60+ hours work week still the industry norm? [Archive]

Xemu

04-04-2009, 07:53 AM

Depends a lot on the studio, and where it is on the ship cycle. The last several months of Halo Wars was easily 60-70 hr weeks for almost everyone. Things can get much worse than that, though not in any sustainable way ... System Shock 1 was sleep-deprivation bad crunch for an extended period, as I recall.

I'd say my average non-crunch period work weeks are probably about 50 hrs, sometimes even a lot closer to the mythical 40. I've worked for good companies though, some are chronic crunchers which can be much more brutal.

When you're having fun with it you don't notice the hours nearly as much however. I wind up working long hours a lot simply because I'm in the zone and enjoying what I'm doing, or going in on a weekend because I'm excited to. Frankly, if I wasn't making games professionally I'd just be finding time to do it at home after my regular job as a DB programmer or accountant or store clerk or whatever.

Dravalen

04-04-2009, 07:58 AM

Epic pays waaay more than the average industry studio, although there's been a fair amount of shit going on around the private boards due to Capp's comments.

Once I ship my current title I'm probably on my way out of this industry. I'm taking a 40% pay cut to work where I do. In addition we are on "manditory" 10 hour work days + saturday at a minimum for the next few months. This does not count the couple ~100 hour weeks I worked for a couple milestones and a pretty consistent 70 hours otherwise the months before that.

My previous job was the same, 70-80 hour week crunch for months, I went back to school rather than continue on at that company and thought that this time it would be different, guess I was wrong.

It's really a bloody shame because it's a damn fun industry(when you're not crunching) and I really enjoy the job its self and working with my coworkers. Priorities change as you get older however, if I want to afford a house and not live at work I don't see that happening in the game industry any time soon.

Reldan

04-04-2009, 08:37 AM

I'm thankful I went into business software development instead of game development based on everything I've heard over the last few years.

I can work 40-45 hours a week probably 7-8 months out of the year, and 45-60 hours the rest of the time (with paid overtime), and get 4 weeks of vacation of year. I guess it all depends on how much you really like to make games.

Cubit

04-04-2009, 08:47 AM

WarrenM

04-04-2009, 09:54 AM

Looking at posts from EpicBoy it seems like they get great monetary compensation, but if it's the norm, then it's not a choice.
It's not the norm. I generally work 40-45 hours a week and work a little on the weekends for the better part of the year. At the end of a project, I put in long weeks for a few months to get the game out the door - aka crunch.

However, we are well compensated for this but Epic is not the industry norm. Many game companies promise bonuses and compensation but deliver layoffs instead.

WarrenM

04-04-2009, 09:55 AM

Sounds like some people are still stupid enough to think that the humans can produce more just because you force them to work for more hours.

A well-rested and happy programmer is so far more productive than an over-worked and tired one.
It IS effective in short bursts however. Mini-crunches to hit internal deadlines generally result in a better product at the end of the day. You can crunch for a few weeks but going beyond that is dumb. That's when you hit diminishing returns.

Macguffin

04-04-2009, 10:47 AM

Not everywhere is like that, but I think that way too many places are.

This is somewhat tangential to the thread, but recently my Boston buddy Darius Kazemi started an early run for next year's IGDA board elections. He put up a blog (http://dariusforigda.org) where he's getting into his positions and generally stirring things up a bit. He's also doing a petition for some more transparency into board activities, like finding Jason Della Rocca's replacement.

I'd encourage IGDA members that want the org to be more effective to check it out.

Dave Weinstein

04-04-2009, 11:57 AM

Sprints can be effective, but only for very short periods of time, and only with equivalent time off afterwards.

Crunch is pretty much always counterproductive, and it goes counterproductive *quickly*.

cliffski

04-04-2009, 12:50 PM

It's better in indie land. We work when we want to (although I probably work more than 45 hours a week), and we have no crunch because we ship when it's done.

Charles

04-04-2009, 12:55 PM

We do almost no crunch at Ubi Montreal, and none of it is forced. They may ask for extra, but there's no downside to saying no.

edit: After reading that article, I think I'll let my membership lapse until they boot the guy.

Charles

04-04-2009, 01:20 PM

Oh, and something to add to the thread: http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php

Charles

04-04-2009, 01:42 PM

You know, just some personal notes on my experience with crunch. I think a big part of the problem is that employees accept it. Nowadays, I am upfront when it comes to jobs: I will not work more than an 8 hour work day except for a few weeks maximum leading up to a major milestone, and even then, no more than twice in a year. People need to push back. They hired you, they are paying you. Why? Because you can do something they value. So don't take shit. Work 8 hours, and tell people when your workload is unreasonable.

New people in the industry are much better with this. A lot of the green people I work with nowadays are interested in working hard 8 hours a day, not fucking around, and they are interested in going home at a reasonable time, not killing themselves.

One day when people all adopt these stances, someone pushing for more than a 40 hour work week will be laughed at. If you read my previous link, this is a solved problem. There's empirical evidence from a century ago proving it.

The problem with the game industry is that it was founded on the backs of dropouts and people who didn't want a real job. Their ignorance is the basis of all the problems we live with nowadays.

cliffski

04-04-2009, 01:57 PM

Tortilla

04-04-2009, 02:41 PM

A well-rested and happy programmer is so far more productive than an over-worked and tired one.

Half right. Well rested employees are more productive, but if I recall my organizational behavior classes correctly there is no correlation between happiness and productivity. Negative emotions detract from productivity but positive ones don't add to it. People can be equally productive on a meh day and on the happiest day of their life.

cliffski

04-04-2009, 02:59 PM

happy employees stay
unhappy employees leave
It takes years and costs a fortune to teach new guys how to do the old guys job.
Thats one (of many) reasons to keep the staff happy.

JoshV

04-04-2009, 03:30 PM

This is not the norm. Are there companies that do extended crunches, yes. But alot of the big companies now have to keep track of hourly work pay overtime. Both Actiblizzard and EA are like this now, two of the biggest companies out there. Personal experience has been moderate crunches now and then, a lot of it is what you're willing to put up with. Mandatory ten hour days are a thing of the past, studios are very afraid to use the word mandatory here in california, or they would find themselves getting sued very quickly.

Jon Rowe

04-04-2009, 04:05 PM

Dan Lawrence

04-04-2009, 04:10 PM

Working in the UK industry I'd say my experience, and that of the people I've spoken too, has been that 60+ working weeks are the norm whenever anything doesn't go perfectly to plan. I know of several stories of the 60+ weeks going on for months and months. I'd say there is definitely a macho culture contributing to this occuring, testosterone pumped programmers daring each other to sleep less and code more. For the IDGA president to be saying this is a good thing? The man has lost all credibility in my eyes. How is the industry supposed to keep talented people? How is it supposed to support people with families? How is it supposed to support peple who aren't a little unhinged?

The bitterness the 60 hour week swiftly engenders in the workforce can turn office life into a nightmare for people working there, a nightmare they bring home with them when they leave the office.

Desslock

04-04-2009, 04:19 PM

I like my 38 hours work week and 6-7 weeks of vacation to be with my family.

That sounds like what I dream about for retirement.

WarrenM

04-04-2009, 05:04 PM

How is the industry supposed to keep talented people? How is it supposed to support people with families? How is it supposed to support peple who aren't a little unhinged?
It's changing, slowly. The demographics in the industry are skewing more and more towards guys with wives and kids. Guys who want to go home at 5pm and spend time with those wives and kids. It's not all high school drop outs who love computers anymore and will become less so over time. Even the young kids I work with tend to have priorities these days outside of work. They want to go clubbing, not sit at their desks all night.

These older developers tend to advise the younger hires to take a healthier outlook on life. It's no longer looked upon as cool to stay up all night working on stuff "just because". It's now looked upon as odd and a little sad.

alexlitel

04-04-2009, 05:54 PM

Charles

04-04-2009, 07:03 PM

thats very very true. But my experience is that young kids joining the industry still see working 12 hour days as some romantic/macho thing to be encouraged.
Maybe part of it is 95% of the workforce being men. Are women as keen on crunch as the guys?

This has not been my experience. The pressure is still from the top. Maybe it's different here in Montreal, people do take their personal time far more seriously than other places. You still get kids who want to prove themselves, but I doubt that's uncommon in general. Who doesn't have an urge to prove themselves straight out of the gate?

But as people like me move up, and train new people, this should become less. I am already telling the people below me: Prove yourself by using your brain, not your time. Find clever ways to deliver goals, don't try and do it by killing yourself. And there are more and more people like me.

But it really takes people willing to tell the people above them to go suck it. They may not like it, but I continually deliver, so how do you argue with results?

cesare

04-04-2009, 07:18 PM

It's changing, slowly. The demographics in the industry are skewing more and more towards guys with wives and kids. Guys who want to go home at 5pm.

5pm? Luxury.

Seriously tho, like people said it's nowhere near the norm, in the US at least (I've heard nightmare stories about the UK). At three studios over the past 8 or so years I've averaged 9 months regular hours to 3 months crunch. The thing is, crunch no longer just occurs at the end of the project, it now happens in the 3 weeks before you release a demo, the 3 weeks before an important milestone, the 3 weeks before a prototype that needs to be presented to corporate, etc.

As some people have pointed out, crunch isn't all bad. The game industry is chaotic and complicated, things almost never work out as planned. When that's the fault of production and scheduling, then yeah, there's issues. When a studio is working a game that's completely doomed and everyone is forced into mandatory crunch to try and "save" it, then yeah, that borders on the criminal.

But when a studio asks that everyone puts in extra effort for a couple of weeks to really polish the hell out of something that's going to be presented to the public, that's not a bad thing. We all want to produce the best shit we can. And I disagree about companies trending older these days, I'm seeing the exact opposite. I'm seeing (and again, ymmv) a trend away from people who are more interested in clocking out at 5 to go see their wife/kids, and towards hungry-ass passionate lifers who eat-breathe-live-sleep games. And that's not a bad thing either. Spending two years of your early 20s working your ass off on a game that your 30-something lead or project manager doesn't really give a shit about is devastating and soul-crushing. Working with hungry-ass kids who are constantly trying to one-up each other in a friendly rivalry way is freakin awesome. Everyone just keeps trying to get better and better at what they do.

As an aside to this rambling, people also need to take into account how flexible most studios are with their hours. At most studios, it's ok to waltz in at 10 in the morning and then take an hour and half lunch, as long as you put in the 8 standard hours. So yeah, you might have to do 12-hour days and weekends here and there, and yeah, that should probably be concretely compensated. But honestly I've never another job where I could basically show up whenever I wanted and not have some management douchebag get all pissed about it.

cesare

04-04-2009, 07:23 PM

The problem with the game industry is that it was founded on the backs of dropouts and people who didn't want a real job. Their ignorance is the basis of all the problems we live with nowadays.

Lol. I didn't see this before I posted my response, but yeah, you might be onto something there. "Dude, this is SO MUCH BETTER than delivering pizzas."

Still, I think pushing hard and caring about something enough to put extra effort in is reasonable in any industry. Of course, I'm saying all this as someone who probably won't have to seriously crunch again til 2010. If we were having this conversation a couple of years ago, I'd probably be clamoring for blood.

forgeforsaken

04-04-2009, 07:33 PM

The problem with the game industry is that it was founded on the backs of dropouts and people who didn't want a real job. Their ignorance is the basis of all the problems we live with nowadays.

Nah, this happens with all kinds of software development, but perhaps with not as great a frequency due to release cycles. I've seen it a bunch of times and have never worked in the games industry.

Dave Weinstein

04-04-2009, 07:36 PM

I dunno, I've been out of games for four years now, and I have yet to have to even do a soft crunch.

MattKeil

04-04-2009, 07:47 PM

I like my 38 hours work week and 6-7 weeks of vacation to be with my family - also I'm not a proper games journalist since I harbor no dreams of going into development.

6-7 weeks of vacation? Man, Europe is wacky.

Mordrak

04-04-2009, 07:50 PM

6-7 weeks of vacation? Man, Europe is AWESOME!

Fixed.

Tortilla

04-04-2009, 08:07 PM

I dunno, I've been out of games for four years now, and I have yet to have to even do a soft crunch.

Oh I hear of it in non game software development. Heck I even occasionally experience it myself, though my management has the grace to acknowledge it's a big imposition and they usually pay some token special one-off bonus to soothe hurt feelings.

I also want to echo what some other posters have noted, there are programmers that completely voluntarily put in the 60+ hour work weeks absent any management pressure to do so and absent any extra pay (salaried people). In my experience they are invariably people with nothing exciting to look forward to at home, either because they are single/childless or because they are married with kids and can't stand it. They typically tend to get good raises and praise from management, and I can't begrudge them that. If they donate 20 hours of their life every week to getting ahead as a programmer, well, I guess they ought to. If it means that much to them.

Charles

04-04-2009, 08:17 PM

Polish is absolutely not worth overtime unless the company is offering direct compensation for it. I make myself available on an on-call basis for emergencies, and that's it, during crunch. If bugs need to be fixed, fine, I'll do it if it's important, but that's that. Polish? No. If you didn't schedule time for polish then you don't get any.

Don't justify people's bullshit schedules by buying in to the "rah rah only you can do it" mentality. Doing it or not starts at the top, not the bottom, and if the top is fucked, well, shit rolls downhill, doesn't it? But what most people don't realize is that if the shit doesn't stop on someone below, well, the people at the top are chained to it.

Let it sail down the hill and it'll drag them with it.

Damien Neil

04-04-2009, 08:23 PM

Working with hungry-ass kids who are constantly trying to one-up each other in a friendly rivalry way is freakin awesome. Everyone just keeps trying to get better and better at what they do.

You know what's really awesome? Working with incredibly smart people who have years of experience at what they do. People who can show you how to better yourself. People who are secure in their skills, so they don't feel the need to one-up you.

Kyle Wilson

04-04-2009, 09:32 PM

I think that half the production talks I went to at GDC this year featured a producer speaking out in defense of crunch. Here are the bullet points from Rod Fergusson's Gears of War talk:

Managing Crunch
* I believe that crunch is necessary in a creative medium
* Crunch should be driven by the ambition of the team and not the inaccuracy of the schedule
* Gather feedback from the team on how they want to crunch
* Crunch a little each milestone to avoid bigger crunch at the end

And here's Allen Murray on Bungie's production of Halo 3:

Planned Crunch
* Crunch is a tool that can unite or divide the team
* How you communicate a crunch is vital to its success
* Communicated in advance
* Scope defined and understood
* Definitive end

Both talks ended with recruiting slides inviting people to send in their resumes. Which I guess just shows that in the current economy, employment in the game industry is a buyer's market.

Johan A

04-04-2009, 09:37 PM

Half right. Well rested employees are more productive, but if I recall my organizational behavior classes correctly there is no correlation between happiness and productivity. Negative emotions detract from productivity but positive ones don't add to it. People can be equally productive on a meh day and on the happiest day of their life.

Yeah, but someone who is happy is far more likely to stay in the organisation and it is rather costly to replace an experienced developer that is familiar with your codebase and processes.

checker

04-04-2009, 10:01 PM

Polish is absolutely not worth overtime unless the company is offering direct compensation for it.

I wonder how this discussion changes as people feel more ownership over the game, both creatively and finanicially. In other words, I would bet the attitude towards crunch changes a lot as people feel more or less like there's a direct relationship between how hard they work, the quality of the resulting game, how well the game is received, and how well they are compensated. This gets to the indie thing cliffski mentions above, as well.

For me, I'm very bursty and ADD, so most of the time I'm working long hours I feel like it's reasonable and self-inflicted because I slacked a bunch of the other time. I don't judge other people who work different patterns as long as they're getting cool stuff done (in fact, I wish I could work the steadier way). That said, when my name is on something, that's a very strong motivator for me to push hard as the end nears...that's just an example of the "ownership" thing above.

Also, goddamn, pulling all-nighters is way harder at 38 than it was at 23.

I agree with the comments that the newer kids are more balanced about this stuff. As long as they're doing kickass stuff, that's great.

Chris

Mordrak

04-04-2009, 10:07 PM

Yeah, I don't think I could have ever made it in a job with long hours. I don't know what it is about me, but if I don't get 8-9 hours of sleep or work more than 9 hours a day, I become even more of a babbling idiot and become nearly incoherent after only 2-3 days of that. I seriously respect the people that can pull it off though.

Mordrak

04-04-2009, 10:09 PM

Yeah, but someone who is happy is far more likely to stay in the organisation and it is rather costly to replace an experienced developer that is familiar with your codebase and processes.

Are you sure? If you're happy, you're likely to estimate that you are worth more. That means you are more likely to look for better opportunities. That means either greater pay to retain you or losing you. I don't know if that's how it works out, but it seems plausible.

Johan A

04-04-2009, 10:33 PM

Are you sure? If you're happy, you're likely to estimate that you are worth more. That means you are more likely to look for better opportunities. That means either greater pay to retain you or losing you. I don't know if that's how it works out, but it seems plausible.

I maintain that an unhappy developer is more likely to leave than an happy one, just from empirical evidence.

Mordrak

04-04-2009, 10:38 PM

I maintain that an unhappy developer is more likely to leave than an happy one, just from empirical evidence.

So there's nothing between happy and unhappy?

