Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
Make excessive overtime illegal (or enforce existing laws). If you miss a deadline the scheduling manager is at fault.
Why isn't the question, why do so many people allow themselves to be abused by their employers in this way?
If people just mind their own business?
The R* employees make a good living building the best, highest selling entertainment products in the world. They don’t need you white knighting for them based on zero information about their jobs.
Since no single employee is indentured to an individual employer, there is no mandatory 100 hour week... as long as you're free to leave the job.
Flip side: Can I advertise for adult workers who wish to sign on to work lots of overtime, part of the year? Of course.
The only circumstance when this should be forbidden is when employees are falsely led to believe they have a choice, when after employment, they do not.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In my experience, people will always work 40-60 hours a week, regardless of how many hours they are forced to work. It's just that if you spend 16 hours at work because you have to you're only putting in 9-10 hours of actual work, with the rest being filled with various kinds of time-wasting activity. And if this is sustained over time then people will find ways of optimizing how to perform the time-wasting activity to get the actual work time down closer to 8 hours without making it look like they're doing so.
You can't change how the human brain works, and anything you do beyond 9-10 hours is going to be wasted time, one way or another.
I had a job a few years ago where they fell behind on a project that was approaching launch day. They wanted me (and the rest of my team) to put in overtime to make up for the dev team's poor planning.
I asked them how much extra that overtime would pay. They said "nothing, you're salaried." I told them in that case I choose not to put in extra hours. They said "you kind of have to." I said "I kind of don't," and quit the next day.
Four stones, four crates.
Zero stones, ZERO CRATES!
Re: "unconscionable and untenable"... It may be unconscionable, but it's 100% tenable, as evidenced by the fact that this was also the custom for the gaming industry when I was in it personally 20+ years ago. After my first two senior engineer positions, I interviewed a few more places, had a conversation with a producer about "crunch time indicates failure of management" which was received extremely poorly, and I never worked in that industry again. I've also seen other friends' attitudes and health pretty much destroyed at other game companies. Like movies and other entertainment, there's always fresh young blood to refill the staff.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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"
I don't even mean that they would lose concentration, even with perfect concentration all through those 100 hours how can the overtime be justified in QA. They massive turn over, so cost of training seems unlikely be the reason to get most out of a single employee and I doubt hand over can justify all those overtime bonuses in the UK.
Is it just that because the devs have to suffer the QA team has to be made to suffer so as not to discourage the devs?
I'm of the opinion overtime should always be optional. Management should staff for the expected workload, not expect everyone on staff to do the job of 2 people. But management doesn't like that, that raises their costs and lowers their profits. And they have the upper hand in bargaining, because they can replace any individual employee. That's why we formed unions, so that the collective power of the employer was matched by the collective power of the employees.
Overtime pay also evened the playing field. Employers could overwork their employees only at a progressively higher and higher cost. That made it cheaper to simply staff appropriately rather than demand 60- and 80-hour weeks regularly. Salaried status removed that balance.
I'm of the mind that labor law should be changed to state that the salary offer for a salaried employee was an offer for a standard 40-hour week on average and that a requirement from the employer to work more than that on a regular basis constituted a change in the terms of employment that would require paying the employee in proportion to the extra hours worked (eg. a 60-hour week is 150% of the original agreement's demand so the employer is required to pay 150% of the original agreement's salary offer). "Regular basis" could be defined by weekly work time over a given period, eg. requiring more than 40 hours per week for 6 weeks in any 12-week period or 13 weeks in any 52-week period would constitute "regular basis" for that period. Employers would then have to balance the cost of overworking their existing staff vs. the cost of adding staff sufficient for the workload.
Scheduled "on call" hours. It's pretty damned standard, and doesn't have people working 80 hour weeks for over a year.
(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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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...
In a previous job I've successfully argued against a sustained crunch time. I was the technical lead of the team (based in Australia, salaried) The (US-based) manager came out with "you need to work 60-hour weeks for the indefinite future".
I pushed back, pointing out that that was counter-productive and would result in negative work that would offset any initial gains from the longer working hours. I said that we would be willing to do it for a couple of weeks to meet the current deadline, but anything beyond that would cause problems in the team in addition to having no benefit.
Somehow I managed to turn things around to the extent that the manager didn't just grudgingly accept, but actually stated that he agreed with me. I don't know how he reconciled that with his previous statements, but that wasn't my concern.
I received a lot of surprised congratulations from the team members, including my local manager (who was probably the best manager I've ever had).
Thereâ(TM)s some interesting research on this. Not just developers... virtually all time or cost estimates are lowball.
