Rockstar Employees Badly Overworked, Say Wives

juicegg writes "Wives of Rockstar Games employees in San Diego recently published an open letter on their Gamasutra blog. The authors say that Rockstar employees are seriously strained by unending crunch periods of 12-hour work days and 6-day weeks. High levels of stress are leading to serious psychological and physical problems for some of the employees. They charge that studio management uses arbitrary, deceptive and manipulative practices to get employees to work more unpaid overtime hours at greater intensity — despite over $1 billion in Grand Theft Auto revenue. Among the blog comments, some current and past Rockstar employees are confirming problems with the studio. 'Ex Rocker' writes: 'What makes R* crunch periods different then any other studio is that they tell you the game has to be finished in 6 months, so let's start our final push to get this awesome game out there! 6 months turns into 1 year, 1 year turns into 2.' Other comments reveal worker hopelessness and general mismanagement at the San Diego studio. This turmoil is affecting development on upcoming games as well." Read on for responses from Rockstar itself and other members of the industry. An anonymous reader adds, "Everyone is talking about the fact Rockstar Games has addressed the accusations that it has forced developers at Rockstar San Diego into unpaid overtime to finish imminent titles. But I've noticed that a former GTA3/Manhunt designer (Chris Kruger) has a comment in this piece published Thursday about crunch in studios, suggesting the problem goes beyond Rockstar San Diego and is company-wide.

He says in Develop's Jury-style debate that the damage caused by excessive overtime can upend the out-of-work relationships developers have: 'Crunch is totally damaging, but much more so to the individuals involved. An almost failed marriage in my case. To the company the cost of crunch is very hard to define but any benefit at all is easy to measure. That's why it's such an easy decision to make for most companies. Unless there is a push back and the cost is made clear, it won't change. In my view self regulation doesn't work, and the only real solution is external regulation or utter agreement from the vast majority of staff on how to approach the matter.'

There's no easy way around the topic, but crunch is clearly damaging. When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?"

Comments

12 hour work days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackers. That still leaves you half the day for sleeping and eating!

Re:12 hour work days?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only need a good 5 minutes with the wife.

Re:12 hour work days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Wives? girlfriends? Out-of-work relationships? That is why American IT industry lost the top spot to India! Where are all the geeks momma-basement's dwellers that made America the greatest? Bring them back! No real geek need life after work hours! After-work hours are for illiterate construction workers with their hot ghetto big tit big butt wives and 10 kids!

Re:12 hour work days?

[mysidia]

You insensitive clod! Some of us have other things we value in our lives than work, sleeping, and eating.

For instance, the above provides no time for reading slashdot and commenting.

Besides the fact at R* crunch time, developers are expected to eat while simultaneously working. So even eating is not fulfilling.

And you've neglected the 3-4 hours required to commute between work and home. Either that or you're assuming that sleeping at your desk is adequate and proper sleep.

Re:12 hour work days?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

What do you mean exactly by "sleeping"? Is that a new coding technique I haven't heard about, or a framework?

Also, what are all this out of work activities you mention? I thought they were just urban^H^H^H^H^Hworkplace legends.

Re:12 hour work days?

[gadabyte]

i'm willing to bet that she wouldn't describe those 5 minutes as "good."

Re:12 hour work days?

[__aaclcg7560]

That's why I got out of the video game industry after six years. I traded in an 80 hour work week lead game tester position for a 40 hour work week help desk position where I make the same amount of money. That allows me to enjoy the remaining 16 hours each day and the full 48 hours of the weekend. What's the point of making money if you can't enjoy it?

Re:12 hour work days?

[Opportunist]

Who doesn't? It's all those mistresses that eat up all the time.

Re:12 hour work days?

[stimpleton]

Probably the motivation that made them write the letter. Females discuss everything.

Re:12 hour work days?

[furbearntrout]

Whatever you say,"Trigger"!

Re:12 hour work days?

[RobertM1968]

I only need a good 5 minutes with the wife.

You're on Slashdot, and claim to have a wife? Heck, even a girlfriend woulda been a stretch of the imagination...

Oh wait, you did say "with the wife" and not "with my wife" - so the question then remains... who's wife? ;-)

Re:12 hour work days?

[RockDoctor]

What's the point of making money if you can't enjoy it?

Heretic!

Burn the heretic!

Re:12 hour work days?

[Phoghat]

I'm sorry. I thought they were talking about roadies for rock stars. Hauling speaker cabinets is a bitch.

Re:12 hour work days?

[hoboroadie]

"Hauling speaker cabinets is a bitch."
YMMV on that, I throw Ampeg SVT cabinets over my shoulder and carry them so that the wheels don't get damaged by rough terrain. (Mostly puny) Musicians seem impressed by this, although the boxes weigh less than 300#. The only time I ever did any 18-hour days was setting up the Rose Bowl for the "Hell Freezes Over" Tour. All anyone cried about was how fucking cold it was, (Pasadena had definitely frozen over;) And only the rookies did that.

Re:12 hour work days?

[RobertM1968]

who's wife? ;-)

Who is wife? You are wife!

The correct word in this case is "whose."

Or... "Who is (your or this or borrowed) wife?"

Shortened to... "Who's wife?"

It actually does make sense in the context of the discussion. ;-)

Re:12 hour work days?

[jbezorg]

They only work part of the time. Every day but just part of the day. There are huge chunks of time when they're just asleep.

This is ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

'What makes R* crunch periods different then any other studio is that they tell you the game has to be finished in 6 months, so let's start our final push to get this awesome game out there! 6 months turns into 1 year, 1 year turns into 2.' Other comments reveal worker hopelessness and general mismanagement at the San Diego studio. This turmoil is affecting development on upcoming games as well."

He could be describing Electronic Arts. Look, the game industry has been run this way for the better part of thirty years. I worked as a coder for a couple of game companies back in the mid-eighties ... and I left for the reasons described in the summary. Never looked back. As much as I enjoyed that line of work, management practices were abusive even then. The irony is that there's no real reason for it other than poor management. We know how to manage software projects well, we know that pushing programmers too hard does not result in any real savings. The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value. That's how you treat piece workers in a factory ... and guess what, piece work is generally illegal. There's a reason for that.

Jam up your development staff the way these outfits do, and you get poor quality code. It is inevitable, Mr. Anderson. The usual chain of events involves increased QA costs, continual rework, missed deadlines and lost customers. Yet they persist in this obviously defective approach, which to me indicates that upper management is hiring sadists to run their development teams.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[AtomicSnarl]

The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value.

Hear hear! For all the "Management Science" out there, what actually does work? The Waterfall method is hugely limited in software development, and upper management without a clear view is crippling. I was once part of a project where six teams had each developed their own printer drivers for their modules because management neither thought of it or noticed the duplication. Team isolation prevented sharing as well, so six freshly re-invented wheels.

What is it they are crunching on anyway? Did somebody's new skin break the display engine? Did fixing a wall error crump edge detection or LOS calculations? Did a weapons tweak make the ballistics engine puke? Was there a pent-up demand for crawling ants lighting on a display instead of just a glow? Where are the edges of accountability for these things, and which manager is (not) paying for their miscues?

Granted, starting with a well behaved engine or other project module is always going to be risky when you push it to do new or different things. The upper echelons should be aware of this in their design plans. But flogging the oarsmen when you're completely off course is the wrong way to go -- fix the navigator!

Re:This is ridiculous.

[sopssa]

In fact he could be describing any company working in any industry. I guess people still think game development is something glamorous, something like it was as a teenager when you had lots of fun ideas (or at least ideas that were fun for you). Fact is that it's an industry like any other. And maybe it should be too - look what happened to Duke Nukem Forever after 10 years. They missed the general professional guidelines. Sure it probably was tons of fun having strippers doing their thing in motion capture room and running the place as more developer hippy place, but the product never finished.

Maybe Rockstar is too much on the other edge, but doing a huge game like GTA requires pushing people to work on it.

Which is one of the reason I never really continued more into game development - at least I can still enjoy doing it at home for my own fun.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[MemoryDragon]

Actually that attitude was exactly the reason why I never even considered going into games development.
I refuse to work in an industry which has a history of abusing its own employees up to levels where it becomes dangerous for your live.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Sycraft-fu]

I think part of the problem is that you will have a crunch time on a game. Because of the way game development works, you are almost certainly going to have a crunch time, and probalby a pretty heavy crunch time near the end. The long part of game development, where you are getting together idea, assets, an engine and such can take a number of years and be pretty normal. However, once you've got everything ready and it is time to put a game together, you are on the clock. You can't spend years in actual development, or your game will be dated when it comes out. You've got to get it all put together in short order.

Ok well that leads to some crunching. Also, in most cases you probably have a commitment to distributors and such to be ready on a certain date, and as such may have to crunch even harder near the end.

That's all well and good, and many jobs have short crunch times. My job has a crunch time at the beginning of every semester when students are coming back and professors are finally getting around to asking for software for classes.

The problem then comes in that management sees the amount of work that gets done in a crunch and says "Man, we could get so much done if we worked like that ALL THE TIME!" Of course there are tons of problems with this that are easy to see, but they ignore that.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[xaxa]

piece work is generally illegal. There's a reason for that.

Piece work is legal in the UK, so long as the worker is still paid the minimum wage.

It was easy enough to find that the same applies in the USA: Employers may pay employees on a piecerate basis, as long as they receive at least the equivalent of the required minimum hourly wage rate and overtime for hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a workweek. (Link)

Re:This is ridiculous.

[ScrewMaster]

Noticing that duplication isn't a job for "Management",

It's always management's fault. If they hire the wrong person, hire an incompetent or (as you say) simply fail to hire a necessary person they're still responsible. That's why they get the big bucks and the stock options, and the rank-and-file are lucky to get health benefits.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[MaskedSlacker]

It's NEVER management's fault. If they hire the wrong person, hire an incompetent or (as you say) simply fail to hire a necessary person THAT PERSON's still responsible. That's why they get the big bucks and the stock options, and the rank-and-file are lucky to get health benefits.

FTFY

Re:This is ridiculous.

[ScrewMaster]

It's NEVER management's fault. If they hire the wrong person, hire an incompetent or (as you say) simply fail to hire a necessary person THAT PERSON's still responsible. That's why they get the big bucks and the stock options, and the rank-and-file are lucky to get health benefits.

FTFY

Very funny, but being responsible for a group of workers, and being held accountable when your team screws up royally are two entirely different matters. So yes, in that sense I agree with you.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Synn]

What is it they are crunching on anyway?

Here's what I've seen in other industries. Boss comes up with an idea, asks how long it'll take. Management says X, so Boss says do it and marketing/sales plans events around it.

Then X doesn't happen because either management gave the Boss an unrealistic schedule or Boss kept coming back with new ideas and management didn't tell him to talk a flying leap.

So then the deadline starts to come around "We gotta demo this next month!" and the devs end up having to crunch out crappy code to make it happen.

Seen this everywhere and it's why I'm a systems guy and not a coder.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[eulernet]

He could be describing Electronic Arts. Look, the game industry has been run this way for the better part of thirty years. I worked as a coder for a couple of game companies back in the mid-eighties ... and I left for the reasons described in the summary.

I totally agree: I worked for several companies during 20 years in France, and this behavior can be found in 50% of the companies.
But it's the fault of the employees, because they don't know how to set limits.

Since most of the developers are young or inexperienced, they don't have a life outside of their work.
Once I realized this trick, I told them that I will start at a given hour, and will return home at another given hour, and I was probably the only one in my company to do that, and I became their most efficient coder.

I also remember a job interview, where the project leader told me that doing an all-nighter occasionally was very beneficial for the group (WTF !).

As much as I enjoyed that line of work, management practices were abusive even then.

It's true, but it's because:
  - the managers don't know how to lead a project (90% of the cases)
  - the managers are not coders themselves (95% of the cases)
  - the managers never finished a game before (99% of the cases)
  - the managers never encountered another way of work (100% of the cases)

The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value.

No, this is not true.
What is valued is the number of hours you do every day. It doesn't matter if you do something or not !!! I worked 8 hours a day, but was less considered than some other guys who were working 2 hours, but been present 10 hours.
Also, socializing is an important part if you are ambitious and want to be paid more, so it's necessary to spend your time chatting with the management, otherwise you'll be ignored (of course, I never did that and my salary stagnated).

In general, any project is already late as soon as it begins.
Working 12 hours every day won't help the game finish in time (and in general, it does the opposite by draining the energy out of the team).

The problem is that the games start with too much elements, instead of building progressively.
So, you have to code everything from the beginning, and that's very bad.
And worse, the final goal changes constantly.
Also, when a game is really on time (by some miracle), managers tend to add even more features, because they suppose that the programmers will easily code them.

The real solution is to stop building large games at the very beginning, and simply add one feature after another.
When the time runs out, you'll have at least something to deliver, not incomplete parts everywhere.

upper management is hiring sadists to run their development teams

No, it's just that everybody only knows this bad way of working, and nobody intends to change that: they don't have the time to try other ways !!!

This work process is so bad that 30% of the coders leave the company at the end of an exhausting project.
That's why there is so much turnover in game companies.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[PopeRatzo]

Look, the game industry has been run this way for the better part of thirty years.

Not just the game industry. I'm betting everybody who's reading this who has a job is working longer hours under worsening conditions.

There's been an all-out attack on workers since 1980. Little by little, every bit of progress that was fought for by organized labor in the first 3/4 of the 20th century is being destroyed.

The years when organized labor was strongest in the US were also our years of greatest economic growth. It's not accidental that Germany, which is one of the countries where organized labor and labor protection laws are the strongest, is also the number one exporting/manufacturing country, with exports valued at about 300% of China's.

It's also interesting that the years when we had upper-bracket tax rates over 75% were also the years that we had the greatest increase in GDP and the greatest growth in the middle-class.

Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that labor unions and taxes on the rich are bad for the economy and jobs.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[blincoln]

In fact he could be describing any company working in any industry.

Not really. There are plenty of companies out there that don't require ridiculous hours of their employees.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[drinkypoo]

Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that labor unions and taxes on the rich are bad for the economy and jobs.

Taxes on the rich are good; let's make capital gains count with all income, and there will be plenty in the general fund. Never happen though, because the rich buy the legislation. Labor unions were good, but now are a drain because they are almost all almost entirely corrupt. How many unions in the USA are run by the Mafia? I know of at least one for sure. I personally know of at least three incompetents working for one junior college who should have been canned long ago so that someone competent could take the work and serve the students by serving the faculty, but it's virtually impossible to be rid of them because they're union employees. And, I might add, I'd have had one of those jobs if they could be fired, and I discussed this situation with their manager.

Unions are the employment equivalent of feminism; it was a good thing until women got rights. Now it's just sexism. We need humanism rather than feminism, and we need labor laws for all people rather than Union protection for a few.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[omar.sahal]

I don't know about the actual working conditions at Rockstar games (or any other companies in this industry) , the article could be an accurate representation of life at this company. However there was one thing that struck me about this article, it seems unlikely to be the work of a large group of people (Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees).

The tone of the open letter was as if it had been written by an individual whose first language was not English, see below for examples.

Little is there to motivate continuation as they also have lost a free vacation week between Christmas and New Year.

Besides bonuses, financial appreciation has lacked in other aspects as well. For four consecutive years, salary raises have not adjusted properly to cover inflation.

This is the course that naturally presents itself, as either these conditions were manufactured from unawareness and actions to improve conditions will prove such innocence. Or if no action is seen after this letter, it clear that other aspects are the cause of the deteriorated conditions of Rockstar San Diego employees and must be further addressed.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[sopssa]

Just like within game development industry. Most of them don't require ridiculous hours. But there is always the single random one, regardless of industry. It just shows that game development is normal industry like any other.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[jmauro]

At least in the US, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) explictly exempts people delivering newspaper from both minumum wage and overtime laws.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[tclgeek]

"I'm betting everybody who's reading this who has a job is working longer hours under worsening conditions." You'd lose the bet. I've had half a dozen jobs over a couple decades or so and never had to work crazy hours for more than a handful of days at a stretch. My benefits today are better than they ever have been. There are many sides to the industry and not all of them are bad.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[ScrewMaster]

Sounds like you are in Management. What does Management do all day? 1. Dream about huge salary increases 2. Order people around without any thought to the order they lack 3. Hunt for a new job on JobFinditForMe.com There should be fewer managers and more coders. ID software was entirely coder driven. Now look where they are. Micromanaged to the shithole. Rage will suck.

I think you misunderstood the tone of my post. I was NOT saying "Aw, it's always management's fault" (as in, they're being unfairly blamed), I was being literal. It is always management's fault because it is their responsibility to hire the right people for the right positions, provide them the resources they need to do their jobs properly, and also to make sure that they're on track and are, in fact, doing their jobs. If that doesn't happen, it doesn't matter how competent or otherwise the actual engineers may be ... the project is likely doomed to failure from the outset. And no, I don't work in management, but given my age and the way engineering jobs are leaving this country I may find myself in management eventually. I'm trying to stave that off as long as possible of course. I like what I do for a living ... whether or not that will continue to be of value is another issue entirely.

Besides, I'm really not into herding cats.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[PopeRatzo]

I've had half a dozen jobs over a couple decades or so and never had to work crazy hours for more than a handful of days at a stretch.

You're the exception, Ms Palin.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[ArmagedionTime]

Tell GM and Chrysler that labor unions do a lot of good...

Re:This is ridiculous.

[PopeRatzo]

and we need labor laws for all people rather than Union protection for a few.

The problem is that the corporations aren't going to give you those rights out of the goodness of their hearts.

We got the five-day work week, and sick days, and safe workplaces, and fair pay because people fought for it and bled for it. A lot of working people trying to organize got their heads broken by off-duty cops working for the corporations.

I'm not saying that there aren't people who are doing bad jobs and not getting fired. Some are protected by unions. Some are protected by being the boss' nephew. Some are protected by having even more incompetent managers.

But every, single American worker has benefited directly from the labor movement. There's not one improvement to wages or working conditions that would have happened without unions. Even in "right to work" (sic) states, it's the union contracts that serve as the model for employment standards.

And most important, organized labor is good for business. As I said above, Germany is one of the most labor friendly countries in the world, and they've had tremendous success in the world economy, exporting more goods than even China, which has no protection for workers.

Men didn't just decide one day to give women the right to vote. The US government didn't just decide one day to be fair and end slavery. And corporations aren't going to give you fair wages or decent working conditions out of the goodness of their hearts. Somebody had to go out and fight, and bleed and get their head beaten in to get them for you.

Finally, you shouldn't expect the government to pass any "labor laws for all people", especially now that corporations will have unfettered ability to use their profits to influence elections.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[dosius]

Sounds like what happened to the Apple ///, 30 years ago. Some things never change...

-uso.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[poopdeville]

I've had half a dozen jobs over a couple decades or so and never had to work crazy hours for more than a handful of days at a stretch.

WTF? I've never pulled an all-nighter for work. And I never will.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

I found my current job by looking for an important position in a traditional and deeply unsexy industry, where most people don't want to work.

I haven't been required to work more than 40ish hours in 2 years or more, and because of the financial crisis overtime is _forbidden_.

It's a supply and demand thing.

Work in a "sexy" job that everybody wants (like gaming or Google) and supply/demand says you're gunna get screwed.

Work in an unsexy industry and supply/demand is in your favour, and you get treated well.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[ScrewMaster]

The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value. What is valued is the number of hours you do every day.

No, this is not true.

That's why I said "simple metrics like". Counting hours, counting lines of code, counting issues resolved ... it's all the same thing, an attempt to quantify a programmer's productivity, efficiency and value to the company by measures that can be grasped by non-technical management types. The problem is, they don't even begin to account for all the more or less intangible aspects to a good programmer's personality that cannot be so easily encapsulated by a couple of integer values.

For example, are you the kind of coder that will get stuck on a problem and beat it to death until you solve it by yourself (or fail to do so) wasting an incredible amount of time in the process ... or have you learned to network with other knowledgeable individuals, people that could dig you out of your mental hole in seconds if you just had the wit to ask them? Does your experience as a programmer, or your awareness of the company's institutional knowledge help you write more efficient code more quickly than someone who isn't so blessed? Are you skilled at documentation? Can you type? Do you constantly look for ways to improve your own development processes? Do you maintain a defensive mindset and thus have fewer errors (and thus fewer QC exceptions and less re-work) than others in your organization? There are many ways to be more productive without spending more time, and not all of them involve matters that can be easily put onto a spreadsheet. The programmer who writes fewer lines of code per unit time may indeed be a waste of oxygen ... or he may be someone who's advancing your project an order of magnitude more quickly than others in your organization. You simply cannot tell that from the number of hours worked, or the number of lines written, or any other equally pointless metric.

Now, a good manager can and should be aware of such details in the people for whom he is responsible, and should make an effort to understand why some programmers perform better than others. Furthermore, he should encourage such positive behavior in those developers who don't already exhibit it, thereby spreading the charm. I happen to work for such a manager right now, and he's the reason why I've been at the same job for so long. But that's pretty rare, it seems. Certainly Rockstar doesn't get it.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[dunkelfalke]

So the labour unions are somehow responsible for GM and Chrysler making cars that suck? Most workers at VW are unionised, but somehow VW still manages to become the largest automaker.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Chelloveck]

What is valued is the number of hours you do every day. It doesn't matter if you do something or not !!! I worked 8 hours a day, but was less considered than some other guys who were working 2 hours, but been present 10 hours.

Amen. I found the same thing when I worked at Konami in the late '90s. The guys on schedule who went home at a reasonable hour were looked down upon; the guys behind schedule but who were in the office all night got the praise. One guy had a cot under his desk and went home about twice a week to shower. But the quality of his code was absolute crap. It was supposedly C++ code. That's the compiler we used, anyway... I pretty-printed his main() function once, with 1-space indents. The middle of the loop had more than 80 columns of leading whitespace! And he's the one who got the management recognition, not the people who wrote solid code the first time around. I would have sworn that the company's motto was "Work harder, not smarter."

No, it's just that everybody only knows this bad way of working, and nobody intends to change that: they don't have the time to try other ways !!!

That is so, so true. It's a great industry to get out of.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Arccot]

I think part of the problem is that you will have a crunch time on a game. Because of the way game development works, you are almost certainly going to have a crunch time, and probalby a pretty heavy crunch time near the end. The long part of game development, where you are getting together idea, assets, an engine and such can take a number of years and be pretty normal. However, once you've got everything ready and it is time to put a game together, you are on the clock. You can't spend years in actual development, or your game will be dated when it comes out. You've got to get it all put together in short order.

This is only true because it's an arms race all of the development companies are involved in. If one company stopped the policy, they quickly wouldn't be able to compete with the shiny and new titles the other companies can put out. If they all stopped the policy together, everyone could compete on a level and more humane playing field. And we as consumers would probably get better games, if not quite so cool looking.

But good luck with that.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Arccot]

Look, the game industry has been run this way for the better part of thirty years.

Not just the game industry. I'm betting everybody who's reading this who has a job is working longer hours under worsening conditions.

I've found a pretty effective way to avoid getting hired for positions under these conditions. When you go in for a face-to-face interview, look around a bit. Are people relaxed? Do they greet each other? Actually smile? Or does the guy who is interviewing you look like he'll go postal with one more thing going wrong?

It sounds simple, but it's really quite effective. And I rarely see anyone coming in for an interview actually take the time to figure out if it's a place they would like to work.

Also, ASK about extra hours. Begin setting limits even before the interview is over. "There are, unfortunately, a few companies out there that do set unreasonable time requirements for coders. Certainly, it's occasionally necessary to do so when a deadline isn't met or some problems come up. *Smile* So I always ask, over the last year, roughly how often have you needed a developer to stay late or work weekends?" Follow up with something like: "That's good to hear. I've seen too many developers burn out young or produce less than stellar code because they couldn't handle their workload. I want to be a developer for quite a long time to come. *Smile*" A good manager will understand its an astute question, and you'll stand out. A bad one will misunderstand and you won't get called back, no matter the answer.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[yabos]

You do realize that being over stressed is dangerous, increases risk of heart attack, decreases life expectancy, etc.. You see, when you are stressed, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol, both of which are detrimental to health if the levels are elevated for long periods.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[gad_zuki!]

Without overworked half-asleep developers how will we have amusing errors like this:

http://www.failcomputer.com/?p=5

or ever see stuff like this again???

http://www.failcomputer.com/?p=66

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Nursie]

You'd lose that bet.
 
I work 37 hours a week. A few more (up to 50) when absolutely necessary. I think there were four weeks I did that last year.
 
Our software is doing great, the company is doing great and I'm getting paid well, raises and a promotion last year.
 
I'd recommend you find other work. Or maybe move to europe :)

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Omnifarious]

Yes, dangerous to their lives. I know of several people who ended up with severe health problems from overwork. Strokes, heart attacks, that kind of thing.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[mlievore]

Everyone talks like this happens only to IT industry! It happens everywhere. I work in the windows and door manufacturing industry that was a normal hours for us 12-hr day 6 days a week and then sometimes 7 days. So boo hoo to you people I've been living it for the past 5 years. Yeah during that time i had to go see a therapist for a while but i got over it. It may have created a rough spot or two in my marriage but again we got over it. So put your chin up high and take like a man and get over it it called work nobody like it but we do cause it needs to be done.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Grishnakh]

Don't forget the negative effects of failed marriages. Happily married people live longer than lonely, divorced people.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[timmarhy]

while i agree with you 100%, this approach doesn't always work. When you ask about hours, but can underestimate the hours and play down the over time. and if your a star candidate that they really want, they won't care if you don't like the over time because they will just offer you the job and try work you like a dog anyway.

I've fought the over time battle before. I got called into the managers office and was told there was no more over time, my response was "sweet so i don't need to come in this weekend?", no no you still need to come in. i blinked for a moment and then asked point blank "do you expect me to work without pay?" to which i recieved a talk about how i'm being put on a salary (which was exactly the same as my wage).

starting the weekend i never answered my phone after hours if it was the work number, and never showed for anything after hours even if i was asked, and i was always at my desk dead on time and out the door right on 5:30pm. while i was at work i still put in the same effort as before so as to not give management any ammo against me.

and you know what? they NEVER said a word about me ignoring phone calls or over time requests. i really expected them to say something the first few times i failed to show up on a saturday, but they never said boo about it. I think basiclly once i called their bluff they gave up on the idea.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[drinkypoo]

But every, single American worker has benefited directly from the labor movement. There's not one improvement to wages or working conditions that would have happened without unions.

Reading comprehension failure. I explicitly stated that Unions were formerly positive.

And most important, organized labor is good for business.

That's not what we have now. What we have now is unions under the control of right bastards who are getting rich on mediocrity.

Even in "right to work" (sic) states, it's the union contracts that serve as the model for employment standards.

But in at-will states, workers are just fucked.

Men didn't just decide one day to give women the right to vote.

No shit? The rest of the stuff you said in the sentence is all true, but it changes nothing I said.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[khchung]

Not just the game industry. I'm betting everybody who's reading this who has a job is working longer hours under worsening conditions.

Not me. Why? Because I know where to set my limits, and I communicate very explicitly about it during job interviews. Abusive managers won't hire me (good for both of us!), and if my current boss no longer respect that limit, I start looking for another job.

It is that simple, no union required.

Look guys, a company is not a family, it exists only to make money, not to babysit its employees. If you won't take care of yourself, don't expect other people in your company to take care of you.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Helen O'Boyle]

Grandparent MemoryDragon wrote:
I refuse to work in an industry which has a history of abusing its own employees up to levels where it becomes dangerous for your live.