NoWayJose

04-04-2009, 11:30 PM

On a slightly related note, in California, as per AB 10, a computer professional is exempt from having to be paid overtime if they: are paid on a salary basis; earn not less than $75,000 per year; are employed full time; are paid at least once per month; and in an amount not less than $6,250 per month.
This is the reason crunch exists (it's not just California that has a law like this, though it's the most famous case). The only reason management mandates crunch is because they can do it without financial penalty. If they were forced to pay normal overtime rates (time and a half being the norm), two things would happen very quickly: 1) crunch time would end, permanently, and 2) many, many "producers" would lose their jobs as their incompetence in planning and controlling scope would be revealed. The minute publishers saw the development costs of games skyrocket as they became accountable for overtime hours, they would stop funding those hours and demand the projects be planned and managed correctly. Crunch was intended to allow for the natural delays and slippage inherent with any cutting-edge technological development. It has instead been used as a crutch by those who cannot think of solutions beyond "throw more man-hours at the problem." I don't know what I would enjoy more: ending crunch, being paid for overtime, or watching those people be unceremoniously ushered from the industry and replaced by people who have some idea what they're doing.

Erik Andersson

04-05-2009, 12:13 AM

So there's nothing between happy and unhappy?

Indifferent programmers?

Shadari

04-05-2009, 12:31 AM

Indifferent programmers?
Yes, what can I do for you?

merryprankster

04-05-2009, 12:50 AM

On a slightly related note, in the geology world we get whats called comp time. Basically when we are in the field we work close to 60 hrs a week, but every hour we work over 40 earns us paid time off. I actually love it. I'll be out on projects for 3-4 weeks and then have a couple of weeks off paid. While I admit it can be grueling in the field, I probably only work about 8 months a year. (though I do run my own business in my offtime)

Not One Of Us

04-05-2009, 12:50 AM

Yes, I'm going to assume there's something I'll be doing for you.

Fixed.

EvilIdler

04-05-2009, 01:32 AM

It's better in indie land. We work when we want to (although I probably work more than 45 hours a week), and we have no crunch because we ship when it's done.

You also get a boss who isn't a complete tosser, usually :)

The law in my country says overtime for salaried employees shall be compensated with equal time off. Hourly pay has a semi-complicated formula for how much you're getting after regular hours. Certain periods can pay triple, like xmas eve after noon and various other national holidays.

cliffski

04-05-2009, 01:53 AM

You also get a boss who isn't a complete tosser, usually :)

Nah, my boss is an angry egomaniac obsessive argumentative bastard who enjoys a drink and collects weapons. Would you want him as a boss?

I think its very true that if you really identify with the game and feel some ownership of it, you don't mind working long hours. Its Sunday morning here and I feel terrible and have a sore throat and a headache, and I'm sat at the PC ready to do some spaceship engine trail animation. If I didn't enjoy the game I was working on, and I didn't have a direct financial link to wanting it do sell well, I doubt I'd be anywhere near as motivated.

Tankero

04-05-2009, 02:13 AM

Nah, my boss is an angry egomaniac obsessive argumentative bastard who enjoys a drink and collects weapons. Would you want him as a boss?

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

WarrenM

04-05-2009, 03:42 AM

But it really takes people willing to tell the people above them to go suck it. They may not like it, but I continually deliver, so how do you argue with results?
Not that I entirely disagree with you, Charles, but telling the people above you to go suck it can make for a tense and uncomfortable work environment. That is arguable, even in the face of results. Team unity and coherency is just as important as anything else. If some people are refusing to crunch while others see a need and are willing, it puts team members at odds with each other and that's just as harmful as any other problem really.

WarrenM

04-05-2009, 03:50 AM

Both talks ended with recruiting slides inviting people to send in their resumes. Which I guess just shows that in the current economy, employment in the game industry is a buyer's market.
But what Rod said is completely valid. Look at it again:

* I believe that crunch is necessary in a creative medium
* Crunch should be driven by the ambition of the team and not the inaccuracy of the schedule
* Gather feedback from the team on how they want to crunch
* Crunch a little each milestone to avoid bigger crunch at the end

What he's really saying is that some crunch will be necessary to get the game beyond shippable and into "great" status. He's advocating small bursts of crunch at milestones rather than a huge one at the end, and he's saying listen to the team as to how they want to do it - which means things like "10 hour days and have weekends off, or 8 hour days and we come in Sat as well"?

All of that is reasonable and I see Epic management taking steps to minimize crunch as much as possible. With projects like Gears it's simply not possible to avoid crunch entirely and still ship the games that we want to ship. Games like Gears don't ship without some pain.

However, as I stated earlier, Epic makes it WELL worth our while.

WarrenM

04-05-2009, 03:57 AM

Oh, and as for the indie thing ...

To each his own, I guess. I see the allure there but, really, I don't want to run a company. I don't want to worry about marketing, web sites, managing every little detail of the project, wrangling contractors, worrying about pirates, etc. All for the pleasure of making less money than I do now. Thanks, but no.

I want to work on my area of the game and contribute creatively to the overall project. Let someone else worry about the crap. :)

merryprankster

04-05-2009, 04:02 AM

However, as I stated earlier, Epic makes it WELL worth our while.

I think this is pretty important. Honestly I've never had any problem putting in the extra effort at work, as long as the client is recipricating.

This whole attitude of a company demanding all this extra effort and crying poverty instead of acknowleging and rewarding it is just wrong.

WarrenM

04-05-2009, 04:21 AM

This whole attitude of a company demanding all this extra effort and crying poverty instead of acknowleging and rewarding it is just wrong.
I agree and those are usually companies you want to try and get away from. They're either living milestone check to milestone check, or they are idiots.

Tim Partlett

04-05-2009, 05:38 AM

cliffski

04-05-2009, 05:49 AM

I actually earn much more as an indie than I did at Lionhead.
just saying :D

Tortilla

04-05-2009, 07:14 AM

But what Rod said is completely valid. Look at it again:

* I believe that crunch is necessary in a creative medium
* Crunch should be driven by the ambition of the team and not the inaccuracy of the schedule
* Gather feedback from the team on how they want to crunch
* Crunch a little each milestone to avoid bigger crunch at the end

What he's really saying is that some crunch will be necessary to get the game beyond shippable and into "great" status. He's advocating small bursts of crunch at milestones rather than a huge one at the end, and he's saying listen to the team as to how they want to do it - which means things like "10 hour days and have weekends off, or 8 hour days and we come in Sat as well"?

All of that is reasonable and I see Epic management taking steps to minimize crunch as much as possible. With projects like Gears it's simply not possible to avoid crunch entirely and still ship the games that we want to ship. Games like Gears don't ship without some pain.

However, as I stated earlier, Epic makes it WELL worth our while.

Rod's argument sounds exactly like a smoker trying to explain why just a few cigarettes, just for stress relief and of course not because of addiction, is no big deal. In other words, it's setting my bullshit rationalization meter off in a big way.

Crunch is never a technical or creative necessity. Crunch is how management gets more work done without more paying for more people.

Dan Lawrence

04-05-2009, 07:48 AM

Crunch is how management gets more work done without more paying for more people.

I'd argue that a lengthy crunch pretty soon leads to less work overall being done than there would have been without the crunch. The tiredness starts to bleed over into the regular working week making those hours less and less productive. Instead I'd say that overtime allows middle managers to present the illusion of 'we're working as hard as we can' to the upper management, while the reality is that less work is being done. Its all about appearances not actual 'short-term efficiency gains'.

Kyle Wilson

04-05-2009, 08:17 AM

What he's really saying is that some crunch will be necessary to get the game beyond shippable and into "great" status. He's advocating small bursts of crunch at milestones rather than a huge one at the end...

That leaves me with two questions. (And I really am curious here, not accusatory).

How much crunch are you talking about? All the data I've seen suggests that after two weeks of 40+ hours, employees become less productive, and that it takes them several more weeks to recover.

Also, if the crunch is driven by the ambition of the team and not inaccuracy in the schedule, why is it top-down and team-wide instead of on an individual basis by people who want to do a little extra?

I'm a lot more likely to believe any claim that "crunch works great for us at company X" if it actually comes from a programmer or artist than if it comes from a producer. :)

WarrenM

04-05-2009, 08:29 AM

I actually earn much more as an indie than I did at Lionhead.
just saying :D
Right, but that wouldn't be the case for me unless I created the next Bejeweled or something. :)

Crunch is never a technical or creative necessity. Crunch is how management gets more work done without more paying for more people.
That's the cynical view, sure. Again, I'm no fan of crunch but it has it's place in the short term.

Also, bear in mind that I'm not talking about 16 hour/7 day a week death marches here. I'm talking about 10-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. It isn't insanity or anything and can be sustained for a month or so before shipping. It's long but it's not soul crushing.

Kyle

How much crunch are you talking about? All the data I've seen suggests that after two weeks of 40+ hours, employees become less productive, and that it takes them several more weeks to recover.
At the end of the project, it can be a few months of extended hours. It ramps up generally. We start with 10 hour days, and then after a few weeks throw in an 8 hour Saturday and during the last few weeks it may crank up to 12 hours a day during the week.

We get comp time afterwards and are financially compensated as well so I know my attitude will differ from those who get jack shit for crunching.

Also, if the crunch is driven by the ambition of the team and not inaccuracy in the schedule, why is it top-down and team-wide instead of on an individual basis by people who want to do a little extra?
My understanding is that it's viewed as demoralizing to have certain people crunching while others are allowed to leave. I can see that but I don't wholeheartedly agree with it. If I'm caught up and I want to go home, I believe I should be able to. However, in my experience there is almost always something you could be doing to move the game closer to shipping.

I'm a lot more likely to believe any claim that "crunch works great for us at company X" if it actually comes from a programmer or artist than if it comes from a producer. :)
Oh, no doubt. And you won't hear me saying that crunch is awesome and that I love it. However, I do think it's a necessary period at the end of a project that can last a month without adversing affecting anything or anyone.

A 6 month death march? Die in a fire.

A month of extended hours to get the game as good as it can be? OK.

Dave Weinstein

04-05-2009, 08:56 AM

If I recall correctly, the crossover point of 60 hour weeks is 8 weeks. That is to say, after 8 weeks of 60 hour weeks (and this is for manual assembly labor, not creative work), the team working 60 hour weeks has produced less total than the team working 40 hour weeks.

Henry Ford was not a humanitarian. The 40 hour work week has a century of research behind it at this point.

Reference Article: http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php

Aeon221

04-05-2009, 09:18 AM

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

And I hear the boss is a master beater!

Reldan

04-05-2009, 10:01 AM

In large-scale projects, however, the final month or two typically is where all the disparate elements are finally coming together and you're having people going over the whole system looking for leakage at the joints.

This is also where I can see crunch as having benefit. There are a myriad number of dependencies between everybody's work, and as a result people need to work until their pieces function properly so they don't hold back others. There are any number of situations where Joe's team's extra 4 hours of work results in not wasting Sally, Bob, and Sue's teams combined 100 hours of sitting around waiting for Joe to get his shit together.

NoWayJose

04-05-2009, 10:08 AM

Also, bear in mind that I'm not talking about 16 hour/7 day a week death marches here. I'm talking about 10-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. It isn't insanity or anything and can be sustained for a month or so before shipping. It's long but it's not soul crushing.
But that depends on your outlook. For a single guy, it's bad but mostly it's about your personal morale. For a married guy, it's about eating dinner at work while your wife eats dinner alone in the kitchen. That gets old very quickly, much more quickly than a month (I have no idea about your marriage, EpicBoy, but I got married because I like being with my wife). For a married guy with children, it's soul crushing after a week. I don't like seeing my kid for an hour in the morning, and that's it. I want to play with him, help with homework, talk about our days, etc. - all the fun and essential evening activities my dad did with me.

It's not just bad management at that point to ask for crunch - it's immoral and unethical. And the reason for that is that crunch is unnecessary. There is absolutely no reason to crunch on any project - ANY project - other than mismanagement. There are always features that can be cut. There are always art passes that can be foregone. The trouble is that most creative directors view every title as a chance to make a triple-A game, and cannot possibly comprehend the concept of cutting one of their brilliant ideas. Which is fine, that's their job. The job of the producer is to reign that in by constructing a reasonable schedule and forcing the creative director to prioritize correctly, and to keep re-visiting of assets and features to a minimum. Of course, people will read this and assume that the quality of games will decline. Some will. But others will be just fine, as designers, coders, and artists start to understand the necessity for planning and execution without the luxury of the "well, let's spend a few months developing this feature and then throw it in the game and decide if it works" mentality that I've seen on a multitude of projects, in a multitude of studios.

I'd also mention that not all titles are going to be AAA. Scheduling and budgetary restraints make that a reality. But even on those titles, I've heard of unreasonable crunch as the team felt "motivated" to try and get a metacritic score in the 90s. That's ridiculous. It's not going to happen, and meanwhile you're burning out the team, straining families, and fostering even further resentment between management and employees.

And I'd also like to address EpicBoy's assertion that partial crunch (ie. some people working later than others) causes morale problems: too bad. If you feel you need to stay late to get your work done, or improve it to some quality level you've decided is necessary, more power to you. My priority is working hard during the day and getting home at a reasonable hour. I'm in this industry for the long haul, so killing myself for a couple of years to ship some game that no one will be playing six months from ship date isn't going to be a priority for me.

Johan A

04-05-2009, 10:18 AM

How much crunch are you talking about? All the data I've seen suggests that after two weeks of 40+ hours, employees become less productive, and that it takes them several more weeks to recover.

Thats my experience as well from working as a developer for the last 15 years. And thats just productivity, not to mention the impact on someones life.

Yes I've crunched alot in my life, and the "you have to work 12h/day for the next 12 months" was one major reason why I left Funcom.

mandarin

04-05-2009, 11:02 AM

In our experience the benefit of crunch has more to do with the excitement and attitude of the team and less to do with the total volume of work hours. I tested this theory on our last project but cutting work hours and enforcing these cuts. The excitement/attitude felt the same as a crunch--we wanted to wrap things up and cram in as much as we could--but we went home at 3:30. And it worked pretty well!

Crunch also changes worker mindset from blue sky to limited resources. If you feel you only have so much time left on a project you begin to optimize your decisions. Maybe feature X requiring Y hours of production isn't worth it, or 90% of X can be accomplished with 10% of Y.

We're an indie data point, so maybe this changes things (we're six people, so it's not like we're a single-man operation or anything).

We did this on Blush, which was an 8-week game:

http://vimeo.com/3427308 (trailer)
http://blurst.com/blush/ (play)

The weekly project breakdown was:

- Week 1, prototyping (2 people), 10-6 M-Thu
- Week 2, prototyping (2 people), 10-6 M-Thu
- Week 3, production (6 people), 10-6 M-Thu
- Week 4, production (6 people), 10-6 M-Thu (I took this week off)
- Week 5, production (6 people), 10-6 M-Thu
- Week 6, production (6 people), 10-3:30 M-Thu
- Week 7, production (6 people), 10-3:30 M-Thu
- Week 8, production (6 people), 10-6 M-Sat

Fridays have always been experimental days (random tests or hobby projects).

Since then we've permanently slashed our work hours. It's hard to quantify exact numbers, but we aren't losing nearly as much output as we're gaining in personal time. The nonlinear gain of crunch goes in the other direction, too. I don't expect we'll raise our hours to full strength (8 hours M-Thu) anytime soon, even with our 8-week production plan for 2009.

If we can make this work other companies can, too. Yeah, we make smaller games, but we feel it's still a big feat to pull off any of our projects in 8 weeks.

-Matthew

Damien Neil

04-05-2009, 11:15 AM

At the end of the project, it can be a few months of extended hours. It ramps up generally. We start with 10 hour days, and then after a few weeks throw in an 8 hour Saturday and during the last few weeks it may crank up to 12 hours a day during the week.

So, let's say that you get twice as much done during crunch time as you do otherwise. (You don't, of course.) You're saying that you could completely eliminate crunch by extending your development schedules by a month or three?

Kyle Wilson

04-05-2009, 11:17 AM

If I recall correctly, the crossover point of 60 hour weeks is 8 weeks. That is to say, after 8 weeks of 60 hour weeks (and this is for manual assembly labor, not creative work), the team working 60 hour weeks has produced less total than the team working 40 hour weeks.

Clinton Keith comes up with this graph (http://www.agilegamedevelopment.com/2008/06/scrum-overtime.html) from tracking the effects of overtime on Darkwatch:

http://www.agilegamedevelopment.com/uploaded_images/overtime-786691.jpg

Damien Neil

04-05-2009, 11:34 AM

The most interesting thing about that chart: Week 1 is a 40 hour week. Weeks 2-5 are 60 hour. The most productive 60 hour week was only about 30% more productive, despite being 50% longer.

WarrenM

04-05-2009, 01:00 PM

So, let's say that you get twice as much done during crunch time as you do otherwise. (You don't, of course.) You're saying that you could completely eliminate crunch by extending your development schedules by a month or three?
You often can't extend the schedule. Your ship date is locked down and you have to hit it or you miss black friday/xmas. That's something only games like GTA or Metal Gear Solid can do and still survive. Marketing is usually rolling months in advance of you shipping and if you miss the date, it's pretty much wasted effort.

But as far as productivity goes - at the end, you're fixing bugs. Reams and reams of stupid little bugs that are clogging up the database. Cover is broken here, coverslip isn't available at this location, some z-fighting there, this mesh looks like it's being lit weird, this mesh has collision and shouldn't, there's a little gap between these 2 meshes, this view could use some optimizing, etc. This is the stuff that can be fixed when you're tired with little consequence. That's why the crunch at the end is about polish and getting the game as solid as possible - it is NOT about adding features. Nobody does anything especially creative during this period ... and you don't want them to. It's about stopping the jello from shaking and about getting the game ready to hit shelves.

Yes I've crunched alot in my life, and the "you have to work 12h/day for the next 12 months" was one major reason why I left Funcom.
That's the kind of crunch that I'm happy to agree with you guys on. That's stupid and unproductive. That will kill peoples motivation and cause them to quit.

A few months at the end of the project? That's expected - it's time to SHIP.