Basically it boils down to bidders knowing that theyâ(TM)re more likely to get the contract by bidding low (or please the boss by guessing low) and slipped targets later arenâ(TM)t catastrophic. IIRC the UK government measured the average overrun and just adds that value to every estimate.
Because nodbody they know has built what they are building. If someone did, they would just copy it. That's the thing non-programmers don't understand - software is effortless to copy (right click, copy & paste). So compared to other fields, software development runs into new problems more often that most other "building" projects (IT or otherwise).
More importantly, it's usually not the developers who make the schedule.
No one, in any line of work, should be expected to sacrifice their family for their job.
"Crunch time" is an intentional policy decision in pursuit of maintaining a cheap labor force. It's obvious companies are getting more labor than they're paying for. What's more subtle is they're also selecting cheaper workers through the same policy. Creating job obligations that require sacrifice of family obligations selects for people with fewer family obligations and people willing to give away labor to maintain employment. People with no spouse, kids, family functions to attend, no savings to live on between jobs, etc. Young workers and foreign workers tend to fit that profile - generally recognized as the cheapest groups to hire. The policy attempts to ensure that they eventually self-select to free up the position for someone cheaper/younger. This raises fewer red flags than firing everyone who gets married.
As an ex-gamer, I understand crunch-time. Although I am single, others have families.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Here is the deal. It depends on the management of the organization. I don't write software but do IT support with incompetent IT project managers. My job in their eyes was to make them look good for their bonus and if I didn't do that ... then I needed to be fired so someone other ass kicker would. If you have experience RUN and give them the finger.
If you don't have experience as I had a gap back in 2013 back in the Great fucking Recession of 2009 I sucked up. I gained weight, lost a marriage, grew gray hair and they got rid of me anyway for not being a team player. I learned not to be a pushover from the experience as a business only concern is it's customers NOT YOU. It is YOUR job to take care of you. Not your employer who NEVER has your interests at heart.
It is a very different world from our grandparents. Look out for you as your employer will take advantage for you or find a young mellinial who will for a fraction of the cost. Look after you and find a good employer. If you want to move up and you are young then go ahead and get some experience, but if you have it then you have more leverage than they do.
http://saveie6.com/
Lol, fuck your "crunch" overtime.
If you expect people to work overtime as a normal thing or insist on "crunch" overtime, then your company is broken.
That's one of the the things I like about the current place I'm working at...they have a company ethic that says overtime is not normal or expected, and they also state that if overtime is an accepted part of the work flow or company culture, then the company is broken. And they're right.
I wouldn't work one minute of overtime ("crunch" or not) unless a) I wanted to and b) they paid me triple time for it.
If you dumbfucks can't plan a project without it running into my off hours, then you'd should get better planners, coders, or managers. But don't think for one moment that I'm going to piss away my life so you dickheads can ship your glitzy bullshit product on time.
Remember, kids- no one on their deathbed ever wished that they'd spent more time at the office.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
this is correct. That's more or less where /.ers are. You put in your 40, occasionally 50 and that's that. But at the higher end in fields where the person is doing it because they want to/obsess over it (video games, high end STEM fields and the like) most of those folks are really putting in that much work.
Just ask John Carmack how much he works in the lead up to a new game/engine. It's a lot.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I work 84 hour weeks (7 12s) as my standard shift, and I'm fine with that. The thing one does is to follow it with a chunk of off time to compensate. I'm actually much happier to have my work time focused on work and larger contiguous chunks of work-free time to focus on not-work. I am not a parent or involved in a long term romantic relationship, and I don't see that every job everywhere needs to be exclusively scheduled so as to be agreeable to those who are. Three people filling two continuous positions in a 2 months on - one month off scheme can work quite nicely. For jobs where there's crunch time, the way to prevent those who are adverse to breaking from their standard work week from being comparatively penalized is to give the crunchers a chunk of off time so that the total time worked is the same for all.
I don't believe it. Maybe some really have that work capacity, but most do not. I do believe that they were spending 100 hours a week in the office, or in front of the computer. But that does not necessarily imply 100 hours a week of work. This is BS.
When I was younger, I thought differently. But it does make things easier when there is a collective bargaining agreement. When the CBA says that an employee cannot be forced to work overtime, that has a force of contract, and this can actually free up other employees who want to work overtime to actually work overtime, without feeling like they are imposing on their coworkers with their "work ethic".
It shouldn't exist.
If you're nearing the end of a project and the only way to complete it is if your employees work 100+ hours weeks, that's a failure on management's part. You failed to manage your time and resources, you failed to set customer expectations properly. Own up to it and take responsibility instead of making other people work themselves to death for your mistakes.