Parent post replied:
Are you serious? Dangerous to their lives? [...] THEY ARE DESK JOCKEYS, get some fucking perspective people, for fucks sake.

The author of the parent post clearly gets out too much. :-) Lucky him.

For the benefit of those who've never had the experience, I'll explain. After you've done a 390 hour month followed by a 340 hour month followed by a 370 hour month, in an effort to complete something that will save your employer hundreds of millions of dollars (don't ask, please), you are tired enough that yes, your well-being and possibly your life is at risk.

This isn't an over-dramatic comment, just reality. It's difficult to eat well, it's impossible to sleep well, and the combination wears you down. You start doing things like misinterpreting traffic signals when crossing the street, your physical systems go into overdrive (high blood pressure, heart racing, etc.) because your body doesn't have the chance to adequately recover at night, and sometimes you aren't the best judge of whether it's safe enough to try to get yourself home from the office or whether you'd better crash on the floor for a few hours before navigating roads.

I've done the 90-100 hour weeks for months at a time. I've done the 72+ hour weeks for years at a time, after the 90-100 hour weeks, with no break in between. And I haven't been in the game industry since 1984. Sometimes it's just part of the job. The trouble (as is mentioned in the article) is when it doesn't end in I've had the distinct pleasure of having management srecommend to me that I go out on disability if I wanted a break from the 72+ hour weeks and months of 90-100 hour weeks, because they simply weren't going to assign me only the amount of work I could get done in 40 hours.

[ FYI, I lost significant golden handcuffs when I left that employer. I wonder if that's at all a factor at Rockstar. ]

And for those of you who think this is just another sign of how screwed up the US is, the Japanese have coined a term, karoshi, for death-by-overwork in their country.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[chiguy]

Having worked in the industry, I agree with all the above.

But I think you give Managers and Coders too much credit.

The reason this kind of abuse happens routinely is Managers can get away with it and Coders let them.

This is just the Stanford Prisoners' Experiment played out in real life.

If you don't like the situation, stop playing your roles. And I promise you, the Managers love their roles.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Hurricane78]

I’m sorry? The waterfall method it deprecated for what, 20 years now?
Nowadays, everyone works with the spiral model. Which works nicely, and is in fact the only model I know, that actually works.
Even Jesse Schell (chairman of the International Game Developers Association and professor at the Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center) does teach it in his book.

If you know this, you know, why most games are sold in the state they are. Development works like this:
1. Define what’s still missing from it, until it becomes salable.
2. Develop those things.
3. If it’s “good enough”, you’re done. Else, rinse and repeat.
4. PROFIT.

The problem is, that with big game businesses, point 1 not defined by the question, if it’s a good game. But solely by the question how to maximize money.
So as soon as you bought it, who cares if it runs at all? As soon as you buy the next game too. When you see, how people vote for the same two bullshit parties over and over again, you know how many will stop buying. Nobody except maybe you.

GTA: SA and GTA IV perfectly prove this point.

GTA: SA: A friend of mine bought it. I downloaded it. I installed the crack, and it ran.
My friend was not so lucky. It crashed before the title screen. R* offered not patch. Not even a statement.
We went on gamecopyworld.com, and the crackers not only provided patches for the four places where it could crash before getting to play. No, they also offered a fix for the horrible bug that made the game look like a mutant urchin on nVidia cards. (One of the 3 points of every triangle, was wildly misplaced, moving around in 3d space.)
You can imagine that he was very pissed.

GTA IV: Upon installation (we both did not buy it, as a punishment, and are proud of it), we both had a input lag of up to five seconds! Imagine accelerating the car, releasing the button because nothing happened, and then two seconds later seeing it accelerate. Yay.
Also we already had misplaced flickering polygons in the intro! Before the game even started. (nVidia there, ATi/AMD here.)
The game is also horribly badly developed. It stutters and is slow, despite having really crappy graphics. Hell, I installed comparable games, and they ran smooth as butter, despite having much more impressive graphics. I later found out, that they ported the game from the PS3 in a horribly bad fashion. You might know that the PS3 requires massive vector-multiprocessor-optimized design. Well, the result is, that the game requires at least 4 cores, to run properly. No matter how good your graphics card is.
Sorry, but that is just a massive failure in porting the game. Unlike GTA III, which was a pretty sweet port, back then.
It’s clear that this was a business decision, to quickly get the game out.
Again, the only thing that helped, were patches, provided by crackers.

But EA is far worse. Ask anyone who tried managing his add-ons in The Sims (e.g. finding the proper way to install/uninstall/update that piece of shit.) can confirm that.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Hurricane78]

A honest question:
Are yo a masochist?

You seem very eager, to support a sense of reality, that hurts yourself.

Please stop spreading mindsets into the people, that hurt us and yourself. Not even if it’s meant funny.
Because in the end, the reason people adhere to such bullshit, is also the fault of people like you, who constantly feed it to them as the actual reality. (Which it is not!)

Re:This is ridiculous.

[StuartHankins]

I refuse to work in an industry which has a history of abusing its own employees up to levels where it becomes dangerous for your live.

Gaming industry? No problem! HR will just add a cheat code so you start the game with more lives.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[MaskedSlacker]

A honest question:
Are yo a masochist?

Only if masochist is a synonym for karma whore.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Lemmy Caution]

The entire game industry is like this.

The entire industry.

Which means if you want to walk away, you have to walk to another career entirely.

And they get away with it because there's a huge pool of young, dumb, eager workers streaming out of universities, eager to do "anything" to work in the game industry. And, conveniently, the industry is supporting education at places like DigiPen to make it difficult for this swelling labor pool to find work outside of that industry easily.

One reason why most videogames are so insipid is that they are created by these one-dimensional workaholics who have almost no real experience of the world outside of the game industry, too.

I think the answer is lawsuits and unions, with regulations a distant third.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[MemoryDragon]

If you wanna have a stroke or heart attack in your mid thirties then do it... Constant overwork and stress causes burnout, strokes, heart attack, due to constant adrenaline being too high and other things it does to your body.
Sport helps to some degree to lower that again, but it is hard to so sport if you are in a constrant crunch dreadmill.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[eulernet]

I would have sworn that the company's motto was "Work harder, not smarter."

Totally right.

BTW, when a company tells you that they are like a family (yes, it happened a few times !), you can be sure that they'll make you work like a slave.

It's not: Welcome to our family
it's: Welcome to Hell !

Re:This is ridiculous.

[eulernet]

The reason this kind of abuse happens routinely is Managers can get away with it and Coders let them.

Yes, you are right, but managers will only hire people that they can enslave.

And this explains why the coders are so young and inexperienced.
The coders still believe that making games is a passion, so why not spend all their time on their work ? It's so fun !

Re:This is ridiculous.

[eulernet]

it's all the same thing, an attempt to quantify a programmer's productivity

In my 20 years experience, no manager ever used metrics for code, since none of them ever coded.
Their best criterion is your amount of presence.
Working 10 hours in a corner won't help you either, you have to brag about it, and criticize people that are present during less hours than you.
It's a pretty wicked system, where the more victimized will criticize the less victimized.

Now, a good manager can and should be aware of such details in the people for whom he is responsible, and should make an effort to understand why some programmers perform better than others.

Managers don't care about coders, they have a team of 40+ people (and in general, half of the team has a personality problem), so they really can't concentrate on a few people, or it would take all their time.
And for them, coding is like magic, so they tend to prefer artists, because they can grasp their work easily (how could you understand the beauty of a few lines of code if you are not programmer yourself ?).

Managers are so stressed (because of the deadline, or because if the project fails, the company dies), so they will pass their stress to all the team.

BTW, who cares of quality, the project is already so late !

I happen to work for such a manager right now

Wow, you are so lucky, but let me guess: you are not working into the game industry anymore.

When coding games, I once encountered such a manager, but the company went down because the project was so huge they were never able to finish it (it was so obvious when I entered this project, I quit after one month).

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The problem then comes in that management sees the amount of work that gets done in a crunch and says "Man, we could get so much done if we worked like that ALL THE TIME!" Of course there are tons of problems with this that are easy to see, but they ignore that."

I've heard of this happening with management for an accounts dept. Talk about stupid. In this case, it meant less employees at end of month to do the crunch work - until of course it just got unworkable. Cue serious issues due to backlog in accounts. In this case this was just one symptom of a very broken approach to the entire operation of the company. I can't really even highlight the line of work, but lets just say the ordinary plebs that were customers (i.e. people on the street - not corporate customers) got to experience firsthand the results of this. Unfortunately the company had a fixed contract for providing "services" so people could only manage a certain amount of boycott (the losses from which only encouraged the company to be even more outrageous).

The inherent problem is that capitalism doesn't work without strong regulation. You can argue that those abusing it will end up crashing and burning and everything will sort itself out in a fashion akin to the natural world or something, but a) this can take a while to happen, b) this causes misery during the process, c) it may not happen, d) as we've seen, there can be huge reprecussions to such crash+burns.

The only answer is to force people to play nice. Obviously this has many problems too, but there has been ample history to draw on in avoiding bad regulation, and of course we do have the advantage that governments can be thrown out (admittedly more so in some countries than others). Also here in Europe, the European Union performs as a sort of collaboration for governments to all have input into regulation, plus there is strong influence from better run countries like Germany and the Nordic countries. Unfortunately the UK also has a lot of influence, but fortunately less so now that people see how broken their model is (only good for short-term advantage). The other problem, which we have here in Ireland, is even ordinary people objecting to having to play nice (or do things "properly"). Particularly absurd given that regulation is only half-effective in this country (lack of enforcement, or more particularly, inability to deal with such widescale flouting of it) and those determined to ignore them can usually get away with it (and certainly at the time). However, we also have the problem in Ireland of people managing to get *official* leeway to ignore regulation.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[eulernet]

Right...and raped women are responsible for their rape.

That's a very bad analogy.
There is no violence from the managers (in case of a rape, I doubt that this is the case).

A few people here already explained why the employees were partly responsible for their enslavement.
I'll give you some other arguments.

On one side, you have young guys who never worked previously (or who know only the game industry) and who dream about writing games (because they love them).
On the other side, you have companies that need to release a game at a given date (yes, it's for the next september !).
The only way that these companies know is to pressure these guys so that they will work days and nights until the game is finished.

Now, take the place of the coders, they don't even think that there is another option than to work 24/7.

It's the job of the managers to realize this, but the managers have to maintain a team of 40+ people (and frankly, managing people is not really their priority, since they concentrate on the technical problems, like making sure that the graphic artists deliver their part on time, that the music will fit with the game, etc...).
So, we have now a whole team of people working like crazy to deliver a product.

I'll take a real case: Ubisoft China on Splinter Cell.
Ubisoft wanted to reduce the cost of their games, since the french and canadian divisions have a lot of well paid people.
Why not try China ?
For the same amount of money, they can hire plenty of engineers (and by plenty, I mean 10 times more than the occidental divisions).
Since they are engineers, it will be easy for them to write games, nothing could go wrong, right ?
And if there is a problem, they could always hire more people.

So the development starts. After several months, they realize that the engineers never worked on games, and have no idea how to make one.
They hire more workforce, since they hope that within all these employees, a few of them will be able to do something meaningful (I won't tell you that all the employees already work 24/7 at this stage).
A few months pass, and the problem is still unsolved, except that the release date approaches.
Now, Ubisoft realized that the game won't finish in time, so the solution was to reinforce the team with a lot of experienced people from France and Canada (and yes, the cost skyrocketed here).

When the game is finished, all the tension disappears in an instant, and a lot of people ask themselves why it was such a nighmare to work on this project. They hate the project, but they have no solution to change the situation.

What is the lesson to learn ?
No, it's not that chinese coders are unable to write games.
The lesson to learn is that it's absolutely useless to work 24/7 if you have no idea how to finish the game.
Just take a pause, and realize that coding the game needs to be done little by little, not everything at the same time (that is what the managers all think: I need to have all the code ready so that I can start scripting the levels, or for graphists: I need all the first level to start scripting).

Re:This is ridiculous.

[PopeRatzo]

I explicitly stated that Unions were formerly positive.

"Formerly" is wrong.

Right now, today, this morning, unions are helping keep wages up and working conditions better.

If unions disappear tomorrow, you will be worse off.

What we have now is unions under the control of right bastards who are getting rich on mediocrity.

That's the corporate line. Can you cite specifics?

Re:This is ridiculous.

[tux_rocker]

Unions are the employment equivalent of feminism; it was a good thing until women got rights. Now it's just sexism. We need humanism rather than feminism, and we need labor laws for all people rather than Union protection for a few.

But still, when your rights according to labor law are violated, who is going to defend you? And do you understand all of labor law actually?

Having unions that can help you in a conflict with your employer is very useful, even when worker rights have been established and the time of activism is over.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[drinkypoo]

That's the corporate line. Can you cite specifics?

The SF plumber's union is known to be a Mafia operation. The people running the union that kept the formerly mentioned community college employees employed even though they are undermotivated (probably since they're so hard to fire) and underskilled are VERY well-paid; they keep their position by making sure that the school administration is likewise VERY well-paid, while departments struggle to provide instructors for classes.

Specifics are trivial to come up with if you are not blinded by starry-eyed idealism. Labor unions do nothing for non-members but harm them. Abuse abounds. (forget the source; I'd link the original story, but it seems to have been disappeared, whether through malice or incompetence at the bellingham herald, I cannot tell from here.)

Re:This is ridiculous.

[TheRaven64]

I wish I could find it now, but I read a study a while ago that said programmer productivity peaked at around 20 hours per week. If you work more than that, the extra time is eaten up fixing bugs that you wouldn't have introduced if you'd been working less. A 37 hour week gives you 17 hours for meetings, coffee, and reading Slashdot.

If you make the developers work 60 hour weeks, then they're going to be tired, they're going to be making mistakes, and even if they do get the product out on time you're going to have to spend a lot more on writing patches later.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[drinkypoo]

But still, when your rights according to labor law are violated, who is going to defend you?

Not a union, because I don't belong to one. In case you didn't notice, minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation for many years. Union members, however, tend to make substantially more than minimum wage. The reality is that no one who is not a union member is benefiting from unions any more, and in fact, may well be harmed by it as I have been, with slackers consuming available positions and preventing me from getting work for which I would otherwise have been hired immediately in at least one occasion. Unions protect mediocrity and corruption and harm motivated, scrupulous workers whether they are union members or not.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[conureman]

"China's exports per person are still much lower than those of Germany, which has a much smaller population of 80 million people. China sells low-tech goods such as shoes, toys and furniture, while Germany exports machinery and other higher-value products."
That's 1.2 Trillion Apples to 1.17 Trillion Oranges, IMO. I don't think the Chinese worker's lives bear much superficial resemblance to the German's, but that's just a wild-ass-guess. I own a few shares of Tandy, and I quit doing business with Radio Shack, and 7-11 too, once I figured out how those Texas Corporations do business. YMMV, of course.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[4D6963]

The really puzzling aspect of this is, whereas scientific management has been used for over a century in a lot of sectors of industry in order to optimise productivity, in software development, an industry that generates probably hundreds of billion dollars a year, it seems as if no one bothered to try and figure out what makes productivity peak.

It's a decades old industry, the richest man in the world for a whole decade built his empire on that, yet even at that guy's company you probably couldn't find a manager at any level who could tell you of methodically determined ways to optimise the productivity of their workers! It's like saying "well, doesn't work too bad for us, not sure if it could work better, probably could... Meh, who cares!". Makes you almost wonder what good managers are, most might as well pick their deadlines by throwing darts at a calendar, and have you spend more time at the office even if you're spending half your day trying not to close your eyes than be there less but be more productive. A lot of managers still base their planning on the idea that man-hours mean anything in software engineering! Don't you have to know anything about management to be a manager or do people just improvise themselves one?

Re:This is ridiculous.

[master_p]

No, it's not a very bad analogy. It's a very good analogy, because the management literally rape those people that are interested in making computer games. It's the management's fault that they fail to guide a project so as that it does not go over budget and that nobody works 12 hours per day.

What you said just reinforces my view.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[TheLink]

The problem is the respawn time.

I heard it's a bit like CS in that you have to wait till everything is over before you respawn.

If it were up to me it'll be more like Team Fortress :).

The graphics are pretty realistic though.

But maybe there should be some sort of glow and sound effect when you get a promotion or level up some other thing ;).

Re:This is ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey it's a clue, I bet your mom didn't pay you much to do the dishes, and it has to be done her way... And dad is gonna be pretty upset when miss the deadline for mowing the lawn ;).

Re:This is ridiculous.

[PetoskeyGuy]

This is only true because it's an arms race all of the development companies are involved in. If one company stopped the policy, they quickly wouldn't be able to compete with the shiny and new titles the other companies can put out

If what everyone is saying is true, then crunch time is counter productive.

Shouldn't the 40 hour a week people produce higher quality, better code on schedule and eventually overtake the crunchers?

Re:This is ridiculous.

[PopeRatzo]

"conservablogs"?

That's your citation? Really?

Re:This is ridiculous.

[drinkypoo]

That's your citation? Really?

Considering the source is well and good, but you can find other sites reporting on the same news story. If the original story were where it belongs (at the original URL, as it would be at any organization competent at website maintenance) then I would have cited it directly.

If you don't like my reference, comb the blog entry for useful search terms, and put google into operation yourself. I am a liberal by definition, and would not have cited such a resource if I thought it was a jerkoff waste of time. It may well be, but your incredulity don't make it so.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[MrResistor]

BTW, when a company tells you that they are like a family (yes, it happened a few times !), you can be sure that they'll make you work like a slave.

Right... Family... you know, those people you can get to do work for you for free.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[McLuhanesque]

Absolutely correct. Been there, done that, had the heart attack at 40.

As I was laying in the hospital bed, wired for sound, my then-five-year-old daughter came in to see me. I will never forget the look of horror on her face when she saw her Daddy laying there, looking like he was one step away from dead. I decided at that moment never to go back. I walked away from a six-figure income to a zero-figure income, got my life together, wrote a book, earned a PhD, and appreciate that there is more to life than working all the time, especially when it's only to make other people rich.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[DarthVain]

I bet they are also responsible for the USA health care system which is what has crippled the auto industry with aging pensioners.

Clearly it is the fault of the unions that health insurance in the States is crazy and that they have the most expensive health care and drugs in the world.

The unions were just the canary in the coal mine.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[cheekyboy]

75% taxes are evil evil evil. So if the 25% ON TOP of 50% costs me say 30k in taxes, I will be willing to spend $5k on a jewish accountant to minimize that by 25k.

All that 75% does is put a ceiling on 'cash' salary, and places the rest of renumuation into under the counter 'gifts'.

Anything higher than 40% is pure THEFT. Governments dont need that much revenue, if they do, then they are too big and wasteful.

Unless the 75% rate is for huge salaries, such as 3m dollars, then its a mafia style theft. Worse than mafia.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Actually it's pretty rare for a game development studio to NOT require ridiculous hours.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[DrgnDancer]

And as has been pointed out in lots of places. Sitting at a desk 12 hours a day isn't exactly a healthy lifestyle. Ignoring for the moment things like stress, poor diet (since they rarely have time to eat properly), and such; a sedentary lifestyle is bad for you. Now an argument can easily be made that they would probably just use the extra time at home to sit in front of the TV/computer, but at least then it's their choice to be unhealthy.

It's not quite the same as a danger to their lives, per se, but it's sure not a recipe for a longer healthier life.

Re:This is ridiculous.

[DrgnDancer]

Is it your manager fault that you couldn't say "no, I won't work late tonight"? In the extreme case of the manager simply saying, "You will be fired if you don't work late every night", is it the manager's fault you don't go find a new job? I don't think anyone is saying that management doesn't share in the blame, perhaps even possessing the lion's share of the blame; but in the end you are responsible for you. You can blame the manager if he makes you work late once. You can blame the manager if he makes you work late for a month. You can blames the manager if he makes you work late for a year. You have no one to blame but yourself if after the first two to three months you haven't thought, "Ya know, I wonder what monster.com has in the area of software development."

In general the people doing software development for game companies are among the best in the field. They can find another job. It may take a month, or a few months, but surely it's better than 70 hour weeks.

How to get management to listen

[Anonymous Coward]

When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?

They'll address it when people stop standing for it. If their developers quit, and they can't find replacements, then things will change.

Unfortunately, my experience in the industry has taught me that most developers are willing to put up with enormous amounts of crap so as "not to rock the boat".

Re:How to get management to listen

[tomhudson]

Unfortunately, my experience in the industry has taught me that most developers are willing to put up with enormous amounts of crap so as "not to rock the boat".

Unfortunately, most developers are too brainwashed | chickenshit | dysfunctional to unionize. "Oh, but our job is different." "We're not blue-collar workers!" "We'd lose our independence!"

There, fixed it for you.

There's nothing stopping workers from unionizing except themselves.

Re:How to get management to listen

[91degrees]

They don't even need to quit! Just refuse to work the overtime!

Most places require some reason to fire people. Not working overtime for free isn't a valid reason. Nor will most managers be willing to have to go to the effort of finding a replacement and dealing with ramp up time.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

And then we can have the same great representation that the auto industry workers have, ensuring that their jobs are safe and profitable. And we can start approaching games in the same useful and productive ways that teachers approach teaching their students.

Sounds great! Where's the piece of paper for signups? I want to know so I can burn it.

A union is a monopoly by another name, and anyone who thinks that unions have anything to do with good products, good business, or sane long-term strategies is a fucking moron. Unlike auto construction or teaching*, video games can be done by tiny independent self-owned teams, and there's nothing stopping people from quitting and forming their own game studio.

* of course this is largely thanks to the teacher's union itself

Re:How to get management to listen

[phantomfive]

No way man, not this developer. Unions just give you someone else who is 'in charge' of you. Not only do you have to pay union dues, half the time those union dues are spent on political purposes you don't agree with and have no say over.

Unions are about power-struggles. Unions are great in industries where workers have no way to answer the power of the boss. It gives them a chance to end on equal footing. In the programming industry, I DO have a way to answer the power of the boss: I find another job. And it works way better for me than a union ever would.

Now, you may not like that solution and would prefer a union; that's fine. But some of us have our own reasons to not want a union, and just because we disagree with you doesn't mean we are brainwashed | chickenshit | dysfunctional.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to unionize to fix this problem. You just have to quit and go somewhere else if the terms are not acceptable to you. Obviously plenty of IT shops are not like that. The one I work for is not, for example. There are occasional crunch periods, generally not more than 2 or 3 weeks each year. I also don't make the rockstar salaries, but I consider my pay to be completely fair for the job I'm employed to do. If I didn't, why on earth would I work there, when there are thousands of other choices?

Look, it's a two way street. I'm offering a job, you want a job: if we agree on the terms, great! If not, great too - we each go our separate ways. Nobody is *making* you take my offer, and nobody is *making* me take yours. We're both free to enter or not enter into some agreement, and we're both free to leave it at any time. That's how the true value of labor is determined: based on where the supply and demand curves intersect.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

Braid had one artist. AI War had no artists. World of Goo had one artist. I don't know how many artists Osmos had, but I'm guessing it's one or fewer. Machinarium claims to be six, but most of them are under "Additional", and I suspect the bulk was done by two people.

I worked on a full commercial PS2 game, Everquest: Champions of Norrath. We had seven artists and five coders.

No, we weren't going to be able to make something like God of War 3 or World of Warcraft, but don't underestimate the strength of small teams. If you spend a tenth as much on development, you only need to sell a tenth as many copies to break even.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Timothy Brownawell]

When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?

They'll address it when people stop standing for it.

They'll address it when they get the memo (assuming they take time to actually read it).

Re:How to get management to listen

[xaxa]

They know that the unions WILL turn against them, cut good things like flexible hours and telecommuting, etc

Does this happen in the USA?

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

Yes, of course there's a lot of bad managers out there (see Sturgeon's Law) but there are also very good ones. The same is, naturally, true of unions, except that unions are far harder to remove if they turn bad than managers are.

Assuming the top leadership of the company is sane, of course, and if it isn't, you have bigger problems on your hands anyway.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying unions are bad is like saying government is bad, or society is bad, or bosses are bad, or fat/sugar is bad... or any other binary worldview statement ...
The bad stuff is found in the extremes. Too much unions = total focus on employees = bad. No unions at all = total lack of focus on employees = bad.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anpheus]

You find another job? You make it sound so easy!

The auto-workers can do the same thing. They can just "find another job", and it's so easy anyone can do it!

Unions have a place, but they too can become a monopoly. Would you be OK with joining a union as long as there were multiple programming unions, competing in how they represented employees and negotiated contracts? IMO, Unions should be subject to the same anti-trust laws that corporations are. There's too little competition.

Re:How to get management to listen

[91degrees]

True. But I know of exactly one company that seems to have read that memo.

And while it's only anecdotal evidence, they don't seem to have suffered as a result.

Re:How to get management to listen

[mdwh2]

You don't have to unionize to fix this problem. You just have to quit and go somewhere else if the terms are not acceptable to you.

Indeed - and it seems to be particularly a problem in the games industry, rather than development in general.

I guess the problem is that there's a larger supply of people willing to work for crap conditions in the games industry, because of the attraction of it being "fun". Although then again, I remember a recent story in the UK where the games industry were whining about a skills shortage. Of course, they had to cheek to blame the Universities. The reality is that there are plenty of us with the skills to work in the games industry, we just go elsewhere where the pay's better, and we're not treated like shit.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Angst Badger]

If you're going to effectively refute the charge of being brainwashed, perhaps you should cite some of your actual experience with unions.

My experience with unions doesn't jibe with your description of them. I was a union member in a west coast school system that I developed software for, and the dues were trivial and I never once had a union official telling me what to do. About the only thing you got right was that the union did attempt to influence local politics, but guess what? Most companies do that as well, and they sure as hell don't ask their employees what they think about it.

What I got out of the deal was decent pay, decent hours, and full health care coverage and a really nice pension plan.

This is not to say that unions don't have drawbacks as well, but everything involves a tradeoff. For a good picture of what life was like without unions, see the 19th century. Or, apparently, Rockstar.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Blakey Rat]

I know I can personally negotiate a much better contract than any union can on my behalf.

The *only* time I'll support unionization if it joining the union is not a condition of employment-- i.e. if it's completely voluntary. Anything else I see as un-American and despicable.

(Of course, unions would never allow that since it would demonstrate my first point very nicely.)

Re:How to get management to listen

[mdwh2]

Surely it depends on the location - e.g., in US states with "at will" employment, can't they fire you for any reason (unless it's explicitly illegal, e.g., illegal discrimination)?

Though this is why I prefer UK employment laws...

Re:How to get management to listen

[Angst Badger]

They'll address it when people stop standing for it. If their developers quit, and they can't find replacements, then things will change. Unfortunately, my experience in the industry has taught me that most developers are willing to put up with enormous amounts of crap so as "not to rock the boat".

It's not just developers. This is why we have unions and labor regulations. They can always find replacements: even in good times, one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time, a figure that the Federal Reserve works very hard to maintain lest it create upward pressure on wages. And most people prefer shitty working conditions to the uncertainty of finding another job, never mind actual unemployment.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike auto workers, IT workers do NOT need huge factories and massive teams. Little studios of 2 or 3 developers have created commercially successful applications, including games. Yes, it won't sell like GTA, but neither do you need GTA's total income to support 2 developers. You pull down a few hundred grand a year and you're in business - that just isn't that hard to do.

The only reason to stay with a situation is because you believe you're better off than *not* staying with it. If you don't think you're better off, by all means, leave! You'd be crazy not to.