The most interesting thing about that chart: Week 1 is a 40 hour week. Weeks 2-5 are 60 hour. The most productive 60 hour week was only about 30% more productive, despite being 50% longer.
When people crunch for extended periods, a LOT of time gets eaten up with talking in the halls and surfing the web. They make their 8 hours of work extend to fill 12 hours but not really getting any more done. That's why it's important to manage the length of crunch. A motivated team CAN be more productive in short bursts.

This is also where I can see crunch as having benefit. There are a myriad number of dependencies between everybody's work, and as a result people need to work until their pieces function properly so they don't hold back others. There are any number of situations where Joe's team's extra 4 hours of work results in not wasting Sally, Bob, and Sue's teams combined 100 hours of sitting around waiting for Joe to get his shit together.
Yep. It's a period where communication is key and if you need to ask someone a question about something it's awesome to have them there rather than have to wait until the next day.

At any rate, thanks for the responses, but I think I'm done responding in this thread. I can see idiots like NWJ starting up with insults and insinuations and it's only going to deteriorate from here. I am not here to defend crunch. I've said many times that I don't like it but I DO view it as necessary thing to ship a top shelf game.

Again, this it's sustainable for a month or two. Beyond that, and it's stupid.

Tortilla

04-05-2009, 02:35 PM

That's the cynical view, sure. Again, I'm no fan of crunch but it has it's place in the short term.

Also, bear in mind that I'm not talking about 16 hour/7 day a week death marches here. I'm talking about 10-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. It isn't insanity or anything and can be sustained for a month or so before shipping. It's long but it's not soul crushing.

I don't think I'm being cynical there. I've worked both ends of this in my time, both dev and PM, so I've seen (and in few cases helped push for) crunch. I've never seen any crunch have ANY benefits beyond letting a team do more with less resources and adapt to deadlines in a fluid situation. From a management perspective that's a big benefit, to be sure, but it's purely a resource benefit.

There are valid business cases for crunch, and I won't deny that. As you've noted, some employers make it worth the while of the devs to put up with work conditions that call for some crunching from time to time. But please don't try to sell me on some rah-rah management BS that crunch is how teams achieve some creative epiphany or sharp technical focus that couldn't have been accomplished within regular office hours if the project was more adequately resourced.

Tortilla

04-05-2009, 02:38 PM

This is also where I can see crunch as having benefit. There are a myriad number of dependencies between everybody's work, and as a result people need to work until their pieces function properly so they don't hold back others. There are any number of situations where Joe's team's extra 4 hours of work results in not wasting Sally, Bob, and Sue's teams combined 100 hours of sitting around waiting for Joe to get his shit together.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner! That's the business case for crunch right there. That's where management has to realize that's is way cheaper to have Joe's team work OT than it is to idle a bunch of other teams. And that's okay if the compensation structure and employee expectations are built to handle the idea that crunch will be called for.

Reldan

04-05-2009, 03:21 PM

Ding ding ding, we have a winner! That's the business case for crunch right there. That's where management has to realize that's is way cheaper to have Joe's team work OT than it is to idle a bunch of other teams. And that's okay if the compensation structure and employee expectations are built to handle the idea that crunch will be called for.

In my company crunch is expected, we know it's coming, and when, and typically for how long, and also why. We also are paid overtime, and typically are encouraged to take vacation for a week or two afterwards.

I will say that I've worked here for 3.5 years now, and for the first three years I was single and this last half year I've been married. A couple years back I and several others basically destroyed ourselves working to make up for some poor management decisions made on the project I was on at the time. I put up with it then, but wouldn't now.

Hell, I'm technically crunching right now - I'm just waiting for our DBA to get a damn index put on a table so I can get the rest of my shit done tonight.

Damien Neil

04-05-2009, 03:28 PM

Hell, I'm technically crunching right now - I'm just waiting for our DBA to get a damn index put on a table so I can get the rest of my shit done tonight.

The reality of crunch time: Most of it is spent surfing the net.

WarrenM

04-05-2009, 04:08 PM

But please don't try to sell me on some rah-rah management BS that crunch is how teams achieve some creative epiphany or sharp technical focus that couldn't have been accomplished within regular office hours if the project was more adequately resourced.
I never attempted to do that.

The reality of crunch time: Most of it is spent surfing the net.
Long term crunch, yes. If that's happening with short term crunch, you're working with people who don't give a shit.

Brad Wardell

04-05-2009, 04:14 PM

I typically work 40 to 45 hours a week during most of the year but during a major crunch time I'll work about twice that.

My productivity scales until around 60 hours a week. After that, it gets into diminishing returns. But often times, it's not about pumping out code but rather simply increasing the communication within teams that requires so many hours.

Tortilla

04-05-2009, 05:45 PM

Hell, I'm technically crunching right now - I'm just waiting for our DBA to get a damn index put on a table so I can get the rest of my shit done tonight.

If you'd engaged your DBAs earlier in the process for some collaborative data modeling and exploration of your usage of the data model, that index would already be there . . .

Yeah, I have strong DBA roots :)

Tortilla

04-05-2009, 05:49 PM

I never attempted to do that.

Sorry, that wasn't directly to your address but I wasn't clear about that. I quoted you because you quoted Rod, and it was Rod's comment that was setting off my BS-O-Meter

NoWayJose

04-05-2009, 05:51 PM

At any rate, thanks for the responses, but I think I'm done responding in this thread. I can see idiots like NWJ starting up with insults and insinuations and it's only going to deteriorate from here.
I'm not sure who I'm supposed to have insulted, other than to call management who relies on crunch to finish projects "incompetent." I stand by that assessment, though I will re-iterate that many of those producers may prove to be quite resourceful and responsible should the option of crunch without compensation be taken away. The fact is they simply haven't had to worry about it as they have this great option available to them without immediate consequence. I certainly never called anyone an idiot! Was it that I commented that I didn't know your relationship with your wife? I don't! I assume (and hope) that it's similar to mine: you enjoy spending time with her and would rather do that than sit in front of a desk at 8pm. If not, then that's fine, too. I just know which I'd prefer. If you misinterpreted that as some sort of dig at you and your wife, I apologize for not being more clear. Will you apologize for calling me an idiot?

I am not here to defend crunch. I've said many times that I don't like it but I DO view it as necessary thing to ship a top shelf game.

Again, this it's sustainable for a month or two. Beyond that, and it's stupid.
In my opinion, saying crunch is necessary to ship a top shelf game and that it's fine for a month or two IS defending it, as I'm of the opinion that it's possible to ship a top-shelf game without it. It's been done in the business before. If events outside the team's control (ie. a massive hardware spec change on a project already underway, etc.) then while crunch MAY be mandated, it should be compensated. But that's a huge difference from what you're espousing, which is crunching during beta, when it's all bug fixing and polish. In fact, this should be the easiest part of the project to schedule without crunch. It's very simple to track how many bugs you're clearing a day and plan accordingly.

Tortilla

04-05-2009, 05:51 PM

I typically work 40 to 45 hours a week during most of the year but during a major crunch time I'll work about twice that.

Good on you! There is nothing in the world more annoying than managers who trot out the door at 5 minutes to 5 during a mandatory crunch.

rei

04-05-2009, 06:19 PM

I wonder what Duke Nukem Forever's team does on a development cycle so long.

nlanza

04-05-2009, 07:00 PM

My understanding is that it's viewed as demoralizing to have certain people crunching while others are allowed to leave. I can see that but I don't wholeheartedly agree with it. If I'm caught up and I want to go home, I believe I should be able to. However, in my experience there is almost always something you could be doing to move the game closer to shipping.

The flip side of this is that it's demoralizing as hell to be ordered to come in on Saturday even though you blew past your bug targets just because some of your slacker coworkers are hopelessly behind.

My last job did this -- months-long crunches with mandatory Saturdays, godawful "catered" dinners brought in during the workdays, table-thumping motivational speeches by executives who were nowhere to be found during those late hours they told us were critical, etc, etc.

It was a startup building pretty complex software, and definitely had the "if you don't come in late you're letting down the team, if you quit you're even worse" attitude.

I left, and now I'm somewhere where crunches are very short -- a few weeks at most, usually with really nice food brought in, very healthy cash bonuses for the extra work, and a general understanding that needing to crunch is a management fuckup.

It entertains me to see that the old place never managed a release on time, had horrible problems with bugs and quality, and recently had 40% layoffs.

The current place hits basically every deadline with minimal crunch, releases good software, and rakes in cash.

People who tell you need long crunches might as well be trying to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

Tman

04-05-2009, 07:29 PM

I'm a software manager - not gaming, but in business for going on 15 years now. I've seen every project there is to have. New technologies, new hardware, new software versions. Regulated, non-regulated, you name it. I've worked with teams as small as 5 and up to 70.

The number of crunches I've seen in the past 10 years is twice. One was because of technology failing late in the process and having to find an alternate technology and the other was a team that let bugs get out of control at the late stages.

It all comes down to planning - a manager who has seen these types of projects should be able to accurately estimate each milestone - prototyping, alpha, beta & RC1. At each milestone you replan based on what you learned the previous milestone. You have 3 basic tenets - resources, features & time and it's your job as a manager to figure out which of those three are static and which ones can change. If you are on a project where they say none can move - it's time to find a new company to work for because they are being woefully unreasonable and have no business being upper mgt.

At no point have I have planned for crunch time. To plan for crunch time just reminds me of the poster "lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part"

Reldan

04-05-2009, 07:51 PM

If you'd engaged your DBAs earlier in the process for some collaborative data modeling and exploration of your usage of the data model, that index would already be there . . .

Yeah, I have strong DBA roots :)

Or maybe when he rebuilt the table this morning he could have put it back on there since we'd already concluded we needed it earlier in the process. Perhaps when I specifically asked if the index had been added and was told it had been 4 hours earlier he could have actually checked instead of assuming it had been done and feeding me BS.

But yeah, blame me when you have no idea what the sitch is.

Tortilla

04-05-2009, 07:59 PM

Or maybe when he rebuilt the table this morning he could have put it back on there since we'd already concluded we needed it earlier in the process. Perhaps when I specifically asked if the index had been added and was told it had been 4 hours earlier he could have actually checked instead of assuming it had been done and feeding me BS.

But yeah, blame me when you have no idea what the sitch is.

I always give DBAs the benefit of the doubt because I've seen what horrible things devs will do to them ;-)

I'm sure there's some good reason he's done what he's done. Though from the story you tell, it sounds like maybe he was just really distracted and worried about whether the short bus would be on time to pick him after work.

Hechicera

04-05-2009, 08:25 PM

thats very very true. But my experience is that young kids joining the industry still see working 12 hour days as some romantic/macho thing to be encouraged.
Maybe part of it is 95% of the workforce being men. Are women as keen on crunch as the guys?

It depends. I'm a female programmer/DBA/AI/Modeler(math) from the non-gaming world. I've seen my share of crunches.

Many women will look at the profession or industry and simply avoid it. But you knew that, the issue is with the women who went in anyway.

Women that do go into it will often be willing to crunch for a few reasons. If it is a start-up, there is the monetary lure. This may be less true with games, but I could see scenarios where it might happen. If they went into the area knowing it's workload they may have done so since they have an attraction to the material that is stronger than any desire of self-preservation. So, they are the type that would do this work until they drop, regardless of conditions. There is also a bit of pressure when you are the only, or even one of the few, women working on the technical side of the house. People tend to judge all female's technical skills, ability and desire to do this kind of job based on your performance. Not fair, but it happens. So you are under pressure to do whatever is needed, plus a little bit more, just to be sure. Either they feel they have something to prove, or feel the weight of representing their sex.

So, if a woman does go into the field, I would assume she would crunch. And if in a crunch, she would also, for a mix of one or more reasons, go full out.

Charles

04-05-2009, 08:25 PM

Not that I entirely disagree with you, Charles, but telling the people above you to go suck it can make for a tense and uncomfortable work environment. That is arguable, even in the face of results. Team unity and coherency is just as important as anything else. If some people are refusing to crunch while others see a need and are willing, it puts team members at odds with each other and that's just as harmful as any other problem really.

I am much more subtle when interacting with the people above me. I maintain a good work environment above all things. The worst it gets is when management is frustrated that they can't force me to do something I don't think is good for the game. Sadly for them, I always back it up with unassailable positions which are reinforced by the people around me.

If I recall correctly, the crossover point of 60 hour weeks is 8 weeks. That is to say, after 8 weeks of 60 hour weeks (and this is for manual assembly labor, not creative work), the team working 60 hour weeks has produced less total than the team working 40 hour weeks.

Henry Ford was not a humanitarian. The 40 hour work week has a century of research behind it at this point.

Reference Article: http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php

This. This needs to be read. I linked it earlier.

Anyone arguing that crunch is necessary sickens me. There is unavoidable crunch in software, yes, but it is a few weeks before a major milestone, and it is to fix very specific issues, and nothing else. Beyond that it's BS.

IF people want to do extra work, that's fine, but they need to realize that past a certain point they are doing less quality work and they won't even realize it. Even if you "want" to do 60 hour weeks, the simple fact is that after not long, you are going to be producing less quality work than if you'd stuck to a 40 hour week.

As was said above, this has fucking science behind it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn't make it go away.

Reldan

04-05-2009, 08:29 PM

I always give DBAs the benefit of the doubt because I've seen what horrible things devs will do to them ;-)

I'm sure there's some good reason he's done what he's done. Though from the story you tell, it sounds like maybe he was just really distracted and worried about whether the short bus would be on time to pick him after work.

He's under a bit of stress right now - it's why I specifically reminded and asked about the index I knew I'd need since I suspected he might have forgotten. That said, I'm not happy with being misled. Joke's on him though - instead of the database being ready to be backed up now, he's going to wind up having to do it at 1AM because of the delay.

Union Carbide

04-05-2009, 08:32 PM

Anecdotally: Outside of games, I make 3x as much money for 33% less hours, annually.

CEBlackwell

04-05-2009, 08:56 PM

I've said many times that I don't like it but I DO view it as necessary thing to ship a top shelf game.
But why is this? Because any top shelf game requires "n months + 2 months" of development? Just because it's only bugs that are being crunched doesn't mean this part of the schedule couldn't be taken into account at the beginning, in the middle and towards the end of the project.

If the schedule is too tight to make the quality of game that management wants to make, they could hire more people. Or offer paid overtime! But why bother when you can ask your existing employees to work a few weeks for free and they feel thankful and empowered by the open communication?

NoWayJose

04-05-2009, 09:22 PM

I left, and now I'm somewhere where crunches are very short -- a few weeks at most, usually with really nice food brought in, very healthy cash bonuses for the extra work, and a general understanding that needing to crunch is a management fuckup.
This is what I'm talking about. If a project has "a few months" of crunch, the producer should expect to be fired. It's ridiculous that a producer can fail at the basic description of his job - schedule and manage a project to completion - with seemingly no repercussions. If a coder is assigned a task and at the end of the project said, "well, I couldn't do that, I couldn't figure out a way, but my solution was to simply pass the work off to everyone else," chances are they'd be fired. Same with an artist or a designer. But producers seem immune to this, and it's because everyone assumes crunch is "inevitable," as EpicBoy says, and therefor shouldn't be punishable, when in fact the opposite is true.

Greatatlantic

04-05-2009, 10:07 PM

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks....

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.

-Karl Marx, Das Kapital

Not quite the quotes I was looking for, but somewhat related. Reading through this thread reminded me of Marx. One of his central arguments: in a capitalistic system in order for a company to be competitive in has to keep costs low. Among other things, this means extracting a 'surplus' of labor from workers, without additional compensation. Hence, the 16 hour workday that remained typical for manufacturing until roughly the 20th century. Admittedly, he was discussing manufacturing and unskilled workers, but I think the same might apply to any workforce with "more applicants than jobs" and replaceable skill sets. Failure to extract this surplus means companies go under, get bought up, etc.

checker

04-05-2009, 10:28 PM

But why is this? Because any top shelf game requires "n months + 2 months" of development?

I think the answer to this is that we still don't know how to make games very well. There's the production side and the creative side, both of which are hard. It's related to the William Goldman quote about the film industry: "Nobody knows anything". Often on games you don't know what the magic is until very late in the project. Sometimes you can move your dates, sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can't capture the magic in the available time and you ship anyway and that's sad, but sometimes it's close enough that working just a bit harder will capture it, and be the difference between "eh" and "awesome". Most creative people I know will go for the "awesome" (even if they're not being compensated for it beyond their name in the credits) because being part of "awesome" is a reward in itself.

It's easy to blame the management for crunch, but scheduling games is very difficult because of the "magic" issue. It's also easy to blame designers for not knowing what the magic is from the start, but that's prima facie false to anyone who's been involved in trying to do something innovative. It's easy to blame developers for being complacent and taking it, but that's ignoring the intense motivation among creative people to make "awesome".

I'm not trying to defend "The Man", and extended crunch makes no sense (there's even data!), but short crunches can make a big difference. I personally think mandatory crunch is stupid, even short-term. You have a bunch of stuff to get done, and people should come in if they feel like it. If you've run your team well and people feel ownership over the game and it feels like the magic is capturable by coming back in after you put the kids to bed, most will come in voluntarily anyway.

It would be interesting to make a chart of people's favorite games and how much crunch they had. No idea what the results would be, or if they're completely uncorrelated.

Chris

Dave Weinstein

04-05-2009, 10:53 PM

The longer you go before the game is fun, the more danger you are in.

Ideally, the prototype was so cool it was fun.

You may get lucky in that some emergent combination of features actually turns into fun late. Or you may crunch your staff polishing a turd, and just end up with a shiny turd.

checker

04-06-2009, 12:04 AM

You may get lucky in that some emergent combination of features actually turns into fun late. Or you may crunch your staff polishing a turd, and just end up with a shiny turd.