There was a time long ago when worked 80+ hours weeks for a long period of time, and it was terrible. I'm never doing that again; sometimes I'm willing to put in 50-60 hours for a project I care a lot about, but if you ask me to put in 40, the answer will be no, and if you tell me I have to, you'll be getting a resignation.
To be fair, I don't work in the gaming industry, mostly because I know the working conditions are awful compared to the rest of the software world.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I just read that and I see only a few professions aren't allowed to work more than 48 hours. Including:
Any worker on ships or boats
What the heck? If you're stuck ok a fishing boat for two weeks with nothing better to do than work, not allowed. You have to sit there don't nothing. Most anyone ELSE can work as much as they want, but not someone who has absolutely nothing better to do.
It is the company, not the industry.
I've worked at five game companies. Each one had strict policies against overtime. I have interviewed with probably 40 game companies and turned many down due to their clearly abusive policies.
At my current company when I came on on a Saturday to finish off some work, the following Monday my manager and the studio head invited me in to an impromptu meeting ('uh-oh') and asked me why I was there, what I was doing, and why I felt I needed to work on a weekend. They wanted to know if there was something going on with the project that they didn't know about, if there were hidden risks to success, and if there was anything that could jeopardize their strict goals to no overtime. They expressed that if people started coming in then some people would feel obligated, so if I decide to come in please don't send emails or check in code.
But I'm not a typical in that I've always looked for good businesses with great quality of life. When I interview I am careful to look for important details. Are there old people in the office, or all the all 20 or 30 years old? (Older workers are much less tolerant of the abuse.) Are there pictures of children on desks? (Parents are more likely to go home in evenings.) Are there signs that people work long hours like excessive food containers from 8 PM or 10 PM pizza boxes? (Again looking for signs people go home.) Are there a good mix of genders programmers are about 80/20 split of men/women? (Women are less likely to put with the hours because of children.) And importantly: Ask what their policy is for overtime. If they hem and haw, or suggest that sometimes they do it but it isn't abusive, that's a sign. Another good question: Has anyone here ever reached retirement? It is an extremely rare thing in game studios, but I've had retirement parties.
I worked at one company where I suspect the average age was mid-50. The office was filled with people for 9:00 meetings, and many chairs were empty around 4:30 in the afternoon. These were highly productive offices, and we were using all the latest technologies. Layoffs were virtually non-existent, and the hiring process was long and involved. I left to pursue a team lead position --- the downside of people staying forever with slow growth is that upward mobility is difficult --- but the workplace itself was amazing, well paid, and well-behaved.
If a place is bad, stop working work there. If they require it (or indirectly "everybody will be there, but you can miss it if you must") that's a sign to move on.
The abusive companies tend to hire lots of workers and fire lots of workers. The high turnover means it is easy to get the job. The good companies are extremely selective about who they hire. They may interview 20 potential candidates and not hire one. They have low turnover because people don't want to leave, they'll mostly only leave to move up the ladder since there is so little upward motion there. The companies are harder to find but they exist.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
If I have 10 well above engineers working 80+ hours on a well defined, well segmented project how many average programmers would I need to do the same job? My guess is, for many projects, you just can't do it. Some things just don't scale. Now imagine a project that has a two year deadline. If you slip the deadline hardware or the market will have moved and you will be forever trying to catch a moving target. For games or some hardware dependent products it's the only way a company will complete the project
I've sent my family away on vacation and had my dog live with me in my cubical. You get in the mindset that "I started this, I'm going to finish it". Often your moral and self worth is so beaten down you actually can't look for another job even if you had the time. I've noticed that companies that have 4+ months of crunch time often have a huge employee turn over after the project completes.
My advice, do it once. Learn as much as you can. Don't trust a work your managers say and then quit. Walk away. Don't worry about the promise of time off for the over time you worked or a share in the profit of the product. It will never happen. Quit, take what you learned, keep the friends you made at the time and find another job.
**Ross Video survivor 2000
it's simply 'chronically understaffed'. Perhaps its deliberately understaffed, but an actual crunch time might last a week or two. After a year you can't call it crunch time and expect anyone to take you seriously. At that point you just suck at project management.
It shouldn't be 'optional' but rather discouraged. Contracts should include a maximum number of overtime hours over which people are simply forced to stop working.
Yep, this has been my experience as well. It's not systemic across the industry, but varies greatly from company to company.