I spent 6 years running my own little software shop. I won't lie, it's hard work, but it's perfectly possible. You don't *have* to put up with anyone else's shit if you don't want to, and you certainly don't need to work for a shop you don't like. Those who say it's "impossible to leave" are playing up the victimhood angle because being a victim is a powerful position to be in - it let you wield public opinion to your own benefit. But the reality is that mobility is higher in our industry than in just about any other. If I walked out the door tomorrow, I guarantee you I could be employed again within 2 weeks. There are thousands of places to work, and if you don't like any of them, it's *very* reasonable to start up your own, so you can run it exactly as you wish. But I guess that wouldn't leave some people with anything more to complain about, so they wouldn't be happy unless they could feel oppressed by somebody.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Captain Splendid]

There are other ways of dealing with the situation that don't involve unions.

When you find that magic bullet, please let us know. Meanwhile, corporations with their hands stuffed comfortably up politician's rectums, they've managed to convince everyone that unions are bad, mkay? Fucking ridiculous.

Re:How to get management to listen

[geekmux]

They don't even need to quit! Just refuse to work the overtime! Most places require some reason to fire people. Not working overtime for free isn't a valid reason. Nor will most managers be willing to have to go to the effort of finding a replacement and dealing with ramp up time.

Uh, after reading about an Army of Wives performing a "mass attack" on a blog about these issues, I seriously doubt the solution is THAT easy.

I mean, when was the last time your spouse went off on a rant to your boss about work ethics? Seriously.

Re:How to get management to listen

[dcollins]

Totally agree. It's a pretty simple state of affairs. "United we stand, divided we fall" and all that.

Re:How to get management to listen

[breagerey]

having worked as both a union and non-union electrician I'd *NEVER hire non-union to do electrical work
With trade unions you know that the people have at least a base level of competence at their job.

I *would hire non-union drywallers though... ;)

Re:How to get management to listen

[_KiTA_]

They know that the unions WILL turn against them, cut good things like flexible hours and telecommuting, etc

Does this happen in the USA?

No. But why let logic and reason get in the way of a nice conservative frothy rant about the EVILS of Organized Labor.

You know, evils, like benefits, decent working conditions, fair pay, being able to say NO when management tries to say something like "Yeah, um, we're gonna need you to work 4-8 hours of unpaid overtime every night for the next year."

See? Evil evil evil! What do we think this is, Socialist France?

Re:How to get management to listen

[igadget78]

No way man, not this developer. Unions just give you someone else who is 'in charge' of you. Not only do you have to pay union dues, half the time those union dues are spent on political purposes you don't agree with and have no say over.

I work as one of 6 developers inside a huge 20000+ corporation. To keep it simple, our corporation decided that we were to move from salary to hourly and it turned up a huge stink, clocking in and such, and people began a movement to unionize which thankfully went nowhere.

When my wife and I got married, she was part of a food workers union which went on strike during winter while she was prego. She lost 15 lbs (she started at 108 lbs) and the Doctors forced her to go on leave 5 months before the baby was due for her health. The union received the doctors notice and as unions typically do to protect their members, is decide that they wont pay the hospital bills for the birth because when we turned in the doctors note, we didn't fill out some 3x5 card that was mandatory for them to continue medical coverage. Where is the common sense in this world you piss ants, but thankfully the state picked up the tab. That's my first and last contact with the f-ing unions. They may have been worthwhile at one point in time, but no longer.

And in regards to getting paid by the line of code, that's stupid too. Out of the 6 programmers, I am probably the #2 guy in skill level, and if you looked at my code vs the other's, mine is object oriented while theirs looks like a batch file, scripted into submission. it gets the job done at a much slower and ludicrous pace.

Re:How to get management to listen

[NNKK]

Firing someone for exercising their workplace rights -- safety, overtime pay, etc. -- _IS_ explicitly illegal.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Bobartig]

Um, exactly how much artwork work is required in a console port of a PC franchise with 'at-the-time' outdated graphics and an existing engine require?

You are also conflating last gen with current gen's artwork requirements. HD gaming has raised the bar exponentially for the number of man hours required to make state of the art graphics. Sure, a small indie game does not require 70 artists, but a game that pushes the boundaries, or at least can hang with the AAA big dogs most certainly does.

On Braid, that game may have been developed by a skeleton crew, but it still required several years of development time and a budget of around $500,000. You can say that anybody can drop what they're doing and start coding a game, but how many have the tenacity and resources to devote that much, particularly when balanced against the risk of never breaking even or losing money in the end?

Financially, indie game development is a HUGE crapshoot. Alternatively, every one of the horrendously overworked R* employees went home to their failing marriages with paycheck in hand. I'm not defending R*'s labor practices, but from a practical risk/reward analysis, they are much better off than the average indie game dev, who operates with no certainty of every having a payday. It's solving the poverty problem by installing slot machines in low-rent neighborhoods. .

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

Base level of competence? Like the Teacher's Union shows? :P

That said, game development is far away from electrical work. Electrical work has a set of best practices and a code to adhere to. Game programming is more of an art. You slap the thing together and pray it keeps working, because it's not like it's going to burn anyone's house down, and you do whatever it takes to release a good game, which has little to do with good code or good art.

If I'm hiring a game programmer I don't really care if he knows design patterns. I care if he can take a game engine and turn it inside-out in a week because we had a neat new idea that the current engine can't support.

There's a reason that technical competence certificates are crucial in the electrical industry, and largely irrelevant in the programming and artistic fields.

Re:How to get management to listen

[westlake]

I DO have a way to answer the power of the boss: I find another job.

I take it your health insurance is portable. Your retirement plan. No problem relocating in this market?

Will a new job be as easy to find five years - ten years - down the road?. None of us remain twenty-something, thirty-something, forever, after all.

Re:How to get management to listen

[msimm]

If most developers are too smart|independent|white-collar to unionize maybe they should start to form their own companies. If existing management practices are so ineffective create/implement better practices and change the industry by example. Seems like that would be the smart thing to do.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interesting since the majority of union workers are federal, state, or local government employees.

Re:How to get management to listen

[rochberg]

You are essentially correct (since we're talking about a US company), but it gets a little more complicated. See here for a description of at-will employment. For the most part, unless you signed a contract (which generally only happens for executive-level management), you are free to quit or be fired at any point for any reason, unless your termination would explicitly violate certain laws (such as discrimination or whistle-blowing). Several states have passed exceptions that would require employers have a just cause for termination, but that is not universal.

Re:How to get management to listen

[PPalmgren]

Unions can be good or bad, but in general, with the labor laws in the US, they do more harm than good in this age. Back in the early 1900s when labor laws were in their infancy, they were necessary. Currently all most unions do is destroy the business they work in by hindering innovation (auto, port, and teacher's unions come to mind).

In the ports industry, it took a company 5 years to negotiate the use of remote operated dock machinery because it could reduce the necessary staff...even though its 10x safer than having someone in the cabs. You can't strong arm the union either because they cover the entire coast..."oh, you don't like that? Well, I'll have my union go on strike on the entire east coast in only your terminals...". Its straight up extortion, and their wages reflect it. Putting clauses in contracts that prohibit innovation is disgusting.

The teacher unions are way different by trade, but you get the problems of being unable to fire poor teachers, resulting in bad education (this is VERY prevalent in the SE US).

I still beleive unions have cases where they are necessary, but at the moment they are far too far-reaching and do more damage than good. I think their power should be scaled back a bit.

Re:How to get management to listen

[MightyMartian]

Sort of like what management does.,,

Re:How to get management to listen

[xaxa]

The *only* time I'll support unionization if it joining the union is not a condition of employment-- i.e. if it's completely voluntary.

Surely you can never be forced to join a union? That's ridiculous.

Your Constitution includes Freedom of Association (just like mine). Doesn't that also include freedom of non-association?

Re:How to get management to listen

[Blakey Rat]

You're free to associate, but that's not the point. Unions will make it a condition of employment to be in the union. So, you can refuse to join the teacher's union if you want... but you can't work as a teacher if you do.

There's no Constitutional issues here, since the Constitution doesn't apply to private business.

Re:How to get management to listen

[lorsungcu]

Mod parent up, tired of hearing unsubstantiated claims against unions from people with no experience with them. It reminds of the tools drooling over Ron Paul who were suddenly economic experts because they read some youtube comments.

How does a statement like "Unions just give you someone else who is 'in charge' of you." get you modded informative? You're more than welcome to actually participate in the union, and steer the political direction of it. If by politics you don't agree with, you mean working to further union power and workers rights, then I suppose joining wouldn't make sense for you...That'd be like signing up for someone to punch you in the face.

As far as "Unions are great in industries where workers have no way to answer the power of the boss.", I guess I'm not sure what you'd have these people do. Sure they can quit, and they may even find jobs. All that means is that someone else will take their place; you could forward your resume if it sounds like the kind of thing you'd be into. You can always just go get that other job if you don't like it, right? Also, you said "industries" - which is exactly what two parents up was talking about ("Oh, but our job is different."). Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Stand up for yourself.

I dont think anyone would say there are no corrupt unions, or that they cant be misused or badly managed. In those cases, it only adds another layer of bullshit on top of a situation like that at R*...but that doesn't mean _every_ union will work that way, and again, you're more than welcome to participate and make your union what you need it to be.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ClosedSource]

Just how much game development is performed through telecommuting and why do you think a union would be against it?

Re:How to get management to listen

[breagerey]

I don't think the Teacher's union qualifies as a trade union

I was responding to your comment that

anyone who thinks that unions have anything to do with good products, good business, or sane long-term strategies is a fucking moron

Union electricians (or many other trade unions) are an example of how your statement is possibly deadly wrong.
In electrical work the only real "technical competence certificate" is your journeyman card that shows you've completed the union apprenticeship (currently 5 years of both school and on the job training).

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

There are many more unions than the auto makers union so the odds are it won't go that way.

That said unions can be just as bad as companies but if an industry can't afford to pay for all the hours actually put into creating a game then there is something fundamentally wrong and it needs correcting in one way or another.

I think the problem is that the industry absolutely loves young employees. People straight out of uni will work as hard as possible because they'll likely be single and assume that's just the way it is. They lack job experience and don't want to rock the boat because they're afraid of being jobless with potentially a load of uni debt.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ClosedSource]

Sure. With unions we might not have had "innovation" like twitter and facebook. Civilization as we know it would crumble.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ClosedSource]

Really? How many times have you been an employee of a company and had a contract?

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a union member for 10 years in a different industry. Money spent by unions for political purposes is money you DO have a say over. If you'd ever been a member in a union, you would know that. You are allowed to be exempted from dues that would otherwise be spent for political purposes. You are simply required to inform your steward and (probably) fill out a form rescinding consent for political spending. I say "probably" because in 10 years in the union (5 as a steward) I have never had one member actually make that request, but I would expect paperwork to be required as records are always required.

From what I have seen, most programmers have never been union members and you all come up with the most bullshit reasons not to unionize. The union is not 'in charge' of you. They are not your boss. Other members, including the union leaders (stewards, area reps, local presidents, treasurers, etc), cannot 'manage' you and, if they try to tell you how to do your job, management will be more than happy to remedy the problem for you.

Unions are great in industries where workers have no way to answer the power of the boss

Sounds to me like the employees at Rockstar Games (and other development companies, according to other posts) are having exactly that problem! The power of the boss enables the boss to abuse the employees. The point of unions is to mitigate the boss's ability to abuse the employees. Apparently, you feel that working 72 hours (6 days x 12 hours) and not getting paid for the hours you've worked is not abusive. Personally, I don't understand what kind of dumbass you have to be to be willing to not be paid for the hours you've worked. If I am at work, then I am getting paid. If my employer wants me to work 72 hours, then they'd better be prepared to pay me the overtime pay I have earned.

Simply put, if you've never been a union member, you really need to get educated about what unions are really like and what they are really all about. Unions are only as strong as their members are active. When you are in a union, EACH MEMBER is the union. Not just the stewards, area reps, vice presidents, presidents, and other officers. Many of the members of the local I was in complained about how the union didn't stand firmer in bargaining and didn't 'help more', but these same people always rolled over and voted 'yes' when asked whether they wanted to ratify the latest contract. These same people were never willing to mobilize, either, by standing up for themselves or bringing public attention to the company's abuses. They even refused to take an hour or two ONCE A MONTH out of their busy lives to attend the union meeting OR even read the minutes of the meeting (posted on a bulletin board in the workplace, online at the union's website, emailed to them [if requested] AND snail-mailed TO THEIR HOMES), but they were happy to bitch about how they didn't know what was going on in the union. They also didn't want to get the union involved when faced with discipline, either. So, how is the union supposed to protect you when you decide to go it alone? I am so tired of hearing all of you whine about how unions are TEH GRATE EVUL, but you've no experience with actually being in a union. Go talk to union members about their unions. Every union is a little different. So, be sure to find members who are happy with their union, as well as those who are not.

Re:How to get management to listen

[korean.ian]

By the way, all this (and the terrible conditions in Rockstar and EA) is nothing compared to programmers' life in China or Korea, where 14-18 hours a day 6 days a week is the normal life of a programmer. Not that it makes it right, of course.

I can't speak to Chinese programmer's working conditions, but in Korea, normal working hours are 8 hours a day 5 days a week with alternating Saturdays. Of course there is overtime, and there are crunch times as well, but 14-18 hours a day 6 days a week is far from normal.

Re:How to get management to listen

[tsotha]

Software development is one of those industries which will always be very resistant to unionization because it's so easy to move production to somewhere else. If these guys unionize they'll simply be out of a job when Rockstar moves production to Atlanta. Or India. Or China.

There are plenty of openings out there for people with skills. These guys should just refuse to work so many hours. Or quit.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ClosedSource]

Most programmers in the US are classified as "Exempt". That means they are exempt from labor laws that require things like overtime pay.

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

Then create your own union. A union is just a group of people willing to pull together to help each other. Besides, I prefer being £10 a month out of pocket rather than doing enough overtime to basically be like a week or more out of pocket per month.

Re:How to get management to listen

[JamesP]

They know that the unions WILL turn against them, cut good things like flexible hours and telecommuting, etc

Does this happen in the USA?

No.

Are you so sure about that?! Because what I mentioned comes from comments from several people, including on this site.

But why let logic and reason get in the way of a nice conservative frothy rant about the EVILS of Organized Labor.

You know, evils, like benefits, decent working conditions, fair pay, being able to say NO when management tries to say something like "Yeah, um, we're gonna need you to work 4-8 hours of unpaid overtime every night for the next year."

See? Evil evil evil! What do we think this is, Socialist France?

These are not evils. And most of it should be a government/legal issues.

What is evil is when workers agree on a 4x10 (4 days, 10 hours per day, per week) schedule and union says no (4x10 is better for the environment and everybody?! tough).

Evil is union forcing a strike when the majority is against it. (and this happens A LOT) So much for the wish of the majority.

Evil is union supporting the slackers and making sure the guy that barely does his job, or doesn't at all stays in the company.

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

It's easy to say that until your job is shipped over seas regardless of your quality. I hope giving up your social life will be worth it once your job is in another country.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Blakey Rat]

Delusion or not, you have to *prove* to me it's worthwhile before I'll even consider it. So far I've been offered nothing in the way of evidence that my situation would be better if I belonged to a union. I *do* know that I'd be out union fees every paycheck.

Re:How to get management to listen

[thaig]

I think that they can't make you do all that truly and your fear of consequences is probably more to do with you being exhausted all the time and not wanting to take the strain of fighting for yourself.

Fighting is only one option - there are a lot of places to work in the UK where you don't need to do battle to be treated reasonably.

Re:How to get management to listen

[phantomfive]

If you want me to stand up for myself, you'd do better to reply to my comment instead of someone else's.

You're more than welcome to actually participate in the union, and steer the political direction of it.

I don't want to spend my time doing that. I want to spend my time building up the company I work for, because at the companies I work for, we work as a team (and I get paid for it). I work for three reasons: one, to learn; two, to make money; and three, to make useful products for the world. A union will get in my way for two of these, and in the computer industry probably won't help much to make money either. We already make a lot as programmers.

As far as "Unions are great in industries where workers have no way to answer the power of the boss.", I guess I'm not sure what you'd have these people do. Sure they can quit, and they may even find jobs.

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. If you are talking about something like the auto-industry, where it is hard to find another job, I concede that unions make sense. In the computer industry, yeah, I suggest they find a job that doesn't make them work so many hours of overtime. Looking for a job is a skill, but it's not especially hard, and if you have "worked on GTA" on your resume, you're going to find one pretty easily. Find a job at a company that doesn't require 72 hour work weeks. Really, it's not that hard.

that doesn't mean _every_ union will work that way, and again, you're more than welcome to participate and make your union what you need it to be.

True, not every union is like that, and you seem to like them. I don't. Good for you. My company already offers health insurance and a 401k matching program. A union isn't going do much for me. The OP basically insulted everyone who doesn't want to join a union, but there are valid reasons to not want to join one.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ngworekara]

Your knee jerk response against unions, which are responsible for a great deal of the birth of the united states middle class, is exactly why programmers will never unionize.
You bought the bs.
Speaking of which, why shouldn't teachers be unionized? They're underpaid as it is. What is wrong with job security and decent pay for people with as important of a job as they've got?

Re:How to get management to listen

[phantomfive]

I would too. Fortunately every company is not like that. A good company is also a group of people willing to pull together to help each other, and each individual gets paid according to the amount of work they put in. That's how good business should be, each person giving the other something they want, and both are better off. Unions often get in the way of that.

Re:How to get management to listen

[91degrees]

My company has already sacked a few software engineers - it only takes an argument with the boss.

On what grounds? You can claim unfair dismissal. The UK is certainly not an "at will" state.

Ultimately what you need to do is work well enough that they're not willing to get rid of you. If you just leave one day after a 10 hour day, what can they do? If they sack you they need to replace you. It's more hassle that it's worth.

And I realise it's a lot easier for me to say this since I'm not in your position. If it helps, I was in your position. And yes, my insistence on working my contracted hours did upset them but not enough for them to get rid of me. I left when I was able to get a better job. And you should try to do the same. Even for the games industry you're being mistreated.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Evil Shabazz]

Sorry you got a flamebait moderation, man. Because you're dead on correct.

Re:How to get management to listen

[91degrees]

Ultimately it's a gamble. They can just get rid of you, but it costs them money as well. It takes time to find a replacement. It takes time for them to ramp up. They'll never understand the code you wrote as well as you do.

But yes, the UK is better. There's a safety net and while jobseeker's allowance isn't great it does mean savings stretch that little bit further.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Nightspirit]

My wife is a food+drug union worker in California. The positive side is we have excellent healthcare benefits. The negative side is it breeds incompetence/laziness? on all levels, from the union down. If you've ever dealt with a troublesome HMO, just wait until you deal with a union, if you can even get a hold of anyone that knows what they are doing within it. In addition, since it is quite hard to get fired most of the employees take advantage of it. The customer service difference between Safeway (union) and Trader Joes (non-union) is astronomical, and Trader Joes even pays more than union wages.

I'm not anti-union in general (I did mention great healthcare benefits), but they definitely have consequences.

Re:How to get management to listen

[mdwh2]

Which employment laws are you talking about?

The ones that say you can't be fired unless there's good reason, AFAICT.

Yes, you might agree to different conditions in a contract, but the point is that it's not that way by default.

Admittedly you raise a good point - if it became normal practice for these things to be part of a contract, then jobseekers have no choice and the protections in law become useless. Although it is possible for law to trump contracts. (I'm not sure how the law works regarding excessive amounts of upaid overtime, where an employee is unwilling or unable, but the small print in the contract said it was allowed.)

yes, I can opt into the EU directive (surely without any impact on my employment). But "rock the boat" is what I don't need in my life right now.

Well indeed, unfortunately people may still be pressured into doing what their company tells them, rather than the risk of getting fired, and having to sue them for unlawful dismissal. The law doesn't stop a company firing you in the first place, but it can make such firing unlawful.

By the way, all this (and the terrible conditions in Rockstar and EA) is nothing compared to programmers' life in China or Korea, where 14-18 hours a day 6 days a week is the normal life of a programmer. Not that it makes it right, of course.

And in much of mainland Europe, I hear they have much better conditions than us. If we're going to compare, let's aspire towards somewhere nicer :)

Re:How to get management to listen

[Duradin]

Could you "just quit" people please clue the rest of us in on how you guys are getting magically portable health insurance?

And if you say HSA I hope you never have a catastrophic event that could easily cost 100% of a few decades worth of your income.

Re:How to get management to listen

[scamper_22]

unions no.
professional association yes.

A professional association suits skilled work better. You can speak with one voice in terms of work conditions, quality...
But you don't get fixed pay grades, work silos...

Besides being a union doesn't stop a shop from just exporting your job. But being a professional association with legal standing carries some weight. Suddenly, software not written by professional developers cannot be assured quality... and thus cannot be imported :P Yeah, it is a dream I have... for quality reasons of course. You know, like how lawyers and doctors protect themselves.

Re:How to get management to listen

[tomhudson]

No, they know unions are bullshit. BULL FUCKING SHIT I SAID IT

They know that the unions WILL turn against them, cut good things like flexible hours and telecommuting, etc

So no

Never been in a union, have you? It shows. Unions don't take away flex-time, etc.

Come back when you've actually been a union-dues-paying member.

A union can work in the best interests of both the employee and employer. The employee gets some protection from management games and abuse, and the employer gets a stable work-force. Also, the employer now has an official way to be notified when they're going too far - before it's too late - rather than what's happening at Rockstar, where it's obviously gone to the point where it's not salvageable.

70-hour weeks say one thing - management doesn't know how to do their jobs. Coders don't put in twice as many productive hours in twice the time - production turns negative after a certain point, with more bugs, lower morale, and generally lower productivity ALL the time, and not just during the extra hours.

Sometimes management needs to have their feet held to the fire, for their own good. 70-hour work weeks are one of those times.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Machtyn]

The labor laws exist because the unions were successful. But like a bad politician, they don't go away when the job is done.

Re:How to get management to listen

[beowulfcluster]

Even while taking those things into account there comes a point when you have to decide if you work to live or if you live to work.

Re:How to get management to listen

[JamesP]

Never been in a union, have you? It shows. Unions don't take away flex-time, etc.

Come back when you've actually been a union-dues-paying member.

I live in a country that forces me to be part of a union.

The union dues are taken every year from my salary. And an ADDITIONAL fee (about $200) is taken every year unless I send them a hand written letter.

So instead of being screwed up by my employer, I'm screwed up by the employer AND the union, thanks guys.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Frosty Piss]

Most places require some reason to fire people.

Baloney, 100%.

"Most places" have at-will employees (no contract), and can fire without cause. Indeed, it is much safer for the employer to fire for no reason, rather than a reason that they will then have to justify, possibly in court.

Re:How to get management to listen

[tomhudson]

Realistically, they're going to be out of a job anyway, so what do they have to lose?

I agree they should have refused to work the extra hours, but again, it's the myth that, just because they're white-collar, they *have* to put in the extra hours. If the majority came in and said "We're not doing the extra hours any more, and we also refuse to work with anyone who scabs by doing the extra hours, and here's our new contract! Sign it or we work to rule!" ... "work to rule" is the one job tactic management absolutely hates. It gets less done, and raises costs.

The company only has two choices - fire them (and never ship), or accede to the demands, ship late, and learn to devote the right amount of resources (people and time) next time so as to avoid "crunch time" as a way of hiding management incompetence. Otherwise, the cycle repeats.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Skater]

I can see that you haven't updated your view of unions since then. Now, many of them have gotten fat and lazy and worthless and are actually killing companies that should be succeeding. Enjoy your own propaganda.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with Korean, I regularly get e-mails when it's past midnight in Korea. When they were in the UK they worked 7 days a week, came in before me and left a lot later than me, and I worked 12 hours a day. They did that for 2 months (just staying abroad for two months, without your wife and kids, as normal part of business, is unheard of in the UK). When people from my company visit Korea, they describe similar conditions (i.e. they stay in work until 11pm regularly).

Also see here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8469532.stm especially the comment by James Mahon.

I can't believe I'm so lucky to know the only Korean that are overworked. I think it's a well known fact that Koreans have the longest working week in the world, even if officially Korea has changed the working hours. 8 hours a day 5 days a week is heaven even compared to the UK, so excuse me if I don't believe you (even if your name is korean.ian).

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

There is not just one union. There are many of them and they're only as bad as the people who join the union and vote for the people running the union.

If so many developers are so perfect and anti-bloated union then when they start their own it will be perfect.

The fact is it is wrong that people work so many hours for free and risk not having a relationship just to make shitty game sequels. Over working employees most likely contributes to poor software too. People just don't function well without a decent sleep.

So your choices are really either to get the government to make those sort of practices illegal or start a union. If you start your own it will be small and nearly impossible for it to be corrupt like the auto workers union. If it does go corrupt quit and get your fellow workers to quit too. A union is effectively a company and you need to vote with your feet and your wallet.

Labour laws aren't in their infancy but tech related fields still have to deal with companies treating employees like shit. Whether its importing people on H1-B visas to work for less, exporting jobs or making you work for free. There's also much more ageism in IT because companies prefer naive young employees who don't realise they're being fucked up the ass. Most jobs don't have to deal with those sort of things so yeah a union is probably a bit useless.

Companies don't only sack useless people. If they're cost cutting they're more likely to cut someone who they deem a bigger financial drain which can be someone who is a better developer purely because his pay is in relation to his skills. He could be older too and therefore more likely to be using more healthcare benefits so again, he's a drain. He's not useless but he can lose his job.

My union only asks for £10 a month and has protected jobs without protecting useless people and negotiated sensible inflation based pay rises. The pay rise deal gets reviewed in 5 years. If the company doesn't want to offer it again they're willing to go for that. They've not been locked into being forced to pay people more money for no good reason.

If you have a union you have the duty to vote in decent people to run it properly and if the union does things wrong then you have the duty to get people to quit the union.

Despite having a union I still work overtime and sometimes I do it without asking for pay because accomplishing something excellent and worthwhile is my my drive. What I don't want is my employer expecting me to give up my free time whenever it suits them. When I switch jobs (which the odds are I will given that I'm not old), I'm not bothered if the company has a union or not because I'm very confident in my ability to do my job, I don't slack and I will do my best to end up in a decent company.

Game companies in particular treat employees like shit. The publishers are like the RIAA, they don't give the retailer much profit (hence the reason they sell used games) and if it's hardware the retailer probably gets zero profit which is why a lot of them did not want to carry the PSP Go. They fuck over the developer by making them give up their social life with potentially no compensation.

Any sector that has to charge high prices for their products yet they can't afford to give retailers a decent cut or pay their employees then something is wrong. It needs to be fixed.

I can't see why people rather support a corrupt set of publishers than start-up their own union because it might end up corrupt.

Maybe if publishers had to start paying for all the work their employers do then they'll think twice about releasing shitty sequels year after year.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

All the art was done custom on our own, and the engine was developed in-house (for a previous title, admittedly.)

I'm really curious where you're getting a budget of $500,000, considering that Jonathan Blow has been quoted as saying it cost $180,000.

And, yes, you're right. A little indie studio can't hope to compete with the AAA studios. Neither can small independent film studios. On the other hand, that's why you don't try to - many indie game studios are making some great stuff right now and are easily paying their employee's (frequently singular) paychecks.

