16 ms·

This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

62 points by suraj 10y ago

wglb 10y ago
When I was younger, I decided that failures in schedules were failures in management. Now that I am older, I feel that failures in schedules are failures in management. Not failures in technology. As patio11 mentions elsewhere in this thread, schedule crunch, except for the very first time, is a deliberate decision.
Macsenour 10y ago
There is nothing that I agree with here. Crunch = Producer fail. Feature Creep = Producer fail. The suggestion that "scheduling is hard", no sh*t Sherlock, that's why you don't hire a 20 year old Producer who did one title at this last company.
Animats 10y ago
If game development paid overtime, game scheduling would be as well developed as film scheduling is. When a film goes over budget, the director and producer usually get their share cut. I've written about this before. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557954
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Paying overtime would solve a lot of project management issues in tech companies. Overtime is for free so why try to avoid it? If people get burnt out after a while there are plenty of people who are happy to replace them.
  - apercu 10y ago
    I think this is the crux of the problem - in the US and Canada (at least) there is an IT class of professionals that are exempt from overtime. Why? Please someone tell me why? And it's not just the gaming industry. I am involved with 10 projects right now (way more than my usual load). 1 of them has a reasonable schedule (though my component is sort of aggressively scheduled), 3 have completely ridiculous schedules (from day one requiring overtime and weekend work to complete), 1 has stupid political nonsense going on which makes it a complete cluster that is making the timeline silly, 2 others are being rushed in phases, since the timeline was stupid to begin with, 2 others are crunched because they are related to the 3 that have stupid timelines (forcing the team to split in to 5 different teams and work in parallel) and the last one is being finalized but had some pressures on my component, which rushed my work. So, anecdotally, 90% of the projects I am involved in currently have issues with their scheduling. As I have been involved with software/hardware development since 1995, my experience suggests this is nothing new.
    - Animats 10y ago
      It's time for repeal of some Fair Labor Standards Act exemptions. There's one for computer programmers.[1] The threshold for exemption from overtime needs to be pushed up to the point that only the 1% are exempt. [1] http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.htm http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.htm
      - apercu 10y ago
        I agree 100%. When on salary you are buying a piece of my time in exchange for an agreed upon amount of compensation. For an employer to make the former variable but not the latter is B.S. Also, the whole more than 40 hour per week expectation is nonsense. I am independent now and can do the same (or more) amount of work in 30-40 hours a week now. In fact, I worked ~500 fewer hours my first full year of being independent. Did I make a little less money? Sure, because I don't get paid time off anymore. And I also worked a lot less.
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  I like that idea, also please take a cut from the salesman.
  - kristiandupont 10y ago
    Neither film nor games have a "salesman" per se -- are you saying this just because you dislike salespeople?
    - sgift 10y ago
      If he says it for the same reason I'd say it it is because in my experience salespeople tend to provide "aggressive" estimates (e.g. You said 10 days, that's almost the same as 5 days, isn't it?) if they think they have better chances to make a sale doing this. So, maybe, cutting into their share would help to deliver a (IMHO) very important message: There are deals which aren't worth it.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  And yet if it was the other way round, maybe our films would be better and actually make sense.
jacques_chester 10y ago
I see a lot of cases of people saying estimation is impossible, which upon closer inspection turn out to be a different argument: "perfect foresight is impossible". The Nirvana Fallacy, in other words. Because it's not perfect, it's worthless. Of course perfect estimates are impossible. You need to make them anyhow. And if you don't make them explicitly, you'll make them implicitly, and they'll be worse.
- x5n1 10y ago