Sure. The former case occasionally turns into The Sims, or GTA 3. A lot of people are willing to take that risk, that's all I'm saying.

Chris

CEBlackwell

04-06-2009, 12:48 AM

It's easy to blame the management for crunch, but scheduling games is very difficult because of the "magic" issue.
This is true for some games, sure, and every non-gaming project in the world also encounters problems that sometimes need to be solved with overtime at the end. But anecdotally this is not the majority of game development, and my evidence is people like EpicBoy expecting a couple months of crunch for every project. Not just expecting the crunch, but being able to detail the flow at the end of the project: some 50 hour weeks, then several 58 hour weeks, and finally a few 64 hour weeks. That's scheduling crunch, not being surprised when the magic hasn't been captured. All this isn't shocking when the President of the company says 60 hour weeks are part of the corporate culture. He's scheduling crunch right into the hiring process.

It's easy to blame developers for being complacent and taking it, but that's ignoring the intense motivation among creative people to make "awesome". Volunteer overtime should never be discouraged!

I'm not trying to defend "The Man", and extended crunch makes no sense (there's even data!), but short crunches can make a big difference.

[snip]

It would be interesting to make a chart of people's favorite games and how much crunch they had. No idea what the results would be, or if they're completely uncorrelated.There's no denying the benefit of more time spent on development -- it surely results in a better product. And this is why as long as management continues to avoid blame for the incorrect schedule (due to the magic of video games) there will continue to be crunch.

But you said you think mandatory crunch is stupid anyway, so it's hard to argue when we really agree. Someone get a fat cat suit in here, I wanna give him a piece of my mind.

Rimbo

04-06-2009, 01:21 AM

A well-rested and happy programmer is so far more productive than an over-worked and tired one.

That's been my experience as well.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 02:40 AM

I'm not trying to defend "The Man", and extended crunch makes no sense (there's even data!), but short crunches can make a big difference.
Exactly.

I've seen the difference short crunches can make on projects at Epic. It's absolutely worth it. I've bolded the important word so I don't have to weed through another 20 posts of people telling me that long crunches are bad.

cliffski

04-06-2009, 03:03 AM

Reading through this thread reminded me of Marx. Among other things, this means extracting a 'surplus' of labor from workers, without additional compensation.

Indeed. I read a lot of Marx as a kid, and at college. What he said was bang-on.
As a capitalist business owner, I only ever employ people in order to (in the economic sense) exploit them. You have a vested interest to pay people as little as possible, and extract as much work from them as possible. And if you get to a point where they do not generate more income than they cost, it's goodbye time.
The side effect of this, is that if all your competitors crunch, you need to crunch too, because effectively they are getting cheaper labour, and you need cheaper labour too.
The twist on it that Marx never predicted (he assumed the workers would say 'fuck this' and riot) is that management have learned enough persuasive techniques to convince the workers that they are getting a good deal. Marx never realised you could give people a 'title bump', and they would be dumb enough to be thankful for it, with no salary increase. In my old job, they used to give me another pile of share options every time they wanted to keep me happy. Share options which I knew, and they knew, were fucking worthless.

If its the producers job to schedule the work, and the finance guys job to ensure the budget allows for some profit given expected sales... why is it the coder who has to work late when those first two guys fuck up?

cliffski

04-06-2009, 03:06 AM

Volunteer overtime should never be discouraged!

I think it should. You can't work 70 hour weeks and be as awake and focused as you need to be. Some games have hundreds of thousands or more lines of code. in C++, a single accidental ';' can fuck up the entire game. This stuff requires concentration.
if you ran an airline, or an operating theater, you wouldn't be keen for the staff to work themselves to death, even if they happily did it for free. Mistakes can be costly, and mistakes are more likely when coders are tired.

There's no denying the benefit of more time spent on development -- it surely results in a better product.

Duke Nukem is going to be so awesome.

Cal

04-06-2009, 03:35 AM

Anecdotally: Outside of games, I make 3x as much money for 33% less hours, annually.

Snap.

Since i quit the industry i now went from 50-60 hour weeks to a standard 37.5 hour week and my pay nearly trippled. My love for games eventually gave way to the desire to stop working insane hours for poor pay.

CEBlackwell

04-06-2009, 03:52 AM

short crunches
Only in game development would several weeks of overtime hours be described as short.

Duke Nukem is going to be so awesome.
Well they're doing a whole new thing, the opposite of crunch time. Expansion time? Smooth time!

KieronGillen

04-06-2009, 04:16 AM

All the talk of Marx and exploitation reminds me that the first covering letter I sent applying for a writing gig* being a big old reiterative rant of reasons why they should hire me, including a "Because someone has to exploit me" near the close. Like, totally.

Following this reiteration of the industry-work-hours argument with avid interest. A mate of mine in development has just released a game after months of crunch in the last few months and also split with his wife. The former certainly didn't help the latter, y'know?

KG

*Not a games writing gig, and one which I was awesomely underqualified for. And since that was true, I figured going with my instincts and writing a properly mental full-bore covering letter was about my only option. I got an interview, so I think I was right.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 06:08 AM

Only in game development would several weeks of overtime hours be described as short.
Really? You don't think it's reasonable to put in a few hard weeks at the end of a 2 year project? Man...

What qualifies as short then? A single 10 hour day?

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 06:21 AM

Really? You don't think it's reasonable to put in a few hard weeks at the end of a 2 year project? Man...

Reasonable to do if the company is in a pinch, yes. Reasonable to expect every single project . . . well that's more of a grey area.

Telefrog

04-06-2009, 07:01 AM

I think the answer to this is that we still don't know how to make games very well. There's the production side and the creative side, both of which are hard. It's related to the William Goldman quote about the film industry: "Nobody knows anything". Often on games you don't know what the magic is until very late in the project. Sometimes you can move your dates, sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can't capture the magic in the available time and you ship anyway and that's sad, but sometimes it's close enough that working just a bit harder will capture it, and be the difference between "eh" and "awesome". Most creative people I know will go for the "awesome" (even if they're not being compensated for it beyond their name in the credits) because being part of "awesome" is a reward in itself.

It's easy to blame the management for crunch, but scheduling games is very difficult because of the "magic" issue. It's also easy to blame designers for not knowing what the magic is from the start, but that's prima facie false to anyone who's been involved in trying to do something innovative. It's easy to blame developers for being complacent and taking it, but that's ignoring the intense motivation among creative people to make "awesome".

I think the comparison to the film industry is very apt. It's a product for consumers with a very creative side. Hollywood has been around for decades and still has crunch time associated with almost every movie project. I think it is inevitable with a creative endeavor that involves so many people.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 07:03 AM

I think the answer to this is that we still don't know how to make games very well.
This might be true but the issue is that there's no excuse for it anymore. We should know how to do this.

There's the production side and the creative side, both of which are hard...It's easy to blame the management for crunch, but scheduling games is very difficult because of the "magic" issue.
BS, all are known at this point. Software development and creative development have been going on for decades and the processes are well understood. If people find it hard it's because they don't know what they're doing. There is no reason for any significant unknowns at this point.

Instituted crunch is a case of bad culture and exploitation. Also, I think EpicBoy is sick if he thinks several weeks is "short." Regardless of how long the project has been going on working late for several consecutive weeks isn't good. The fact that it's expected and intentionally ramped up proves that it's scheduled which is sickening. Also the idea that everyone should stay late, even people who wouldn't have to otherwise, because it's good for morale is just wrong. If people aren't mature and professional enough to realize that others don't need to stay that's their issue and should be dealt with on a person by person basis. As others have said forcing people to stay who don't really have to is by far worse for morale and likely breeds more animosity.

Every chance I get I dissuade people from putting in extra time, even (especially) if it's of their own volition. It's bad for everyone including themselves, except for management of course.

Rob_Merritt

04-06-2009, 07:09 AM

I know people in the industry that look forwards to crunch time. One programer I know even says its the best time because he can avoid his family and enter in "the zone." Some sort of coder heaven. He compares coding for 14 hours a day for 8 to 16 weeks during the final crunch as an oympic event.

That said, he weighs 350, divorce, hasn't seen his kids in years and hasn't had a stable relationship but he loves his job and management loves him.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 07:44 AM

He probably loves his job because it's the only thing that isn't terrible in his life.

NoWayJose

04-06-2009, 08:00 AM

Really? You don't think it's reasonable to put in a few hard weeks at the end of a 2 year project? Man...

What qualifies as short then? A single 10 hour day?
Honestly? I'd prefer zero mandatory (I too have used the bold text) extra hours with no compensation. AS CEBlackwell says above, if people are so inspired by their project that they want to come in on their free time to make it better, that's great. I've done it myself plenty of times! I might do it still! But there are two reasons crunch persists at the scale it does in the game industry: 1) it's legal to keep people past normal working hours without paying them, and 2) employees, especially grizzled vets like yourself, Charles, and myself, have been conditioned to think it's normal and expected, and if for some reason we don't stay late, then we "don't care" or are "letting down the team." Hopefully enough of us will either change our minds or die off, or the laws will change, so that eventually the games industry grows up and is run like a business, not like a collection of garage developers only too happy to work for free.

I'm still convinced that #1 is the real reason for this. If you're correct and crunch is unavoidable and necessary, and beneficial, then build it in to the budget. That means more than a vague "we're well-compensated." It means paying an hourly rate above and beyond the equivalent rate for normal hours. I think we'll find out very quickly just how necessary crunch is.

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 08:13 AM

BS, all are known at this point. Software development and creative development have been going on for decades and the processes are well understood. If people find it hard it's because they don't know what they're doing. There is no reason for any significant unknowns at this point.

Actually, there are a lot of unknowns. Software development is the process if identifying and solving unknowns. There is no way to be sure of the complexity of a project short of actually doing the project and measuring the results. The only accurate estimate is the one delivered when the project is complete, etc. That's why a lot of techniques from the agile software fad all deal with assuming that a software development project is one big minefield of nasty surprises and never planning in detail for more than a few weeks out.

There is a cultural issue at work here too, a lot of companies in my experience manage software projects very very badly and bury their head in the sand when it comes to risks and realistic assessments. PMs don't put worst case scenarios into budgets or schedules because upper management won't approve projects that look that dismal. Devs cave under pressure during planning and reluctantly commit to unrealistic schedules. I'm sure many devs on this board have been on projects that they knew were doomed from the outset and yet they went along anyway because the alternatives all involved a good chance of getting in big trouble or possibly canned.

There's a culture of dishonesty built up around software development that really irks the hell out of me, so I apologize if I seem very bitchy indeed in this thread.

Brian Seiler

04-06-2009, 08:16 AM

Often on games you don't know what the magic is until very late in the project.

You know, I'm on the other side of software engineering, and I can't say it's really that much better over there. There's about a billion different project engineering techniques precisely because it's a large behemoth and frequently you can't see the big picture problems until it's too late to avoid delays. The best solution I've ever seen came from the first company I worked for, which is an incredibly large petrochemical company that I will not mention by name. They followed a bog-standard waterfall model with five stages, at the end of each of which the project schedule was redone. At the beginning, you add precisely 300% contingency time to account for all the stuff you don't know (in other words, your estimates are 4x what you really think they are). As the project crosses gate reviews, you start whittling down that project contingency time and reallocating it to the issues you've discovered, but the result is that projects get greenlit based on their potential returns on the worst possible implementation scenario, so almost all projects were "good," and no project was ever late. Just to illustrate, one project I was tangentially involved with had one of the software companies that was providing stuff to them go under, a bunch of issues with interfacing the different equipment they needed, and an endless parade of bugs and failures, and it delivered right on time and slightly under budget.

I guess that the reason games don't use a model like this is because of the difficulty in getting funded for a project where you've got a vastly overblown contingency budget?

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 08:16 AM

He probably loves his job because it's the only thing that isn't terrible in his life.

Yeah, those people are out there. I've worked with a few. The most heartbreaking case was a guy whose father was lying in a hospital dying by inches over the course of months and he just couldn't cope with it emotionally. He visited the hospital often but I guess he felt guilty if he didn't spend every waking moment outside of work with his father so he coped by working insane hours. He put in 12-16 hour days for months when there really wasn't anything going on to justify the effort. It was hard to watch.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 08:40 AM

Yeah, those people are out there. I've worked with a few. The most heartbreaking case was a guy whose father was lying in a hospital dying by inches over the course of months and he just couldn't cope with it emotionally. He visited the hospital often but I guess he felt guilty if he didn't spend every waking moment outside of work with his father so he coped by working insane hours. He put in 12-16 hour days for months when there really wasn't anything going on to justify the effort. It was hard to watch.
Having gone through a similar situation with my mother I can understand. I was fortunate that where I was working at the time was incredibly understanding about the situation. I'd visit her regularly and would regularly leave work at a moment's notice some days because of a change in her condition. Even though I was an hourly employee they still paid me a full day when something of that nature happened. Later when my first nephew was born a couple of coworkers practically pushed me out the door to go see my sister and new nephew. Of course my mother having worked at that place for years helped. She had tons of close personal relationships there.

Kyle Wilson

04-06-2009, 09:12 AM

If you're correct and crunch is unavoidable and necessary, and beneficial, then build it in to the budget. That means more than a vague "we're well-compensated." It means paying an hourly rate above and beyond the equivalent rate for normal hours. I think we'll find out very quickly just how necessary crunch is.

Just to clarify, compensation at Epic is something of a special case. Remember that infamous IGDA Leadership Forum panel (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7344863953591545577&ei=HSjaSf3BNoOeqgKZ47maAg&q=igda+leadership+forum) where Mike Capps said

There's a lot of talk, "Oh you can make great games working 8 hours a day 5 days a week, it's management's fault if they work more than that"... Fuck, it's management's fault for hiring people who want to leave at 5pm every day is the way I look at it!

He went on to add context that makes that comment sound less harsh. Epic shares profits among all employees. Each additional person they hire dilutes the pool. As a result, they tend to attract alpha-geek types who'd rather keep team sizes small, work hard, and make more money. Epic has a unique company culture. Epic crunch is a much better deal for the employee than crunch at most game companies.

That said, if all that is true, I'm not sure why Epic can't rely on individual bottom-up crunch instead of team-wide top-down crunch. I'm biased: When I put in long hours, it's because I'm trying to get stuff done without the distraction of having everybody else around.

cesare

04-06-2009, 09:14 AM

You know what's really awesome? Working with incredibly smart people who have years of experience at what they do. People who can show you how to better yourself. People who are secure in their skills, so they don't feel the need to one-up you.

That's great too. Both are better than working under 40-year-olds who haven't played a video game in years, don't give a shit about the project, and are much more interested in spending time with their families than they are in creating a decent product.

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 09:17 AM

That's great too. Both are better than working under 40-year-olds who haven't played a video game in years, don't give a shit about the project, and are much more interested in spending time with their families than they are in creating a decent product.

I sincerely hope I never work with you. Nothing personal, but it sounds to me like your priorities are fucked up and that's not a sustainable thing.

beloved one

04-06-2009, 09:20 AM

Haha, people wonder why working conditions persist, when caring about family is considered a drag on the project. Let me clue you in, work is just work. You don't have to love work to do a good job, and conversely just because you have a lot of enthusiasm for something doesn't make you good at it.

Look at case studies, work ethic is one of the least good predictors of software success. Working tons of hours is a great predictor of failure though.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 09:21 AM

That's great too. Both are better than working under 40-year-olds who haven't played a video game in years, don't give a shit about the project, and are much more interested in spending time with their families than they are in creating a decent product.
I would hope that most people are more interested in spending time with their families. Your attitude is what's scary.

Major Malphunktion

04-06-2009, 09:22 AM

Really? You don't think it's reasonable to put in a few hard weeks at the end of a 2 year project? Man...

What qualifies as short then? A single 10 hour day?

I've been on projects outside of games that we did not crunch ONCE in 9 years and made our dates. Every project, every time.
Sure a sprint at the end of a 2 year cycle fine, what if you have a recurring schedule like an episodic game or an MMO then is it ok to do these 'sprints' every say 90 days? Should this be the norm?
There is no 'end' in MMO creation, and when the crunch starts unfortunately it is like an echo chamber and that crunch cycle is hard to get the company out of.

cesare

04-06-2009, 09:23 AM

My last job did this -- months-long crunches with mandatory Saturdays, godawful "catered" dinners brought in during the workdays, table-thumping motivational speeches by executives who were nowhere to be found during those late hours they told us were critical, etc, etc.

...

It entertains me to see that the old place never managed a release on time, had horrible problems with bugs and quality, and recently had 40% layoffs.

Lol. Sounds like we worked at the same place. ;)

TheJare

04-06-2009, 09:31 AM

A mate of mine in development has just released a game after months of crunch in the last few months and also split with his wife. The former certainly didn't help the latter, y'know?
I recall at least Chris Taylor and Peter Molyneux describing how their crazy work hours led to splits, and later elaborated that people in their staff suffered similar fates.

In my experience, the biggest benefit of short crunches has not been the extra hours as much as the increased sense of urgency and intensity with which people work during a crunch; more stuff gets done per hour, and fancy pie in the sky experimentation almost disappears (almost!) to true "it's done or it's out" decisions. I'm not saying everyone is a slacker unless management gives the whip; ideally, your manager would know how to instill this atmosphere without increasing hours.

As the crunch extends beyond reasonable (lots of circumstances define what "reasonable" is), intensity goes from extra high to lower than normal and judgment goes from sharp to poor. You need to keep increasing the extra time to compensate. By the end of it, most developers realize that they could have achieved the same in normal hours if they (themselves and/or their managers) had known better: how to keep intensity high, how to schedule, what's the "magic", what are the priorities, when to stop trying on an idea that just doesn't work, etc.