Re:How to get management to listen

[tomhudson]

We've already got to deal with the bullshit and idiocy and idiocy of the MBA managers who don't understand the technology they're managing

And that's why you need some sort of collective bargaining. To tell the company "look, you guys are obviously failing at your jobs. 70-hour weeks show you do not know how to allocate resources or plan properly. You are setting us all up for failure. Fire the management assholes responsible, and sit down with us to discuss working conditions, or from now on we're just going to "work to rule". Don't like it, we'll have a picket line set up in 2 minutes - the signs are already in our car trunks, we've already organized it to go public on facebook, twitter, etc., and those NDAs - you're in breach of our original agreements - think about it."

The reality is that companies like Rockstar are abusing their employees, and it's dragging down everyone else in a rush to the bottom. It's not going to stop until people push back.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

Good question.

My mom taught for years, and left, largely because of the teacher's union. The union, you see, has no interest in providing good education. It's a seniority system, and solely a seniority system. If a school has to fire someone, they have one choice and one choice only: the person who's been there the shortest period of time.

In return for this "job security", my mom was forced to pay a significant chunk of her already-meager paycheck.

The teacher's union is heavily involved in banning homeschooling. The teacher's union is heavily involved in requiring "teaching degrees" for all teachers, and don't be fooled by the name - a "teaching degree" has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the rote busywork of making generic uninspired lesson plans.

I've got a friend who's a teacher, and her school is currently fighting with the public schools in the area. Why? Because her school takes crummy students and actually educates them. They refuse to graduate kids if the kid doesn't deserve an A - no grade at all - and the majority of their one-on-one tutored children end up earning that A when no other school could make them learn.

They're fighting with the public schools because the public schools think they're doing too good of a job. That is literally the problem.

You're right. I don't like unions. I don't like unions because I saw what my mom went through to be involved in one.

Unions are a monopoly. Like any monopoly, they can be good or bad. But power corrupts, and they tend to move towards "bad" - some worse than others.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

I agree with everything you're saying here, honestly.

I think what we have here is, while not ideal, still not a terrible layout, though. There are a lot of communities built around good work conditions for game employees at this point, and, as mentioned, it's surprisingly easy to go out in the indie world and Do It Yourself. Good developers are in high demand in the game industry as long as you don't demand high salaries, and let's be honest, if you're either masochistic enough or dumb enough to work in the game industry you're not expecting a high salary anyway.

(I say this as someone who's planning to spend his life in games, note ;) )

There are certainly exploitative companies. The nice thing about them is that they tend to burn themselves out - as an artistic medium, games suffer ridiculously if people aren't well-rested. It's sort of a cute self-balancing feature, with, admittedly, the unfortunate side effect of burning out otherwise-skilled people.

I think any sort of an industry-wide union would be great for a bit. I'm uncertain on whether it would be a disaster long-term or not, but I'm satisfied enough with the current situation, and worried enough of what that force could do to the industry, that I'd rather not see it happen.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

I think it's funny that I got both a Flamebait and a +5, Insightful in the same discussion, making the exact same point. Such is life. :)

Re:How to get management to listen

[MartinSchou]

The labor laws exist because the unions were successful.

Very true

But like a bad politician, they don't go away when the job is done.

And what job is done, pray tell? As far as I can tell 12 hours a day, 6 days a week with no end in sight, sure as hell doesn't sound like "the job is done". Sounds more like "we own your ass" to me.

One of the reasons unions work so well in more socialist countries like most of Europe, is that when company A decides to fuck over its unionized employees, the union will step in. And if company A still won't behave, the union will talk to company A's 'colleagues', their suppliers and their customers (where possible), asking them to please tell company A to behave, because if they don't, then their employees will go on a sympathy strike.

Alternatively the union will be the ones leading the lawsuit against company A, leaving the workers without having to retain their own lawyers.

Granted, this does have side effects. I think the American worker has a higher monthly pay and lower expenses for consumable good. But then again, we also suffer from other horrible things like socialized health care, five weeks of paid vacation a year and the horror of 40 hour work weeks. Granted, this does depend on where in Europe you live.

Re:How to get management to listen

[theJML]

Actually, here in Virginia (and a number of other states) We have a law in place that says that the employees need not have a reason to leave. The other side of the law is that employers need not have a reason to drop you. They do not, by law, need to give you advance notice, pensions, severance, or even an explanation. Either party can simply walk up to your desk and say "Have a nice life".

Of course most people give 2 weeks notice because they don't want to burn bridges, and most employers give a reason because they want to make it clear to the other employees what the reason was... sometimes.

Sure, them canning you will make more work for them, but you know they'll just dump it on 'the team'. Have that happen a few times and it reminds me of the Star Wars quote "Fear will keep the local systems in line". People like having a job, and they like not being fired on the spot for insubordination or someone's whim. However, the law remains because it's expected that the employers sorta like having employees that don't just leave. So it basically makes the employers a bit more wary of what they do to their employees.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Da_Biz]

Right. Unions are killing companies like Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Hyundai, and Ford.

Polarized, black & white thinking is rarely profitable.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Laxitive]

You will not be fired for exercising workplace rights. You'll be fired for "not being a team player".

-Laxitive

Re:How to get management to listen

[Dahamma]

Well... From Jonathan:

"I worked an average of three or four hours a day on development, with a few self-imposed crunch periods. The development cycle was around three years. It was hard at times, but that's just because it's a lot of work for one person to do."

For some reason he seems to consider his time free. I'm continually amazed at how people fail to account for the opportunity cost of their time in the software industry. 4 hours a day for 3 years is 1 1/2 years of his time. Just because he doesn't take a salary from himself, doesn't mean that should not be included in the development cost - he just received his equivalent compensation plus much more once the game sold so well.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Fex303]

Firing someone for exercising their workplace rights -- safety, overtime pay, etc. -- _IS_ explicitly illegal.

But the point of 'at will' employment is that they don't have to give a reason for firing you. Or they can give any other reason, such as that they don't like the colour of the shirt you're wearing.

As long as they don't say that you're being fired for exercising your workplace rights, my understanding is that it's not illegal. When I headed to the States to work, at will employment just blew me away with how open to abuse it was.

Re:How to get management to listen

[91degrees]

Yes. I've learned a little about US worker rights (or lack thereof) today.

Re:How to get management to listen

[NNKK]

You cannot skirt the law just by saying you're not doing anything illegal. What insane legal system are you living under?

If you have evidence the real reason you were fired was because you wouldn't work overtime without legally-mandated compensation, you have several agencies and then the courts to appeal to.

Re:How to get management to listen

[NNKK]

No, most programmers in the US work for companies who CLAIM they are classified as "exempt". There are specific legal requirements for such classification, and the truth is that the vast majority of programmers _do not_ meet them.

Read up on real employment law, don't just go off common knowledge -- it's almost always wrong.

Re:How to get management to listen

[tomhudson]

So when did the UNION force you to give up flex-time and tele-commuting? Or is this just a made-up example of union-bashing?

Re:How to get management to listen

[GospelHead821]

The last time I was part of a union was when I worked at a grocery store in high school. I was just a bargaining chip. They promised me one thing and then told me later (in less honest language) "We had to concede what we promised you to get more important benefits for more important employees." Maybe I couldn't even have gotten as good a deal as I got without union representation but what I remember most vividly about them is that they broke their promise to me because I wasn't important enough for them to care about keeping it.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

That still doesn't explain the $320,000 difference :)

Anyway, I can tell you why he considers his time free. It's because he'd be doing it whether he got paid or not. Being able to make money is just a nice bonus.

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

I think ideally developers don't need a full on union. If they would at least stick together and protest companies that treat their fellow developers like shit rather than paying dues to people to do things for them.

I suspect the gaming industry is a bit like the movie industry and you'll end up getting black balled if you stand up against their activities which is why you end up seeing anonymous wives doing the complaining instead. They can't black ball everyone.

By just sticking together than going the proper union route then there is no union trying to justify paying dues once things get better.

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

That's true which is why I'm not too bothered about a place having a union (this is my first to be honest and will likely be the last since it's a rare thing) but they can be nice. The problem is probably when the company starts treating people well and then then the union is left trying to justify their existence.

The ideal thing would be that developers would just stick together and not require paying someone to speak for them.

Re:How to get management to listen

[JamesP]

So when did the UNION force you to give up flex-time and tele-commuting?

Do you want a specific date?! July 2007. They said it couldn't be done and that was it...

And since they are 'for the worker' they know what' best for everybody, doesn't they?!

Or is this just a made-up example of union-bashing?

I don't need to make anything up, unions comes up with and endless supply of bs.

But of course having a guaranteed supply of money is great and they can also pretend to be 'for the worker'

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

Because there is a very good chance they wouldn't do the right thing if no one stood up for the employers.

The reason we got the pay rises based on inflation was because of the union. I doubt they'd do it on their own.

In fact, part of the business is, imo, outdated and was losing money. They needed to make cuts there. That's fair but but giving employees the minimum and no choice who gets cut isn't great. Having someone get you more time before you're sacked so you can find a job and getting voluntary redundancy so those who want to leave get to and those that don't stay.

That's better for the company any way because if someone wants to leave they will anyway in that situation and then that area is left with even fewer people and will suffer further.

Given the choice to get rid of anyone means they'd probably get rid of the older people as they're a drain on health insurance, their pension costs are higher and they're close to collecting that pension. Those people would probably rather stay on so they're more likely to collect that pension.

I'm no hardcore union man. I think a lot of them are corrupt, I've never been part of one before and it doesn't even enter my mind as a consideration when looking for jobs so I may never be part of one again. But while it's there, I will take advantage of it. It's insurance and it's only £10 a month. I'm not making minimum wage, £10 isn't really anything.

So explain to me why it's ok for the publishers to screw everyone, for managers to protect themselves from lay-offs but the developers shouldn't have any sort of protection.

Re:How to get management to listen

[jmauro]

. Internal organization and negotiation would be another (but not up to union level)

At that point you are actually a union so you might as well register as one so you won't all be fired en mass and replaced with cheaper labor.

Most unions and their behavoirs are basically a reflection of how the managment\employee relationship is before the union was formed. Since most of those realationships are really screwed up, most unions are really screwed up.

Re:How to get management to listen

[sonicmerlin]

To compete with the truly high-quality AAA titles you need more than a small team. Reality runs in the face of your fantasy.

Re:How to get management to listen

[toriver]

No, crunch time means bad planning, or inflexible launch windows, both caused by the non-workers (i.e. management) that set plans and release dates. Release shit AFTER you know it is done. Or face crunch-time-stress induced errors.

Too many managers are in the "nine women one month" club of clueless people.

Re:How to get management to listen

[sonicmerlin]

Unions can be good or bad, but in general, with the labor laws in the US, they do more harm than good in this age. Back in the early 1900s when labor laws were in their infancy, they were necessary. Currently all most unions do is destroy the business they work in by hindering innovation (auto, port, and teacher's unions come to mind).

In the ports industry, it took a company 5 years to negotiate the use of remote operated dock machinery because it could reduce the necessary staff...even though its 10x safer than having someone in the cabs. You can't strong arm the union either because they cover the entire coast..."oh, you don't like that? Well, I'll have my union go on strike on the entire east coast in only your terminals...". Its straight up extortion, and their wages reflect it. Putting clauses in contracts that prohibit innovation is disgusting.

The teacher unions are way different by trade, but you get the problems of being unable to fire poor teachers, resulting in bad education (this is VERY prevalent in the SE US).

I still beleive unions have cases where they are necessary, but at the moment they are far too far-reaching and do more damage than good. I think their power should be scaled back a bit.

Complete strawman. How is Ford managing to succeed where their competition failed? Education has more to do with the government's incompetence than unions. Innovation is nice and all, but people need to live. Unions never stopped innovation in the past. You're oversimplifying. Your opinion of what an employee's wage should be is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Re:How to get management to listen

[jmauro]

California also requires all time over 80 hours in a two week period to be paid at 1.5 times normal rate. Even if the employee is exempt and salaried. As Intel found out in 2002 and IBM found out in 2006, the courts don't look too kindly on a company playing like they didn't know.

My guess is that they're not paying overtime like they should.

Re:How to get management to listen

[sonicmerlin]

Unions don't get in the way of that. Reality gets in the way of that. Your fantasy word of altruistic companies and managers doesn't exist. Companies exist to make profits. They don't care about their employees. It must be nice to live in that tiny snow globe of yours.

Re:How to get management to listen

[sonicmerlin]

The evidence is there for you to find. The reality is you're just stubborn and refuse to look for evidence that contradicts your belief system.

Re:How to get management to listen

[sonicmerlin]

Strawman. Unions are run by employees who are fully aware that their survival depends on the continued success of their employer. This is why you don't see auto workers with $300,000 salaries. Get over yourself please. How about actually talking to union members instead of spouting irrational garbage?

Re:How to get management to listen

[Dahamma]

Yeah, I do get that, and the OP may have exaggerated a bit (though not necessarily by much - a good consultant can easily make well over $200k in 18 months if desired). But it still doesn't mean he can just claim as a blanket statement "anyone can make a game for free!" (which he basically states)

If it hadn't been for the revenue he made after it was released, I doubt he'd be making more games of that level of effort without any upfront source of income, unless he's lucky enough to be independently wealthy - in which case the opportunity cost of his time is zero (or negative for many people who would otherwise just spend money with all that free time ;)

It reminds me of all the people who say things like "why buy a $10 DVD when you can rip or torrent it, burn to a DVD-R, and print a nice label?" Or "why buy a wireless router for $100 when you get go get a cheap used PC for $25, download and install a simple Linux distro on it, configure DNS, DHCP, routing, firewall, VPN, etc yourself?" Yes, you can spend a few bucks less out of your wallet those ways, but don't kid yourself that you are really "saving money" if you get paid $75/hour to do the same things in your day job! If it's a hobby, that's great, but not everyone finds it as fun...

Re:How to get management to listen

[sonicmerlin]

Per hour productivity in Asian countries is horrible. Koreans work the longest hours per year by far, and their per hour productivity is something like less than half the US's. France has a 35 hour work week, and their productivity is 113% (where the US is 100%).

Re:How to get management to listen

[Nazlfrag]

What have the unions ever done for us?

Re:How to get management to listen

[nanospook]

This just changed in California. Our salaried developers there all of a sudden are classified as non-exempt.

Re:How to get management to listen

[PPalmgren]

I'm curious, in both of your posts you use pounds. Have you dealt with labor unions in the US? US labor laws are not the same as UK labor laws.

I argued in my original post (GGP) that labor unions are not the way to solve this issue in the US based on historical evidence of what Unions do to their industries here. Have you dealth with US labor unions? My best friend is a teacher, stepmother a teacher, and I work in the ports industry. I'm speaking from experience. Anecdotal evidence from across the pond does not convince me of anything, because the law is different.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ScrewMaster]

You cannot skirt the law just by saying you're not doing anything illegal. What insane legal system are you living under?

If you have evidence the real reason you were fired was because you wouldn't work overtime without legally-mandated compensation, you have several agencies and then the courts to appeal to.

The GP is right though ... there are always ways to fire someone, the trick is to do it in such a way as to avoid a lawsuit. If nothing else, they just claim they were "eliminating the position." I know that works in my State, since I've known a number of people over the years that were laid off because their position was eliminated. Of course, the eliminated position was usually filled immediately.

Re:How to get management to listen

[KitsuneSoftware]

You don't need to compete with a AAA to be successful. I know this because I am a one-person game developer, and my best estimate of my income is somewhere around $85k.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ScrewMaster]

They can always find replacements: even in good times, one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time,

A figure which is utterly irrelevant to a software project that is under time pressure. If one of your developers leaves in a crunch situation, you can't just plug-in a replacement: game programmers at not easily hot-swappable. The time spent bringing the FNG up to speed (as well as the time lost by the other developers who aren't coding but teaching the new guy) is not tolerable under such conditions ... what you will likely do is just push the remaining coders that much harder until the job is done. Maybe you'll later replace the one who had the sense to leave ... or maybe you won't. Probably you'll decide that since the project was delivered you didn't really need him in the first place. Thus begins the evolution of a hellhole.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Provocateur]

There's nothing stopping workers from unionizing except themselves

There is, and it is the main reason unionizing (at least in IT) was stillborn. Just check my sig.

Otherwise, it would have been there, still be here, alive and kicking, preventing management from exploiting or even thinking of OT without pay. Who knows, if it *did* start, even the gaming indistry would have been protected.

Re:How to get management to listen

[phantomfive]

It's not about altruism. It's about me providing good work for a fair price that a company wants, and only giving it to companies who are willing to give me something fair in return. It's win-win. If you are trying to rip off your company, or your company is trying to rip you off, then it's a bad situation.

This should be obvious.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Pinky]

It's not just developers. This is why we have unions and labor regulations. They can always find replacements: even in good times, one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time, a figure that the Federal Reserve works very hard to maintain lest it create upward pressure on wages. And most people prefer shitty working conditions to the uncertainty of finding another job, never mind actual unemployment.

This has to be balanced with the fact that the unemployment rate for programmers tends to be *much* lower than the general employments rate. Also, the skill difference between an average programmer and a great programmer is a factor of 10 in productivity which means that programmers are not commodities. If you're good at programming and well connected you can do very well.

By the way, 5% unemployment is basically full employment. It gets disproportionately harder to do better the closer you get to 0% unemployment. Programmers (especially good ones) are extremely rare and hard to hire.

Re:How to get management to listen

[TubeSteak]

They can always find replacements: even in good times, one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time, a figure that the Federal Reserve works very hard to maintain lest it create upward pressure on wages.

That's one way to describe "natural unemployement," albeit a somewhat dishonest representation.
What you present as a conspiracy theory is more adequately explained by market forces.

Two guys won the Nobel Prize explaining why "one person in twenty is unemployed at any given time"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment

Re:How to get management to listen

[xaxa]

I'm not anti-union in general (I did mention great healthcare benefits).

I hadn't heard of this before, it's not necessary here. Looking through a few of the large UK unions the most you'll get (unrelated to your work) is some kind of life insurance and free legal advice.

Presumably, healthcare benefits might encourage people to join a union even if they disagree with the politics and people running it?

Re:How to get management to listen

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The small and medium sized unions that don't have 'monopoly power' over a particular industry tend to have a very positive effect for *everyone*. Up and down the line - companies that employ these unionized employees know the rules, and the members of the union know the rules.

The large unions that do exert 'monopoly power' over a particular industry are so bad as to be disgusting. Not just for the employers, but for the members as well. How many GM employees get their pension? Yeah. The total amount of money promised to union employees nation wide for pensions will, at an educated guess, bankrupt the country if actually paid out as promised. And some of the promises are so absurd as to be comical! What business could *possibly* hope to pay for 40 years of retirement pensions for an employee who works for 30, in some cases 20 years?

As already pointed out, the Longshoreman's union is just a big 'guaranteed employment' racket. And the country pays for it in goods prices. Perhaps we should be paying more, to keep the money in the country. But I want the extra money *I* spend on local goods to go to people who have a drive to innovate. NOT somebody who is willing to work day in and day out at a job a robot has been able to do for a decade.

I think many, possibly most programmers, want to see (or at least wouldn't be against) stricter nationwide *laws* regarding salaried employees, comp time etc. But most devs are acutely aware of the dangers of unions.

Personally, I *despise* the *NEED* for unions. And there is need. I look at the restaurant industry where I live and just shudder at the phenomenal instability the average server lives with, on wages that are nowhere *near* high enough to allow planning for downturns. My field may have instability, but my skills demand a salary sufficient to allow for significant savings, in spite of my more expensive 'lifestyle'. And if restaurant servers haven't unionized yet, why would one expect well paid developers to do so?

Re:How to get management to listen

[xaxa]

Your country needs to restore some balance (I doubt this will be easy!). It seems the corporations have too much power, and the unions also have too much power.

There are at least three teacher's unions in this country, and no crazy requirements to join any of them. They're generally in the news threatening to boycott some new "improvement" the government wants to introduce, which the government says will raise standards and the unions say will raise numbers on reports but not children's education.

Re:How to get management to listen

[xiong.chiamiov]

You find another job? You make it sound so easy!

The auto-workers can do the same thing. They can just "find another job", and it's so easy anyone can do it!

The difference between a good and mediocre programmer is much more than that of two auto workers. If you know what you're doing, it's not that difficult to find a good job, even in this economy.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

This is extremely true. I admit that I have never come up with a good plan on how to do it, even if I started from the assumption that I had been elected President.

It's a tough situation.

Re:How to get management to listen

[dbIII]

Most places require some reason to fire people

Refusing to work overtime? Insubordination! Throw in allegations of incompetence if that isn't enough, or if you really want to be nasty sexual harrassment. The reason never actually has to stand up in court before you get fired. There is plenty of time to put something together later if it does end up in court for wrongful dismissal.
It's the workplace equivalent of being charged with nothing but "resisting arrest" - you can't win if those with power over you want to push it far enough. If somebody really wants to get rid of you and you can't go over their heads then you are finished. Legal action later is going to be against the company and not personally against the manager - with minimal spin there is no consequence at all for the manager even if you win.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Nightspirit]

In the US I don't think most workers have much of a choice of being in a union unless they start their own. For example, if I wanted to work at Vons (a grocery store) because they were hiring, I could either join the union or not take the job. Same for teachers and auto workers. And in this economy employment>politics for a lot of people.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Javaman59]

You'll be fired for "not being a team player".

Yes, or for any other reason. "Won't commit to a reasonable deadline". "Didn't achieve agreed deadline". "Code had bugs". "Code produced on time, and working, but missing documentation". "Too many coffee breaks"...

"A reference??? You gotta be kidding, after the way you performed here."

The real problem is that software work is always "impossible", in the sense that you can't achieve all goals in the given time. If the programmer rocks the boat, then, no matter how well he balances the priorities, and achieves the main objectives, he is open to criticism. His only defence, if management is malicious, is to work to exhaustion.

Re:How to get management to listen

[bikehorn]

My experience with unions is a positive one. I am an electrician and a member of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). I'm not crazy about everything unions do, including my own, but when I became unionised I moved from a company that was abusive, disorganised and flat out too cheap to pay for MANDATORY safety gear...to a company that is organised, on top of their stuff, not abusive to their employees and staffed by COMPETENT people. Everyone I work with loves working here. I also get a great benefits package and the variety of work experience I am able to take in is huge plus the supplementary specialised training available to members doesn't really have an equivalent outside of the union. Also, no matter who I work for, I get paid the same rate.

One more thing, our company does not keep around any incompetent electricians who waste time and slack off "just because they are in the union". The union does not prevent us from sacking them if they legitimately suck ass. It's much like the non union world...If you are good, you will have a full time job even in a crap economy. If you are useless, you will be sent back to the union hall and you will sit there a very long time.

I think developers in companies like R* should become unionised. You guys who suggest that they "just quit" when their company pushes them too hard are probably right in theory but the reality is, I doubt there will be any mass quittings that "force the company to rethink their actions" and I doubt that conditions are going to improve industry-wide. So what is the long term solution to this problem outside of organising into a union? It will push the monetary cost of developing games up, but reduce the human cost. That or they will outsource. There is no perfect fix since management will not experience a magical paradigm shift in their labour philosophy. I'm all for solutions that don't involve unionising but, are there any that will really be effective?

Re:How to get management to listen

[ScrewMaster]

So maybe they just changed the salary range at your company, and rather than divide developers into exempt and non-exempt ones, they decided to treat them all as non-exempt.

However you look this, when you get right down to it a lot of programmers are treated with contempt.

Re:How to get management to listen

[khchung]

You find another job? You make it sound so easy!

The auto-workers can do the same thing. They can just "find another job", and it's so easy anyone can do it!

Yes, IT IS THAT EASY.

Why "auto-workers" can't do the same thing? Because they restricted themselves as "auto-workers". You first limit your own choice of jobs and then complain there is no job for you? Is that even reasonable?

You (not you personally, just a manner of speaking) can't take a pay cut to switch fields because you got bills to pay? That's your problem, it is you who decided to live a lifestyle that used up all your monthly income leaving you with no savings and, eventually, stuck with your current job.

If you had, instead, got into the habit of saving at least 35% of your income, then after one year, not only would you have savings enough to last 6 months (longer if you further cut back expenses), you can also switch to a job with 35% pay-cut and have zero impact on your lifestyle.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Helen O'Boyle]

Parent article said: No, most programmers in the US work for companies who CLAIM they are classified as "exempt". There are specific legal requirements for such classification, and the truth is that the vast majority of programmers _do not_ meet them.

Mod parent up. IT tech support staff working primarily from troubleshooting guides, attorneys reviewing documents, and other "professionals" have found to be misclassified as exempt from OT. It certainly appears to be the case that there are more jobs classified as "exempt" than there are jobs that are really exempt from OT compensation. Note that the specifics of the laws vary from state to state.

IANAL, and I last looked at this a while back, but I believe that when looking at a particular incidence of possible misclassification, you match the situation against both federal and applicable state laws, and whichever laws are more favorable TO THE EMPLOYEE apply. In some cases, exactly what you do on the job (not your title, but your actual duties) in IT may be the deciding factor. (Please check that before relying on it, of course. But I'm tossing it out there in case it's useful to someone.)

Re:How to get management to listen

[nitehawk214]

You're free to associate, but that's not the point. Unions will make it a condition of employment to be in the union. So, you can refuse to join the teacher's union if you want... but you can't work as a teacher if you do.

There's no Constitutional issues here, since the Constitution doesn't apply to private business.

Except that your example is teaching... most schools in the US are public ones. Thought it seems like the Constitution rarely applies to schools anymore.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ClosedSource]

The classification is done by employers despite what the law might say. It's been going on for the 25 years I've been around and the government has made little or no effort to challenge it. In fact its common practice on defense contracts, so clearly the US government is OK with it.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Anarchduke]

I agree we should undo all the damage that union's have done to our great country.
For example, the evil unions forced our country to pass socialist laws like:
40 hour work weeks
Overtime
Safe workplaces
Fair wages/ no company store money
Minimum Wage
and of course, Child Labor.

Wouldn't we be lucky to be in a business friendly country that employs children and doesn't let them waste the day in some silly school environment?
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/

Re:How to get management to listen

[91degrees]

I see your point, but I have to chuckle at the idea of sexual harassment in the games industry... That would involve finding a woman to harass:)

Re:How to get management to listen

[91degrees]

Judging by what these guys say, I can't see how the Computer Software Professionals Exemption doesn't apply to the programmers. Although for that matter I don't see how it doesn't apply to Intel and IBM either.

Re:How to get management to listen

[DrXym]

If I'm hiring a game programmer I don't really care if he knows design patterns. I care if he can take a game engine and turn it inside-out in a week because we had a neat new idea that the current engine can't support.

I agree that you need a few very skilled people to tune code and experiment, people who really know their shit. But I don't see that it should be mutually exclusive with sound design practices. Code needs to be as modular, well defined, readable, maintainable and reusable as possible. It doesn't have to affect speed or turnaround. I would be very wary of any programmer who couldn't explain some design patterns or show some other indication of a programming methodology. Yes they might still turn out a game on time only for you to discover after they left that there are 10,000 lines of monolithic, unreadable crap in the middle of it.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ZorbaTHut]

That's sort of the point, though. In a lot of games, who cares if there's 10,000 lines of monolithic unreadable crap? If it gets the job done, then it works. Hell, in many cases you can't patch the game post-release anyway - you release the game, it's done, you move on.

Re:How to get management to listen

[X0563511]

I think you lack an understanding of how artwork is done in games.

You work in "high definition" and par it down to what you need. IE, sculpt a hundreds-of-thousands-poly mesh, and 'bake' the normals and AO into textures to apply to a simplified mesh.

Textures and such tend to also be much higher resolution/detail in the original form as well.