  That's not the problem. The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and crunch.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    > The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. That's not unique to game development. Or software. Or any industry, really. > The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and crunch. Of course, but that's because the estimate is not being treated as an estimate. It's being treated as a plan, or a goal. I read a book called Industrial Megaprojects in which the author, talking about civil and industrial projects on a gigabuck scale, lamented the same problems.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      > That's not unique to game development. Or software. Or any industry, really. Yes, it is. It's not literally unique to software, because R&D and "nobody ever made something like this" projects share it, but most industries don't.
vvanders 10y ago
Nope, nope, fuck you. Voluntary crunch leads to a culture of overtime. You won't be considered a "team player" if you decide that you don't want to spend weekends and extra hours in an industry where you make 40% less than your peers. I feel even stronger about this after having a kid. There's no way I'm destroying the relationship I have with my family for your product. I saw it again and again when I was in the industry(at least 3 divorces on the last project I worked on) and I'll never go back.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Also there's solid data against crunch. I've posted the game outcome project before. They sampled hundreds of developers and found a very negative correlation with crunch. He's true that voluntary crunch is less worse than mandatory but it still has a negative impact. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20141216/232023/The_Game_Outcomes_Project_Part_1_The_Best_and_the_Rest.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20141216/232023/The_Ga...
- fenomas 10y ago
  This level of hate is unfounded - the author specifically condemns the kind of situation you're describing. He's arguing that teams must maintain a culture of normal working hours, to keep energy and morale high even into the project's final weeks, just in case a brief crunch becomes unavoidable. Unless you're saying that you saw three divorces caused by a project where nobody worked any overtime until the last few weeks, you're attacking a straw man here.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Not quite, from the article: > Perma-crunch is stupid and destructive, but voluntary crunch by people who are trying to push the medium is a good thing. Hard work is not bad or evil. Great things can happen when you’re willing to push. The thing with voluntary crunch is it becomes institutionalized and part of your company culture. If you don't pitch in you're managed down and out since there's always some poor soul willing to do your job. At least until they burn out in 3 years(look up the Gamasutra GameDev Salary, average tenure is just under 3 years). That said some of the best people we hire are ex-gamedev. In the industry you're trying to find the intersection of sane hours, good pay and stability. If you're in the top 5% of studios you might find that but a large majority of people never even see one of those 3 things.
rock_hard 10y ago
"scheduling is hard"?? Yeah, if you have no fucking clue what you are doing I guess everything is hard! Shipping successful products on time and in-budget is not rocket science! The right people are out there...you just have to hire for it.
- apercu 10y ago
  It is not hard at all, but typically external pressures force people to agree to things that don't make sense. I have a client that has an event every year at the same time (let's say it's mid-July. They want projects to be completed before this event every year. But for some reason, they don't start planning these projects until let's say end of April. So every year it's the same crazy pressure and quality issues. If only the planning for these projects started in say, October? But no, in October the team is still dealing with the fallout of the poorly planned projects of the current year.
georgemcbay 10y ago
All those words and none of them touch upon the obvious financial bullshittery of being expected to work as much as double time for the same salary.
- apercu 10y ago
  When I started my career I worked for a University and then a private scientific engineering/manufacturing company. The latter was purchased by a public company. They cut 20% of the staff and expected the same output. This has been going on for 20 years.
flashman 10y ago
"It’s your entire job to say no to stuff like this [asking for more time]." No, as a manager it's your entire job to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen. How did you let the project lead get into this situation? How irresponsible was it to basically gamble - not just with money, but with other people's time and careers - that the project would be on schedule? "Oh, but that's the way games get made." Right, so now you're just normalizing deviance.
quanticle 10y ago