The long-term effects of personal burnout and resent towards other teammates and managers (if only they had done their job right!) are hard to overcome. Even the pride in "being part of awesome" will not compensate once you've already been part of "awesome" once, because rose-tinted glasses will ensure that you remember the first "awesome" as so much better, and the crunch as "not so bad".

Edit: besides experience, age and personal commitments outside of work, another reason why developers are growing more and more resistant to crunching is because we are much more aware that our game's success rests much more in the hands of marketing and IP management than in having this or that extra feature.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 09:35 AM

I recall at least Chris Taylor and Peter Molyneux describing how their crazy work hours led to splits, and later elaborated that people in their staff suffered similar fates.
I was lucky enough to marry a woman who understands what I do for a living. She's supportive of my doing a little extra on the weekend (just a few hours, nothing crazy). She's fine with crunch as long as I let her know it's coming up and she can mentally prepare herself for it.

This has a lot to do with where I work. She knows that Epic will make it worth our while financially so she's willing to stick it out.

In short, my wife rocks.

NoWayJose

04-06-2009, 09:40 AM

Just to clarify, compensation at Epic is something of a special case. Remember that infamous IGDA Leadership Forum panel (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7344863953591545577&ei=HSjaSf3BNoOeqgKZ47maAg&q=igda+leadership+forum) where Mike Capps said

He went on to add context that makes that comment sound less harsh. Epic shares profits among all employees. Each additional person they hire dilutes the pool. As a result, they tend to attract alpha-geek types who'd rather keep team sizes small, work hard, and make more money. Epic has a unique company culture. Epic crunch is a much better deal for the employee than crunch at most game companies. Spending time with your family is important, but so is demanding competence from producers.

That said, if all that is true, I'm not sure why Epic can't rely on individual bottom-up crunch instead of team-wide top-down crunch. I'm biased: When I put in long hours, it's because I'm trying to get stuff done without the distraction of having everybody else around.
I'm aware that Epic compensates very well. And that every studio fosters its own culture. However, there is an over-reliance, industry-wide, on the idea that videogames cannot be scheduled, that it's impossible, and all you can do is give it a decent guesstimate and make up the difference with free labor. That is absolutely ridiculous. It's absurd to see a guy like cesare not only willingly work for free but chastise others who balk at the idea.

One thing EpicBoy mentioned has stuck with me, which is that even people with zero outstanding bugs should probably stay during crunch because there's "always something to do." That's a very dangerous attitude to have. A team full of people "finding things to do" leads to an unstable dataset and almost guarantees the introduction of bugs where before there were none, putting the release date even further at risk. A properly managed project will scale down production as the ship date nears, not ramp up. If you're scrambling to shove content into a game at Beta, you're in real trouble.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 09:43 AM

NoWayJose

04-06-2009, 09:43 AM

I was lucky enough to marry a woman who understands what I do for a living. She's supportive of my doing a little extra on the weekend (just a few hours, nothing crazy). She's fine with crunch as long as I let her know it's coming up and she can mentally prepare herself for it.

This has a lot to do with where I work. She knows that Epic will make it worth our while financially so she's willing to stick it out.

In short, my wife rocks.
Congrats, that good to hear. My wife rocks as well. That's why I want to be with her evenings and weekends, and not at work. She also understands crunch may be necessary (though as the majority breadwinner, she may wonder why she's able to be home at a decent hour, while I'm frequently unable to), but the issue isn't our spouses' understanding. It's the need for the industry to grow up, to stop relying on free labor to cover the incompetence of management.

And by the way, while spouses may be forgiving, children may be less so inclined.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 09:47 AM

You also don't have kids. Things would probably be different if those additional responsibilities fell on her shoulders. As it is now she just needs to find something to do on her own, not usually difficult for most people.
Us not having kids isn't an accident. :)

But I agree, someone with kids has a harder row to hoe in this regard.

checker

04-06-2009, 09:51 AM

and all you can do is give it a decent guesstimate and make up the difference with free labor.

I think the first half of this is true, but the second half is not. The labor shouldn't be free. There should be profit sharing/royalties/bonuses/overtime/whatever, so that you feel like the extra push is worth it both creatively and financially. I think the difference between overtime and royalties is just the age old one of up-front-non-leveraged versus deferred-leveraged compensation. Which one people want depends on the project, the company, their personality, where they are in life, etc.

It's important to point out again that compensation is not just monetary. Since everybody in this thread on the anti-crunch side (I guess I'm on the pro-crunch side, weird) is very fond of data, all the data about happiness from the past few years shows that money doesn't correllate with happiness once you're above the poverty line. People like those silly titles, people like being able to work on new and interesting stuff, people like the idea that if they are seen as a high performer they'll be given time to prototype that game idea they've had for a long time, etc. Just saying "those people are stupid for letting themselves be exploited" is ignoring a ton of psych research. To be clear, I think people working on the game should share in the financial successes and failures, but I'm just pointing out that money is not the only form of compensation for people.

On the software scheduling front, there is definitely a lot of "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" going on in the industry, but this is just human psychology. It happens at every software company I've seen that's trying to do new stuff.

which is that even people with zero outstanding bugs should probably stay during crunch because there's "always something to do." That's a very dangerous attitude to have.

There are various phases. At the very very end, yes, you lock things down. But there is a phase before that where you can do pick up polish things, and sometimes those are highly leveraged. Even just playing the game and spotting things and letting people know about them is very valuable towards the end. So, I agree with the "there's always something to do" attitude.

Chris

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 09:55 AM

I remember that spending all my time working to make the game seemed like a good idea.

And honestly, I don't regret the massive effort on Rainbow Six (the entire networking engine and all the multiplayer code were written in the last 9 months of the project), but only because it was a critical and financial success. Had that effort been expended on a flop (which I've also done), it would have had no redeeming features.

And all that being said, Rainbow Six very nearly cost me my marriage. And had that happened, success or no success, it wouldn't have been worth it at all.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 09:57 AM

Even just playing the game and spotting things and letting people know about them is very valuable towards the end. So, I agree with the "there's always something to do" attitude.

I can, without even working hard, think of two instances where significant bugs were introduced during the polish phase by someone "finding something to do". One of them was egregious enough to get noted in pretty much every review.

And that's just off of my personal experience.

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 09:57 AM

There are various phases. At the very very end, yes, you lock things down. But there is a phase before that where you can do pick up polish things, and sometimes those are highly leveraged. Even just playing the game and spotting things and letting people know about them is very valuable towards the end. So, I agree with the "there's always something to do" attitude.

Chris

I agree with you on that as well, but that's a discussion that has nothing to do with crunch time and everything to do with good teamwork. Another thing a lot of companies do a horrible job of promoting effectively but I'll save that rant for another day.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 10:02 AM

NoWayJose

04-06-2009, 10:05 AM

I think the first half of this is true, but the second half is not. The labor shouldn't be free. There should be profit sharing/royalties/bonuses/overtime/whatever, so that you feel like the extra push is worth it both creatively and financially. I think the difference between overtime and royalties is just the age old one of up-front-non-leveraged versus deferred-leveraged compensation. Which one people want depends on the project, the company, their personality, where they are in life, etc. But, it's important to point out that compensation is not just monetary.
My point isn't to simply be paid more (I'm compensated quite well, as it turns out). My point is to make management responsible for the decisions they make. Currently, there is no immediate consequence to asking for crunch at any degree - you simply make it mandatory and (as this thread evidences) most of the company will willingly put in the hours without complaint. That's not a healthy way to run an industry. There should be consequences for mismanagement, to encourage good practices.

Royalties and completion bonuses are nice (I've received both and have been appreciative of them), but are not the answer here. Royalties are based on sales, which are not necessarily related to the amount of polish or work put into a project (in a perfect world, blah blah...). Sales numbers should be a management concern - their job is to manage a P&L sheet, but since the L column can easily be adjusted with free labor, there's no need to properly balance it. Completion bonuses are almost by definition below the full amount one would be paid if true overtime pay was used.

On the software scheduling front, there is definitely a lot of "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" going on in the industry, but this is just human psychology. It happens at every software company I've seen that's trying to do new stuff.
Not to sound harsh, but so what? Lots of things are human psychology, but we don't do them. I'd love to be paid to sit around and watch YouTube all day, but I don't expect management to do so. I'm sure they'd love me to work 16 hour days for free, but that's also unreasonable.

There are various phases. At the very very end, yes, you lock things down. But there is a phase before that where you can do pick up polish things, and sometimes those are highly leveraged. Even just playing the game and spotting things and letting people know about them is very valuable towards the end. So, I agree with the "there's always something to do" attitude.
That's true. But when it's used as a motivation for mandatory, team-wide crunch, I think it's overplayed. If you truly are done with your work, how do you tell your wife or kids that you're staying extra hours just to play the game and write up some emails? And would management be willing to pay a top coder, artist, or designer his true overtime pay scale to sit around and play the game? Probably not.

checker

04-06-2009, 10:06 AM

I can, without even working hard, think of two instances where significant bugs were introduced during the polish phase by someone "finding something to do". One of them was egregious enough to get noted in pretty much every review. And that's just off of my personal experience.

Of course. I can think of lots of anecdotes where amazing things went in at the last minute, too. And, I can think of examples where the whole thing was locked down early by producers and it was run like the Space Shuttle control software, and it felt like it to the player. The point I'm trying to make is that all of those outcomes are possible, and people of course tend to believe they'll do the awesome one. It's the job of a good producer/dd/pm/whatever-they-call-them-at-your-company to know when to let stuff in and know when not to. The point is simply that the answer should not always be "no".

Chris

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 10:06 AM

There are various phases. At the very very end, yes, you lock things down. But there is a phase before that where you can do pick up polish things, and sometimes those are highly leveraged. Even just playing the game and spotting things and letting people know about them is very valuable towards the end. So, I agree with the "there's always something to do" attitude.
Being forced to stay late so you can "find something to do" seems like a morale killer. It would strike me as the company not really valuing me and my personal time and making me stay late for the sake of making me stay late. I worked in those conditions before and I hated everything about it. Making people work late as a matter of policy regardless of there being actual work to be done is stupid and I would never want to work somewhere that has such an attitude ever again.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:11 AM

There is a very limited pain point to the company for crunch.

Some percentage of the staff will switch companies after ship anyway, so it doesn't matter if they get burned out.

Some percentage of the staff will leave the industry after ship anyway, so it doesn't matter if they get burned out.

Some percentage of the staff would be "good attrition" if they left, so it doesn't matter if they are driven out.

And bonuses or profit sharing only apply if the game is wildly successful anyway, so it only gets paid if there is lots of money around.

In short, all of the downside risk is carried by the line developers.

If there were actual up-front "you make me crunch, my paycheck gets bigger next paycheck" costs to the studios, rather than a deferred part of a possible windfall, I think you'd see a lot more investment in good project management and a lot more concern over the decision to go to overtime.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 10:12 AM

And, I can think of examples where the whole thing was locked down early by producers and it was run like the Space Shuttle control software, and it felt like it to the player.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what this means. You're saying the content/code was locked before all the features were in? That seems like an odd decision, depending on the time frame of course. If however the game was feature complete and the resulting experience was lackluster I'm not sure that's the fault of the producer locking down.

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 10:13 AM

Being forced to stay late so you can "find something to do" seems like a morale killer. It would strike me as the company not really valuing me and my personal time and making me stay late for the sake of making me stay late. I worked in those conditions before and I hated everything about it. Making people work late as a matter of policy regardless of there being actual work to be done is stupid and I would never want to work somewhere that has such a an attitude ever again.

Being unable to find a useful way to contribute to what the team needs to accomplish (I'm assuming a real crunch for a real goal here) should be a huge red flag to an employee and to management. It's a failure of teamwork, which is all around bad. It's a failure on the employee's behalf to maintain a skillset that lets them contribute. It's a failure on a managers part to make sure that a person doesn't become isolated in their own little technical world because that isolation is a really bad thing for many reason.

In short, if an employee is pissed off that they have to come in when they have nothing to do then a lot more than just poor project scheduling has gone wrong.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:14 AM

Hooray for QA?

Object lesson. Turning your lead QA into a mission designer has repercussions.

NoWayJose

04-06-2009, 10:16 AM

Being unable to find a useful way to contribute to what the team needs to accomplish (I'm assuming a real crunch for a real goal here) should be a huge red flag to an employee and to management. It's a failure of teamwork, which is all around bad. It's a failure on the employee's behalf to maintain a skillset that lets them contribute. It's a failure on a managers part to make sure that a person doesn't become isolated in their own little technical world because that isolation is a really bad thing for many reason.

In short, if an employee is pissed off that they have to come in when they have nothing to do then a lot more than just poor project scheduling has gone wrong.
If there's really that much left to get done, then pay people to do it. What's so controversial about that?

cesare

04-06-2009, 10:21 AM

I sincerely hope I never work with you. Nothing personal, but it sounds to me like your priorities are fucked up and that's not a sustainable thing.I'm not married, don't have kids, and have seen 2-3 week crunch periods have a great effect on the end result of a project (I've seen months of crunch do absolutely nothing to save a garbage title as well, but that's another story). I understand that crunch is usually a result of poor planning, but I really, really disagree with the attitude, "Well, management fucked up, tough shit, I'm not putting an hour of extra effort into this project". Honestly I don't want to work with someone who has that attitude (and likewise that's nothing personal). If I've just put 2 years of my life into a project, then no, a couple of extra hours a day for a few weeks isn't going to kill me. Coming in on a Saturday here and there isn't going to kill me, and almost all studios (even the shitty ones) that I've worked for compensated time, if not actual salary. I'm OK with that.

I know this board skews older, so I'm going to be in the minority in this argument. And it's increasingly apparent that this is just another front of the married-with-kids demographic clashing with the single-and-childless or the married-and-childless demographic. Which never ends well. :)

I was lucky enough to marry a woman who understands what I do for a living. She's supportive of my doing a little extra on the weekend (just a few hours, nothing crazy). She's fine with crunch as long as I let her know it's coming up and she can mentally prepare herself for it.

I'm not married, but my girlfriend is the same way. She's a nurse and regularly works 12 hour shifts overnight. We both understand that each other's work sometimes requires crazy hours. It's not the end of the world.

checker

04-06-2009, 10:26 AM

There is a very limited pain point to the company for crunch.

This I agree with. But I think the focus should be on this--changing the compensation structure so that people can choose where they want to be on the risk/reward continuum--rather than on trying to eliminate "reasonable crunch", which I think is not a bad thing for creative projects if handled well for all the reasons mentioned above.

Probably bad form, but I edited my post above to include a paragraph about non-monetary compensation, which might have gotten missed. The psychology of that would need to be in the mix as well.

Being forced to stay late so you can "find something to do" seems like a morale killer.

Again, I'm against mandatory crunch. I think I was pretty clear on that point.

Not to sound harsh, but so what? Lots of things are human psychology, but we don't do them.

I was just trying to say that the "forgiveness not permission" thing is way deeper than games, or software, or employee/management, etc., and so it's a hard one to fix. I wasn't trying to say it was optimal in any sense. In fact, most "modern" software methodologies embrace it and don't try to ask for permission in the first place, they ask for meta-permission by admitting up front that they don't know how to schedule software. :)

Chris

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 10:27 AM

Object lesson. Turning your lead QA into a mission designer has repercussions.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. What I was saying is that QA should be catching anything that is broken or wrong or whatever. There's also a communication issue there ... if you change something like a mission design at a late stage, you'd damn well better be communicating that to QA and giving them a chance to bash on it.

Damien Neil

04-06-2009, 10:28 AM

Really? You don't think it's reasonable to put in a few hard weeks at the end of a 2 year project? Man...

I think that every bit of research out there says that the gains from even two weeks of overtime are minimal, and that past four weeks you're losing ground.

I think that there are times when overtime is necessary. I think that when you've built it right into the schedule such that it's expected, "necessary" has gone out the window.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:29 AM

I'm not sure what you're saying here. What I was saying is that QA should be catching anything that is broken or wrong or whatever. There's also a communication issue there ... if you change something like a mission design at a late stage, you'd damn well better be communicating that to QA and giving them a chance to bash on it.

What I'm saying is that we didn't have sufficient resources, so our lead QA Analyst instead became the game mission designer. Which meant we didn't have a real QA lead, since the person who was supposed to be saying "Don't touch that" was the person who wanted to touch it.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:30 AM

I know this board skews older, so I'm going to be in the minority in this argument. And it's increasingly apparent that this is just another front of the married-with-kids demographic clashing with the single-and-childless or the married-and-childless demographic.

You might also consider that some of us "used to be you".

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 10:30 AM

I think that every bit of research out there says that the gains from even two weeks of overtime are minimal, and that past four weeks you're losing ground.
I can only speak from experience. A few weeks of crunch works WONDERS around here to get the games from good to awesome.

What I'm saying is that we didn't have sufficient resources, so our lead QA Analyst instead became the game mission designer. Which meant we didn't have a real QA lead, since the person who was supposed to be saying "Don't touch that" was the person who wanted to touch it.
Ouch. :-/

checker

04-06-2009, 10:34 AM

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what this means. You're saying the content/code was locked before all the features were in?

No, I'm saying that strict top-down conservative software scheduling doesn't work very well. If you're working on heart-monitor firmware, it might be necessary, but the cost is immense in relative terms. This is why all this agile crap is popular now in non-someone-will-die-if-there-is-a-bug software, because there is such a huge upside to being able to react to change during development. This is true even in relatively well-understood areas like corporate intranet db kinds of stuff, and it's doubly true in art & entertainment software when there's that "magic" thing that has to happen.

Chris

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:36 AM

I can only speak from experience. A few weeks of crunch works WONDERS around here to get the games from good to awesome.