Re:How to get management to listen

[xaxa]

Interesting. I've just come across this, which says you can't be forced to join (be a member of) a union, but you can still be forced to pay for some union services: "in the 1988 case Communication Workers of America v. Beck, the Court said that a worker could be compelled to pay only that portion of union dues and initiation fees used for collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance procedures. No worker can be compelled to pay dues for such things as politics, lobbying, and union organizing".

But it sounds like most people don't know of these rights, unions are taking advantage of this, and I doubt many people are willing to take the union to court to enforce them.

Re:How to get management to listen

[TheRaven64]

The same is, naturally, true of unions, except that unions are far harder to remove if they turn bad than managers are.

You and the grandparent both seem to treat the idea that unions are monopolies as axiomatic. This is common in the USA, but it isn't in most of the rest of the world. You have several unions for a profession and if one is bad then it's easy to remove them; just join one of the others instead. Unions that don't represent their members' interests quickly run out of members. If members of one union are getting a better deal than members of another, then that union grows.

Often, you'll get different unions representing different demographics within the workforce. If you think the union is rewarding incompetence, join the one that only recruits from the top few percent and requires you to pass some accreditation exams before they let you in. If their exams are good then they will then be in a stronger bargaining position with the employers, because they can say 'give our employees more money, they're worth it, otherwise hire from the people who can't pass our exams. They'll be cheaper, but they'll be less useful to you.'

It's much harder to get your boss fired than it is to switch unions.

Re:How to get management to listen

[TheRaven64]

The entire problem with the system can be summed up with this phrase:

the teacher's union

The union. Not a union. If you allow unions to become monopolies then they will exhibit all of the same problems that any other monopoly exhibits.

Re:How to get management to listen

[TheRaven64]

It's worth noting that a 1:10 rate is pretty much the lowest estimate for this variation that you'll find, and is only from studies with relatively small sample sizes. Even the studies cited in the article you link to claim the ratio is 1:25 by some metrics. It's more of the variation between an average programmer and a good programmer. The difference between a good programmer and a great programmer is often another factor of ten. This is especially true in teams, because a good programmer can make other programmers a lot more productive; a two minute chat with a good programmer can often save a less-good programmer hours of time.

Re:How to get management to listen

[tomhudson]

"why buy a wireless router for $100 when you get go get a cheap used PC for $25,

1. How about "Because the used PC doesn't have wireless"? Duh! The cost of the add-in wireless xmitter, or a switch ($15), second network card ($10), and a couple of ethernet cables ($6 each) brings it up to $62.00
2. Because a wireless router is under $50.00 on sale (the older Linksys b/g and the Dlink b/g/n - $49 is what I paid for each of them), not $100.00.
3. Because with a laptop or Wii, wireless networking is built in, but I have to spend money on more cables if I use the PC as router (and for the Wii, I'd also have to buy an adapter).

Re:How to get management to listen

[tomhudson]

I'm still hoping for the mythical "+5 Troll" mod. In theory, it's supposed to be possible depending on the timing of the mods, but the odds are, even if you DO achieve it, someone else will mod it yet again.

Now back on-topic ... I've found that people who aren't unionized are AFRAID of talking about unions. "It might get back to the boss" seems to be the prevalent attitude.

When employees are treated fairly (I'm not saying "coddled", just treated fairly and with respect), the question of a union doesn't even come up. Talk of a union is a sign that employees are fed up and would jump ship at the first decent offer. They're looking at job boards, they're less productive because they're demoralized, etc.

If a union prevents those conditions from getting to that point, it seems that it would be in the employers' best interests to not discourage one or more unions.

then again, it's in the employers' best interests to treat employees properly, but they don't do THAT either in a lot of places.

Hint - When you feel constrained against voicing your opinion of job conditions on the job, it's time to leave the job.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Dahamma]

I just made up those prices, I wouldn't get too literal there... But anyway, yeah, I think I have made similar points on /. before when people bring this up, but I usually just get modded down ;)

Which is a bit ironic, since my primary router/gateway is a Linux box (though also a NAS, DLNA/DAAP server, backup server, an external HTTP/FTP/SSH/mail server, etc). I just don't pretend the hours of tinkering with it has saved me any money as a router...

Re:How to get management to listen

[quanticle]

Well, that, and the fact they know that their jobs would all be exported to a place where unionization wasn't the norm the moment any significant number of them decided to do so. I mean, look at the manufacturing and automobile industries. The high levels of unionization only worked so long as there were significant barriers between markets. The moment those barriers fell, the unionized shops got beaten by the non-union shops. Even here in the US, auto production has largely moved to southern states which don't have a strong union tradition like the north.

The computer industry never had the benefit of a period of high barriers like the manufacturing industries had. We've known right from the very beginning that our work weighs nothing; that it can be transported around the world for almost no cost and no time. Unionizing the presence of this knowledge is nothing less than a death wish for the industry.

Re:How to get management to listen

[quanticle]

That said, there's nothing saying that you have to work in the games industry if you're a coder. There are plenty of other programming jobs out there that don't have these ridiculous schedules. In fact, this is the reason that I explicitly avoid pitching my CV to game development shops. No matter how attractive the job looks at first, it'll slowly turn into hell on earth as management pushes the coders to skimp on quality and their own health in order to meet a deadline that they themselves have imposed.

Re:How to get management to listen

[winwar]

"It's been going on for the 25 years I've been around and the government has made little or no effort to challenge it."

If an employee does not file a complaint, the government does not investigate. But once a complaint is filed, the DOL will happily look at similar employees in similar positions for the last few years. The damage a single complaint can do is staggering. The fact that so few are filed indicates that most employees may deserve the abuse they get....

Re:How to get management to listen

[kbielefe]

"Non-frothy" conservative arguments are too subtle for a quick discussion like an online forum or a TV sound bite. An overweight conservative could go on a diet and his opponents would accuse him of being anti-food.

No one thinks decent working conditions, etc. are a bad thing. The problem that comes up all too often when a union is involved is that good working conditions in exchange for good productivity ceases to be a voluntary agreement that both sides are happy to hold up, and instead turns into a management vs. labor antagonism where both sides try their hardest to do the absolute minimum forced upon them by a contract with the force of law behind it. Union leaders end up fighting tooth and nail to help workers keep relatively crappy jobs where management doesn't respect them and watches them like a hawk to make sure they're living up to their end of the contract.

No thanks. I was fired from a union job in my youth and will never work for one again. I now work for a company that respects me and keeps working conditions reasonable for no other reason than they want to entice me to voluntarily stay and do a good job for them. On those rare occasions where extra hours are required to meet a deadline, I'm happy to do it because I have respect for them.

Re:How to get management to listen

[ClosedSource]

"If an employee does not file a complaint, the government does not investigate."

That hardly qualifies as due diligence. But the point is that having Engineers classified as exempt simply wasn't considered a violation of the law. As I stated before, the US government was aware their contractors were doing this and actually set up some policies that in certain situations would allow the government to profit from the unpaid hours.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Dr_Terminus]

What is evil is when workers agree on a 4x10 (4 days, 10 hours per day, per week) schedule and union says no (4x10 is better for the environment and everybody?! tough).

Evil is union forcing a strike when the majority is against it. (and this happens A LOT) So much for the wish of the majority.

Evil is union supporting the slackers and making sure the guy that barely does his job, or doesn't at all stays in the company.

If thats what you're dealing with, then it sounds like theres something wrong with your union. The union exists to give some bulk bargaining power to its members - so if the majority of its members want a 4x10 schedule, then thats what the union should advocate.

Here in France, there tend to be multiple unions workers can join. At Airbus, for example, there are three unions - one large, one medium, and one small. So if you're dissatisfied with the conditions/politics/etc of one, there are others that you can join. As a result of widespread union activity in France, working conditions are typically very good, with generous vacation time and benefits.

Re:How to get management to listen

[RogerWilco]

It seems that you don't have unions that understand that in the end, if the business fails, their members are without a job.
Most unions that I know in The Netherlands understand very well that a well running company is also their responsibility, not just the management/shareholders, but because in the long run it benefits the employees if the company does well.

But then Dutch unions usually side with the Dutch employers against for example the British or German ones, understanding full well that if the Dutch companies get too expensive because of their demands, the jobs will move to another country. Maybe you need to organise unions differently in the US?

Re:How to get management to listen

[RogerWilco]

I know I can personally negotiate a much better contract than any union can on my behalf.

Well, stories like this seem to indicate that there are a lot of people who think like you but in the end end up a lot worse. Unless having large amounts of unpaid overtime seems like a good deal to you?

Re:How to get management to listen

[Blakey Rat]

That's because I'm not them. I don't get stomped into the ground by work... if I were in their situation, I'd either renegotiate my pay, or quit.

The fact that they haven't done that only proves my point: I'm better at managing my work experience than every employee of Rockstar, apparently.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Skater]

Who said anything about auto unions? Ever think there are unions in other industries? And did you notice where I said "many of them"? Perhaps I think there are some unions that do good.

Lacking the ability to read is never profitable.

Re:How to get management to listen

[surlybob]

What is evil is when workers agree on a 4x10 (4 days, 10 hours per day, per week) schedule and union says no (4x10 is better for the environment and everybody?! tough).

2 years later or the next "downturn" that magically becomes 5x10. Fuck that. Oldest management trick in the book.

Evil is union supporting the slackers and making sure the guy that barely does his job, or doesn't at all stays in the company.

Management doesn't need unions for this. They just get their pet senators to give them a bailout cuz they are "too big to fail". As for the so-called union freeloaders you refer to, I'd look for them in the same place as Ray-gun's "welfare queens" -- in imaginaryland. Young conservatives are cute. You'll change your tune after a few more years away from mommy and daddy.

Re:How to get management to listen

[surlybob]

Quitting would be a start. Internal organization and negotiation would be another (but not up to union level)

This one is definitely fresh from mommy and daddy's nest. You see, James. Some people have families that they need to feed and don't have the luxury of just "quitting" when their boss plays hardball. Fact is, management has absolutely no incentive whatsoever to even care a little about worker's rights unless there is something like a union to put the fear of god into em. It ain't perfect, but neither is the whole "let the corps, banks and managers do whatever the hell they want to" plan that caused the economic collapse of 2008. Fact of the matter is, managers can afford to lose some money to "mean" or "unfair" worker organizations. Workers, on the other hand, are pretty much living paycheck to paycheck.

While power hungry bozos try to convince people that's better to form a union that's going to totally screw-up relations with employers

What a child. Unions should no more care about "relations with employers" than slaves should care about "relations" with massa on the plantation. To management, workers are mere "human resources", and if there were some way legally and logistically to throw workers into a great furnace and money pop out, they would do so (and get their pet senators to make it legal, too!)

Until our system is reformed to something where government action isn't based solely on how many senators you can buy or how much you can contribute, unions, weak and flawed as they may be, are the only thing standing between us and absolute corporate dictatorship. With the recent supreme court decision, it's gonna get ugly, let me tell ya.

Re:How to get management to listen

[surlybob]

Yeah, man. Your boss has your best interests at heart! Just promise me that you'll remember this thread when your job gets offshored to India or China, in a few years. After all, unions "play dirty" and "don't give workers any benefits", LOL. Seriously, though, those dues are chickenfeed. furthermore, what you may pay in dues would have been lost in unpaid overtime, anyways. Joining a union is like having a CPA do your taxes -- yeah, it costs some money, but in the end you save much more than you paid. Just turn off Fox News and ask around and you'll learn all about it.

Re:How to get management to listen

[surlybob]

Would you also support the right of software companies to collude among themselves to keep wages low?

Naw, they totally don't do that! (sarcasm)

Re:How to get management to listen

[Eli Gottlieb]

You forgot the bizarre tendency for software developers enjoying the social and technological benefits of a social-democratic society to put forward strictly laissez-faire views.

Re:How to get management to listen

[thetoadwarrior]

Not myself personally. I am American and my father worked in his company's union. Oddly enough that is what put me off unions because he actually did effectively work two jobs to help ungrateful people who wouldn't end up voting the right way because they thought management would be more likely to sack them.

I'm in a union because it happens that this company has one. I didn't join straight away but after about a year, I thought it was only £10 so I might as well give it a go seeing how I waste more than that a month on beers after work.

I do believe that it is very easy for a union to be corrupt and useless. More so if they do make head way and improve things for employees then there is less to justify their existence.

I think if developers were to have their own union they should make it their own rather than joining up with some national union that is effectively a corporation.

People should also be made aware that they should quit the union if they're unhappy with it at all. You can't just join a union and assume nothing can be done or be afraid of looking like an employee brown noser. If it's bad then quit and suggest to others to do the same. Make the union work for you rather than you working for them.

Re:How to get management to listen

[Da_Biz]

Lacking the ability to speak with precision is the hallmark of a fearmongerer. Go peddle your demagogery elsewhere--and I'm sorry I interrupted your Fox News viewing.

Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but...

[realmolo]

Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. "Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume.

They should quit and get into creating applications instead of games. Yeah, it's not nearly as sexy, but the pressure is MUCH lower. And the pay is probably better, too.

cry me a river...

[Anonymous Coward]

Once game development is a boring or uncool as say, J2EE or cobol development, the sweatshop reputation may fade. Until then, good luck.

It's not like these people couldn't get another job, say, writing insurance software or something if the hours were *really* a problem.

Welcome to Capitalism

[Akido37]

That's the way it is - it's profitable for the company with no downside.

The only option is for employees to show that it will cost them in the long run through turnover and training new employees.

Alternately, unionization or government regulation are the only other options.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Advocating unions or government regulation makes you sounds like a socialist.

Oh god, anything but that! The horror! Way to buy into the buzzword of the day.

When companies demonstrate they can treat workers with respect (which includes reasonable working days), I will stop bashing on the corporate model. Many corporations, however, fail to latch onto the fact that by respecting their employees will do more in the long run than treating them like shit and causing a huge turnover rate, forcing them to pay money for training on new workers.

Yes, I am aware that a company's sole purpose is to return as large a profit as possible within the bounds of law to the shareholders; however, this doesn't preclude the ability for companies to treat their workers like human beings for once, and that means paying them a living wage along with a few benefits. If they can't do this, then as far as I'm concerned they shouldn't be in the fucking business. Shareholders need to demand more from their companies instead of whining about their own pockets which are probably lined with enough Benjamins as it is already.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[xaxa]

Advocating unions or government regulation makes you sounds like a socialist.

Is there a problem with that?

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[91degrees]

You're clearly not American.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, seeing as how the government and unions here rape things until they die bleeding from the ass. Can't speak for any other country. You need to look at cases individually. Anyone who only says "unions are good" or "unions are bad" is a fuckhead ideologue of the sort we need to breed out of the species as fast as we can.

California is going to be a desolate wasteland in 10 years or so because of the magic combination of government employees and unions. The politicians and union leaders here are the foulest, most amoral sacks of pig shit on the planet, with the exception of the regular citizens who cheer for them. *Those* people are lower than slime molds.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[nurb432]

Yes, there is.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[nurb432]

Oh god, anything but that! The horror! Way to buy into the buzzword of the day.

Um, no. Its not the 'buzzword of the day' ( if there is one currently, its fascism ), its a time old concept that is rather repulsive and is not the type of system our founding fathers intended, here in the US anyway.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[Afforess]

Advocating Unions does not make you anti-capitalist. Unions developed largely in response to situations like in the OP. There are nothing wrong with Unions.

Government Regulation on the other hand, well, we all know how good a job the government is on that... I'd rather trust myself to a union than a government that changes it's tune every election.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[nurb432]

The subject here is about a bunch of 20 somethings coding for a computer game company and working extra hours, NOT the banking industry and its trouble.

Try to stay on topic, ok?

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[xaxa]

Yes, seeing as how the government and unions here rape things until they die bleeding from the ass.

Would a union of software developers "rape things until they die bleeding from the ass"? Unions are groups of people, anything they do is a result of the decisions made by those people.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[alphaseven]

That's the way it is - it's profitable for the company with no downside. The only option is for employees to show that it will cost them in the long run through turnover and training new employees. Alternately, unionization or government regulation are the only other options.

The problem isn't capitalism, it's just bad management at that specific develooper. Here's part of interview with someone from one of the most successful developers right, Infinity Ward (who did Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2).

we schedule our projects well so there is never a feeling of "oh crap, this whole project is going to hell"; we reward our employees for their hard work with significant royalties; we usually make games on a relatively fast (but not rushed) two-year dev cycle; we almost never have forced crunch - in fact I've worked one full Saturday plus a few scattered weekend hours in the entire six years I've been at Infinity Ward.

I'm not a executive, but I would think Rockstar would be better off by hiring the best, paying them well and not overworking them so they can have a low turnover. I keep reading the same articles about "crunch time" and underpayed employees then later I read about the same companies having financial problems (EA in particular but also Rockstar).

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[Adambomb]

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/healthscatter.png

Glad that anti-socialism angle is working out so well for your country.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[MindlessAutomata]

Try unionization, or maybe educate employees. Government regulation would hurt people like me with no family or social life that wouldn't mind long crunch periods. There is no one-size-fits-all style to life and freedom, despite what the populists tell you, is not designing all life to the lowest-common-denominator.

'course many unions are just as corrupt and faceless as any government, and reward seniority over anything else.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[interkin3tic]

Advocating unions or government regulation makes you sounds like a socialist.

Is there a problem with that?

Yes! Regan, Rocky, and the Wolverines didn't team up to defeat soviet russia so we could become communists!

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[interkin3tic]

Yes, seeing as how the government and unions here rape things until they die bleeding from the ass.

Yeah! If we let programmers unionize, they'll rape the video game industry over until it's no longer profitable in the US and another country will take over, just like actor and writer unions have done to hollywood!

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[korean.ian]

Try unionization, or maybe educate employees. Government regulation would hurt people like me with no family or social life that wouldn't mind long crunch periods. There is no one-size-fits-all style to life and freedom, despite what the populists tell you, is not designing all life to the lowest-common-denominator.

Never has a user name been more appropriate for a post.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[haruharaharu]

The subject is your assertion that government regulation is always terrible. The fact is, capitalism is a toxic thing when taken to extremes, and regulation is often a good idea. In this case, any one employee would be fired on the spot if they complained about management and, in fact, it doesn't appear as though management will fix things on its own, what with this being a 30 year tradition.

The government has an interest in its citizens enjoying a decent standard of living, and that includes people seeing their children. The regulation I have in mind here is removing the exemption for computer guys from overtime. You don't like regulation, so you should be fine with this.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[nurb432]

The subject is your assertion that government regulation is always terrible.

No, it was not. Please read again what i said, and what context it was written in and think before you make stupid assumptions.

But to help you out:

I did include the government option when monopolies and unfair trade was taking place ( as examples ). Neither of those are in effect here considering this is a leisure company, and NOT something more fundamental like food or transportation or energy. The OP threw out a totally ludicrous statement of government involvement in a *video game company*.. Which to me smells of socialism on a grand scale.

Furthermore, regulation is NEVER a 'good idea', but i agree that it is required as a last option, in special cases.

If you don't like the rules at work while writing code, GO FIND YOURSELF ANOTHER JOB. There will be plenty of people to fill your vacancy that will be quite happy with the position. Until we start talking about actual safety or captive abuse issues, the government does not be involved and the freemarket should be left alone.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[thetoadwarrior]

If the conditions are the same everywhere then you can't really go elsewhere. All companies forcing poor conditions on employees is just as bad as the government forcing perfect conditions on employees.

Government regulations aren't necessarily socialism or are you for removing the bill of rights and allowing local communities decide whether people can own guns or have free speech based on their community's needs?

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[The_Wilschon]

And the voting public in Massachusets (Masschusets for crying out loud!) just threw a Democrat out on his ass. Screwed indeed. Nobody likes anybody, regardless of party. Can we move on back to the topic yet?

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[nurb432]

Conditions are not the same everywhere. We are talking about a freaking video game.. If we were talking about something important that mattered and every similar career option in the country was locked in, we could discuss appropriate regulations..

But we arent in that situtaion, and again its a VIDEO GAME.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[thetoadwarrior]

You're right it is just a video game. There is no reason someone should have to give up an excessive chunk of their social life and potentially harm their health just to make a video game.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[nurb432]

Unless they choose to, its a free country remember :)

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[mad.frog]

The only option is for employees to show that it will cost them in the long run through turnover and training new employees

Yeah, except that in this case, it won't. Most games are failures; it's totally a hit-driven business. So, for the most part, writing a coherent, maintainable, well-written-and-architected piece of code is a NON-GOAL in this industry. It's far more profitable to write a pile of crappy code (licensing libraries where possible) that can be thrown away in the (likely) event of product failure.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[haruharaharu]

It's people like you that are undoing the 40 hour work week that was won only a century ago. Apparently, you think that a worker is on an even bargaining footing with a company and that exploiting a recession to screw employees is ok.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[MindlessAutomata]

Not for my entire life, mind you, but I'm far from mindless for not wanting a family! That's like spitting in the face of the American Dream--not splurting out yet another future taxpayer or consumer, gathering my own wealth, whilst disregarding females :P

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[CaptainPinko]

... and is not the type of system our founding fathers intended, here in the US anyway.

So what? Neither is a system where blacks and women can vote. In fact, the founding father tacitly agreed to continue slavery in the south. So why should we care what they wanted? They gave us the means to change laws so we can.

Re:Welcome to Capitalism

[thetoadwarrior]

Is it free enough that the people running companies should be able to run them as they want to rather than the government regulating it? Yes you can argue that you can go elsewhere but if the majority are crap well then you're screwed because not everyone can work for one company.

For gaming I personally feel this sort of thing helps the industry prop their way of business where they pump out half assed games because it's cheaper than it should be.

So yes, people are free to do what they want and if they want to risk having no relationships or a social life and poor health, that's their choice but with all freedoms there are responsibilities are they need to realise they're not actually helping things.

If they're working on GTA all the time...

[ScottySniper]

Maybe they'll go on a killing spree with a supercar they got from their mobile phone.

Re:If they're working on GTA all the time...

[ScrewMaster]

Maybe they'll go on a killing spree with a supercar they got from their mobile phone.

I don;'t know about any supercar, but you push an unstable personality too hard in this society and you're taking your life in your hands.

programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

> When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?

The day that programmers stop being yes-men and saying to their managers they can do it. I've been with EA 5 years. I know the drill. Once your team wises up and only signs up for what it can deliver, the crunch goes away.

Step 1: Be upfront and straightforward. Don't promise what you can't deliver.
Step 2: Dont' work more than 40 hours. Just leave after that.
Step 3: Profit.

Re:programmers

[JWSmythe]

    That not only applies to game development. That applies everywhere. Don't promise deadlines that you can't comfortably achieve.

    I've been pushed to give impractical goals. I can't even count the number of times that I've been thrown an idea (not a plan), and been pushed for a deadline. "Will this be done in a month?" You simply can't give an answer to that. One job, it was with some unusual hardware. The pieces slowly rolled in, and each one presented it's own set of problems that set my personal timeline back. I keep my own personal set of expectations, but I won't promise these as a real life timeline. The expected timeline is usually 3x as long, with a list of caveats attached. If everything goes smooth, great. It'll be finished in 1/3 the promised time. If it doesn't? Well, you should have enough room to work in (hopefully). Sometimes a hard problem becomes an impossible one. A recent one involved a hardware fault, and the vendor reproduced it, but wasn't able to solve it. That required going another route, which pushed that step back to the beginning.

    You have to work what is practical for you. If you can do 50 hours/week, do it. If you may want to actually have a social life and not get burnt out before you're 30, do the 40 hours and go home. Unfortunately, this can give the sign that you aren't willing to work hard enough.

Re:programmers

[JamesP]

can I say 'THIS' a million times?!

This is not just for EA, it's for everybody.

Top developer mistake: UNDERESTIMATING development time
2nd place: being 'yes men' and get taken by the manager's attitude.
3rd place: taking your boss seriously
4th place: not standing up for BS like CMMI etc.

Re:programmers

[Areyoukiddingme]

Step 2: Dont' work more than 40 hours. Just leave after that.

I did that while I worked for Sony, early in the noughts. They fired me after less than a year and a half. I was unemployed for 20 months, and very nearly lost my house and car. My salary has never yet recovered to average levels for my age and experience.

That's why they work their 12 hour days. There's a regular Slashdot poster with a sig that says "Debt is slavery." It's no joke.

Re:programmers

[Blakey Rat]

There's a regular Slashdot poster with a sig that says "Debt is slavery." It's no joke.

I think the point is "don't build up so much debt in the first place." Buy only what you can afford-- other than my mortgage payments, I have zero debt right now, and I have enough in savings to pay my mortgage for at least 3 years.

Re:programmers

[Hollovoid]

This is true, overworking and unreasonable deadlines are present in almost any industry, and to be honest, I would have envied those guys at rockstar with what the company I work for had us doing.. 13 days on, 1 day off, 12-16 hr days, for 4 months straight at one point. It breaks people down, after only the first month injuries and massive mistakes became the normal, then people started calling in, quitting, and becoming extremely irritable over everything. But even after all of that, if another huge contract came in, they would do it again in a heartbeat, because to management, money is worth it, and you should be happy to be working at all..

Re:programmers

[interkin3tic]

Step 1: Be upfront and straightforward. Don't promise what you can't deliver.
Step 2: Dont' work more than 40 hours. Just leave after that.
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: Profit!!!!

T,FTFY

Re:programmers

[Areyoukiddingme]

Oh I'm with you. Almost. I only have enough in savings to pay my mortgage for a year. But my car is paid for and I don't carry a balance on any credit card. As far as I'm concerned it's the mortgage itself that keeps me enslaved. The bank is perfectly willing to take my house away from me if I don't keep paying. I know. I've been served papers before.

I said in my first post that my salary has never recovered. There's a reason for that. I have no interest in taking a high pressure job again. I put in my 40 hours and go home at night. I'm sure that contributes to my lower than average earnings. Oh well.

Re:programmers

[JamesP]

Estimating time can be near impossible when management doesn't know what it wants or hasn't defined the details. Which is extremely common.

I agree, and this is another problem, scope creep.

When you add in aggressive schedules and long bug/feature lists, the pressure to perform is enormous. Estimating development time accurately in the middle of all this is very difficult to get management on board with.

This is something that developers have to learn to deal with. You're right.

What I meant with that phrase is that, and several studies back that, is that developers consistently and almost predictably underestimate completion time of tasks.

We have to keep that in mind at all times.

Re:programmers

[Nightspirit]

Yes, but if you don't have any hard timelines you end up with Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:programmers

[Kneo24]

Thanks for pointing out to everyone how lazy you are. There's nothing wrong with working 40 hours a week, but I somehow doubt it would seriously inconvenience you to work 45 hours a week once in a while. You are paid to do a job. If you're salary, you're expected to a do a little more sometimes because you have a few extra perks the hourly people don't have. If you don't like being salary, don't take salaried jobs.

Re:programmers

[MartinSchou]

Yes, but if you don't have any hard timelines you end up with Duke Nukem Forever.

I'm pretty sure you don't. Last I heard they canceled it.

Re:programmers

[__aaclcg7560]

These days CRUCH TIME IS ALL THE TIME. That's an 80 hour work week. I worked 28 days straight on my last project as a lead tester despite an official six-day work week policy that the HR person recited but didn't enforce. I was still tagged as not being a "team player" because I took two programming classes and went to church. My sin was having a personal life outside of work.

Re:programmers

[91degrees]

I'm sure that contributes to my lower than average earnings.

Is your income greater than your expense? Will you be able to retire comfortably? If the answer is yes to both of these then I believe you have a lifestyle to be admired.

Re:programmers

[Alcoholist]

This sort of relates.

