Working hours and crunch time

http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives/006083.html

Read it. Laugh out loud.

 

Oh, and relation to this article:
http://www.sumea.com.au/snews.asp?news=2755&comment=posted

If the link doesn't work as I believe that certain pressure was applied to certain people then the thrust of the comments was this:

1. Tue, 8 May 2007 14:4:49Z - Kipper
I think that's excellent to local studio heads speak out about quality of life in the game industry. Excessive working hours - which Jason focuses on in his blog post - is but one of a host of unethical working conditions we've seen game developers face in recent times. For example, some studios even seem to think that their staff have no right to privacy, taking it upon themselves to read through their staff's email and messaging logs (without daring to state that this is company policy, of course). Any company that spies on its staff like this displays a clear contempt for their talent and deserves no future in a professional creative industry. Well done to Red Tribe for taking a public stand for ethical working environments in the game industry.
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2. Tue, 8 May 2007 14:41:30Z - Anonymous Coward
It's not even an ethical issue. These practices makes good business sense. It's that simple.
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3. Tue, 8 May 2007 14:43:12Z - Anonymous Coward
Red Tribe + Ethical = "error"

 

*chuckles*

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

 

I know that this probably bad form etc but this could reach the proportions of the legendary Melbourne House/Age blog. It gets better.......
http://www.sumea.com.au/snews.asp?news=2755&comment=posted

 

I believe that any move to improve the working state of the industry as a whole has to be a good move, so long it's not more retric.

But the problem doesn't only lie with the studios, a lot of pressure can placed upon then by publishers, especially when studios many not have a lot of choice in the work that they have available to them.

It just about happens in most industries. When the custom says jump, you find yourself asking "when can i come down?"

What I think most people don't like is when the company routinely talks about quality of life, but then asks you to work on the weekends...

If RT are committed to making a change, then thumbs up to them and good luck.

 

Oh the never ending debate. I can't believe those from RT who posted didn't get into trouble. Outrageous. Those people should be punished for discussing internal company policies/politics/runnings as a violation to the NDA they signed! Now I don't want to be naming names, but there are companies, in which, this is grounds for dismissal!

 

There are so many comments there that it's hard to know exactly, what should they be punished for saying?

I can't remember a clause in my contract stating that I shouldn't tell anyone if I'm working in awful conditions. Maybe I got lucky?

 

Maybe it's just my bad experience with the one company I used to work for. Although not written into the contract, when the time came, word was, leak info of any kind and you're out. Hard to implement when the staff leaves, but if you still value your job whilst being employed there, it's kind of daunting.

I guess I should've put a disclaimer in my last post. *this post does not reflect the opinions of the author, nor the opinions of The Chaos Engine*. Leave me alone, I'm one tiny little woman hehhehe.

 

I will not personally be joining the ranks of revealing any corporate secrets, so I will instead just mention my own personal feelings. I feel that I am approaching a brick wall of crunch in a far off distance. But it's not receded into the fog. I see it pretty clearly. And the hill I tread rises up gradually to meet the wall, then the path ends. I hope it won't end in a big splat!

I am truth be told a little scared. I don't know if this company I was enjoying is going to become my emotional undoing and cause in me a stirring of intense hatreds. I wouldn't want to devolve so, but I would still exhibit a certain dedication, towards the crafting of quality work. And I can honestly be led in that direction by the hairs of my ethic. But after a while of course it can be exploited in a not at all nice way, and the negatives start to pour in.

I just hope the deadline is truly the deadline, and doesn't get moved again. If I was knuckling down to gear up for the "last real haul", and at the end of all the hardship and blood sweaty tears it turned out "No wait, that's not the real end. Here's the actual end out here a bit", well I think I'd cry.

Anyway. I expect there are serious discussions of this topic deep in the innermost folds of this place. I would like to participate, rather than be an external-dangler.

You never know! I might even have items to contribute in a non-fascist way!

 

Okay Mr Irritant Number Four, as a number of comments in that post say, crunch is pretty much par for the course in the industry. Whether or not it is an experience that will make you run screaming for the hills crying for your mummy is totally dependent upon how it is dealt with by the people that manage the resources, budget and project schedule/plan.

1. If you have a producer who is relatively competent and realises early on in the project cycle that a team of 20 cannot magically produce the work of a team of 40 then the experience will be hard but rewarding. You'll probably come out the other side with various amusing anecdotes about how Dave didn't sleep for 2 days and was found naked, curled in the foetal position under his desk. Or how, after a particularly bad 5 days, the team all drank a bit too much falling over juice and got upto some rather amusing hi-jinks involving roadside safety equipment, household pets and a distinct lack of clothing.