>Scheduling isn’t just a problem in videogames, this is all kinds of software development. And yet, somehow, videogames still manage to be worse about scheduling and effort estimation than pretty much any other kind of software system. Why is that? Why do managers of video game development teams feel like their industry is a special snowflake in software, that it's not bound by the same constraints as enterprise CRUD apps? EDIT: Literally every point he brings up regarding feature creep and estimation applies equally to enterprise CRUD apps. So as bad as estimation for enterprise applications is, I never hear about people working 80-hour weeks for years on end to bring Widget Planner 3.55 (Now With Fruble Support!) to fruition.
partycoder 10y ago
You can take risks, but you must have a share of the rewards. Taking risks in exchange for nothing is not fair.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
> Keep in mind that when you’re giving a quote like this, you are basically making a promise to get the job done for a certain price. Favorite quotation from this article. So much insanity and stress flow from this. But hey, this is a team. We're all in it together. If things go wrong, count on my support ... unless it means you'll miss your deadline. What kind of loser-idiot misses their deadline? I asked you how long it would take at the start! Why didn't you tell me six months ago it would take three additional weeks? Let's try this again: how long will it take to finish level 9? I think you know the right answer now, don't you?
patio11 10y ago
When people who work in the games industry say they crunch because they're young men with poor boundaries who would do anything to make video games, and when industry veterans literally write PowerPoint decks about hiring suggesting targeting young men with poor boundaries because you can get them to crunch since they will do anything to write video games, I choose to believe their words. This lines up with external evidence. Scheduling software is hard: granted! But do we see 90 hour crunch on every single shipping product in the US software industry? No, that's ludicrous. Do we see 90 hour crunch on substantially every shipping software project in, I don't know, the Japanese software industry? Oh we do! Curious! Does that industry also write schedules which assume crunch? I mean it sounds far fetched but no, literally in the design document written in the first week of a three year project there are exhortations about how understaffed we are (Why?) and how tight he schedule is (Why?) and how required heroic efforts are (Why?). And does the Japanese software industry hire people with poor boundary control and ruthlessly inculcate lower boundaries? Great Scott it does! Crunch in the video game industry is not an accident. It is a policy. Do not work in video games.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  I think you might be missing the point of the article. The metric for measuring a game's success is how fun it is to play. You can't plan fun, that only comes from having a playground and tweaking things until the game play feels satisfying. Note I use words like fun and satisfying - words that are all highly subjective, and can only really be ticked off when you have the game in front of you and can agree it was fun to play. The metric for measuring the success of software on the other hand is directly proportional to the amount of functionality it implements, as defined in the requirement spec. These totally different goals for development are the reason the industries are so different, and why one is harder to plan for than the other.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    You don't have to build the whole game to get started on testing how fun it is to play, you start with an ideas sandbox and go from there. A large part of modern game development is involved in building up art assets, you only need a minimal set of art assets before you start playtesting and refining ideas.
megablast 10y ago
Seems like the solution to this is not to promise release dates, and fixed budgets.
- taurath 10y ago
  Release dates aren't going anywhere as long as there's a traditional retail chain and marketing spends. You can do a hell of a lot to just pay workers overtime - people in the film industry in LA may work overtime, but if they go overbudget it comes out of the show runners cut. In software overtime is just free time, and they'll squeeze you out like an orange and replace you with a new fresh eyed person when you can't go anymore.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > In software overtime is just free time, and they'll squeeze you out like an orange and replace you with a new fresh eyed person when you can't go anymore. Thankfully, in many European countries software development is under the same rules as any other job, and one is entitled to get either free time or money form those extra hours. Granted not all companies play ball, but then one can make them play ball, if they feel like getting some external help from either unions (we have IT unions) or lawyers.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      The "management" exemption is often heavily abused to extend unpaid overtime. It happens at e.g. Rockstar and Jagex.
supercoder 10y ago
I'd never work for this guy