I've been in the videogame industry for quite a while, and have worked at a number of videogame companies. The best companies I've worked for had very good work-life balance, and actively discouraged crunching. They wanted their employees to be happy and productive over the long haul, not to burn out and leave. The companies who tried to push employees into working longer... well, I found better jobs, simple as that. I think the younger the workers, the easier it is to exploit them, because they don't have as much leverage or confidence in their ability to get a different job. People who have a lot of shipped titles and industry experience are a bit harder to push around, I guess.
It's frustrating to hear about people still being taken advantage of, because I really do enjoy the industry I'm in, and feel lucky to be making a good living doing what I love. Not too many people can really say that. I'm hopeful that more employers eventually realize that mistreating your employees is a terrible long-term way to do business, as you'll eventually lose your best people after they get burnt out, and take all their hard-won real-world experience with them.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I hate crunch as much as the next person but it's not as simple as you're making it
Ads have to be purchased months in advance, promises have to be made to stores (Walmart, Gamestop, Best Buy, etc...) those companies have shelves that need to be full of product. They only have so much space so you have to promise them your product will be available to fill their shelf on a certain date. They also have limited promotional space so you have to schedule your posters, cardboard stands, flags and whatever other promotional stuff you're going to have with them and promise on a certain date.
TV stations have limited time for ads so if you want commercials to run you also need to book them months in advance.
Even on the internet while you can post an ad whenever you want if you want your add to be on the front of some popular site you need to book it in advance otherwise someone else might have already booked that time period.
All that is to say that game teams are asked well in advance "when will your game be done" and the team says "We'll have it done by October 23th 2018". At that point, marketing, PR, and sales will all make promises to 100s of different companies for the game.
Now, 6 months before the deadline the team realizes they aren't going to hit the deadline and all the promises the company has made will be broken or money wasted. Those other companies expecting a product will not be happy to do business again with your game company as you've proven yourself to no be able to keep your promises.
So, what do you do? You crunch to meet the deadline you promised.
I don't have a solution. One solution might be "better planning" but that's easier said that done. How many of you had a deadline when you were a student and ended up having to crunch to get your paper written, homework done, test study etc. Planners aren't any more perfect than you.
In any case, I'm not defending crunch. I'm join pointing out the solutions are not as simple as many seem to think
If you are a top-level executive and you are paid a six-digit salary (not barely six-digit, starting with a 1, you know what I mean), then part of that salary is the expectation that you will sacrifice your private life for the sake of the company if needed.
Bad managers (i.e. statistically speaking half of them) believe they can have the same expectation towards people who earn a fraction of their salary.
Good managers understand that one reason they get this salary is that it is their job to make things work with the resources available.
"Crunch" time is almost always an excuse for bad planning, over-eager resource and deadline estimates made but not owed up to by management and, frankly speaking, what the guys really mean when they start the talk is "I need you to work additional to save my ass, because I promised something I couldn't deliver".
The worst is when crunch time is a fixed part of the plan from the start.
---
All that said, there can be real need for crunch time. If not mismanagement but an externally caused crisis happened. If circumstances changed. If a serious problem with everything is discovered too late.
My profession is Information Security. If there is a serious incident, I would expect that certain key people drop everything and come in. And I would strongly recommend the managers above them to give these people massive rewards for doing so. Not just monetary. Pulling someone away from their family on the weekend can only be compensated for by giving them extra free days (paid, for you Americans as that is apparently not self-evident over there).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
AC means non-salary overhead associated with a worker. In the US that means benefits like health and dental insurance, but also includes things like the employers portion of social security, pension matching, workman's compensation contributions, tax and vacation and sicktime costs (most businesses track and fund vacation and sicktime from different buckets than salary, since they don't have to pay you for vacation and sicktime you don't take.)
...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)...
Here's an idea: you get considered for "progression" when you do the work you were hired to do, doing it well and during the agreed upon work week.
DNA, the splice of life.
They'll find someone who is.
After all, there's a whole bunch of people waiting outside for the chance, so you don't want to just walk away from that, do you?
Sound familiar to anyone else?
Why is this even a question?
I've worked a number of jobs that had expected or mandatory overtime.
When I worked power plant construction, we routinely put in lots of overtime, and were paid very well for it.We worked rotating shifts so you got anywhere between 48 and 120 hours off between shifts. Of course, if they didn't pay and give us some time off they wouldn't had any engineers to build, test, and operate it during construction and startup. We lived on our OT and per diem and banked our salaries.
Later, I worked in plant inspection and while we had not paid OT we got compensatory time off.
As a consultant, I had a target of 2000 billable a year, which was done by long hours during projects followed by weeks on the beach.
In all cases, I was well paid, there were enough breaks to prevent burnout and the work was interesting. Consulting tended too burn people out with the travel and hours so we had a 25% annual turnover rate.