Assuming 60 hour crunchs, two weeks of crunch equate to extending the schedule by one week.

On a multi-year project, I'm sure that there were production errors that cost more than that one week, they often happen in the "fuzzy up front" part of production.

Moreover, Epic is one of the studios that could actually say "we're delaying by a week to get it just right", and have no problem doing so.

Brian Seiler

04-06-2009, 10:39 AM

This is why all this agile crap is popular now in non-someone-will-die-if-there-is-a-bug software, because there is such a huge upside to being able to react to change during development. This is true even in relatively well-understood areas like corporate intranet db kinds of stuff

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I've worked at three different non-game companies (two huge, one small) and have friends who have worked at maybe ten or so more, and none of us have ever been on an Agile project as organized by the management. I attempted one myself on a project where I was the only resource and the people I were working for didn't know it was a project, and the scope creep was so ridiculous that I had to either lock down the feature set after a week or so or beat the guy who was asking for it to death with a length of pipe. The gigantic piece of work that we've contracted out to a third party company right now probably was developed that way, though, and it's run about four months over schedule now. I accept as an intellectual fact that this process works, but I have never once in my life seen it actually, you know, WORK. I'm not a senior in the field by any means, though.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 10:44 AM

Moreover, Epic is one of the studios that could actually say "we're delaying by a week to get it just right", and have no problem doing so.
No, we have dates as well. Microsoft puts a LOT of money into marketing Gears and everything they put out (after a certain point) has a street date printed on it. Missing that date would be a serious problem.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:44 AM

I have seen agile work well.

I have seen agile crater.

One key factor is experience. More experienced developers are better able to assess risk, block feature creep, and assess schedules.

The game industry loses senior staff at an astounding rate. As a hint, if "Senior" is a role that is often filled by people with a handful of years of experience, either you are in a brand new field, or you are losing your real senior staff.

And the same poor scheduling and poor planning that is often the root cause of the use of the "crunch hammer" is caused by that loss of institutional knowledge and expertise. And of course, it is the long hours (and comparatively low pay) that often drive away the senior staff.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:46 AM

No, we have dates as well. Microsoft puts a LOT of money into marketing Gears and everything they put out (after a certain point) has a street date printed on it. Missing that date would be a serious problem.

Then target your schedule at a hard GM that is three weeks before the publisher deadline. Treat that as the real schedule. And that gives you far more time than you claim Epic generally needs for any scheduling errors.

checker

04-06-2009, 10:47 AM

I accept as an intellectual fact that this process works, but I have never once in my life seen it actually, you know, WORK. I'm not a senior in the field by any means, though.

Oh, I don't think it works either, hence my use of the modifier "crap". But, I've never seen anything that works, so hey, the more methodologies the merrier! Hopefully this isn't an invitation for everybody to come out of the woodwork with their awesome project management philosophies.

Chris

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 10:48 AM

Then target your schedule at a hard GM that is three weeks before the publisher deadline. Treat that as the real schedule. And that gives you far more time than you claim Epic generally needs for any scheduling errors.
I don't know how to explain to you that it's not realistic. If the date isn't real, it won't be taken seriously. What you're describing is buffer time, which we do work into the schedule, but it is always used up by the end. Always.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 10:50 AM

No, I'm saying that strict top-down conservative software scheduling doesn't work very well. If you're working on heart-monitor firmware, it might be necessary, but the cost is immense in relative terms. This is why all this agile crap is popular now in non-someone-will-die-if-there-is-a-bug software, because there is such a huge upside to being able to react to change during development. This is true even in relatively well-understood areas like corporate intranet db kinds of stuff, and it's doubly true in art & entertainment software when there's that "magic" thing that has to happen.
If you're depending on that "magic", as you put it, to happen in the last couple of months then you're doing it wrong.

First, there is no "magic" the concept of fun is better understood than most people think and that "magic" should be captured up front. I'm fully aware that things change and the project and people need to be flexible but that can be anticipated and scheduled, as can various other speed bumps. Flexibility doesn't not require crunch or overtime. Short of something catastrophic happening any shortfall in the schedule is the fault of the creator/maintainer of that schedule.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:52 AM

I don't know how to explain to you that it's not realistic. If the date isn't real, it won't be taken seriously. What you're describing is buffer time, which we do work into the schedule, but it is always used up by the end. Always.

The fact that it isn't being taken seriously is a sign of a problem. I've worked on a project in nightmare crunch, where I knew the real drop dead date, and most of the people on it didn't. It didn't change the way I was working, and it didn't change the schedule I was following, and we didn't end up using the hidden buffer.

And yes, the reason that the real date wasn't widely known (it would have had a real financial cost as we would have had to go to an expedited duplication and ship process, but one that was certainly possible) was that there was a real fear that many of the staff would let up.

And that is a sign, then and now, that you have issues that need to be resolved. If necessary, put penalty and/or bonus clauses to focus people. Ideally, professionals should be able to push that knowledge aside and keep working, but the ideal doesn't always happen.

I've been fond of hard feature cut dates. "If we haven't met these solid goals by this date, the following features die." Part of the problem with project management in games is that features are cut far too late. You end up crunching, blowing out your schedule, or cutting more features than were necessary because a number were partially implemented, or some combination of the above.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 10:54 AM

If you're depending on that "magic", as you put it, to happen in the last couple of months then you're doing it wrong.

Strong agreement. If it isn't fun at the end of the pre-production prototyping phase, you don't put a full team on it, you go back until it is fun from the beginning.

Then throw the prototype away and build the real thing, using what you learned. Small prototype teams are a *lot* cheaper than full development teams and a hope that magic happens at the end.

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 10:57 AM

I don't know how to explain to you that it's not realistic. If the date isn't real, it won't be taken seriously. What you're describing is buffer time, which we do work into the schedule, but it is always used up by the end. Always.
So either people slack unless the threat of failure is immediately over their heads or you're not scheduling enough time for tasks and they eat into your buffer time. Either way there should be early evidence that the schedule isn't right or people aren't working enough as individual tasks go over their alloted time. If all tasks are being completed in a timely manner and you guys are still over running your buffer then the schedule itself is wrong.

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 10:58 AM

I'm not married, don't have kids, and have seen 2-3 week crunch periods have a great effect on the end result of a project (I've seen months of crunch do absolutely nothing to save a garbage title as well, but that's another story). I understand that crunch is usually a result of poor planning, but I really, really disagree with the attitude, "Well, management fucked up, tough shit, I'm not putting an hour of extra effort into this project". Honestly I don't want to work with someone who has that attitude (and likewise that's nothing personal). If I've just put 2 years of my life into a project, then no, a couple of extra hours a day for a few weeks isn't going to kill me. Coming in on a Saturday here and there isn't going to kill me, and almost all studios (even the shitty ones) that I've worked for compensated time, if not actual salary. I'm OK with that.

I know this board skews older, so I'm going to be in the minority in this argument. And it's increasingly apparent that this is just another front of the married-with-kids demographic clashing with the single-and-childless or the married-and-childless demographic. Which never ends well. :)

I think you just moved the goalposts there, or else I didn't understand your original post. I'm okay with crunch from time to time, and my employer compensates me for it when it becomes necessary. That's different than the attitude that you originally seemed to be espousing. Your post implies that you believed that the work project was more important than any non-work concerns. That I think is what garnered the slew of negative responses.

Quaro

04-06-2009, 11:04 AM

Sounds like the financial stake Epic employees have in the final product is somewhat unique. If you end making bank by working late, that's a lot different than the typical unpaid overtime bullshit.

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 11:06 AM

I don't know how to explain to you that it's not realistic. If the date isn't real, it won't be taken seriously. What you're describing is buffer time, which we do work into the schedule, but it is always used up by the end. Always.

I hate to jump in on a poster that's already being dogpiled, but I feel compelled to. What you describe is a failure of project management. It's probably not something you can fix in your employer, but I thought you might be interested to know what's going wrong.

In my experience, devs can of course blow through any schedule given to them no matter how generous or buffered it was, because the more padded it looks the less they take it seriously in the early phases. In essence, they quietly and unconsciously convert buffer time into "play with new technology time" or "surf the web and pretend to work" time. The latter, ironically, is the project phase I'm currently in.

The solution to preventing this sort of schedule slippage due to early lack of focus is to spread concrete deliverables all through the project and hold people accountable for those deliverables. Keep people focused on right on the edge of crunching throughout the duration of the project and productivity will soar.

checker

04-06-2009, 11:08 AM

Strong agreement. If it isn't fun at the end of the pre-production prototyping phase, you don't put a full team on it, you go back until it is fun from the beginning.

I actually have a big article I'm stewing on about prototyping. I have some experience (http://chrishecker.com/Advanced_Prototyping) in this area, but my thoughts have evolved over the years. My current thoughts are that it is not a panacea like you imply (and I used to imply). There are many couplings between systems that are hard to prototype, etc. But, I'm still stewing, so no more on that right now.

And then, you add in the fact that getting permission to do a long prepro phase is sometimes irrationally more difficult than getting permission to just go into production, and there are time-to-market issues, and novelty of the concept issues, and you get the current mess.

In general, I strongly agree with the overall concept of "stay small and cheap until you've found the magic", it just isn't that easy in practice often, sadly.

I actually think this is getting off topic, though. It seems on the face of it to be on topic, because there is a belief that better project management will eliminate crunch, and I think what EpicBoy and I are saying is that crunch is useful even if you've hit all your milestones and your bug count is zero. It's more a psychology thing than it is a task completion thing (although it's often both). There is just almost always more to do on a piece of art & entertainment to make it better, and if you've got some time, people will often go for it.

Chris

Andrew Mayer

04-06-2009, 11:13 AM

I hate to jump in on a poster that's already being dogpiled, but I feel compelled to. What you describe is a failure of project management. It's probably not something you can fix in your employer, but I thought you might be interested to know what's going wrong.

...

The solution to preventing this sort of schedule slippage due to early lack of focus is to spread concrete deliverables all through the project and hold people accountable for those deliverables. Keep people focused on right on the edge of crunching throughout the duration of the project and productivity will soar.

Totally agree with this.

It's very strange that we work in an industry that sees its own massive failures in effective project management as some kind of "hardcore" badge of honor, and does so at almost every level.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 11:15 AM

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 11:17 AM

Totally agree with this.

It's very strange that we work in an industry that sees its own massive failures in effective project management as some kind of "hardcore" badge of honor, and does so at almost every level.

Hey, don't lump me in that "we" buddy! I work in telecom software development. You can tell by the way I drive my nice car home at 5pm and hang out with my wife and kids ;-)

checker

04-06-2009, 11:22 AM

If you start production on something that isn't fun, in the hopes that it will be fun before it ships, you've effectively put "And then a Miracle Happens" on your schedule.
Sometimes it does.
Most of the time, you ship a crappy game.

Yep. And most films are crappy. And most albums are crappy. Sturgeon's Law is alive and well in all art & entertainment forms, that much is clear.

Sadly for the project-management-philes, you can't really point to consistent successes on the other side, either. The fact seems to be that there are too many variables to isolate any one of these things as causal for success or failure. It's unfortunate that "both sides" point to the successes and failures and say "see, I told you so". I have another rant brewing about the failure of Computer Science as a field to address this issue of "how to make software", but it remains true that "Nobody knows anything".

Chris

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 11:26 AM

Sadly for the project-management-philes, you can't really point to consistent successes on the other side, either. The fact seems to be that there are too many variables to isolate any one of these things as causal for success or failure. It's unfortunate that "both sides" point to the successes and failures and say "see, I told you so".

What games would you give as examples that were fun to play in prototype, and lousy games when shipped?

Dave Long

04-06-2009, 11:28 AM

Wasn't Iwata's talk about Miyamoto's methods mostly about prototyping (again).

This has been the standard MO of Nintendo and why they've been successful for so long. They know what the game is going to be long before they've committed that massive team to build the final art, sound, and programming assets.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 11:56 AM

If you start production on something that isn't fun, in the hopes that it will be fun before it ships, you've effectively put "And then a Miracle Happens" on your schedule.

Sometimes it does.

Most of the time, you ship a crappy game.
Individual things become "fun" all throughout the project timeline (the chainsaw clicks, the curb stomp feels good, active reload seems balanced and cool, etc). The "magic" is when it all gels which happens in the final few months.

ElGuapo

04-06-2009, 11:56 AM

caesare, no offense, but I can go ahead and speak for one side of the "unmarried with no kids" camp and say that my free time is plenty important to me. Even as much as the people with kids! This is not directed at you, per se ... it's not personal, I've just seen this attitude before.

It irks me that when I used to be employed by a large company (I'm self employed now) there used to be a mentality that the single (mostly guys) could put in the hours, because the married men and women with kids "had lives" or had other priorities. I always thought that was irritating beyond belief, because you know what? My time is just as valuable as theirs. Them going home and watching their kids play is exactly equally as important as whatever I did with my free time. I always hated that line of reasoning.

Also, if the single folk let management treat them like that, it backslides into the married folk as they aren't seen as the "go getters" because they are not putting in the hours. It leads to everyone's suffering longer hours as this escalates.

If you really don't think your off time is valuable, fine. Go get a second job, if you want to work so hard. Awesome for you, look at you, you hard worker! But don't let that slide into the rest of us, thank you.

By you, I don't mean YOU specifically. I mean any employee who sees a divide between single and married coworkers.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 11:57 AM

What games would you give as examples that were fun to play in prototype, and lousy games when shipped?
What I would like to see is an example of a game that was tightly scheduled and shipped on 40 hours a week with no extra effort required. And was awesome.

checker

04-06-2009, 11:59 AM

What games would you give as examples that were fun to play in prototype, and lousy games when shipped?

Wait, you're mixing two of my points together. I said I strongly agreed with the "stay small until you've found the game" thing (whether you call it a prototype is a different topic) as the best way to go that I know of; separately, I was saying it's hard to point to consistently successful scheduling if the metric is "awesome game", and there are plenty of examples of games that hit their dates but sucked.

But, even though it's not what I was saying, I actually have seen examples of what you're asking for above, but I can't talk about them publicly. These unnamed examples are part of what motivated me to rethink my attitude towards prototyping gameplay (as opposed to prototyping UI and tech, which work well in my experience), but again, that's another topic that I'll leave for later. As part of that same deferred discussion, I don't think what Miyamoto does is "protoyping gameplay" in the sense the industry usually uses the term, as much as it is building the game from the inside out, like an onion (an analogy I think he's used, start with the moveset, etc.). Again, not fully thought this stuff through yet.

Chris

Brian Seiler

04-06-2009, 12:01 PM

What I would like to see is an example of a game that was tightly scheduled and shipped on 40 hours a week with no extra effort required. And was awesome.

What's the situation like at Blizzard? I would imagine they're a good candidate. Lord knows they take long enough from conception to final release, and they're given so much latitude with their stuff, that they shouldn't need to put in crunch hours. They're a business that can afford to push release a week to avoid crunch, I would think. Of course, I'm not a developer, so if I'm wrong about that disregard this as the ignorant hate speech that it is.

As an aside, this is why I'm not in games development, beside from the fact that I live in Houston. I simply won't do those hours. Hell, I can't, really - I'm not precisely what you'd call a hearty diabetic and a bunch of stress and stuffing whatever I can get delivered to my desk into my face over the course of a week could seriously ruin my day. I suspect I would be fired immediately.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 12:01 PM

Well, many years ago, I shipped an MMO expansion that was very well received by the player base (and ungimped one of the classes) entirely on schedule and without crunch.

Of course that was a one programmer, one producer/designer project.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 12:02 PM

What's the situation like at Blizzard?
I don't have anything to back this up but my understanding is that Blizzard is fairly crunch happy. Or were, anyway. Same with RockStar.

checker

04-06-2009, 12:06 PM

Miyamoto

And, since we're wheeling out Miyamoto, I figure somebody's got to post this:

"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."

You guys can fight it out whether it's applicable to this thread or not. :)

Chris

Brian Seiler

04-06-2009, 12:07 PM

That DOES baffle me. When even guys who can afford not to do it are doing it, you have to wonder if there isn't a problem with the system. I mean, some fans might have filled their socks in rage if WotLK had been delayed a month, but I don't honestly think it would have impacted sales in the slightest. If they theoretically did any crunch to get that out and I was an employee, I'd be pretty pissed off about that.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 12:11 PM

Well, to clarify, I heard this years ago. Even before WoW existed. Maybe now that they make hundreds of millions every month it's less of an issue.

Lum

04-06-2009, 12:14 PM

Major Malphunktion

04-06-2009, 12:15 PM

What games would you give as examples that were fun to play in prototype, and lousy games when shipped?

Spore.
All those prototypes they released were fun, but the end result game was...meh.

checker

04-06-2009, 12:15 PM

And, since we're wheeling out Miyamoto, I figure somebody's got to post this:
"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."
You guys can fight it out whether it's applicable to this thread or not. :)

Hah, while looking for that one, I also found this one:

"We've just finished that, but we can make it better!"

Seems quite applicable to this thread. :)

Chris

TheTrunkDr

04-06-2009, 12:17 PM

Once upon a time Neversoft claimed a no crunch policy on their careers web page. That was even before EA spouse I believe so they could very well have been serious about it. I have no idea if it's still like that or that it ever actually was.

Dravalen

04-06-2009, 12:41 PM

I don't know how to explain to you that it's not realistic. If the date isn't real, it won't be taken seriously. What you're describing is buffer time, which we do work into the schedule, but it is always used up by the end. Always.
Wow, attitudes like that fucking infuriate me. I've had it happen to me multiple times where I've hit my deadlines and because other people didn't take it seriously(because it isn't "real") I've had to work more hours to make up for it.

cesare

04-06-2009, 12:51 PM

I think you just moved the goalposts there, or else I didn't understand your original post. I'm okay with crunch from time to time, and my employer compensates me for it when it becomes necessary. That's different than attitude that you originally seemed to be espousing. Your post implies that you believed that the work project was more important than any non-work concerns. That I think is what garnered the slew of negative responses.