62 points by suraj 10y ago

wglb 10y ago

When I was younger, I decided that failures in schedules were failures in management. Now that I am older, I feel that failures in schedules are failures in management. Not failures in technology. As patio11 mentions elsewhere in this thread, schedule crunch, except for the very first time, is a deliberate decision.

Macsenour 10y ago

There is nothing that I agree with here. Crunch = Producer fail. Feature Creep = Producer fail. The suggestion that "scheduling is hard", no sh*t Sherlock, that's why you don't hire a 20 year old Producer who did one title at this last company.

Animats 10y ago

If game development paid overtime, game scheduling would be as well developed as film scheduling is. When a film goes over budget, the director and producer usually get their share cut. I've written about this before. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557954

maxxxxx 10y ago
Paying overtime would solve a lot of project management issues in tech companies. Overtime is for free so why try to avoid it? If people get burnt out after a while there are plenty of people who are happy to replace them.
- apercu 10y ago
  I think this is the crux of the problem - in the US and Canada (at least) there is an IT class of professionals that are exempt from overtime. Why? Please someone tell me why? And it's not just the gaming industry. I am involved with 10 projects right now (way more than my usual load). 1 of them has a reasonable schedule (though my component is sort of aggressively scheduled), 3 have completely ridiculous schedules (from day one requiring overtime and weekend work to complete), 1 has stupid political nonsense going on which makes it a complete cluster that is making the timeline silly, 2 others are being rushed in phases, since the timeline was stupid to begin with, 2 others are crunched because they are related to the 3 that have stupid timelines (forcing the team to split in to 5 different teams and work in parallel) and the last one is being finalized but had some pressures on my component, which rushed my work. So, anecdotally, 90% of the projects I am involved in currently have issues with their scheduling. As I have been involved with software/hardware development since 1995, my experience suggests this is nothing new.
  - Animats 10y ago
    It's time for repeal of some Fair Labor Standards Act exemptions. There's one for computer programmers.[1] The threshold for exemption from overtime needs to be pushed up to the point that only the 1% are exempt. [1] http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.htm http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.htm
    - apercu 10y ago
      I agree 100%. When on salary you are buying a piece of my time in exchange for an agreed upon amount of compensation. For an employer to make the former variable but not the latter is B.S. Also, the whole more than 40 hour per week expectation is nonsense. I am independent now and can do the same (or more) amount of work in 30-40 hours a week now. In fact, I worked ~500 fewer hours my first full year of being independent. Did I make a little less money? Sure, because I don't get paid time off anymore. And I also worked a lot less.
Bombthecat 10y ago
I like that idea, also please take a cut from the salesman.
- kristiandupont 10y ago
  Neither film nor games have a "salesman" per se -- are you saying this just because you dislike salespeople?
  - sgift 10y ago
    If he says it for the same reason I'd say it it is because in my experience salespeople tend to provide "aggressive" estimates (e.g. You said 10 days, that's almost the same as 5 days, isn't it?) if they think they have better chances to make a sale doing this. So, maybe, cutting into their share would help to deliver a (IMHO) very important message: There are deals which aren't worth it.
hacker_9 10y ago
And yet if it was the other way round, maybe our films would be better and actually make sense.

jacques_chester 10y ago

I see a lot of cases of people saying estimation is impossible, which upon closer inspection turn out to be a different argument: "perfect foresight is impossible". The Nirvana Fallacy, in other words. Because it's not perfect, it's worthless. Of course perfect estimates are impossible. You need to make them anyhow. And if you don't make them explicitly, you'll make them implicitly, and they'll be worse.

x5n1 10y ago
That's not the problem. The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and crunch.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  > The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. That's not unique to game development. Or software. Or any industry, really. > The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and crunch. Of course, but that's because the estimate is not being treated as an estimate. It's being treated as a plan, or a goal. I read a book called Industrial Megaprojects in which the author, talking about civil and industrial projects on a gigabuck scale, lamented the same problems.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    > That's not unique to game development. Or software. Or any industry, really. Yes, it is. It's not literally unique to software, because R&D and "nobody ever made something like this" projects share it, but most industries don't.

vvanders 10y ago

Nope, nope, fuck you. Voluntary crunch leads to a culture of overtime. You won't be considered a "team player" if you decide that you don't want to spend weekends and extra hours in an industry where you make 40% less than your peers. I feel even stronger about this after having a kid. There's no way I'm destroying the relationship I have with my family for your product. I saw it again and again when I was in the industry(at least 3 divorces on the last project I worked on) and I'll never go back.