A relation of mine works on a team that writes new financial apps in COBOL. Some big financial institution managing millions of pensions. One of their biggest problems: the team is getting old and finding new COBOL programmers isn’t as easy as you would think.

Anyway, the young university grads at the firm think COBOL is old geezer work. They would scurry around a few floors down, writing front end stuff in Java and Visual Studio. Always agitated, always in a hurry, always behind yet they worked 70 hour weeks. The COBOL team managed to convince one of them to come work in their department. After six months, you would barely recognize the kid: he got a haircut, the bags under his eyes were gone, he had returned to a healthy weight, met a girl, purchased a respectable condo. Why? He now has the time to do it. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, three weeks of vacation every year. These 'old geezer' programmers would pull this off by very carefully planing out what they were expected to do, not over-commit, submitting the plan to management and then getting it done. Since COBOL programmers tend to work at a fairly predictable rate, it was easy for them to always be on time.

I've only programmed for financial companies but IMHO I think these young game hackers are getting caught up in the whole "OMFG I pulled off this monster hack and it only took 20 hours and six cans of Red Bull!" I've done that too -- back in college. But if you start thinking like that professionally and promise as much to your boss, he's just going to ask for it all the time until you are all used up.

Re:programmers

[sfjohnso]

I've been the manager of a team of programmers, pushed by Sales / Marketing types to agree to ridiculous dates. I finally learned a productive response that has served me well for 20+ years: I draw a dependency diagram on a whiteboard, with all of the "completed" stuff in green, and all the "incomplete" stuff in red (redrawn in green as completed), and with our (even wildly optimistic) estimates for each. The screamers come by, and I show them the diagram. This gets them to a) see the complexity of delivering a software-based product, b) see that most of the stuff is crap they've demanded, and c) gets them to start thinking about what to remove in order to bring in the availability date. The focus is now off the team, and back on the product features and complexity, where it belongs.

Re:programmers

[ScrewMaster]

I finally learned a productive response that has served me well for 20+ years: I draw a dependency diagram on a whiteboard, with all of the "completed" stuff in green, and all the "incomplete" stuff in red (redrawn in green as completed), and with our (even wildly optimistic) estimates for each.

That's a great idea, but it presumes that your "screamers" are merely misinformed and willing to listen to reason ... not completely irrational. I've dealt with both types, and the latter can be a real challenge, let me tell you. Show them all the charts you want, they won't believe you and figure that you're lying to them because you're just lazy.

Re:programmers

[JWSmythe]

    This has pro's and con's.

    Pro's.. It shows that you have a plan, and can demonstrate the steps completed and what is pending.

    Con's.. Some folks just want a report saying it's done. They can't or won't be bothered to read the whiteboard. A lot of times, the screamers will just scream, regardless of what coherent data you can provide.

    I'm a big fan of whiteboarding. Not just for drawing circles and nonsensical information to make it look like I'm smart. It's very useful as an aid that won't be a piece of paper to be accidentally shuffled away. At very least, I can point and try to explain things, but it frequently causes glazed over looks. But for me, it gives me a good way to track what I'm doing, and it's a wonderful feeling of accomplishment to change the status of a particularly troublesome piece.

    In the past, I've had a list of tasks mandated by the CEO directly spelled out clearly on my whiteboard. Other folks will come in and demand their pet problem takes priority, so I've pointed at the whiteboard. "These came down from the CEO as priority over everything else." They don't care, and demand their pet project be done first, even though the list is clearly a business priority, not a wild hair up the CEO's butt. I let them play the game for about a minute, and finally give in and say, "If you can get the CEO to tell me to make your pet problem a priority over his, I'll stop working on those items and do yours." Oddly enough, at no job have I ever had the CEO come and ask me to change my priorities. I make my own decisions, and I understand the business needs. My interest is the best interest of the company I'm working for. If the company fails, I'm out of work. If some annoying twit has a pet problem that fails, but isn't a business priority, I won't be walking away from a company that just went under.

Let's try this again ...

[ScrewMaster]

What the heck? I was logged in and it posted me A.C. Anyway ...

He could be describing Electronic Arts. Look, the game industry has been run this way for the better part of thirty years. I worked as a coder for a couple of game companies back in the mid-eighties ... and I left for the reasons described in the summary. Never looked back. As much as I enjoyed that line of work, management practices were abusive even then. The irony is that there's no real reason for it other than poor management. We know how to manage software projects well, we know that pushing programmers too hard does not result in any real savings. The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value. That's how you treat piece workers in a factory ... and guess what, piece work is generally illegal. There's a reason for that.

Jam up your development staff the way these outfits do, and you get poor quality code. It is inevitable, Mr. Anderson. The usual chain of events involves increased QA costs, continual rework, missed deadlines and lost customers. Yet they persist in this obviously defective approach, which to me indicates that upper management is hiring sadists to run their development teams.

Re:Let's try this again ...

[CodeBuster]

which to me indicates that upper management is hiring sadists to run their development teams.

One should be careful not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Re:Let's try this again ...

[ScrewMaster]

which to me indicates that upper management is hiring sadists to run their development teams.

One should be careful not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Well, in this case I think there's quite a bit of malice involved. Yes, there's stupidity on the part of upper management for believing that destroying people in this way actually serves any real purpose. But malice is a part of this syndrome as well: if you're a manager and you are willing to treat your people in such an horrific manner, you are either a sociopath or a sadist. Neither type should ever be in a management position.

Re:Let's try this again ...

[eulernet]

Check my reply to your anonymous post above.

Re:Let's try this again ...

[91degrees]

Well, management have their bosses to satisfy. They often have theirs (or the publisher or shareholders). Most people like the think they're decent people and typically managers I know have worked late with us.

Sociopaths, possibly, but I think calling them sadists is being a little too harsh.

Re:Let's try this again ...

[ScrewMaster]

Well, management have their bosses to satisfy.

Yes, and a manager who simply allows an overflowing river of excrement to pass him by and continue on to inundate his workers is worse than useless. If that's the best he can do, he should find another line of work, or move to another organization, because he's no good to anyone.

Most people like the think they're decent people

A manager who tolerates a level of employee abuse such as we're hearing about from Rockstar is not "decent people", and it doesn't matter whether they think they are or not. If I were a software manager (and by the grace of whoever actually runs this Universe I've managed to avoid that fate to date) I simply would not be able to handle that, could not, would not damage people for no good reason. Look, it's been shown over and over that individuals can be convinced to do horrible things to others fairly easily. It's not particularly difficult to accomplish: anonymity is often sufficient, and unaccountability will pretty much always do it if one is not, in fact, "decent people." Robert Heinlein chirped it when he said "all sin lies in hurting other people unnecessarily." By that metric, Rockstars management are sinners all right ... bigtime. Truly, they should be ashamed.

It can take balls to do what's right, to choose not to hurt another person especially if that costs you. Much of the problem is due to the almost-infinite capacity most humans have have of rationalizing that which they know is wrong, and people whose power and livelihoods depend upon unethical actions can usually find "good" reasons to continue them. "If I fight upper management and try to do right by my people I'll probably get fired and then where would my family be, and besides whoever replaces me will probably be worse" is a good one, for example. I have to assume that these managers know what they're doing is wrong, because otherwise they'd be psychopaths.

Personally, I couldn't behave like Rockstar's management does. Besides, my parents would return from the grave and haunt me for the rest of my natural life.

Re:Let's try this again ...

[91degrees]

Yes, and a manager who simply allows an overflowing river of excrement to pass him by and continue on to inundate his workers is worse than useless. If that's the best he can do, he should find another line of work, or move to another organization, because he's no good to anyone.

Yes, but they don't... So what are you going to do about it?

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[jjohnson]

There's a reason EA and Rockstar take young 20 year olds just out of school, and expect them to be gone by 30. Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves.

This is why I discourage anyone...

[betelgeuse68]

When they say they want to get involved in the games industry.

EA still like this

[jjohnson]

A friend of mine was, at 29, a 10 year veteran of EA and in team management position. He left when his boss met him coming in one morning and said "Hey! Look, we redid your office! Isn't it awesome? Look, the couch folds out into a bed!" He said this sort of thing was well understood at EA to mean that he wasn't spending enough time in the office, and quit.

Re:EA still like this

[nycguy]

I'd take that as a hint that it was time to start boning the secretary...

Re:EA still like this

[St.Creed]

"Hey! Look, we redid your office! Isn't it awesome? Look, the couch folds out into a bed!"

"That's great! Now I can ask my wife to move in here with me, and we can finally spend some quality time together!" :)

Re:EA still like this

[Backward Z]

I worked at EA for six months in a development position. As I was leaving, I ran into the studio lead that hired me. He asked me, "How are your hours?" (I was already in the 70's and it was Thursday). He commented, "Aw, shucks, I thought we were all done with that," before launching into a story about how every year, despite swearing he'll never do it again, he ends up in serious crunch. "Hell, just last year Paul and I were doing 110, 120 hour weeks to finish Lord of the Rings."

And so I didn't pursue extended employment at EA.

Re:EA still like this

[failedlogic]

This explains how most of the EA games are made by a bunch of brain dead people. They are trying to be too big and they can't manage it properly.

If people are working 110 hours they should have added more developers earlier and kept the same development period. They are wasting people's livelihood, health and families just because they are too bloody cheap to hire more people.

Re:EA still like this

[__aaclcg7560]

I heard the reason why all the conference rooms in EA now have glass panels is that someone walked into a private conference room to find someone boning the secretary.

Re:EA still like this

[__aaclcg7560]

I knew one crazy bastard who worked a 120 hours per week for six months as a video game tester and then spent the next six months taking 25 units at college. Managed to get through school without any student loans that way.

Re:EA still like this

[__aaclcg7560]

Plus he was turning 30 was a contributing factor. One tester I knew was given a copy "Logan's Run" when he turned 30 by his manager and soon quit after that. Age discrimination is huge in the video game industry. Unless you're high up in management or start your own studio, 30 is retirement age.

Re:EA still like this

[ScrewMaster]

If he was a 10 year veteran at 29, he probably skipped college and doesn't have the social skills to bang the secretary.

If he skipped college it's more likely he was a jock, and was already banging the secretary.

Re:EA still like this

[Waccoon]

He said this sort of thing was well understood at EA to mean that he wasn't spending enough time in the office, and quit.

A nice but completely empty example.

I find it hard that someone works at a workplace for 10 years, and then quits when they replace the sofa. Either political bullshit had been eating away at him for some time and the sofa was the last straw, or he was a prima donna. More details would be helpful.

Re:EA still like this

[ralphdaugherty]

I find it hard that someone works at a workplace for 10 years, and then quits when they replace the sofa.

      He may not have even had a sofa, before or after. It was code phrase at EA that you're not spending enough hours at work, in other words, a veiled warning. He had a choice of spending more time at work or spend it looking for another job. He chose the latter.

      The details were all there.

  rd

Not that I'm a cynic but....

[rimcrazy]

Having worked 28 some years in the semiconductor industry grinding out chips for PC's the story sounds SOOOooooo familiar.

"It's just this time...honest....just give up your entire personal life.... your wife and kids will love you for it cause we are just going to rain cash and kudo's on you"

Fast forward 2 years later...

"Ok, so my wife left me, my kids hate me and now your telling me my bonus went to the CEO and his butt buddies on the board because they needed something to light their cigars with and now your laying me off because we missed the market because you couldn't make up your friggin mind what you wanted and we all killed ourselves for you for nothing? Do I understand this right?"

Sux don't it?

I feel fortunate to have stashed just enough away to moon them all Ace Ventura style and walk away. Those in this kind of mess really have to ask themselves what is REALLY important. Those that run places like this which is 90% of corporate business these days don't give a rat's ass about you. Employees are an expense to be reduced not an asset to be valued. Think you are not replaceable. Put you hand into a bucket of water and pull it out and see how fast that hole fills up. That is the reality. If you really like that work more than life itself, then that is what you should do but if not..... you might just want to look around.

Project management...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd suggest crunches are a symptom of bad project management, but there is apparently no project management in the first place. So it's simply incompetent, panic-driven management. Industry-standard, really.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Vintermann]

Agreed, they are being ripped off. Thing is, a celebrity company looks good on your CV... the problem is that celebrity companies know that, and exploit it. It's harder to write "Member of GTA programming team" on your CV if you didn't leave on amiable terms - and they may not let you do that.

And not this is not standard behavior

[perpenso]

And no this is not necessarily standard behavior. Historically at least one other very large and very successful developer/publisher compensated for its cunch time hours with appropriate sales based bonuses. Nearly all workers and wives believe they are treated fairly. In more recent times industry lawsuits led this developer/publisher to move to hourly compensation that includes overtime. It is amazing R* did not also make such a move.

--
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN

Easy problem to solve

[dissy]

Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.

The employee that reports it is guaranteed to get 300% of the income they legally are entitled to, as will all the others that come out in the DOJ investigation who wish to join.

Then there will be tons of fines towards the company measuring in the tens of millions of dollars.

I always love to see the excuses why particular members of management are allowed to remain on the payroll after costing the company tens of millions of dollars in illegal activities.

Unless the employees do not wish to start legal action. Which means there is no problem at all.

Re:Easy problem to solve

[Timothy Brownawell]

Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.

Except that those laws unfortunately don't apply to programmers.

Re:Easy problem to solve

[haruharaharu]

I guess you've never been in an abusive relationship.

Re:Easy problem to solve

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, are you an idiot? Hourly paid employees do have rights. The DOJ cares about them. Do you work at Walmart?

"Exempt" employees are deemed "management" and therefore have to "do what it takes" to get the job done. This is typical for software developers, but most office workers too. If the exempt employee doesn't like the conditions, it is up the him/her to solve the problem - talk to your boss, figure out comp time (usually illegal), work out a bonus structure that doubles your salary on completion, or quit.

It really is that simple. The DOJ doesn't care.

When I left "employee" and became a contractor, my client implied that I should work more hours than I billed. I raised my rates and still billed every hour. I was hoping they would fire me, but they didn't. When that contract was up, I raised my rates for the new contract, they paid it, so I guess I was worth it. I hardly ever worked/billed more than 45 hours a week. For a few weeks, during "crunch time", I would work and bill 60 hours, but never more than twice a year. After crunch, I took a 2 week vacation.

Finally, after 10 years of raising my rates, they demanded I become an employee or my contract wouldn't be renewed. I left. Thanks for all the "f0ck you money, guys!"

Re:Easy problem to solve

[dissy]

I guess you've never been in an abusive relationship.

Nope. Never really understood those in the 'victim' person in them either.

Though you have a good point, in that I do know more than a couple people in such relationships, and the reality of it does seem it is very hard for them to break out of it. So I admit there is probably something there I am missing.

Re:Easy problem to solve

[greg_barton]

And now is the time to sue. Politically, there may be no better time.

* During the 90's there was too much potential for upward mobility. Exploited employees didn't want to risk their chances of making it big. (boy, didn't that work out?)
* During the 200* years, we had a republican administration more than happy to forget you'd filed a complaint.

Now there's recession and a democratic administration that's willing to actually enforce the law. Both factors could change soon. (Hopefully the recession before the democratic administration...)

So strike while the iron is hot, boys.

Re:Easy problem to solve

[dissy]

Except that those laws unfortunately don't apply to programmers [flsa.com].

Wow, I just read that page and this is the first I've heard of those exemptions. (I am not a programmer)

That seriously blows then.

Re:Easy problem to solve

[Kjella]

"Exempt" employees are deemed "management" and therefore have to "do what it takes" to get the job done. This is typical for software developers, but most office workers too.

Which is one of the things I don't get with the US. We have in fact an almost identical formulation here in Norway, but it actually applies only to managers and people of "exceptionally independent positions". I've worked as a consultant for some years now and even I'm not an exempt worker. Why? Because I work for a consultancy company and if they point me to go work on a project, I must go work on that project. Normally we're flexible anyway because it's good for billable hours and the bonus, but if my employer instructed me to work overtime then they'd have to pay for overtime.

The only people that are exempt are the line managers and the highest tier consultants, which are more networking / key account managers / sales / strategy / product development than billable resources that count hours. And even they were considered to only barely qualify by the legal team. Basically, to qualify for this you must have substantial freedom in what, how, when you work and also in what you do and what you delegate to others. Choosing whether to miss family time or sleep from your 12 hour shifts aren't it.

Re:Easy problem to solve

[sitarlo]

You are both idiots. Things like this are handled by state labor boards and the EEOC. Usually, there's nothing in it for the employee.

Unionize.

[REALMAN]

I smell a Video Game Industry Union coming. Since The Supreme Court decided that Corporations are persons with rights over and above any actual people it's no surprise that this kind of treatment is becoming the norm.

Union, Yes!

[Animats]

Those guys need to unionize. They need The Animation Guild, Local 839, IATSE. The Animation Guild represents Hollywood cartoonists at Cartoon Network, Fox, Disney, ILM, MGM, Universal, Warner, etc. Here's their current standard contract. They get the traditional time and a half for overtime after 8 hours or five days, double time after 6 days.

That's what prevents "crunches". The film industry has "crunches", but they cost the production money, so considerable effort is made by producers to avoid them.

The jobs performed by Animation Guild and IATSE members are very similar to those of many game developers, especially on the art side.

The best time to organize is during a "crunch". Management isn't in a good position to face a strike.

Re:Union, Yes!

[ducomputergeek]

Then the press release would read, "Rock Star is proud to announce the opening of our Rock Star Mumbai Studio."

On the up side, at least the developers would have more time to spend with their family....right?

Re:Union, Yes!

[dcollins]

"Then the press release would read, 'Rock Star is proud to announce the opening of our Rock Star Mumbai Studio.' On the up side, at least the developers would have more time to spend with their family....right?"

FUD. Somehow all these digital animation studios are still in business even with unions: http://www.animationguild.org/_Jobs/Jobs_h/jobsFRM.html

Re:Union, Yes!

[westlake]

Then the press release would read, "Rock Star is proud to announce the opening of our Rock Star Mumbai Studio."

Rockstar plays on the racial and sexual stereotypes of inner city gangland culture.

Not surprisingly, this doesn't always go down well in the inner city itself - and if your development team is an Scotland and doesn't understand what will be considered out of bounds, you just might ignite a fuse that won't be easy to put out.

Re:Union, Yes!

[sitarlo]

Programming can be easily outsourced so it will never be unionized.

This is why I left the games industry.

[91degrees]

It's not just Rockstar. They're all the same.

I worked in games for years before I finally managed to get out and get a job as a freelance contractor. The last company I worked for was the worst - not through malice; just incompetence.

Now, one particular time we were overloaded with projects. I put in my hours. I put in extra time when I decided it was needed. The result was that I got criticised at appraisal for not putting in stupid amounts of overtime.

They did apologise for the heavy workload and promised they'd do somethign about it for futiure projects. Next project there were demands to work every weekend and work late every night.

They gave lip service to work-life balance, but if anyone actually wants to apply this policy, they get nervous.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[rennerik]

Why don't they just quit? In this economic climate I think many people are thankful they *have* a job. Thinking about quitting is the last thing on their minds.

But that's not necessarily just it. It's actually the same reason the don't become application developers as you mentioned: they love games. Absolutely LOVE them. They live by them, they breathe by them. Game developers are a special breed... game development is complicated in and of itself, when compared to just regular application development. It takes dedicated, hard-working people under an enormous amount of stress to bring a title to fruition.

And many developers, regardless of workforce pressures, will continue to work for a studio because that's how much they love games.

There are a few articles on this written by some ex game devs who lost/came close to losing their marriages/home life/etc because of stuff that EA was doing. I can't find a link to them so if someone can it may help to understand the point-of-view of many game devs.

Organize stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

When people are overworked to the point of collapsing, when you put in 80 hour weeks and still can't feed yourself properly. When your boss does his best to make you feel small, you organize.

The conditions these jerk offs are working under are 1 million times better than anything industrial works get. They are being greedy little shits themselves. If they weren't so greedy, they would all just walk out. They would organize. They however, won't do that. They want that shiny car, they want that big house in the burbs, the big fucking tv, the 2.5 kids. They expect it all, and nobody has the heart to tell them, that just isn't how it is.

Simple solution you dolts. Don't like the work ethic of your employer, find a new one! They are treating you that way because you LET them treat you that way! If they ask you to work for free, tell them fuck no. You certainly wouldn't see a machinist, a welder, or any skilled tradesmen work a single minute for free. Our services are valuable, we know that, and if you won't pay for it, we'll go someplace that will. You all have the same option, and it's only your own greed that keeps you working like a dog. I do not feel sorry for these wives or their husbands, neither should you.

Re:Organize stupid

[91degrees]

But look who's complaining. It isn't the programmers! It's the wives! And years ago when EA_Spouse made the public complaint it wasn't the programmer, it was his (or her) spouse!

The developers are being exploited, but they don't seem to realise!

Re:Organize stupid

[Eli Gottlieb]

Actually, last I heard there had been major class-action lawsuits against EA and IBM for this kind of thing by the developers. They won, too.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[the grace of R'hllor]

"Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team, quit at start of crunch period"

The people who'd hire them would expect to abuse them the same way.

Exactly. Where is the Digital Developers Guild?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to say the same thing. If not the Animation Guild (which may not have relevance for programmers, for example), perhaps another union should be set up for the gaming industry. The movie and television industries have unions for various facets of production:

DGA - directors
WGA - writers
IATSE- production people
Teamsters-- transportation
AFTRA -- news, radio, sports and weather; variety shows, etc..
SAG -- screen actors
MPEG -- (the other one) Motion Picture Editor's Guild
etc.

After that EA letter floated around a few years back, I thought surely a union was going to result, but apparently not. People always say "well everyone wants to work for the gaming industry, they'll just replace you with someone else"... really? And people don't want to be movie directors and actors

The gaming industry is not in its infancy any more. It makes more $ than the movie industry. Modern Warfare 2 made what, a billion dollars? About what Avatar is making?

I know there's been an anti-union trend over the last few decades, but there's a Democrat in the white house now. The fact that this industry isn't unionized yet is confusing to me. What's going on? Are developers just a bunch of nerdy pushovers? Do they believe threats about moving jobs overseas? Are they by nature independent and/or competitive and the idea of working together just not in their nature? You could say the same about Hollywood...

Others have filed lawsuits

[perpenso]

Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.

A few years ago there was such a lawsuit against a game developer. It prompted various game developers, affected and unaffected by the lawsuit, to switch from salary with no overtime to hourly with overtime. Since it is in California and high profile with deep pockets I'm very surprised that R* did not.

--
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN

Sounds like..

[cyberfunk2]

That's funny.. working at R* sounds just like being a grad student.

Re:Sounds like..

[rochberg]

Except the hours and pay are both better.

so why is Rockstar losing money?

[alen]

Take Two the parent company is losing money for 2009. a lot of money. revenues are down and there is a big loss for the year. and the company is burning a lot of cash. at the current burn rate there is a good chance of Chapter 11 in 2010.

Re:so why is Rockstar losing money?

[jimicus]

There's a big secret that some managers don't seem to get. (It's mercifully less common here in the UK, but I have seen it).

Now, this is a huge secret. I'm not sure I should be posting it here. But anyway - listen closely...

A man working for 60 hours per week will not necessarily produce 50% more than a man working for 40 hours per week. In fact, it's very likely that once he gets tired, he'll make mistakes which he'll then have to fix once rested - and time spent fixing mistakes made through exhaustion is time not being spent on new features.

There, I said it. If you'll excuse me, I have a bunch of managers with torches and pitchforks at my door and I need to set the dog on them.

Re:so why is Rockstar losing money?

[phorm]

Probably the same reason they're working their employees to death. They're likely running in circles trying to find some way to make cash, burning out their devs and admins with constant direction-changes and generally not being able to make up their f*cking minds.

Just because they're not paying their devs properly doesn't mean they're not otherwise burning through cash without a profit-path

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[interkin3tic]

Why don't these programmers just QUIT?

They're so overworked THEY DON'T HAVE TIME!!! Most are working on their letters of resignation, but they only have enough break period type one letter, and most weeks that's taken up by going to the bathroom or eating.

Do you know what's funny?!?!

[JamesP]

I hear this: "My bosses are morons that make everybody do crunch time, etc"

Makes me wonder: guys, LEAVE, everybody at once, right now! And make your own company. And treat developers like they should be treated.

If your bosses are morons it shouldn't be too difficult.

Their wives?

[cptnapalm]

One must wonder if they are in the position they are in because they are the sort of guys that have to have their wives do the complaining for them.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[couchslug]

That's called "churning", and many employers do it because workers are simply not valuable. New trucking school students are treated the same way.

"Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves."

They have nothing to stand ON, they can be replaced by those willing to compete. Until they acquire value, acting as if they have it is a (nice if you can pull if off) bluff.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[tmesis892]

Why don't they just quit? In this economic climate I think many people are thankful they *have* a job. Thinking about quitting is the last thing on their minds.

I used to think like that and stayed with Oracle much too long putting up with management's BS. Now I work for Google for a few months and couldn't be happier. Google is hiring developers aggressively "in this economic climate". Opportunities are there, you just need to look for them.

just walk away

[mrflash818]

"It's not just Rockstar. They're all the same."

I agree.

No worker is truely a slave. You chose to get hired. You can choose to walk away.

I gladly was willing to make less money to have a family, family time, and a life. I switched from dot-com to healthcare IT.

Once I was established at IT at the healthcare company, I switched to a 'coordinator' that works between IT and customers. Kept the same salary. Oh, and now I even telecommute a few days a week, too.

Suprisingly, there are jobs out there that pay well, and do not require 60+ hrs/wk.

Re:just walk away

[mikael_j]

No worker is truely a slave. You chose to get hired. You can choose to walk away.

I'd have to say that there are exceptions to this statement, such as those working as outsourced first line tech support and customer service drones (and no, they're not all high school dropouts, when I worked first line DSL tech support after college most of my coworkers where people who lost their jobs in the dot bomb fallout or CS/CE graduates who couldn't find anything better), in those jobs it almost seems like a lot of employers try to keep everyone afraid of losing their jobs (and definitely not considering quitting without finding another job first since that would result in no income which kind of sucks when you're working 25-35 hours per week for $12/hour before taxes and have no savings (+ student loans/mortgage to pay if you're really unlucky)).

Those people are many times just a modern western take on slaves, the employers have just figured out that it's a lot easier to let them clothe and feed themselves, that way they can handwave away any complaints about the pay, hours or general work environment with "well, why don't you just quit then?" (even though they know most of their employees no matter how qualified can't "just quit" since they don't have any savings).

/Mikael

Steven Levy reported the changeover in "Hackers"

[rbrander]

Required reading for the Period It All Changed is Steven Levy's book "Hackers". He focused on Sierra On-Line, which started off programming Apple ][ games in assembler, with founder Ken Williams as programmer/guru to houseloads of teenage programmers that were making up to a quarter-mill a year (in 1983 dollars) for inventing Frogger and the like, because Williams gave percentages of what the game made to the developers.

This changed at remarkable speed to a market where the owners of capital got everything but "what the traffic will bear" in terms of how little programmers would work for.

And young people doing something that gives them a buzz (and, let's face it, fellow addicts, writing an elegant algorithm, solving a knotty problem, producing a slick-looking result on-screen, especially in a problem area where the output is intensely visual...there's no buzz like it) will work for pretty much nothing.

And, no, my "owners of capital" term isn't the start of some socialist screed. The critics are right: the workers can just walk away any time they come to their senses. The profit split may resemble a 19th-century company town by a coal mine, but "Labour" here isn't some hapless bunch of illiterates with no options; they just have to accept that they're being "paid" in buzz, and any time they want to switch over to money, they can go program payroll systems.