The snark in the family comment was intentional.. I think my bitterness about apathetic coworkers and management exceeds my bitterness about crunch. Do I think that a single project is more important than someone’s family? No. But I also hate the attitude, “Fuck you, I have a family, I’m going home because this is just a job and I don’t give a shit about whether this game is good or sucks.” I understand all the negative things people are saying about crunch, and like I said above, I’ve worked crunch in horrible situations on futile projects (and left the company immediately after). But there’s this attitude on the other side that anyone who gets emotionally invested in a project or is willing to put in extra effort is naïve or stupid, because hey, it’s just a job and if things aren’t where they should be that’s management’s fault. What about the fact that we all just put a year or two of our lives into this? I like the fact that I care about what I'm doing (not saying that others don't care), and I'm not yet completely jaded and cynical even after doing this for almost nine years. Of course, like I said in an earlier post I think I’m just on my third wind and happy at my current studio (no crunching here yet). :)

caesare, no offense, but I can go ahead and speak for one side of the "unmarried with no kids" camp and say that my free time is plenty important to me. Even as much as the people with kids! This is not directed at you, per se ... it's not personal, I've just seen this attitude before.

It irks me that when I used to be employed by a large company (I'm self employed now) there used to be a mentality that the single (mostly guys) could put in the hours, because the married men and women with kids "had lives" or had other priorities. I always thought that was irritating beyond belief, because you know what? My time is just as valuable as theirs. Them going home and watching their kids play is exactly equally as important as whatever I did with my free time. I always hated that line of reasoning.

I agree with everything you’re saying, but I think you’re missing my main point (see above response).

Also, fwiw Rockstar enforces some brutal mandatory crunch. That may have changed in the past couple of years but upper management were notorious slave drivers a few years ago.

Tim James

04-06-2009, 12:54 PM

What about the fact that we all just put a year or two of our lives into this?Still meaningless on your deathbed.

Also, the people you are upset about rarely give ultimatums. They "push back" in order to work out a solution that is reasonable for everyone. No need to get angry; it's part of the process in a team environment.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 12:57 PM

Do I think that a single project is more important than someone’s family? No. But I also hate the attitude, “Fuck you, I have a family, I’m going home because this is just a job and I don’t give a shit about whether this game is good or sucks.”

This is a shining example of the crunch "teamicide" that is talked about in Peopleware.

WarrenM

04-06-2009, 12:58 PM

Still meaningless on your deathbed.
Technically, so is everything else in your life.

Tortilla

04-06-2009, 01:01 PM

Technically, so is everything else in your life.

Oh I don't know about that. If I was on my deathbed I'd rather be surrounded by family members that love me as opposed to CDs containing all the kick ass software I'd written.

Brad Wardell

04-06-2009, 01:04 PM

Good on you! There is nothing in the world more annoying than managers who trot out the door at 5 minutes to 5 during a mandatory crunch.

If my development team is here, I'm here. I try to do a superset of the hours they do if I can. For instance, this week we start work with GPG on the day 0 update of Demigod so I expect to do between 95 to 105 hours this week (including Easter).

Those kinds of hours are very unusual but there's a lot of cool stuff we're putting into day 0 via Impulse Reactor.

Plus, I tend to make myself available to directly handle reviewer questions and to play with reviewers on-line.

Tim James

04-06-2009, 01:10 PM

If I was on my deathbed I'd rather be surrounded by family members that love me as opposed to CDs containing all the kick ass software I'd written.But not that one that was full of cover-slip and screwed up light maps. Fucking dead to me. (Just teasing EB, I don't really have a big dog in this fight.)

Plus, I tend to make myself available to directly handle reviewer questions and to play with reviewers on-line.Do you let them win?

Also, I don't think working extra hours on your 70' yacht really compares to what everyone else has to deal with. We need to hear from the regular folks.

Brad Wardell

04-06-2009, 01:11 PM

Incidentally, here are some things I've seen in the industry:

Most game *studios* have very set schedules. Game HAS to be done by this date because the team is already scheduled to be moved to the next game on that date. That's the general business model we've seen.

Now, Stardock is a mutant because it has its enterprise software group (non-game software) so we can release our games when we're happy with them and we don't like working crazy hours.

I'm working crazy hours right now because it would be really inconvenient to GPG if we tied up their resources any longer. Demigod is already solid, but we (Stardock) want to keep adding more on-line tournament features so it's an atypical thing.

But on our own games, we'd just push the date back to avoid putting in extra hours which is what we did with GalCiv: Twilight of the Arnor which we pushed back from January of last year to something like April simply because we wanted to keep polishing the game but didn't want to work crazy hours.

Brad Wardell

04-06-2009, 01:14 PM

Do you let them win?

Also, I don't think working extra hours on your 70' yacht really compares to what everyone else has to deal with. We need to hear from the regular folks.

Well, I'm better about not cheating to win. In 2004, I used a poorly documented cheese tactic to beat Bruce Geryk at The Political Machine. He was insanely good at the game right away.

Tim James

04-06-2009, 01:15 PM

Regarding schedule slips: doesn't anyone think of the poor, lowly consumer? I want my quality games now, dammit, not some cock tease from a date change. Just buy your wife and kids something nice.

Brad Wardell

04-06-2009, 01:56 PM

Well, I will say that nearly every developer at Stardock could make more somewhere else. I say that all the time actually. Obviously, that doesn't include me, my gold plated rocket car in the parking lot is a constant reminder to all.

But the thing is, a lot of people who make games, myself included, do it because we enjoy it. If I weren't doing this stuff all the time, I'd probably be one of those WoW players who plays 60+ a week doing that. At least here I get paid for my obsession.

A lot of people who are game developers (at least here anyway) are game players first who just like to make games and play games.

Cubit

04-06-2009, 02:04 PM

Damn, I want to work for Stardock. They aren't too far away... :)

CEBlackwell

04-06-2009, 02:19 PM

"Well, management fucked up, tough shit, I'm not putting an hour of extra effort into this project". Honestly I don't want to work with someone who has that attitude.
There is a difference between this sociopath you imagine, furious and unbending, and someone who describes the need for crunch as a management mistake. If the game needs to be fixed with crunch, I'm sure everyone on this forum would come in to fix it. But only some would be saying "Oh well, it's inevitable, all games need my overtime" giving management reason to repeat the exact same practices on the next game.

Damien Neil

04-06-2009, 02:21 PM

But there’s this attitude on the other side that anyone who gets emotionally invested in a project or is willing to put in extra effort is naïve or stupid, because hey, it’s just a job and if things aren’t where they should be that’s management’s fault.

I get emotionally invested in projects.

That's why crunch fills me with a white-hot anger that makes me want to see the managers that use it thrown into a deep, dark pit full of man-eating snails. Because, as has been demonstrated by study after study over the course of a century, crunch doesn't work.

It's a crutch for incompetent managers who think that throwing people's lives into the meat grinder will rescue them from their inability to produce a realistic project plan. It's a way for ignorant children to show off how studly and dedicated they are to the project. It's a way to guarantee that an "senior" team member is one with five years of experience, because most people leave the industry after just one or two projects. It's a way to produce bad code.

It's a sickness. It destroys lives. It hurts the people who do it. And it does it for nothing.

Maybe someday the game industry will drag itself out of the dark ages. Until that day comes, it will be mainly populated by young, single men who are willing to trade away everything in their life in return for the chance to work on games--and who will mostly burn out young and exit the industry before they hit 30.

Dave Long

04-06-2009, 02:43 PM

Nobody ever says, "I wish I had worked more!" with their dying breath.

kathode

04-06-2009, 02:50 PM

I'm late to the thread, but throw my support behind those advocating small bursts of crunch and decrying the big long periods of aimless death-marching. Some crunch is inevitable. Sustained crunch is not.

I find one of the main reasons for end-of-project crunch is not really a frantic attempt to cram work or polish into the game (this is what causes death marches), but a dramatically increased amount of caution surrounding work done. The usual #1 problem that can really prevent a game from shipping is a lack of stability. Every single software product is going to crash at some point, but clearly there's a line where it's too much.

So you've got to hunt down all the crashes you can. The problem becomes that, with the massive size and complexity of game code these days, any change to the game's codebase can have a rippling effect that often leads to unanticipated results, like features breaking or introducing new crashes. You're the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in there. So you have to take a lot of time, evaluate every change, rebuild the game (often an hours-long process), and meticulously retest the game with the changed code. It simply takes a huge amount of raw time.

The same is true of content (i.e. art), but that is usually more deterministic than code changes. Still, effort has to be made by everyone to ensure only necessary and safe changes are being made. And that effort has to increase dramatically toward the end of the game. So time has to increase to support that. It's a compounding problem. If you haven't made strong efforts in that direction throughout the dev cycle, then the problem is going to be worse in the end.

Dave Weinstein

04-06-2009, 02:53 PM

This is why "cram the features in, and then fix the bugs afterwards" development is so disasterously difficult to schedule.

Not only that, but the final (and often very long) stabilization push is very demoralizing, because "not crashing all the time" doesn't have the same sense of momentum as the addition of new features does.

The moral of this story is, test as you go, fix bugs as the features go in, and don't start adding more features until the quality bar has been met.

Major Malphunktion

04-06-2009, 02:55 PM

The moral of this story is, test as you go, fix bugs as the features go in, and don't start adding more features until the quality bar has been met.

QFT. I've seen some big train wrecks when new systems and such are built in a vaccuum. If your sprints - since it seems most people are using some sort of agile development - don't include a QA guy...bad developer BAD.

CLWheeljack

04-06-2009, 03:01 PM

Passion for the project is great and all, but the problem I've seen is that very, very few people in the industry know how to say "no". This is partially Charles's point about the developers needing to push back against requests to work crunches and long hours, but it also speaks to people who mentioned how incompetent project managers who don't know how to do time estimates and just tack on additional crunch when their initial schedules fail.

When it becomes clear that you don't have time to do everything in the original design doc within the original schedule, you can either (a) add more time, (b) add more crunch, or (c) cut something out of the game. In my experience, (c) is almost never the answer chosen, but it is often the best choice. The mentality that "crunch is inevitable in a creative industry" just lets people ignore the option of cutting something out, of saying "no" to something in the game. When crunch is an option, passionate people are going to choose to take on more work instead of cutting features that they're passionate about. If the designers don't have a list of things to cut in a prioritized order when the production starts, the designers aren't doing their jobs either.

Hans Lauring

04-06-2009, 03:03 PM

It's worth noting that we're talking about two different worlds here.

There's the US where you typically get about 2 weeks holiday and there are few laws governing hours. Then there's continental EU (i.e. everywhere in the EU except the UK) where Hanzii lives, where you typically get 4-6 weeks holiday mandated as a minimum, and there are laws governing working more than 48 hours a week.

That doesn't mean crunch doesn't exist in continental European game studios. As hours are supposed to average 48, you can work 40 most weeks and then 60 during a few weeks of crunch time without breaking the law. Still, I suspect it's a lot less of a problem than in the US (and also the UK).

The EU Working Directive gives this as a minimum:

*Guarantees workers 11 hours' rest per day and regular breaks
*Weekly working time of 48 hours, on average, or less
*Minimum annual holiday of four weeks

That's a minimum. Some countries have more generous rules than that.

One country, the UK, decided to give workers the chance to "opt out" of this minimum. So a manager can ask "are you ok working 80 hours this week?" and as long as the employee agrees, then no law is broken.

I'm glad this interesting discussion kept moving on. I'm also glad EpicBoy stayed in as one side, since I didn't find NWJ insulting in any way at all.

I just want to point out that while the above is technically true, it isn't. Which means we do have an 38 hour work week an 5 weeks mandatory vacation as the law, but there's no police force enforcing this.
There's just the unions - thank God they're strong.

As a journalist I have plenty of crunch. As a young journalist working on a daily newspaper I had crunch every single day - but I also had compensated time off and plenty of co-workers just as good as me, which meant that if I worked 60 hours weeks on one story, then once it was printed, I could go home and stay home, knowing that somebody else would cover my beat just as well.
Our union protect us, but no union would tell a memeber working on the next Watergate to quit it and go home... but if management wanted me to work 80 hours a week searching for the next Watergate-like story, I could call my union rep. and have him ask them to fuck off, while I went home to my family.
I left newspapers because of this, Now I work magazines and once in a while (after disease or just before holidays) I stil crunch... the important thing is, that besides my 7 weeks vacation I also get extra time off due to overtime.

In other words, if I was young and working for a company like Epic so good at sharing the earnings, I would probably crunch too... the question is, whether Epic could do without crunch, could do better or could attract more mature (have children) workers... and whether that would make a difference to the better.

NoWayJose

04-06-2009, 03:31 PM

Good to hear I'm not insulting.

If the consensus on a team is that crunch is inevitable, then it should be even easier to budget for it, monetarily. Two weeks of extra hours at the end of a project? Two weeks over overtime pay. Pretty easy to predict and plan for. Keep your comp time and completion bonus, just pay me for the hours I've worked. Team spirit and pride in a project are all great and I've been lucky enough to have them on the myriad of titles I've shipped, but my time is valuable to me, so if you want me to spend it at work, all you have to do is pay me.

CEBlackwell

04-06-2009, 03:33 PM

What I would like to see is an example of a game that was tightly scheduled and shipped on 40 hours a week with no extra effort required. And was awesome.
But barely any companies are even attempting this. They don't have to. However, if it became the standard then awesome games would get made. They would cost 2 months more development of course.

Charles

04-06-2009, 08:36 PM

What I would like to see is an example of a game that was tightly scheduled and shipped on 40 hours a week with no extra effort required. And was awesome.

Nice bullshit argument, but it doesn't prove that crunch is necessary, just that people are stupid.

EFlannum

04-06-2009, 09:43 PM

Blizzard still has crunch. In fact they have pretty hefty employee turnover. There are many studios (Red 5, Arena.net, Carbine, just off the top of my head) which were born from Blizzard employees seeking greener pastures.

Yep, one of the reasons we really don't crunch a whole lot at Anet is because of the lessons learned at Blizzard. So speaking for myself a 60 hour work week is not at all the norm.

checker

04-06-2009, 11:21 PM

Oh I don't know about that. If I was on my deathbed I'd rather be surrounded by family members that love me as opposed to CDs containing all the kick ass software I'd written.

It is probably a mistake to wade into this cul de sac of the thread because given my luck in matters public relational someone is going to take this and try to turn me into some kind of monster or something, but I'm not sure how one does the actuarial death bed calculations on creation versus family. For me, at least, I love my family (I have a 5 year old daughter, and adore spending time with her), but I also think that games have the potential to be the preeminent art form of the 21st century if we don't fuck it up and if can we push towards more emotional connections with people and figure out how to speak to the human condition through interactivity. Those are pretty important and lofty goals in my opinion, and a new "top tier" art form taking its place alongside film, literature, visual arts, and music would be a pretty big deal for society and history, so how do you weigh that? For me, I try to get a balance, where I push hard on my creative goals, and also try to be a great father. It's a give and take (even outside of the crunch question), but I don't think one of those completely overshadows the other to the point where it has no weight at all.

So, I guess, yes, if I help to create some amazing work of art during my life, then that would be worth a fair amount on my death bed.

I think. Studies have shown humans are very bad at predicting their emotion response to stimuli, so none of us actually know what we'll be regretting on our death bed. :)

Chris

Gordon Cameron

04-07-2009, 12:30 AM

I think I'll mainly be regretting the fact that I'm on my death bed.

Tankero

04-07-2009, 12:42 AM

You know what, I had opinions, thoughts and notions about the value of family in opposition to the value of creation, to creative works at the individual and cultural level... But it's all too subjective, it's a discussion that easily outpaces my pedestrian mind.

Yeah, that's pretty much all I had to say.

Dan Lawrence

04-07-2009, 12:45 AM

Your go to movies here are "Citizen Kane" and "Its a Wonderful Life", compare and contrast which of the two leading protaganists seems happiest at the end of the movie.

Tankero

04-07-2009, 12:50 AM

I don't know, seems like a simplistic, and by now calcified in stereotype, answer to me.

Dan Lawrence

04-07-2009, 01:11 AM

The point is culture will 'advance' or change anyway, sure you should push in the right direction but destroying your family life for 'success' isn't helping humanity, its not noble. Wanting to be the guy who dramatically advances the artform of videogames is mostly just vanity (and I say that as someone who is interested in doing that advancing) its not noble in fact its mostly selfish on the individual level. The other side is that you can have a massive influence on people's lives even if you don't do 'great' things, just reading a book to your kids in bed or giving a friend in need a bit of spare cash can have an influence.

I've rewatched both movies recently and I think they stand up. Its also telling that they were both filmed and written after the last big financial collapse and the wars which followed it. Very instructive for the children of today's 'credit crunch', as it seems the lessons of history need to continuously relearned.

KieronGillen

04-07-2009, 01:16 AM

Nobody ever says, "I wish I had worked more!" with their dying breath.

Unless you're half-way through - say - a book, I dare say. If you'd lobbed me on my death-bed half-way through writing Phonogram, I wouldn't have shut up about the fucking thing. My friends and family would be "Christ - won't he just die already".

KG

Mordrak

04-07-2009, 01:36 AM

If I'm on my death bed, just let me sleep god damnit.

