Slashdot Asks: Should 'Crunch' Overtime Be Optional? (forbes.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: Rockstar Games co-founder and VP Dan Hauser unleashed a storm of controversy when he casually stated in an interview with Vulture that "We were working 100-hour weeks" putting the finishing touches on Red Dead Redemption 2. Reaction was swift with many condemning the ubiquitous practice of crunch time in the video game industry in general and Rockstar's history of imposing harsh demands on its employees in particular... Hauser responded that he was talking about a senior writing team of four people working over a three-week period. This kind of intense short-term engagement was common for the team which had been working together for 12 years. Hauser went on to say that Rockstar doesn't "ask or expect anyone to work anything like this". Employees are given the option of working excessive overtime but doing so is a "choice" not a requirement.

A QA tester at Rockstar's Lincoln studio in the UK has taken to Reddit to answer questions and clarify misconceptions about overtime at Rockstar that have arisen in the wake of Hauser's comments.... He has no knowledge of working conditions at other Rockstar studios. The first thing the poster points out is that he and other QA testers (with the possible exception of salaried staff) are paid for their overtime work. He then writes "The other big thing is that this overtime is NOT optional, it is expected of us. If we are not able to work overtime on a certain day without a good reason, you have to make it up on another day. This usually means that if you want a full weekend off that you will have to work a double weekend to make up for it... We have been in crunch since October 9th 2017 which is before I started working here...."

[A] requirement to opt into weekly overtime shifts and more than a year of required crunch time ranging from 56 to 81.5 hours spent at work each week is a far, far cry from Hauser's claim that overtime is a "choice" offered to Rockstar's employees. The good news is that Rockstar has changed its overtime policies in response to the negative press engendered by Hauser's 100-hours comment [according to the verified Rock Star employed on Reddit]. Beginning next week "all overtime going forward will be entirely optional, so if we want to work the extra hours and earn the extra money (As well as make yourself look better for progression) then we can do, but there is no longer a rule making us do it."
The videogame correspondent for Forbes argues that this "crunch time is the norm" idea in the videogame industry "is unconscionable and untenable. No one, in any line of work, should be expected to sacrifice their family for their job. If people want to devote their life to their job, they should be able to do so but those who would rather work a standard work-week should also be able to do so without suffering adverse job-related consequences." But what do Slashdot's readers think?

Should 'crunch' overtime be optional?

Comments

Illegal overtime

[ceoyoyo]

Make excessive overtime illegal (or enforce existing laws). If you miss a deadline the scheduling manager is at fault.

Re:Illegal overtime

[dgatwood]

Make excessive overtime illegal (or enforce existing laws). If you miss a deadline the scheduling manager is at fault.

This. Crunch overtime shouldn't be optional. As soon as you allow anyone to do insane extra amounts of work, you create an environment where that becomes expected. And then, because there were no negative consequences from the poor planning, nobody learns, and the next time, it is even worse. Pretty soon, you end up in a situation where you're all-crunch, all the time.

Re: Illegal overtime

[Z00L00K]

Double pay on overtime to ensure that if it's ordered then it bounces the cost. Triple if it's on weekends.

Re: Illegal overtime

[Darinbob]

Farmers are self employed though. Self employed people often are regularly working very long hours, to complain to the boss they look in the mirror.

For real overtime, you DO get paid for this, you get paid for the overtime hours more than normal hours. Many employees want this. However if it's continual then something's wrong. Something's wrong with the company too since they lose so much money this way versus hiring extra help at the standard rate.

However there are people who are salaried who say they do overtime, I suspect they're just confused about the terms. For salaried workers there's no real laws in many states about how long you can or can't work. Typically most companies won't explicitly ask salaried workers to work over 40 hours a week, but many employees will do so anyway can claim "it's expected of us" even if there was no order to do this or the policy says otherwise. A temporary crunch time is perhaps normal; fix the dead-in-the-water bug before the customer pulls the plug for example. But again when it's ongoing then it means something is wrong with the company. There are people in Silicon Valley who say crunch time is "normal" but I think they're mistaken and should be checking the laws in this regard, or raise concerns with upper management.

Re:Illegal overtime

[Darinbob]

It usually is poor planning though. If the team regularly has to work extra hours then either the scheduling is faulty or the management is relying on all this "voluntary" overtime which is shortsighted. Sure you may want to do a good job, but that should be incentive for you to push back on unrealistic schedules rather than incentive for you to work twice as hard. You also need your direct management to push back against unrealistic project managers.

However, sometimes project managers are just stupid and will never learn. I've seen them with many years of never once having a project done in time and yet they continue to make unrealistic deadlines; a fault with upper management for keeping these people around perhaps.

For instance, I've been at a place where things were often sales driven - one lone guy goes and gets a contract signed and then engineering is told that we need to have the project done by the deadline or else there are contractual penalties. The sales guy doesn't get punished for this (and usually is excessively rewarded via commissions), so it keeps happening. And yes, we had sometimes paid very large penalties for being late. So after that company was bought out by a very much larger corporation, I overheard two of the project managers who were well known for having unrealistic deadlines complain that the new company was so slooow at planning things. After they left the lunch table the rest of us had a laugh at their expense since those guys rarely had a project come in on time with quality.