There's some buzz there, too, believe it or not, you find elegant algorithms, and user interfaces that match the human intuition and expectations hand-in-glove, in lots of places. And you're home by six, good paycheque warm in your pocket.

There are satisfactions, too, in being part of actually building the Real World, not just amusing people with fantasy ones.

Move on up out of a games team

[jabjoe]

Games teams are for single 20 somethings. As they become married, and parents, they should move into central teams where the pressure is less and their experience benefits the most games. Sure it's not as "cool" but by then you shouldn't care about that sort of thing.

Wow damn

[aztektum]

This is just hitting /.? It's been all over the nets for 2-3 weeks. Perhaps /. could stand to hire some of R*'s management :P

Re:Wow damn

[pwnies]

/. has never been a place for news as it happens. The reason that /. is so great is it's discussions after the event has come to pass. If you want news as it happens try reddit or something similar. It feels weird telling someone who has a lower UID than myself this, but, you must be new here.

Only 6 days a week?

[s_p_oneil]

I've been working 7 days a week for the past two years. This article is making Rockstar sound pretty good to me (unless the pay is lower ;-).

Re:Only 6 days a week?

[Destined Soul]

Okay, you got me curious.. are you working 7 days a week at 12+ hours each day? Or is it a lot fewer hours just over the entire week?

If so, do you have a happily married wife and kid(s)? I know a few people that would be fine with working solid 10+ hour days a week all week but they have no life nor significant others.

I'm not trying to argue that it's wrong but I am curious how you would do it. I've done 55+ hour work weeks for months in a row and it was starting to take its toll on my family.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Zero__Kelvin]

""Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume."

If you are a manager of a gaming company. Many others will be quite unimpressed. To many people it appears a bit like putting "designed a toy rocket" on your resume for NASA.

No incentive to avoid crunch aside from bad press.

[LordZardoz]

Most of the larger companies are trying to get away from this practice, though not always with much success. I do know that even within a single company, things can vary greatly from one team to the next, so I wonder if this is due to the management at a particular studio, or if it is a problem that affects all of Rockstar. The article mentions 'despite over $1 billion in Grand Theft Auto revenue', which is deeply misleading. That was made at Rockstar North, in Scotland. There is no reason to assume that just because one studio is printing its own money that the revenues will be distributed evenly across all partner studios.

I have worked for two of the largest companies in this industry, Ubisoft and EA. At those companies, I can tell you that as far as the CEO / corporate level management are concerned, they just want to see a game get done on time and on budget, and for it to hit the sales estimates. This is because those things will have a direct affect on the quarterly and annual statements. For a game to be a hit depends on many factors that cannot be directly influenced; ie: the design, gameplay, story (if applicable), the license and the marketing campaign all have to hit the right notes to result in a hit. Most pressure that a typical developer sees, especially if there are not any direct design responsibilities, is to get stuff done On Time and On / Under budget. The incentive used is a bonus. And this is where good intentions start to break down.

The producers on a project are typically given a bonus that depends mostly on the game being done on time and on budget. They are given a budget, and after that, the rest of the company does not look at anything beyond various demo's done for the editorial boards. The CEO types would like for the employees to be happy (no one wants bad press), but they leave that up to the studio HR and project leads / producers. What most people do not realize is that even within the same company, the work experience can vary greatly from one team to the next. One team might be using wise development practices, be carefully deciding which employees work on the title, and doing what they can to keep the scope of the game manageable given their time constraints. Other teams might simply pour on the crunch hours and death march the employees to meet the goal. But if the game is done on time and on budget, the producers always get their bonus.

What I see as being a big part of the problem is that there is no incentive at any point for those who run the projects to keep their employees happy. At a company like Ubisoft, you can finish your project, and have 70% of the staff quit, burn out, or just refuse to work on the sequel. But if you got it done on time and on budget, you get the same bonus.

Getting back to the article at hand, it is entirely possible that the people running Rockstar North have great development practices and have happy employees, but for the Rockstar San Diego studio to be helmed by Captain Bligh.

END COMMUNICATION

In VFX we used to say

[fscrubjay]

Never enough time to do it right, always enough time to do it again

quit

[vacarul]

I used to work for a company where stress level was high. I did it for money, for 4 years. When that problem was solved I quit. Your body and mind it's like a car: if you abuse it, it will start to fail.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yet you found enough time to post on Slashdot!

GTA was meant to look like pikmin

[bazorg]

GTA IV was originally meant to look like Pikmin but the employment conditions are so terrible that the work output shows what's on programmers' minds...

Old addage about complaining...

[HockeyPuck]

There's an old expression, "Don't complain about not having shoes, when there are people who don't have feet."

I'm unemployed and would love a job. So would those included in this January 8, 2010 report by the US Dept of Labor.

Unemployment rates for the major worker groups--adult men (10.2 percent),
adult women (8.2 percent), teenagers (27.1 percent), whites (9.0 percent),
blacks (16.2 percent), and Hispanics (12.9 percent)--showed little change in
December. The unemployment rate for Asians was 8.4 percent, not seasonally
adjusted.

Among the unemployed, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27
weeks and over) continued to trend up, reaching 6.1 million. In December, 4 in
10 unemployed workers were jobless for 27 weeks or longer.

If you don't like the job for whatever reason, quit. This isn't indentured servitude.

Re:Old addage about complaining...

[thetoadwarrior]

So should employers pay India wages to US developers and the developers should live with it just because there are people that do the job for even less than that?

Good thing you tow the company line, they'll definitely push you up into management where you don't have to produce anything of value.

Re:Old addage about complaining...

[Jedi Alec]

Indeed. God forbid they convince management that using 40 FTE (every last one of them exhausted, pissed off and planning to leave asap) to churn out a crappy product might not be as good an idea as using 50 happy FTE to produce a good product. And hey, you might even turn out to be one of the missing 10!

They should not be complaining

[ZenPirate]

Normally I'd side with the workers, but in this case.... for the love of God be happy you have a job at all!!!

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Angst Badger]

Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. "Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume.

Sure, if you're looking for another job in the game industry. It's not going to count for much in the bulk of the business software world, where the stiffs in HR who are screening the resumes probably haven't even heard of GTA and are mainly looking for an entirely different set of buzzwords and acronyms than a game programmer is likely to have.

Piecework is not generally illegal

[alfoolio]

... and guess what, piece work is generally illegal. There's a reason for that.

Telemarketers, garment industry workers and many others would be greatly surprised to find they are engaged in illegal work activities.

Overtime is free. Free stuff is good.

[rpieket]

The problem is not bad management, or workers accepting these practices. The problem is that overtime is unpaid. You see, if overtime is free for the employer, the employer would be unwise to not use this valuable, free resource. If a manager did not spur their workers to work nights and weekends, all year long, they could be accused of wasting resources. It's free, people! Use it as much as you can! If employers would have to pay their workers for overtime, they would not ask them to work so many extra hours as a matter of course. -Ron.

And this is unusual??

[Qwavel]

Aren't a lot of white collar jobs like this now?

- "Unending crunch periods"
- 12-hour work days and 6-day weeks

When I was a systems consultant that was pretty much the norm. As a consultant I got off easy compared to the regular employees.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[MemoryDragon]

Problem of age, often it comes down to the fact, first job, being inexperience, ending up in a high profile shitplace and being worked to a burnout, after that the management cashes in and you are let go...
Most of the times you have to go through one of those dreadmills to really get the fact straight.
I have been through that, and when my last job started to develop in the same way, I simply quit, I had learned my lession. You can get those shit jobs also outside of the games industry, but they are not as common!
All I can say is once you see such a job starts to develop into this direction, immediately start to look for other options, polish up your resume and go for interviews (heck even if they want you to make overtime, you can leave for any reason if you are outside of your working hours) and once you landed something decently, give to them hard...
And then leave! The other option is to sue them into oblivion for breaking the labor laws (also once you are out of the dreadmill) those guys do not understand any other language!
Those bosses behave like the school bullies and unless you hit them really hard they will not change their ways!

Re:Unions

[YrWrstNtmr]

So why are Americans so hostile to Unions again?

Because we've seen the dark side of unions. Eventually, they become an entity unto themselves. Creating agreements with management that benefits 'the Union', and not the workers.
Oh, the workers may initially glean some benefit, but the union management becomes a parallel to the company management. Profit and control driven. And will do whatever it takes to increase the union profits, even to the point of driving the parent company into the ground.
And as a side effect, driving quality down, by forcing the company to keep substandard workers.

See the US auto industry for an example.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[geekmux]

Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. "Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume.

They should quit and get into creating applications instead of games. Yeah, it's not nearly as sexy, but the pressure is MUCH lower. And the pay is probably better, too.

Nah screw that. They should develop more applications that have a little more excitement into them. Hell, I'd like to see a FPS-style application that I could use to manage my networks and servers. "Work" would take on a whole new meaning when you're busy arming yourself with the Ping Pistol and Portscan Pulse Cannon...

Executives

[hackus]

I bet they get in at 8am, take their lunch and are home by 5PM.

I would bet on it, because I have never worked anywhere yet where executives work those sorts of hours.

If they do, they are small privately held companies and not publicly traded.

The only time I ever put those sort of hours in where for myself, at about $100 an hour.

There is no way I will ever do that for a corporation. In fact, as an individual, if you are seriously considering wrecking your health or your personal family relationships at that sort of work pace, why the hell would you do it for a corporation instead of your own private business?

Dumb.

-Hack

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[geekmux]

That's called "churning", and many employers do it because workers are simply not valuable. New trucking school students are treated the same way.

"Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves."

They have nothing to stand ON, they can be replaced by those willing to compete. Until they acquire value, acting as if they have it is a (nice if you can pull if off) bluff.

Er, no offense to the Bubba FTE crew out there, but I'd say your analogy is a bit flawed. It takes a WHOLE lot more training to code and code well than it does to drive the big rigs, thus employers, after either paying an experienced coder a decent salary, or investing upwards of tens of thousands to get the noob up to speed on coding, I'd say that they have a value.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[MemoryDragon]

Problem is those guys should report the companies to the authorities...
They usually clearly break labor laws, and that means they owe the employes a lot of money.
EA already lost a load of money over the incident several years ago. I assume Rockstar needs to learn its lesson as well.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[dcollins]

"Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. 'Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team' looks pretty good on a resume."

Having worked in the industry one major reason is "Naive and heroic dedication to the project". I had friends recently working in a similar crappy situation, crunching for a year, and the attitude they expressed was "The new management sucks! They're killing us. Right after this game ships for christmas (9 months away), I bet the whole team will quit." Which is jaw-droppingly bad career tactics if you think about it; I was pretty aghast listening to them.

Re:Exactly. Where is the Digital Developers Guild?

[dave562]

There hasn't been anyone there to lead the charge. Organizing a union is a big undertaking. I used to handle the IT system for the MPEG. They have a staff of about 20 people. Too many nerds are "do it themselves" types. They won't give their "hard earned money" to someone else just so that someone else can "represent" them.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Ritchie70]

game development is complicated in and of itself, when compared to just regular application development.

Yeah, if you mean compared to developing corporate VB applications.

There are many other types of development that are also complicated in and of themselves.

Embedded software. Automation control systems. Engine controllers. Drivers. Operating systems.

You are oversimplifying

[Sycraft-fu]

Ok, so you had a good experience with unions. That's wonderful, not everyone does. Take my roommate, he's in a plumber's union. Well for starters they take a significant amount in union dues, over a hundred a month. For that he gets apparently jack and shit. They ran out of work during the recession and basically told all their employees "Sorry, nothing we can do." None of those dues were used for savings for unemployment help, they didn't reduce rates to try and get more work. For that matter he got a "raise" because he'd been with them long enough. Of course additional money per hour times zero hours equals useless. Also he's not allowed to take non-union jobs while they don't have a job for him. He is more or less expected to sit around and go broke because they can't find work. Of course he's broken the rules and gotten a job, but there you go.

Or there's me. I work in a non-union place. Hours are pretty much 8-5 unless there's an emergency which there rarely is. Plenty of paid time off, fairly low stress work environment overall. Pay isn't stellar, but then you do have to trade some pay if you want higher quality of life, and it is still plenty to own a house and all that jazz.

Unions can be good, but they also can be extremely bad. If you had a good experience, fine, but don't assume it is all great. With my roommate's union, it was fairly good when economic times were good, but then so was most work. However in the down time their members are even more fucked than non-members.

Re:You are oversimplifying

[mdarksbane]

My mom is in a teacher's union in Ohio. She freely admits that the union keeps incompetent people from being let go in favor of those who are better teachers. They also remove your ability to bargain for your own wages - they bargain for you, and sometimes that means you get something better, and sometimes it means they ignore what areas of compensation you care about in favor of others (see increasing pensions to the point where the state will go bankrupt if they ever have to pay them, instead of money you are sure you'll actually get). They will fight for you if management tries to get rid of you... of course, they'll also fight for people who have no business being teachers, increasing the antagonism between you and administration. She firmly believes that no useful reform is going to come to the education system until you make a system that sidesteps the union and existing organizational structure. She also doesn't really want this to happen, because it will likely cost her a large portion of the benefits she has in her contract in lieu of decent pay.

There are a lot of people who, given the option, would take higher pay over a higher pension. However, if you've been working twenty years for that pension, it's not like you're going to be in favor of changing the system now. Unions pretty much remove your ability to have a choice there if you're going into a union-dominated field - you don't really have an option as a public school teacher - either you're in the union, or you pay the union dues anyway and don't get a say in what they negotiate for your salary.

Game developers get away with bad business practice because probably 3/4 of people going into computer science started out wanting to make video games. They are one of the few areas in CS where people just love the work they're doing enough to put up with poor management and horrible hours. Even if people try to unionize, there are so many scabs ready and willing to do the work instead, that I doubt there would be much success to it.

Re:You are oversimplifying

[thetoadwarrior]

Aren't you just acting brainwashed by assuming all unions are bad because you know one person that has had a bad experience?

I pay £10 a month and yes, in general, they do nothing for me but it's the same as insurance. You don't get anything until you need it and when other departments within my company were facing lay-offs, quite a few jobs were saved and those that were laid off ended up with much better leaving packages. They did help negotiate an inflation based pay rise system.

They didn't ask for too much they just said if things get more expensive they we deserve to keep the buying power we had. Last year was a bad year for the economy and no one got a pay rise. No one complained because the system is fair and makes sense.

They don't try to keep jobs for useless workers. I've seen people get told they've fucked up so nothing can really be done. Ironically, from my experience most useless workers aren't union members because useless people seem to generally be selfish too, from my experience. I think it has to do with keeping people away from then to no draw attention to the fact they're useless.

I'm just surprised that so many people can trust their employer but not a union. A union and company are effectively the same and that means some are good and some are shit and if you can't find a good one then start you own union or company even.

Re:You are oversimplifying

[thetoadwarrior]

A union is as bad as the people within it. It's a democracy and the people are voted into it by people like your mom. So she no one but herself and her fellow teachers to blame.

Since everyone in here is so certain that they're so perfect and don't need a union then they'll vote for good people only and the IT union will be perfect.

Re:You are oversimplifying

[mdarksbane]

Yes, and you have a whole hell of a lot of control over a statewide union as an individual teacher. I'm pretty sure she's voted however she thought things should be run every time. You mock the idealism here but still think that being a democracy means one person's view mean jack without dedicating their entire life to campaigning.

Re:You are oversimplifying

[cjsm]

Take my roommate, he's in a plumber's union. Well for starters they take a significant amount in union dues, over a hundred a month. For that he gets apparently jack and shit.

I have a hard time believing this post is the full picture. Sounds like more right wing bullshit to me. My (late) father was a plumber, who did strictly commercial plumbing, e.g. laying plumbing for new commercial contruction, such as hospitals, etc. Admitedly, this was a while age, in the seventies (he died from lung cancer in his fifties). But he never once complained about the union. Believe me, if the union was treating him unfairly, he would have complained Not that unions, just like politics, can't be corrupt. But the unions are a democracy, and, workers can vote, and have a say in affairs. And skilled tradesmen like plumbers have more influence than, say, members of the janitors union.

Got any factual links to back up your claims? Sorry, from years of experience, I've learned most right wingers are compulsive liars and exaggerators, who make up facts, or seriously twist them into disinformation.

Re:You are oversimplifying

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

My best friend was an insulator in the local pipefitters union, working in commercial power plants. He paid excessive union dues (as much as $100 per check at one point) and his pension and retirement are handled by the union boss' brother. Money kept disappearing, but if you ask to look at the books, you get pulled off your job (sorry, the site cut back and you're the one that needs to go) and the union's business manager will suddenly have a hard time finding work for you even though everyone else is working. Everyone in the union gets laid off regularly, even if there's work... just to make sure the members know who the boss is. Again, like other posters, you aren't allowed to work outside the union, you sit at home, collect your unemployment and keep your mouth shut. They take your union dues and contribute to politics with them. You're expected to be a registered voter, and registered to the Democrat Party so you can vote in their primary, or again, you'll have a hard time finding work. The union will sometimes take members out for a day to go protest non-union jobs and, again, if you don't go to enough of the protests, you have a hard time finding work. And of course, if you either leave the union or get kicked out because you disagree with any of that stuff, your "friends" who are also in the union suddenly turn their back on you. My friend left the union last year, became a direct hire to the power plant he liked best, got a $40k a year raise, vacation and other benefits and no longer has to worry about the abuse. The downside? The guys he spent the last decade working with call him a scab, have written him off and give him hell when they meet up at work.

My dad worked for a highway department. After years of trying to pursuade them about how great they were, they signed on with SEIU, who delivered on their initial promise - the workers got a raise, better health insurance and more time off. After that, the union disappeared. They only show up again when it is time to renegotiate the contract or if there are rumblings about decertifying the union since their promises of protection were empty. Boss is having a shitty day and decides to give you three days off without pay? File your grievance and the union ignores it. Get ticketed because the boss forces you to drive overloaded? Pay the fine because the union doesn't give a damn. Deserve a premotion based on your seniority but it's given to a newer guy just because he's politically connected? Again, the union doesn't care. Just shut up and keep paying your dues.

Their stories aren't unique... but especially in the case of my best friend's former union, if you complain, you WILL pay for it. You shut up and take the abuse or you get blackballed. I can imagine back in the John Wayne days, that went doubly, since men were weak and less than men if they complained about pretty much anything. Workers don't always get a vote and the unions can be just as abusive, if not more so, than the employers they are supposedly protecting the workers from.

As for

Got any factual links to back up your claims? Sorry, from years of experience, I've learned most right wingers are compulsive liars and exaggerators, who make up facts, or seriously twist them into disinformation.

ad hominem much? I mean, righties will say the same thing about lefties. How about sticking to the facts rather than political biases? You yourself said that unions can be corrupt and then you summarily dismiss any stories of corruption as being exaggerated, twisted, right wing lies.

Re:No incentive to avoid crunch aside from bad pre

[MindlessAutomata]

Mod this up--I'm no way involved in even a related field of work, but this is pretty close to the reality of how corporations run.

I'm sick of the "CEOs are evil sociopaths" mentality simply because it implies that the rich are some evil exploitative faction of society while everyone else are halo-wearing do-gooders. Everyone is the same, and often the greatest evil is really just assholes in middle-management. My point here is that malice is far less common than simple incompetence.

The only way to fix this is for employees to work together. Unionize? Maybe, maybe not, but in any business the lowest common denominator can affect business if they work together.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[DigitalJanitor]

The problem really isn't R* or EA (not that they're faultless here), it's the employees. If you LOVE games so much that you're willing to sell you soul to a studio, then who's fault is it? It's like the battered wife that LOVE the man so much that she'll keep going back no matter how badly he beats her. Is the man faultless? Absolutely NOT! But it isn't he who continues to go back for more abuse.

Hey Devs, wake up! Stop putting up with the abuse! No need for a union, just stop taking it.

Oh yeah, and if it's true that studios hire 20-somethings and expect them gone by 30, let me tell you something... your 20-something. You have you're whole life in front of you. Quit. Move. Stand up and say, "NO!" Whatever you want, you're 20-something. The night is still young!! Once you get to be 40-something, you'll understand what I'm saying here.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[MindlessAutomata]

Maybe because the opportunity is the best thing they have at that moment of their lives, particularly in a rotten economy?

No sympathy...

[Charliemopps]

Lets not forget most of these guys make a metric shitton more money than most of the rest of us. Quit and get a factory job like the majority of us and I'll listen to you complain. Right now you're a programmer, writing some of the most popular games on the market and building a reputation for yourself that will land you a job anywhere you want in the future. My guess is most of these guys love putting in these kind of hours doing this sort of things and their excuse to their wives is "The company makes me do it!!"

Re:No sympathy...

[thetoadwarrior]

Money doesn't mean much when you're always at work and no they don't make shit loads when you factor in the cost of living in areas like Silicon Valley and not everyone at Rockstar is Sam Houser and therefore don't get a big ass wage like his.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[rochberg]

Well, there's also the fact that 20-somethings just out of school work for about half the pay of a 40-year-old looking at how to pay for their kids' college tuition and put a little aside to retire before they hit 70.

We have a "sucker" culture

[ClosedSource]

For some reason engineers and software developers got the idea years ago that they were "professionals" and thus should have pride in finishing no matter the cost.

Of course, the jobs that are really considered "professional" by most people (lawyers, doctors, etc) don't operate this way.

Re:We have a "sucker" culture

[ScrewMaster]

Of course, the jobs that are really considered "professional" by most people (lawyers, doctors, etc) don't operate this way.

If doctors and lawyers were, by and large, as "professional" as a typical well-managed engineering staff, we wouldn't have a problem with health care or our legal system.

But ... I do know what you are saying (and I used to be that way myself.) I will finish the job, and I will do it well ... but I won't be screwed in the process. Probably that's because after having spent 18 years as an independent developer and now ten as a full-timer (and as someone with the usual financial obligations that accrue over time) I expect to be compensated for my efforts.

Would you like some Rat with your union-free world

[ClosedSource]

Too bad you can't go to the alternate reality without unions where everybody works 60hrs/week and you can be legally exposed to any danger without the company having to worry about being responsible.

So in other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a whole lotta Rockstar employees' wives who need some pipe layed. San Diego, here I come!

Ah yes,

[icepick72]

the puppy mill for young and fledgling programmers.

It's not unique to game jobs

[ClosedSource]

In the US there's a large supply of people who want to eat and keep their houses that are willing to work under crap conditions.

Hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

I like big tits and big butts, you insensitive clod!

Re:Hey!

[0100010001010011]

Don't lie.

Re:Hey!

[dosius]

I don't think he can.

*LIDES*

-uso.

Re:Hey!

[Bruha]

We'll as long as these poor saps are sitting at their desks they have plenty of T&A around that's for sure. Might not be what they want, but hey we all make sacrifices now and then!

Fresh off the turnip truck?

[ClosedSource]

"Would you also support the right of software companies to collude among themselves to keep wages low? Oh wait, that's actually illegal."

I'm not sure if it's illegal in the US but it happens everyday here.

Re:Unions

[Blakey Rat]

We also see articles like this one almost every day. (About the forced, involuntary, unionization of childcare workers. They actually had to pull an organization out of their ass to justify unionizing *against*.)

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[ClosedSource]

I can't speak for the current generation of game developers, but my first generation experience (Atari 2600) is that being a game developer carried little weight when applying for a non-game job.

Re:SD Sux

[Bill Dog]

Do you get paid to write these? If you haven't already, you could make a template that you could sell to anyone who wanted to try to scare hippies away from moving in to their town. They could just fill in some company names and some landmarks and voila. Just keep constant the greed and religion and militia themes, the pot-head victimization angle, and the xenophobic finale.

I'm sure

[/dev/trash]

The wives don't mind the money that comes in each paycheck. Oh but I don't get to seeeeeee him until the game is done. yeah and?

get a damned hobby.

Re:I'm sure

[JSBiff]

If it's *your* wife, you might be a little concerned that her 'hobby' will end up being 'screwing other guys'. That goes the other way too. If your the wife, you might not just be bored, you might (often legitimately) be concerned that if you never see your spouse, he'll end up 'getting what he needs' with someone else. . . how's the old saw? If you can't be near the one you love, love the one you're near?

People also often have children. It really is important for a father/mother to spend some time every week, multiple days, with their children. These crunch's, I bet, often mean that people are out the door before their kids go to school, and back home maybe in time to say goodnight to them. If you're also working on the weekends (which you probably are in such a 'crunch'), then you also don't even get to see them on the weekends, which means they pretty much never see you.

I'm well over 40 and I don't agree

[ClosedSource]

So your argument is that if employees settle for being exploited, there's nothing wrong in exploiting them.

Re:I'm well over 40 and I don't agree

[toriver]

Well that is the base premise for S&M and D&S sexuality isn't it? :)

The game studios hire straight out of school precisely because those younglings will not have accumulated any work experience that should have taught them that you really need a social life and that you have rights. They will think that what they are experiencing is what working life is.

Re:I'm well over 40 and I don't agree

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure "nothing wrong" is what the GP was going for with the phrase Is the man faultless? Absolutely NOT!

Re:I'm well over 40 and I don't agree

[Cap'n.Brownbeard]

Actually, that's not what was said at all...

Is the man faultless? Absolutely NOT!

Re:I'm well over 40 and I don't agree

[ClosedSource]

Which is followed by "But it isn't he who continues to go back for more abuse."

That sounds like blaming the victim to me.

Re:I'm well over 40 and I don't agree

[TheRaven64]

No, he's saying that if employees are willing to settle for being exploited there's not much that you can do to help them.

His analogy is apt. If you talk to people who work at women's shelters, you'll find that there isn't much they can do for some women; they'll take abuse and even if they leave they'll go back later. You can make it easier for them to leave by providing support that's available if they do, but they have to make the decision to leave on their own. Short of locking up the abusive husband (not often possible if the woman won't press charges), there's nothing else you can do.

Re:I'm well over 40 and I don't agree

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Right, and the victim *is* to blame, in that he or she is capable of correcting the situation, but does not.

It doesn't let the abuser off the hook, but to say that there's nothing the victim could do is being disingenuous.

People don't like blaming the victim in real life because it's an asshole thing to do - the victim has already been through enough, and the lion's share of the blame does not belong to them. But I've got nothing against blaming the victim in metaphor.

Oh please

[/dev/trash]

If you actually still think that Obama or ANY GOP/DEM is going to fight for your cause ( no matter what it is ) you've not been paying attention all these years.

6 months turns into ...

[PPH]

... years. This sounds like standard MBA resource planning to me. Management probably knows it will take years. But if they start out telling the staff that, people will pace themselves. So they turn it into a panic and get everyone psyched up for a 6 month push. Followed by another one, and on and on.

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." -- C. Northcote Parkinson

Re:6 months turns into ...

[haruharaharu]

And when, after a year or so, nobody believes the bosses anymore, you fire them all and get new ones, right?

Re:6 months turns into ...

[PPH]

Why fire them? 20 years of Dilbert has demonstrated that credibility, trust and respect are not necessary to manage a group of employees.

It's not just Rockstar

[gillbates]

Any company will exploit their workers given the opportunity. At least Rockstar employees love what they're doing.

I've come to the point where I no longer care about rocking the boat. Yes, it will get you a bad performance review. But now that the economy is in the tank, it is very important to draw that proverbial line in the sand. You might even get fired.