WarrenM

04-07-2009, 02:22 AM

Nice bullshit argument, but it doesn't prove that crunch is necessary, just that people are stupid.
It shows that extra effort is often necessary to take a product from "good" to "great". Those extra hours that people put in (either at the end or over the life of the project) are the difference makers. It doesn't have to be crunch - voluntary extra hours are just as, if not MORE, effective. In fact, I'd prefer that it was all voluntary as I'm no fan of crunch - however, I do see it's place as a useful tool.

If I'm on my death bed, just let me sleep god damnit.
On my death bed, I'm going to appreciate my family and loved ones being around. I'm also going to want to look back on my life and feel satisfaction that I put my all into everything I did, creatively and professionally.

Dave Long

04-07-2009, 06:30 AM

I'm also going to want to look back on my life and feel satisfaction that I put my all into everything I did, creatively and professionally.
This is easily done without working 80 hour weeks.

TheTrunkDr

04-07-2009, 06:35 AM

It shows that extra effort is often necessary to take a product from "good" to "great". Those extra hours that people put in (either at the end or over the life of the project) are the difference makers. It doesn't have to be crunch - voluntary extra hours are just as, if not MORE, effective. In fact, I'd prefer that it was all voluntary as I'm no fan of crunch - however, I do see it's place as a useful tool.
So you're really convinced that a crunch period is absolutely necessary to the creation of a "great" product and that having additional time can't possibly yield the same results?

If this really is the belief of management, fuck them, also pay me for that additional time that's been mandated.

I have to agree with others, if studios actually had to pay overtime I think you'd see the amount of overtime people put in would be cut drastically.

WarrenM

04-07-2009, 06:35 AM

So you're really convinced that a crunch period is absolutely necessary to the creation of a "great" product and that having additional time can't possibly yield the same results?
Read what I wrote. Please, just once, it'll make me so happy!

"It doesn't have to be crunch - voluntary extra hours are just as, if not MORE, effective."

This is easily done without working 80 hour weeks.
*face palm* FFS... I'm done with this thread. Carry on!

TheTrunkDr

04-07-2009, 06:49 AM

Read what I wrote. Please, just once, it'll make me so happy!

"It doesn't have to be crunch - voluntary extra hours are just as, if not MORE, effective."
Fine, whatever, you're convinced "overtime" (however it's achieved) is required?

That makes even less sense. At least you had a (I think rather weak) point about a crunch period focusing people but now it's just plain necessary to always put in more time than is scheduled regardless of what it is, you'll absolutely always need more overtime a longer schedule can't possibly give the same results?

Brian Seiler

04-07-2009, 06:56 AM

I think the point is that games don't come together until very late in the schedule in any way that allows you to meaningfully conclude what actually works and what actually doesn't, at which point you enter the polish stage. You would be right to conclude that there is absolutely no intrinsic solution why this must happen - the problem here is clearly that most, if not all video game project schedules are underestimated. That's a problem with every kind of IT project I've ever seen, though, so it's not JUST a video games problem. The fact that this is a creative entertainment product only amplifies that issue, meaning that the vast majority of games produced today will require a short-term crunch at the end to do the massive volume of work that miraculously springs fully formed into being once all the moving parts are strapped together or the game is likely to suck.

Did I get that right?

Unfortunately, the solution to that problem is to start budgeting more time into the schedules for these projects and rejigger the milestones - a process that, at least in my corner of the IT universe, happens at a completely different level from the dudes actually doing the work.

TheTrunkDr

04-07-2009, 07:23 AM

Here's the ultimate issue. Management is always going to try and get more work out of it's employees that is their purpose, this is true regardless of industry. If the employees have the attitude that additional work is necessary and it's alright if it's not compensated then of course that is what will happen. It's up to the employees to push back and say 'No' and as long people believe overtime is some sort of necessary evil then Management will always win, they don't even have to try in the case of EpicBoy and a few others.

If people don't want to be chained to their desks they need to make a stand against that and the first step is realizing that uncompensated overtime isn't a necessary evil for the process to work. It can work with proper planning and scheduling or at worst, compensated overtime. I know, I've shipped a projects early, under budget and with the only cuts being design issues that didn't pan out with nothing more than two or three late nights (like 9pm late, not 2am late and mostly because I was working on a bug that I wanted to solve before I left for the night).

WarrenM

04-07-2009, 07:29 AM

It's up to the employees to push back and say 'No' and as long people believe overtime is some sort of necessary evil then Management will always win, they don't even have to try in the case of EpicBoy and a few others.
Just take me out of the equations here because it's not applicable to me. Management doesn't "win" at Epic simply because the employees are regularly given money hats to compensate for any perceived injustice of having to work a Saturday or some over time at project end.

TheTrunkDr

04-07-2009, 07:35 AM

Just take me out of the equations here because it's not applicable to me. Management doesn't "win" at Epic simply because the employees are regularly given money hats to compensate for any perceived injustice of having to work a Saturday or some over time at project end.
While the profit sharing works for Epic it doesn't work everywhere and, in my opinion, isn't a good means of compensation for overtime as it's not guaranteed and there is far too much outside of any particular employee's power for it to function in the general case. I mean, what do you say to someone who's put in tons of time, their heart, their soul into a project which then flops? I'll take the overtime pay thanks, I'll get my compensation and it keeps management honest.

CEBlackwell

04-07-2009, 07:41 AM

Those extra hours that people put in (either at the end or over the life of the project) are the difference makers.
Those extra hours could also be bought and paid for by management. They could pay for overtime or they could hire more people or they could make a more cushioned time frame from the beginning. But they don't have to because of the systemic belief that every great video game in the world needs free extra effort.

"Management provides the tools and money to make a good game, but only you guys can make it great. You all want to make a great game, don't you? That's what Volunteer Saturdays are all about! Greatness. Pride in our work doesn't stop at 5:00pm. I can't wait to see what you brainiacs get done!"

WarrenM

04-07-2009, 07:47 AM

Those extra hours could also be bought and paid for by management. They could pay for overtime or they could hire more people or they could make a more cushioned time frame from the beginning.
You know, here's something else to think about. Most game companies aren't rolling in cash. They barely survive. Do you think they're sitting on piles of money that they selfishly aren't paying out to the employees in overtime pay because they're trying to be mean spirited?

For most small devs, making the deadline is the difference between making another game and going out of business.

Sure, large devs like EA don't really have an excuse but to simply state that management should pay for this and pay for that is not really realistic in a lot of cases.

TheTrunkDr

04-07-2009, 07:55 AM

You know, here's something else to think about. Most game companies aren't rolling in cash. They barely survive. Do you think they're sitting on piles of money that they selfishly aren't paying out to the employees in overtime pay because they're trying to be mean spirited?

For most small devs, making the deadline is the difference between making another game and going out of business.

Sure, large devs like EA don't really have an excuse but to simply state that management should pay for this and pay for that is not really realistic in a lot of cases.
Then they're underfunded or overreaching. Either way it's management that put the brunt of their bad decisions and poor management ability on the backs of the employees and it never seems like management people ever get reprimanded for doing poorly while their employees are stuck with the consequences. Management needs to learn to set a budget and schedule appropriately.

NoWayJose

04-07-2009, 08:47 AM

Sure, large devs like EA don't really have an excuse but to simply state that management should pay for this and pay for that is not really realistic in a lot of cases.
We're not saying "pay for this" and "pay for that." We're being very specific: pay for the labor you use. Why does a small developer get off the hook for this? I'd argue that it's worse for them to expect work without compensation as it's a direct benefit to the manager (who is frequently the owner and the one shelling out cash). Small developers go to publishers with a bid to make a game, including a schedule and a budget. If they're underbidding on either, why is it up to the employees to make up the difference for free?

This also feeds into the problem at large publishers, who frequently recruit from small developers and are getting personnel already conditioned to work for free.

Conrad

04-07-2009, 08:56 AM

We're being very specific: pay for the labor you use.

This sounds more like general opposition to the salary model of compensation, rather than a specific game-industry complaint.

TheJare

04-07-2009, 09:01 AM

Most game companies aren't rolling in cash.
Game companies that barely make it each month beyond the startup phase are not making great games. Either they stop being strapped for cash because their games sell, or they make progressively worse games because good developers leave for companies that offer more security, better compensation and the potential for better games.

Brad Wardell

04-07-2009, 09:07 AM

Tortilla

04-07-2009, 09:11 AM

Then they're underfunded or overreaching. Either way it's management that put the brunt of their bad decisions and poor management ability on the backs of the employees and it never seems like management people ever get reprimanded for doing poorly while their employees are stuck with the consequences. Management needs to learn to set a budget and schedule appropriately.

All true, but I do want to re-iterate that there are valid business cases for overtime. I think this thread is starting to veer into an attack on management based on the concept that no overtime in ever justified in any fashion, and that's not true.

First, a few business realities of software development.

1. Smooth staffing is impossible. You can't just say that project X will require Y people. That's not how it works. Project X will require Y people up to milestone 1, Z people up to milestone 2, A people for the first half of milestone 3 until serious testing begins, and then B people for the rest of milestone 3, etc etc. It's very complicated.

2. Flexible schedules are often impossible. Don't blame the management of software dev houses for this, the clients (publishers in the game world) who provide the big piles of money to fund projects want contracts with hard deadlines and they aren't sympathetic to overly padded schedules usually.

3. Staffing up is hard and expensive. It takes time and money to bring someone on board and train them up to the point they can really be a contributor.

Given all the above, crunch is often the only feasible answer to being behind schedule/under resourced and needing to catch up. That's okay and not abusive management as long as the employees are compensated appropriately for the crunch. Where it becomes abusive management is when uncompensated crunch is an assumed fact of life and built into the project plans and schedule forecasts.

Tortilla

04-07-2009, 09:13 AM

I can't say how it works at other companies. At Stardock we discourage long hours. But we do have crunch times.

The reason I think crunch times are inevitable is because we procrastinate. No matter how much time you give a project, people (myself included) will put off things until the bitter end.

But the solution for that kind of thing is to make sure the developers have a stake in the success of a product. Things like merit based profit bonuses and such can go a long way and by doing that, you don't have to force people to work extra hours, people want to.

I came in this Saturday to work on Demigod and there were aleady a dozen people in the office already working on it (not coding in-game directly as that's done by Gas Powered Games but working on everything from beta testing, community feature coding, match-making coding, etc.). No one even asked them to come in. But our company culture encourages it for those who believe in the connection between their labor and the overall material success of what they're laboring on.

Sounds like you need a PM who knows how to crack the whip in a firm but gentle fashion ;-)

WarrenM

04-07-2009, 09:16 AM

Thanks, Brad and Kraaze. Finally, voices of reason.

Dave Long

04-07-2009, 09:16 AM

I can't say how it works at other companies. At Stardock we discourage long hours. But we do have crunch times.

The reason I think crunch times are inevitable is because we procrastinate. No matter how much time you give a project, people (myself included) will put off things until the bitter end.

But the solution for that kind of thing is to make sure the developers have a stake in the success of a product. Things like merit based profit bonuses and such can go a long way and by doing that, you don't have to force people to work extra hours, people want to.

I came in this Saturday to work on Demigod and there were aleady a dozen people in the office already working on it (not coding in-game directly as that's done by Gas Powered Games but working on everything from beta testing, community feature coding, match-making coding, etc.). No one even asked them to come in. But our company culture encourages it for those who believe in the connection between their labor and the overall material success of what they're laboring on.
What happens to the people who don't come in? Do others in the office look down on them? You might want to check into that, because what you're doing there often causes morale issues.

You say it's not expected, but peer pressure is a powerful thing. People will say they're doing it because they like it, but at the end of the day someone is probably just saying that because they're afraid that not saying it or not showing up will cost them their job.

Dave Weinstein

04-07-2009, 09:27 AM

If you manage people in software development, and you haven't read Peopleware, go (now) and get a copy of 2nd Edition. It's a short read, and arguably the most valuable use of your time as a manager other than using your ability to spontaneously create gold bars.

NoWayJose

04-07-2009, 09:39 AM

This sounds more like general opposition to the salary model of compensation, rather than a specific game-industry complaint.
Really? Other industries expect and even mandate overtime without compensation?

CEBlackwell

04-07-2009, 09:42 AM

You say it's not expected, but peer pressure is a powerful thing.
Not to mention knowing the boss will be in Saturday and see you absent...

1. Smooth staffing is impossible. [snip] It's very complicated.
It's all very complicated, so... give up?

2. Flexible schedules are often impossible. Don't blame the management of software dev houses for this, the clients (publishers in the game world) who provide the big piles of money to fund projects want contracts with hard deadlines and they aren't sympathetic to overly padded schedules usually.So no one should be blamed when a dev house agrees to deliver an 18 month project in 16 months due to publisher ultimatums/pressure? That's just the way it goes, get ready for months of crunch, developers?

I think we all agree that crunch should be compensated. Hooray, that issue has been put to bed. Now, the issue of how necessary crunch is rages on...

NoWayJose

04-07-2009, 09:45 AM

Given all the above, crunch is often the only feasible answer to being behind schedule/under resourced and needing to catch up. That's okay and not abusive management as long as the employees are compensated appropriately for the crunch. Where it becomes abusive management is when uncompensated crunch is an assumed fact of life and built into the project plans and schedule forecasts.
But that's not what EpicBoy said, despite his thanks for your reasonable response. He said small start-ups should be expected to pay for this and that because it's not fair.

I still think crunch can be avoided, but if people truly are unable to figure out how to ship a game on time without crunch (seems unlikely but since no one seems interested in trying, we may never find out), then they just need to pay overtime during crunch.

Mordrak

04-07-2009, 09:47 AM

Really? Other industries expect and even mandate overtime without compensation?

Yup. The way it works though is they give you a project and don't give you enough to time to finish it without overtime. You're expressly forbidden to work overtime, but if you don't finish the project, your days are numbered. If you work overtime and claim it, they'll pay you, but your days are numbered.

Or so I hear.

Tortilla

04-07-2009, 09:48 AM

It's all very complicated, so... give up?

I simplified a hell of a lot in my attempt to reduce a very complex topic into a readably brief post, but there are ways to attack the problem so that smooth staffing is possible. They bring their own problems to the forefront though, so it's not a free win. Unless you want me to launch into a long rant on iterative development and rolling wave scheduling, suffice to say that in some situations a little overtime is a better answer than re-arranging the world.

So no one should be blamed when a dev house agrees to deliver an 18 month project in 16 months due to publisher ultimatums/pressure? That's just the way it goes, get ready for months of crunch, developers?

That's specifically the case I identified as abusive management, where the assumption of overtime was built into the schedule. Again, you've raised a topic where I could rant on for thousands of words due to all the dishonest games that get played in scheduling software projects. Suffice to say that as long as a reasonable schedule was attempted and the OT is minimal or only due to unexpected slippage it's probably not abusive management.

Kalle

04-07-2009, 09:57 AM

Yup. The way it works though is they give you a project and don't give you enough to time to finish it without overtime. You're expressly forbidden to work overtime, but if you don't finish the project, your days are numbered. If you work overtime and claim it, they'll pay you, but your days are numbered.

Or so I hear.

Hearing stories like these reminds me why having strong unions around is a good thing.

steve

04-07-2009, 10:04 AM

Really? Other industries expect and even mandate overtime without compensation?
I'm curious what non-union industries exist that don't end up with some uncompensated overtime. I've always worked more than 8 hours a day, though it's varied between "crazy hours" and "an extra hour here and there."

Doctors regularly put in crazy hours when they're interning. Are they compensated for overtime? (They may be; I have no idea.)

CEBlackwell

04-07-2009, 10:06 AM

Suffice to say that as long as a reasonable schedule was attempted and the OT is minimal or only due to unexpected slippage it's probably not abusive management.
Agreed, but the topic at hand isn't minimal OT or unexpected slippage. Every industry deals with that.

You've also focused on "abusive management", but I'm more concerned with incompetent management. Or worse, management that never has to answer for scheduling mistakes because crunch is an expected part of the industry. Assuming that "a reasonable schedule was attempted" is really giving a benefit of the doubt.

TheTrunkDr

04-07-2009, 10:08 AM

Hearing stories like these reminds me why having strong unions around is a good thing.
Agreed. If I were in that situation I might work a little overtime to get the money but be looking for another job.

Brian Seiler

04-07-2009, 10:09 AM

Hearing stories like these reminds me why having strong unions around is a good thing.

I would think that this would be necessary for any company that does a lot of fixed-bid contracts, particularly if you're letting your project lead feed the estimates that inform your bid. When I first entered the industry the impression that I got was that this was the way a lot of consulting houses worked for non-games IT.

As far as the broader question goes, I think that there's a divide between the positions here. I don't think that ANYBODY is happy that crunch happens, because it indicates a failure of the project management process. The question is whether that failure is inevitable or not. Procrastination, for example, could be addressed by having much more frequent individual milestones that have to be met (on the other hand, you end up treating your employees like teenagers who have to do their homework or they get a paddlin'). Of course, there are thousands of different little problems like this that contribute to crunch, and it's not only a problem in games - I can guarantee you of that much. I don't doubt that a lot of small studios that are looking for a producer to give them money to make their game underestimate how much work their game will be in completely good faith, just because everybody there would rather have a hard time making the game they want to make than an easier time writing the goddamn login page. I don't think crunch is any one problem, and I certainly don't think there's a quick and easy solution to it. Like I said before - the best remedy I have ever seen to avoiding that sort of thing is to so dramatically overestimate the costs for your projects that it's impossible for you not to come in under time and under budget. For a business like the one I was working at, that works fine, because then you know as a hard fact that all the projects you greenlight out of the giant slate you've got in front of you will make good returns. For a game studio, I don't think it works so good, because...come on. How many games would pass that mark? Halo and Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War would make it just fine, but anything that you can't guarantee will sell X million copies is right out, and that's not a gaming future I want.