2. If you have a producer who doesn't really know what he/she is doing and would rather spend time filling in all the fiddly little fields in MS Project than actually managing the team & the project then the experience will be quite unpleasant. You'll end up fairly jaded and cynical, vowing never to go through that again. Welcome to how pretty much everyone who is in the industry feels about the industry at one time or another.

3. If you have a producer who calls themselves a producer purely because they heard the word during a McDonalds TV ad for the latest curly fries and double McLardy Death Burger with cheese and wouldn't know the arse end of an Excel budget spreadsheet if they were faced with an Engine Coder wrapped in a printout of the thing with a big sticker on his/her forehead stating the fact that they were going to a fancy dress party dressed as a game development budget spreadsheet, (not that this person would know what an engine coder was anyway),....... well...... if you don't quit the games industry all together during crunch time then I'm afraid that's the best you can hope for.

4. If you have no producer at all and the project is being run by the Business Development Manager of the publisher, (assuming you've got a contract). Run. Now. Don't even pick up your shit from under your desk. Just go. Get out while you can.

I hope that makes things clearer.

 

On one hand there is this: If I need to get something done I don't mind to put in the time. Be it the crunch at the end of the project or a show-stopping problem that keeps other people from continuing their work: if it needs to get done it needs to get done.
And there have been enough times when I was in the zone, getting stuff done, and then noticing "Oh, already midnight. Better go home, but let's do some final tests before leaving."
What I have no tolerance for is when some #!$@% junior producer regularly decides "Everyone stays till the image is built and has run compliance tests" and because of bad scheduling the process takes till 3AM. Every time. Or senior management decides, after not taking an interest for 90% of the project, near the end of the project to "redesign" parts that were working and signed off for ages so we have to struggle to get everything back into working order.

 

I haven't been the industry that long but I tend to find that if the hours are recognised by the company and are (even if it's only slightly) justifiable by the staff who work them, everyone involved tends to get on quite well. Unfortunately, the hours and crunch time are a given for the industry and if you happen to work for a company that will pay you for said hours you are extremely lucky.

Last year I was unfortunate enough to work for an extremely small company who had me and a handful of other developers working from 8am til 4am every day for about a month just to hit the third "final" deadline. I can clearly remember the reaction of each of us when that deadline was extended by a week and we were told we had to work all the hours God sends to hit this "definitely final" deadline. Needless to say that we're not working there any more, the company lost the contract, didn't get paid and went into liquidation a couple of weeks later.

The moral of the above paragraph is respect your developers because without us you're fucked!

 

I've been in the software industry about 15+ years (games industry for a few years), and I have worked at one company that deigned to pay overtime. The management was pretty poor and people were treated with disrespect, but I still look back now, and think "Yeah, but at least they paid overtime." (Needless to say, it wasn't a games company.)

Other than that, here's a piece of advice: Short of actually paying you overtime (and even then it's not guaranteed), you will never (never!) be properly recompensed/whatever for the hours you do. Whatever short term/minor benefit it gets you (if any, and it will be short term/minor - people quickly forget), it won't be worth the scads of time/your life that you pissed up the wall 'helping them out' with their stupid deadlines. Basically, someone might say "Thanks" a couple of times. That's pretty much it.

I now no longer work overtime unless there's an agreement to pay me for it. From the start, I failed to see why the relationship should be so one-sided - you can work hours of unpaid overtime every day for weeks/months on end, yet they still haul you up in front of the beak if you're half an hour late in the morning. Fuck that. Fuck that shit in the ear. So now as well as failing to understand it, I fail to be complicit in the arrangement.

Coincidentally (well, not so coincidentally, of course, because people will always try it if they can) someone recently decided to be a dick about paying me overtime, even though it had been agreed. And they knew I was working long hours, because they kept thanking me for it, for getting the project finished asap, etc. So this just reinforced my view of overtime.

Don't worry about me though - it's very much turned into a 'Now find the umbrella' situation .

But seriously, my advice for the young'uns is: don't do all that overtime. You will never look back and think that it was worth it. And you could have been doing something else, like living your life.

I came up with a smug aphorism for this recently:

Sorry to be crotchetty, but I'm sick of the bullshit, especially since I recently had to listen to EA's head of HR going on about how EA has changed so much and they're much better now, only to say 5 minutes later (literally) that the success of the Wii took them by surprise, so now they're really trying to 'churn out those Wii games in a few months'. Sigh.

 

Most company's don't have to good eye for details in a game and only want it to be released asap
with the finished game coming some weeks later in forms of patches.

I must say that the new Head of EA has some better policy's on the big picture but still fails to give the games a longer development time.

to bad we can't do anything about it.
*picks up his tools and starts digging again*