Now, you might ask why anyone would voluntarily do something that would get them fired. Here's why: It is better for both you and I in the long run. This is almost a classic prisoner's dilemna. Here's how it would play out in a world where every employee stood up for themself:

1. Employer X attempts to get employee A to work unpaid overtime for salary j.
2. Employee A refuses.
3. Meanwhile, employer Y pays employee B a salary, k.
4. X fires A. X must now find another employee.
5. X must hire someone. They now have to hire B, at salary k + $(bonus) + $(raise), in order to induce him to leave Y.
6. Y must now hire someone. They now hire A at j + $(bonus) + $(raise).

In other words, a small amount of unemployment shows that the economy is working well for workers. What most people don't know is that the average employee in a tech-oriented business brings in $10k of revenue *per week*. That is, the salary and (more importantly) bonus a new hire draws is almost insignificant in comparison to the loss of profit a company endures during their absence. A company which waits even two weeks to hire someone at a lower salary will in most cases never recoup the lost opportunity cost of waiting. Businesses hate uncertainty, especially the loss-producing kind.

Re:It's not just Rockstar

[MukiMuki]

It's a little disingenuous, this example. The pool of employee that becomes A (out of a job) rarely comes back at the level of pay he was at beforehand. Someone with a job in the tech field has a monumentally better chance of finding a better job than someone without one does at finding a job with their old level of pay. It's a momentum-based job market, almost.

Re:It's not just Rockstar

[gillbates]

While I don't deny that people do come back at a lower pay grade, the reason they do is because after a few months of searching for work, they're willing to take whatever is offered.

If they stood their guns, OTOH, we would all be better off. Look at it this way: there are n people out of work right now. The market rate for salary is x.

1. The company is going to hire someone. So, regardless of how much, or how little, the candidate demands, there will be n-1 people out of work after the hire. The longer the company procrastinates, the more money they lose.
2. The potential candidate can offer to work for x - $(some value) in order to undercut the other n - 1 people looking for work.
3. Suppose that said candidate offers to work for x - $(some value). Here's what he has accomplished:
   1. He is now employed at a salary below the value of the work he does. He's going to lose k * $(some value), where k is the length of his employment. In order to regain the loss, he's going to have to find another job at some later date, at a higher salary. But that's not likely, because:
   2. In accepting work at a rate of x - $(some value), the going rate is now y, where y = x - $(some value). That is, the market rate is now lower than it used to be, so he's going to have a difficult time convincing another company to hire him at y + $(some value), rather than the going rate of x.
   3. There are now n-1 people looking for work. Because he's reduced the value of their labor, *they* have now suffered a loss of (n - 1) * $(some value). So in taking that job at a lower salary, he's not only taken a personal loss, but caused everyone else looking for work to take a loss as well.

I know it's a simplistic analysis, but the basic point still holds: those who take pay cuts undermine not only themselves, but everyone else as well.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[jabjoe]

Thing is, games has a really casual atmosphere, and most of the programmers are C or C++ programmers, and don't suffer from the "can only think in objects, not instructions and data/bytes". Better still most are there because it's more than just a job to them, they are interested in the technology and how it works. It's why so many are self-taught. I've spend most of my time in tools (and some engine), in central departments, so I've avoided the horrors that is common. Every time I've looked outside of games, I've been put off by all C#/Java/HTML, and "professionalism" (read, not really interested, "just a job"). Seen the odd one that interests though.

Say Wives....

[mysidia]

Rockstar Employees Badly Overworked, Say Wives

By wives' definition: overworked means not spending a lot of quality time with me. Regardless of how strenuous and stressful the work is... there's more of a self-interest there.

What about married female workers at Rockstar? Do their husbands say they are overworked?

Why are we inquiring of spouses rather than the employee?

Some spouses' definition of "overworked" means working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and not chatting (personal calls) on their business line 3+ hours a day.

12 hours a day, 6 days a week is not that bad, that's 72 hours a week. As long as the employee agreed to it, and the pay is appropriate, that should be fine. There are plenty of professions that involve that many hours a week, e.g. The average Firefighter works >60 hours per week as well.

But again, most of that time is not spent conducting physically draining activity. In the case of a developer, most time is spent thinking.

It's called "needing the money", and sometimes the need for cash trumps having a lot of time for recreation, in certain life situations.

Realizing for most individuals, it's going to be unacceptable over long periods of time, but for a few years it should be alright. Employees at startups have long been known for long work hours in exchange for extra compensation or special fringe benefits.

In fact... in the long run, working 8 hours a day is going to be unacceptable to most people. Every hear of this concept called "retirement" ?

Would you think it an adequate tradeoff to work 72 hours a week instead of 40, and retire within 10 - 15 years instead of 30 years?

Re:Say Wives....

[Fantastic Lad]

12 hours a day, 6 days a week is not that bad, that's 72 hours a week.

Yes and no. There are certainly worse situations, if that's what you mean, but I suspect you are talking from a more brainwashed perspective. When nearly all of the useful hours of your life are owed to somebody else, you have none left over for personal reflection and spiritual growth. (And by spiritual, I do not mean religious. Quite the opposite.) --But over-work is a great way to prevent people from thinking and becoming strong. It is a basic truism to state that, "Strong people are difficult to exploit." --And exploitation is big money.

In any case, super-long hours are often unnecessary; if earnings were disseminated equally among employees, more people could be hired and everybody's standard of living could go up. If things were managed in a sane, non-greedy manner.

Contrary to popular belief, this does not automatically lead to laziness and welfare economics. Hard work feels great, especially physical and manual hard work. I like it a lot. I have the luxury of choosing my work and my hours, and I simply find that I am happier when I'm working. But unless this is a chosen state of affairs, and unless it is balanced with healthy amounts down-time, then it can quickly turn into a form of indentured service; slavery.

But it's hard to contemplate such things when you're hacking away at a job and then return home to eat, watch TV, sleep and then go again.

Also. . . if you are speaking from personal experience wrt girlfriends, I hear you. I've had both good SO's and difficult ones. The good ones step up when they see the person they love being hurt rather than doing so out of a sense of selfish ownership. It's pretty clear which is which when you spend enough time with somebody. And like a crappy job, I recommend people suck up the courage and get out of crappy relationships.

-Cheers!

-FL

Re:Say Wives....

[__aaclcg7560]

What about married female workers at Rockstar? Do their husbands say they are overworked?

Are you joking? Secretaries, HR and marketing staffs worked 40 hours a week. Any female programmers, artists or testers were single and worked the required 80 hours a week. The only exception I can think of are the Latino janitors who work two or more jobs everyday regardless of sex or marital status.

Re:Say Wives....

[mad.frog]

12 hours a day, 6 days a week is not that bad, that's 72 hours a week

It is if you are only getting paid for 40 hours...

Re:Say Wives....

[mysidia]

Uh... paying an employee working 72 weeks for only 40 hours is highway robbery. Most likely their wages/salary are inflated to an appropriate salary for the higher number of hours.

If otherwise... how would they retain any employees doing that?

Surely they'd all bail ship and get jobs at employers willing to pay the predominant market price for their job and hours worked....

Re:Say Wives....

[mad.frog]

Surely they'd all bail ship and get jobs at employers willing to pay

Well, that certainly what *I* did...

Not really so funny

[phorm]

The parent is marked funny but it's actually somewhat close to the truth. In my last job I was getting hit with constant OT. Usually by the time I got home or was just about to head out on weekend, the phone would ring because some BS or other had cropped up. Often these were related to some software or other update pushed live without proper testing by another department. It was crazy, because though it pissed my boss off as much as us most times, he wasn't in charge of those that kept pushing up broken crap.

Long story short, finding a job while dealing with hefty OT at work, fixing various things at home, and generally surviving wasn't all that easy. Most companies want to interview during the day as well, so when you're already punched for time try finding enough to get halfway across time for an interview during the middle of the work-day.

The company would have been a lot more productive by putting proper testing procedures in place and/or paying a bit more for proper hardware and another admin (we went from four to two in the time I was there), and it may have actually saved them money in the long-run. Instead the admins got run into the ground and eventually (myself included) did quit. I've heard that they actually changed a lot since I left, maybe having 3+ of their Sr Admins go in a year pushed the right message forward, or at least gave those remaining the power to make a stand.

Re:Not really so funny

[ScrewMaster]

It was crazy, because though it pissed my boss off as much as us most times, he wasn't in charge of those that kept pushing up broken crap.

I feel your pain.

Re:Not really so funny

[phorm]

Yeah, I think that one thing that may be worse than bad management is possibly undefined management. When you don't even know *who* is in charge of given people and there's no real chain-of-command then pandemonium can ensue.

Re:Unions

[haruharaharu]

Because when we got unions that fight with management. Europe has unions that work with management and attempts to come to a mutual solution. Part of the difference seems to be that employment laws actually protect workers a bit more - you can't just boot someone out the door with no notice and no severance in most of EU, and there's a social safety net. Over here, we think it's patriotic to starve in the gutter and die of a preventable disease for lack of insurance or welfare. At least we aren't socialist, right?

Oh gee, the old 'but what about the children!'

[/dev/trash]

The guy's on crunch, he's not getting laid.

Open letter to Rock Star Employees

[jason.sweet]

If you regularly work more than 45 hours a week, you are doing it wrong. There are exceptions, but they should be rare. Get your priorities straight!
If your job sucks, you are doing it wrong. Fix it or get out!
If your wife talks to your boss for you, you are doing it wrong. Grow a pair for christ's sake!

Re:Open letter to Rock Star Employees

[troll8901]

Grow a pair for christ's sake!

Maybe the Pair has shrunk down from years of disuse, seeing that we don't generally socialize.

Rockstar. . . hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see:

Grueling hours. Check.
Damaged health. Check.
Strained personal relationships. Check.
Doing work for free. Check.
Corporation raking in billions. Check.
Disregard for talent. Check.

Sounds just like being a real life "rock star!"

(on a serious note: Come on Rockstar. Treat your freaking employees well. This makes me not want to buy your games.)

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Yaur]

"Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team" looks pretty good on a resume.

More like toxic than good.
I know how the gaming industry works and what kind of developers that environment is likely to produce, unless I'm looking for something specific to game development (say a DirectX expert) its unlikely someone from the GTA team would even get an interview.

Re:Even the 'best' of the big are not good

[KitsuneSoftware]

Oops, I didn't mean to post that anonymously... brief summary: all big games companies seem to have this problem, even those that try very hard to avoid it. I blame the middle managers. I left Jagex because of a middle manager being extremely unpleasant, despite the considerable efforts of the senior management to make the company an awesome one to work in.

I've been there

[Locke2005]

I've worked 80-hour weeks, and made the following observations: 1) Doing it for a couple weeks is generally ok. Do it for more than 3 or 4 weeks in a row, and it does begin to have serious health side effects. 2) After about 12 hours, your error rate goes increases to the point where you are probably doing more harm than good 3) The best code gets done when people have a chance to step back, reflect on what they are doing, and brainstorm on more efficient ways to reach their goal ("sharpen their axe", so to speak), rather than just keep plugging away at what their first guess for a correct approach was. Sure, sometimes I change my mind too much when faced with a number of equally valid methods, but in general allowing people to actually think about what they are doing does produce better product. These observations apply to development, the experience of managers, QA, or testing may be different.

One of the most destructing things to productivity is bad management. Shortly after I was moved between two teams in the same group at Intel, I asked my team manager if I could take a day off (without pay) to go on a Mt. St. Helens climb with my old team. He refused, claiming "We're doing a new release that day and we need you around to test it." (I was a developer, not a tester. Also, I was a contractor, so technically I could have just told him "fuck you!" and gone anyway.) So, I come in, and wait around for the release. Around 4:30, they finally got the build to work! That's right - I missed out on a team building excursion with a majority of the group so that I could sit around all day doing nothing! It's things like that that make you start looking for a new position; shortly after that, I found one, and announced "It should come as no surprise to anyone that I've found a better place to work."

Re:I've been there

[JustNiz]

>> So, I come in, and wait around for the release. Around 4:30, they finally got the build to work!

Dude if you're a contractor you need to think differently than a salaried employee. You bill by the hour so should view that day as easy money.

>> I missed out on a team building excursion with a majority of the group

You're lucky you got invited. Again stop thinking like a permie. Most companies I've contracted at make it clear that as a contractor you're not a part of the family so don't get 'permie perks'.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason EA and Rockstar take young 20 year olds just out of school, and expect them to be gone by 30. Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves.

And young 20 year olds just out of school haven't yet had a shitty work experience to pay off their massive college debts yet either.

They also haven't had a shitty work experience to put on their resume since every decent job requires at least 2-4 years of experience in the industry.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[__aaclcg7560]

The big problem with going from the video game industry to a different technology industry is convincing hire managers that your video game work experience is real work. That's a high hurdle. When I got out of the video game industry, I had IT certifications and a programming degree in my pocket. The fact that I turned 30 and started studying for a career change meant that I was no longer a "team player" in the video game industry. When my manager gave me the "his way or the highway" speech, I took the highway because I was ready.

Re:No incentive to avoid crunch aside from bad pre

[MartinSchou]

[...] I can tell you that as far as the CEO / corporate level management are concerned, they just want to see a game get done on time and on budget [...]

Well, that is rather easy to do if you can make your employees work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week and not pay overtime.

Missing the point here!

[Taur0]

The real headline should be: Programmers at Rockstar have wives.

Re:SD Sux

[ScrewMaster]

Confucius say: What batshit crazy nuts don't realize is that only a fellow batshit crazy nut would actually think that someone who's a batshit crazy nut could ever be credible.

Confucius also say, "Even pig fly once in long while."

Granted, that's usually after having been launched from a steam-powered catapult, but there it is.

sexist headline

[malp]

Is /. implying only lesbians and men work at r*?

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[ScrewMaster]

If you LOVE games so much that you're willing to sell you soul to a studio, then who's fault is it?

I think it's more akin to the artists that go to the big labels and sign away their collective souls to black-hearted record company executives. Here's the problem, as I see it. Truly creative minds derive much of their (for lack of a better term) job satisfaction from the creative effort itself, with financial reward being a secondary attribute. Businesses are usually very aware of this, and will cheerfully exploit what they perceive as a weakness.

Unfortunately, that fact (along with the generally naive attitude that most young people have towards the corporate world) just makes them grist for the mill. Programmer, musician, artist ... watch your step because the private sector will take your best years from you, and leave you little in return.

Re:Whine some more please ...

[Nazlfrag]

The employees get paid overtime presumably. That's a very big difference.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[TangoMargarine]

Notice he didn't say he was one of them...

How is game management different?

[Opportunist]

I mean, I guess we're all in agreement here that it's crappy management who is to blame for crunch time. At least I have never seen any good reason for crunch except management with unrealistic ideas of time tables and schedules. But why is it so apeshit bad in game dev? Sure, everyone had his share of crunch, but I can't remember it being as bad anywhere else. Permanent crunch is definitly neither known in database engineering, not even in malware defense (where it can be quite crunchy at times, if something new hits the fan).

Don't come with "but technology develops so quickly, you have to get your game out before the technology is obsolete". I know technology moves quickly, but it moves even faster in the malware biz. You have to learn new tricks on a weekly base. And still, crunch in the excess of 70 hours is rare and definitly nothing that becomes the standard for half a year or longer. Don't tell me a new set of DirectX fads every other year is worse.

And yes, I'm also aware that there are special times in a year when games HAVE to be finished. But that would probably warrant crunch in October/November to get the game done for Christmas. Not throughout the year.

So what is it? What makes game development a permanent crunch?

Re:How is game management different?

[mad.frog]

What makes game development a permanent crunch?

The mere fact that they can. Work 'em hard, burn 'em out, let 'em leave -- no worries, there are always more eager young fresh faces willing to take over at the salt mines, because Writing Games Is Cool!

sigh...

Re:How is game management different?

[Opportunist]

Probably, but writing games is also not trivial. At least if you want to do it well. And as anyone who has ever been in development can tell you, it takes months to get a new guy onto the team and up to speed. Wasting programmers is simply a very, very dumb idea, no matter what.

This just in: working for game companies sucks

[mad.frog]

May I remind you of Electronic Arts:

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/

I worked there during that time, it's all true. The truism here is that too many young coders think that writing games is "cool", so they'll put up with bullshit to do it... while the company (correctly) figures that they can burn 'em out with no worries, as there's always more young talent eager to take their place.

Vitamin D defiiciency may be part of this

[Paul Fernhout]

Treatment guidelines are here, especially important for slashdot types (like me :-) who spend too much time indoors at the computer:
  http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

Fixed the wrong thing entirely

[dbIII]

Management is the line of communication as well as allocation of resources.
That makes the six different versions of a printer driver a management failure.

Re:Fixed the wrong thing entirely

[MaskedSlacker]

Sure, as far as you or I are concerned. But management will never believe you or me, that is my point.

time management

[icepick72]

But what do their mistresses say?

Re:SD Sux

[Bill Dog]

The sad thing is that Slashdot is mostly just a place where batshit crazy nuts come to validate the batshit crazy nuttiness of other batshit crazy nuts. Like quizmaster AC above did.

So being batshit crazy nuts becomes a range rather than a point, for connoisseurs of batshit crazy nuttiness to identify and celebrate the nuances of!

Those folks better get cracking...

[jskline]

You need to work real hard in an American company when your a coder. Especially if it's a company that saw huge returns on one of their programs. The greed has set in. Get your asses in gear. NOW. Or; or... we'll ship these jobs over to India or China!

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[BitZtream]

Perhaps its not that they don't know what quality of life is, but that 20 years have a different idea of what quality living is than a 30 year old.

I have a simple solution

[melted]

Get a fucking life. Don't work 12 hour days. Don't come in on Saturday. You may be passed over for a promotion, but you won't be laid off. If you are, sue the sonofabitches and get your money that way. Then find a company that doesn't rape your ass for a paycheck. There are plenty of those around.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[csartanis]

I wouldn't have any problem putting on my CV that I quit celebrity team X because of poor working conditions. It tells the prospective employer that you won't let them push you around.

Sounds like...

[Nabeel_co]

Sounds like a ploy by Fernando to get some more "workers" for Fernando's New Beginnings.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Machtyn]

To repeat the AC... "Why do they need to be under a tremendous amount of stress?" Sure, you have to meet deadlines and such, but that's what the planning process is for. Planning happens in all development types (Agile, etc.) And the plan must be revisited to revise the deadlines (because, sometimes, crap happens and code doesn't work correctly.)

I wonder how the employees do at companies that state "it'll be done when it is done." I wonder if it is a less stressful place to work because you know your employer is watching out for you and the product. Or is it a massive push to get it done at all costs, and the employer is trying to put a good face to the public.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[Machtyn]

As a 30-something, I already do. There's a reason my ringtone is They Might Be Giants' "Minimum Wage"

This is how much they care..

[c4t3y3]

Asked & Answered - Re: Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire, Rockstar San Diego and More

As for the stories spreading around the internet, yes we have noticed them. Unfortunately, this is a case of people taking the opinions of a few anonymous posters on message boards as fact. No business is ever perfect, but Rockstar Games is a tight knit team made up of around 900 supremely talented and motivated professionals, many of whom have worked here for a very long time. We’re saddened if any former members of any studio did not find their time here enjoyable or creatively fulfilling and wish them well with finding an environment more suitable to their temperaments and needs, but the vast majority of our company are focused solely on delivering cutting edge interactive entertainment. We’ve always cared passionately about the people working here, and have always tried to maintain a supportive creative environment. There is simply no way Rockstar could continue to produce such large scale, high quality games without this.

..what? overtime in the gaming industry? oh, not us, it would be impossible to produce games like that

If you think Rockstar management is honest I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

Imagine the same thing, but in the other direction

[Hurricane78]

Imagine if employees would act that way:
“Hey boss, you know, the economy is pretty bad right now and, $someOtherExcuseOrLie, bla bla bla... So this month I expect you to pay me 150% of my normal pay, for the same work. Or else I will have to quit, because you don’t have the proper engagement in the company and our contract. Thank you for understanding.”

That’s just as right/wrong.
Now ask yourself, why it’s going this way, and not the other way around.
I mean the company can just as badly work without employees, and you can just as well find another job.

The only difference: It’s a one-to-many relationship with companies vs people. People are fragmented and fragmentable.
And bosses naturally assume a position of the world being under their control. Employees naturally assume a position of the supplicant.
Despite this not being the case. Both give and take.

This results in something, that is practically the same as (unfairly) exploiting a monopoly. Which for good reasons is illegal. But unfortunately only, if it’s about any other market than the job market.

The solution is quite simple: Just as a boss can have multiple employees, a employee must be able to have multiple bosses.
The fact that you can only have one boss at a time, is effectively killing most competition, and raising the risk for employees.

As you will know, this is partially the case, if you’re self-employed. Just that in that case, you don’t get all the benefits of working in a company. Like perhaps medical care, pension, and other departments taking care of billing etc.
But who says that it’s not just as easily possible, for a company to offer these services to self-employed people with contracts?
A “boss” can just as well have 20 hours a week subscriptions/leases with a proper contract. That contract can just as well include additional services like paying something into pension, medical care, and those external companies that handle billing etc. Either hidden in the normal costs, or explicitly stated.

I completely stopped trying to get into companies,and this is the only kind of contract I will ever have with a company again.
The only hard part, is to find someone reliable, who can do the billing for you. I also recommend an experienced sales guy, who can be the interface between you any your clients, and find new clients for you, in exchange for a payment.
If you want to free yourself, I can only recommend doing something similar. :)

Agree with this...

[Mongoose Disciple]

I think there's two things that lead to shitty conditions for game developers:

1) There are a lot more people who want that job than can have that job, so people who won't put in unreasonable hours can be and often are replaceable. (Unsurprisingly, experienced game devs/managers with a bunch of shipped successful titles on their resume often are able to demand better working conditions, because they're at least a little less replaceable.)

2) Game development isn't run as "professionally" as other development. This is a superset of the problem of bad management that the parent poster raises.

Generally in the game industry it seems like it's standard to be able to fuck around more at work and work late/varied hours than the rest of the team much more than is standard in other dev jobs. So of course you have to spend more time if you can take a two hour lunch and play other games, or if the lead dev doesn't roll in until noon and anyone who needs to ask him a question is shit out of luck until he arrives.

Re:BitZtream, ever been there man? It's serious

[Omnifarious]

I don't really disagree with you, but...

Over use of all caps words and phrases combined with a strident tone trips all of my 'crank' alarms. Please reconsider your style if you want anybody to take you seriously.

This must be fake.

[marqs]

Never heard of a developer that have a girlfriend so I think wives are totaly out of the question.

Matter of priority

[ZmeiGorynych]

Once I realized in my last job that I wanted out, I just shifted priorities. No matter how hard they try to push you, if you only care about _appearing_ to do your best in your present position, that takes much less effort, and leaves enough energy free to jobhunt aggressively. It's still tough, but eminently doable.

Burned programmers don't code very well

[master_p]

It's a well known fact that if your mind get tired, the code you write is not that good. It's one of the reasons there is no overtime for programmers in the aerospace & defense industry, where each bug may cost millions of dollars and possibly human lives.

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[dangitman]

I used to think like that and stayed with Oracle much too long putting up with management's BS. Now I work for Google for a few months and couldn't be happier. Google is hiring developers aggressively "in this economic climate". Opportunities are there, you just need to look for them.

So, will you know what to look for when Google becomes like Oracle?

Re:Rockstar is the evildoer in this situation, but

[TheRaven64]

Possibly you are not aware of psdoom.

Re:Unions

[4D6963]

That's what amuses me about Americans and their ideology of having the government keep its hand off the steering wheel. Particularly since the early 1970s, you've done pretty much everything you could to see how it works when you let everything run itself without any global control.

Then when corporations and unions run wild and do whatever they can for their own profit, you guys fail to connect the dots with your ideological problem. Things work out better in some other countries because the governments define strict rules to absolutely everything to try to make sure that things run right and in most people's interest. Because a government (one without an important corruption problem)'s best interest is aligned with the best general interest. But in the USA, a bunch of John Galts made you fools believe that what was in their best interest was also in your best interest, that's how you suckers work 70 hours a week and get paid like you work 40.

I'm from France, and I used to think that the concept of working overtime for the same hourly wage as regular working time was scandalous. Because in France, not only are you paid for your overtime work, but you're paid more! And you work overtime for free? SUCKERS!!!

That's the ultimate paradox, an awful lot of you American software engineers are libertarians, preach less government control, but at the same time you suffer on a daily basis from unacceptable (by French standards) work conditions that are avoided in other countries only through more government control. It's like you guys have no clue what's good for you!

Yeah sure.

[jotaeleemeese]

Most geeks can't sustain a varied conversation, their social ineptitutde is now legendary.

Somebody in a company has to relate to the outside world and bring some realism. Geeks are not that people, which is why you need to manage them.

Nope.

[jotaeleemeese]

I have worked in several industries and never worked more than 40 hours/ week.

Nope.

[jotaeleemeese]

I have never worked more than 40 hours per week.

If you don't say no then you will say yes forever.

Sad to see so many people with so little self respect and dignity (and please don't come with the "I need bread on the table". I do as well, but I plan in order to be able to afford to uphold my dignity...

Ha,ha, ha.

[jotaeleemeese]

"In the programming industry, I DO have a way to answer the power of the boss: I find another job. And it works way better for me than a union ever would."

It is always entertaining to see how precious some geeks thing they are.

The evidence is overwhelming that programmers have zero power against their employers (heck, their wives are saying as much), but you valiantly suggest otherwise, against monumental anecdotal evidence.

Laughable frankly.

Re:Ha,ha, ha.

[phantomfive]

Um....in what way does this even imply I think I am precious? I know that my time and skills are worth around $50 an hour to some people. If my current boss doesn't feel they are worth that much, I will find someone else who does. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved. I mean, this is really how I handle my life, it isn't some theoretical projection.

Of course, if these guys have some unnatural desire that they HAVE to work at Rockstar, then yeah, they basically have no power in the situation. Otherwise, with "Worked on GTA" on their resume, they should have no problem finding a job.

Me, me, me.

[jotaeleemeese]

It is called a Union for a reason buddy.

You can't be forced to opt out EU time directive.

[jotaeleemeese]

That on its own is enough reason to claim unfair dismissal.

Also there are rules about periods of rest and how many consecutive hours you should work.

Most people don't know this, or if they know it don't have the moral fortitude to confront their employers.

I am a foreigner in the UK and stand for my rights. Every employer that has suggested to me to opt out of the EU time directive has been told in no uncertain terms that is not going to happen, and since I am a nice chap I will forget about it. In other words I rock the boat because it is the right thing to do.

So no pity or sympathy for you matey.

Re:Could outsourcing help this?

[MrResistor]

The gaming industry does use outsourcing, and they have the same problems with it that everyone else does (ie, what you asked for and what you get are almost never the same thing). According to a game studio recruiter I recently had a conversation with, outsourcing has lead to the creation of a new job title, "Technical Artist", whose job is basically to make the outsourced stuff work the way it's supposed to.

That said, perpetual crunch time is not universal in the industry. The few guys I know in the industry seem to have fairly reasonable schedules, but they don't work for EA or Rockstar.

And yet they dare not say it's name...

[BoothbyTCD]

'[U]tter agreement from the vast majority of staff on how to approach the matter.' has another name. It also begins with a U. Of course, 'union' is a dirty word on slashdot, and apparently in IT in general outside of government. Which is why these people continue to be exploited.

Now... it's Miller time...

[drkim]

Wow! Me too!

I was a game tester working 12 hours a day.
Now, I've cut back to 8 hour shifts which means I can go home and relax playing games for 6 hours.

Timeless

[proslack]

To paraphrase Thoreau: I have no doubt that some of you who browse this site are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your employers of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live...