrequently as possible. The money is not even the issue. It is that it creates an incentive and a data-gathering state -- because a great number of game companies five years ago didn't even *track* how much time was being spent on a project -- that improves the overall process of making games, and therefore improves the games themselves, which is what we all want. And going home once in awhile is nice too.
Yes, it is obvious that when you work in a situation like that, you leave. In fact it is amazing to me that some people don't seem to realize that this is so obvious it doesn't need to be said. But leaving and then not talking about the issue, or leaving and forgetting about it, is selfish, stupid, bad for the industry, and bad for the games. We're fixing it instead.
So...your post was a fake? I'm not following you here...
I agree on the "plan better" part, but regular overtime is an important component of many companies' business models: if you get people to agree to overtime wages you can often save/skimp on benefits by avoiding additional hires (and their family health care, etc.)
Dunno, as a casual games consumer I really don't care how hard the people worked to make the games. I usually play only the best of each genre anyway, and I rarely end up having to pay for that privilege. If more relaxed work conditions help you make better games, that's great, but if 85-hour days are required instead I really don't care either way.
"The quality of life of game programmers" still seems like a low priority issue to me, but whatever you want to do in your free time is OK with me as long as it doesn't end up costing me in some way.
Agreed that this is not a "final solution" measure when it comes to better process. But the advantage in addressing the overtime issue is when it comes to tracking productivity in general. Product does not equal time, but time is a trackable resource whereas frequently the product itself is inconsistent (lines of code do not equal time do not equal product, either, for instance).
When you track time, and particularly when companies are held accountable (ie paying) for time spent, what this does is give them incentive for committing to reasonable delivery dates and content. When the company has a penalty for overcommiting, when it makes a commitment *to the developer* to have reasonable scheduling, there is a catch in place to track and therefore analyze and evaluate the efficiency of the process. So it's not really about the money *alone*, though compensating people for the work they put in is reasonable and positive too.
The general problem is when a company will overcommit to what they can deliver in a certain timeframe, and when they can't make it, the developers are the ones to suck up the penalty, while the company (as a whole, as a unit) can frequently have no "memory" of this happening because there is no tracking system in place. Free Radical here is not saying they are going to plan to run heinous overtime -- in fact it's highly likely they wouldn't be able to afford to. What they are saying is that they will hold themselves accountable for maintaining a schedule, and will compensate if they fail to do so. Ultimately overtime is a management/business failure (either in terms of planning or hiring the people that can deliver on what they plan), so for it to be only on the shoulders of the individual developer is not reasonable. When crunch actually results in numbers on a sheet that go to the top of the company and suddenly becomes an issue of "whoa, this title was X over budget because of X overtime", things are more quantifiable and are addressed faster, as opposed to the slow erosion of company morale and high turnover that results from heavy OT situations without tracking or compensation.
Paying by the hour isn't the be-all end-all to this situation, but if it results in more conscientious scheduling, that scheduling will benefit everyone. The developers are still core salary, the majority of their paycheck is coming from a salaried rate, and the difference paid in overtime -- and when there is serious crunch that is actually going to cause the company overtime, it is not a case of some people getting the work done on time and leaving and others continuing without them, it's usually the team as a whole -- is not going to be significant enough, I think, to provide a motivating "penalty" for people who work faster than others. The majority of the cases where this is going to apply are going to be beyond the scope of a regular work schedule, and if someone is milking overtime pay without getting management permission for that overtime due to an extenuating circumstance, that's an individual problem that would likely be addressed one-on-one.