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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.
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.
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'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.
(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...
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
...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?