Finance and law are notorious for working new hires long hours and expect many of them will leave; it's a way of getting cheap (relatively) labor and finding out who will stick around and meets their performance standards. As a result, they are always churning through staff.
In the end, some, people will put up with it or even enjoy it while many others will; burn out and leave; adding to a companies hiring costs. For companies that require specialized skills that are harder to find or lots of experience with a particular job that can be a problem and drive wages up.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is not a case of ambiguous language. The company seems to be officially stating that not only was there a culture of "you must work overtime", but it was an official rule and Hauser simply lied to everyone about this rule existing.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Does your doctor work 100 hour weeks, how about your lawyer, the engineer designing the bridge you will be driving over, or the high rise you will be working in, or the pilot flying the plane you are traveling in? Ask the surgeon if he as performed 99 hours of surgery before he cuts you open for a 'simple one hour surgery. Or the pilot of a plane if he is putting in 100 hours of flying that week?
In all cases, the answer will be no but probably not even close to 100 hrs. But this is expected of software engineers, especially in the gaming industry. Treat them like digital garment workers. Wringing every last ounce out of them. Why should management care about their health, employee burnout, or work-life balance? If you don't like it, they say, "Just quit". They will just find the next naive inexperienced developer to fill the role.
There really is a simple solution to this all. Pay all software engineers by the hour. Overtime paid at time and a half. When the dev costs suddenly triple, management will take notice and stop this insane practice.
Let me tell you something. You can ALWAYS find another job. You can NEVER replace time lost with your family.
It's a sign of bad management and development. Then again, only an idiot would work much of it. Life exists *outside* the office, not in it.
...for the poor planning by technically illiterate managers or the absurd promises made by salespeople chasing commissions through the time honored practice of lying?
That's just crazy talk.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Optional under an union contract with clear rules only!
Quit my very first serious job after the MsC exactly because it wasn't optional, and didn't pay any overtime with shenanigans. The local Deloitte shop puts newcomers on a 2-month low-pay, "training" contract that mostly comprised 3-week actual training and 7 weeks of "peak" work in a finantial client.
I asked if the 50-70h weeks would last a lot longer before signing a full contract, and they said it would be at least 3 more months of peak work. I told them "bu-bye" and took a 3 month break afterwards which is still the talk of every interview as they think I was fired (which, to the eyes of most employers, is an effective dismissal for not accepting the work conditions, but whatever).
They also used shenanigans like a "no schedule salary fee" (~100 Euro), in order to prevent counting hours and avoid overtime pay. From colleagues that stayed in other projects, this was mostly the norm but I do believe I was unlucky on the client/project to a degree.
Well, because Slashdotters on the whole aren't very smart, we get asked the softball question: should this be happening?
Winner of the Softball Question of All Time Derby: Should every day be ice cream day?
Note: If you're being asked, it's by a children's book written at a grade-two reading level, intimating a terrible adult truth in a toddler-safe 1/4 teaspoon dose: that 90% of unintended consequences are entirely foreseeable, but for the thick and eternal haze of ice cream psychology.
Hardball question: is there any way to enforce an "optional" crunch time industry-wide workplace policy where your crunch time record doesn't serve as a plausibly deniable tie breaker at your next promotion (and every promotion opportunity thereafter?)
This discussion, as posed, doesn't even have the virtue of the childhood reader, which is at least intimating something dark about the universal will to consume ice cream.
I've always wondered about studies focusing on Office drone work and diminishing returns. I think anyone that's honest with themselves knows it's very difficult to do hard problem solving for even 8 hours a day, let alone longer. Perhaps a few brilliant minds can but it seems rare according to research.
The brain needs rest, so many discoveries come during showers, baths or walks. It's time employers stop being bean counters and recognize a relaxed mind is also a working mind.
I do think one can get away with menial or physical labor jobs during longer days. I've done both and I have done 12 hour all days (when I was younger). But to code for 12 hour days? Often you just come back to your work the next day and spend the first half of the day fixing mistakes and wondering what the hell you just did.
Unless the SW developer IS the bidder. That kind of thing is insane. I don't know why anyone signs contracts like that.
At the end of my PhD the university wanted to patent something, and they wanted some example code they could publish to make it easy for others to try out our technique in their application. Great. I volunteered my code but told them it could use a little neatening up. As I was leaving I didn't feel much like doing it for them gratis. So they hired a professional development house to do it. $20k bought a developer for a month. He failed. They kept the $20k. I took a look at what he produced, which was a mess, and did it myself over a weekend. I did not get paid.
That contract should have been for work delivered. If the developer didn't think he could complete the project in the time quoted, he should have upped the estimate.