Now, speaking as a manager - don't start thinking of yourself as just a creator. Remember, you have to do a whole lot of stuff that's boring and tedious beyond the few hours a month being creative. You need to write documents, you need plans, you need to show up to meetings, you need testing, etc. Don't kill yourself and ruin your personal life over crap like that. If you work too long hours then your quality will suffer and you'll learn to hate your work.

Re: Illegal overtime

[supremebob]

You realize that the guys who actually leave at 5 PM every day are usually the first ones to get laid off, right? If the boss man doesn't see you slaving away in your cube while he's walking out, it means that you're likely expendable in his mind.

I know that's not a big deal at the moment because the economy is pretty good and there are other tech jobs out there, but when the job market goes to shit you really need to more conscious as to how your work ethic looks to other people.

Re: Illegal overtime

[orlanz]

Well said. This 100 hr/wk crap is throughout the consulting industry, not just gaming. I have done it a few weeks over the decade. I am done months of 70 hr/wk over that time. And I normally do 50 hr/wk. And no, I never got overtime pay.

What I noticed is that anything over 70 hr/wk is basically a waste of time (it varies person to person; for me it's ~60). Your productivity starts tanking after 35 hrs. Study after study has shown that people who regularly work 60 hours per week actually are LESS productive than those who work 40 hours per week. Studies have shown that 35 hrs/wk is even better (9-5 w/ 1hr lunch).

Most people know this! Yet we continue to have teams sleeping under tables, holding up ceilings with pizza boxes, and injecting caffeine all over the place.

It makes the ones in charge feel better. It tempers their stress and prevents them from losing it on the workers. "They are sleeping in tents. What more do you want from them?"

But all it really tells me is just how unqualified those middle managers are and how out of touch higher ups are with their operations. Best thing to do is leave. Standing up means you aren't a "team player" and appears less productive... even if you are more.

Re: Illegal overtime

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

I too have people try to tell me that I should take on extra work because the work 'needs to be done and it's not done and you were hired to do the work'.

No. I was hired to work for X hours. Which I give you. Willingly and full bore. After that it's choice and if you want to make the choice attractive the cost increases.

I took my job with a certain life/work balance in mind. If you want me to temporarily change it, make it worth my while or hire more people. I work to live. I do not live to work.

It already is optional

[Anonymous Coward]

"Crunch time" already is optional. Slavery was abolished a LONG time ago in the USA.

Perhaps you meant to say "Should there be no consequences for refusing overtime?"

Of course, if you were honest about what you meant to say and asked that, then you would hear a resounding "NO! You are responsible for your own choices."

It should be illegal.

[Qbertino]

Meaning: It should be a walk in the park to enforce compensation and damages due to violation of standard workplace regulations in a civil lawsuit. And before you go on with "own choice" jadijada, please note that in 99.9% of all times we're not talking "Valve exclusive top tag team working out the last glitches on Half Life 2" or "small indie crew building the next Super Meat Boy" but "regular coding monkey working for some EA joint with managers that couldn't plan a software project if their life depended on it and don't give a flying f*ck about the teams health". To emphasize: Germany has very strict workplace rules and is very productive not in spite but because of those - so there is no reason this couldn't work in the US too. EA and the likes would have their ass handed to them in court.

And we all know that humanity would be better of if we took EA and all its entire bunch of asshole execs, wrapped them in barbed wire and shot them into the sun.

Who is at fault? Bidder or SW developer?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah this is another thing. By the time the schedule is missed the bidder (or scheduling manager in your instance) is already bid 3 or more other programs. In some cases the project takes 2-10 years and by the time it is realized "it can't be done for what we bid it for" the bidder has long spent his bonus and gone off to other projects or even to other companies. This leads to the "Bidder is never at fault, the SW developers always"

Formula for success

[hey!]

(1) Fail at planning.
(2) Ask the impossible of your employees at the last minute.
(3) Have competitors who suck just as bad as you at management.

Re:Essentially, it is not

[JaredOfEuropa]

Even optional overtime can be mandatory de facto, as Hauser himself implied with his "make yourself look better" remark. If your colleagues are all pulling 100 hour shifts and you are not, guess who is not going to come out all that well in the next performance reviews? And one could argue that this is justified: if your team mates are working long days and weekends and you are not, you're only making it even harder for them, right? So it all comes back to corporate culture and norms. Some companies with a conscience - or hard-pressed to retain quality staff - are actively pushing a healthy work-life balance for that reason: if most people (and most notably the boss) work 100 hour weeks, the rest of the staff will feel obligated to follow suit. But if most people leave at 5 and the boss doesn't send emails during the weekend, everyone will feel comfortable working normal hours.

If overtime truly is to be optional, you will have to make sure that most people and especially management do not work long hours on a regular basis.

Re: Either work it or donâ(TM)t

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an extremely severe difference between utility workers working on-call/emergency works working overtime. Often in the case of storms, many out of town utility workers will volunteer for overtime to help out. Also I'd like to point out that those utility workers are union employees(typically IBEW in the US). There is a huge difference between working overtime due to a disaster vs regularly being forced to work excessive hours.

There are many people who can die due to lack of electricity. Pretty sure nobody is going to die of a R* misses a release date...

Sack the planner if he's ever done it before

[Bruce66423]

Two strikes and you are out. There need to be consequences for such cock ups. The need is to encourage pessimistic planning - and if higher management whinges, it should be their job on the line as well.

Also crunch time overtime should be very highly paid. Again: there needs to be a strong incentive to avoid it. If it happens, it needs to HURT the reputation of the managers who allowed it to happen.