vvanders 10y ago
Also there's solid data against crunch. I've posted the game outcome project before. They sampled hundreds of developers and found a very negative correlation with crunch. He's true that voluntary crunch is less worse than mandatory but it still has a negative impact. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20141216/232023/The_Game_Outcomes_Project_Part_1_The_Best_and_the_Rest.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20141216/232023/The_Ga...
fenomas 10y ago
This level of hate is unfounded - the author specifically condemns the kind of situation you're describing. He's arguing that teams must maintain a culture of normal working hours, to keep energy and morale high even into the project's final weeks, just in case a brief crunch becomes unavoidable. Unless you're saying that you saw three divorces caused by a project where nobody worked any overtime until the last few weeks, you're attacking a straw man here.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Not quite, from the article: > Perma-crunch is stupid and destructive, but voluntary crunch by people who are trying to push the medium is a good thing. Hard work is not bad or evil. Great things can happen when you’re willing to push. The thing with voluntary crunch is it becomes institutionalized and part of your company culture. If you don't pitch in you're managed down and out since there's always some poor soul willing to do your job. At least until they burn out in 3 years(look up the Gamasutra GameDev Salary, average tenure is just under 3 years). That said some of the best people we hire are ex-gamedev. In the industry you're trying to find the intersection of sane hours, good pay and stability. If you're in the top 5% of studios you might find that but a large majority of people never even see one of those 3 things.

rock_hard 10y ago

"scheduling is hard"?? Yeah, if you have no fucking clue what you are doing I guess everything is hard! Shipping successful products on time and in-budget is not rocket science! The right people are out there...you just have to hire for it.

apercu 10y ago
It is not hard at all, but typically external pressures force people to agree to things that don't make sense. I have a client that has an event every year at the same time (let's say it's mid-July. They want projects to be completed before this event every year. But for some reason, they don't start planning these projects until let's say end of April. So every year it's the same crazy pressure and quality issues. If only the planning for these projects started in say, October? But no, in October the team is still dealing with the fallout of the poorly planned projects of the current year.

georgemcbay 10y ago

All those words and none of them touch upon the obvious financial bullshittery of being expected to work as much as double time for the same salary.

apercu 10y ago
When I started my career I worked for a University and then a private scientific engineering/manufacturing company. The latter was purchased by a public company. They cut 20% of the staff and expected the same output. This has been going on for 20 years.

flashman 10y ago

"It’s your entire job to say no to stuff like this [asking for more time]." No, as a manager it's your entire job to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen. How did you let the project lead get into this situation? How irresponsible was it to basically gamble - not just with money, but with other people's time and careers - that the project would be on schedule? "Oh, but that's the way games get made." Right, so now you're just normalizing deviance.

quanticle 10y ago

>Scheduling isn’t just a problem in videogames, this is all kinds of software development. And yet, somehow, videogames still manage to be worse about scheduling and effort estimation than pretty much any other kind of software system. Why is that? Why do managers of video game development teams feel like their industry is a special snowflake in software, that it's not bound by the same constraints as enterprise CRUD apps? EDIT: Literally every point he brings up regarding feature creep and estimation applies equally to enterprise CRUD apps. So as bad as estimation for enterprise applications is, I never hear about people working 80-hour weeks for years on end to bring Widget Planner 3.55 (Now With Fruble Support!) to fruition.

partycoder 10y ago

You can take risks, but you must have a share of the rewards. Taking risks in exchange for nothing is not fair.

HillaryBriss 10y ago

> Keep in mind that when you’re giving a quote like this, you are basically making a promise to get the job done for a certain price. Favorite quotation from this article. So much insanity and stress flow from this. But hey, this is a team. We're all in it together. If things go wrong, count on my support ... unless it means you'll miss your deadline. What kind of loser-idiot misses their deadline? I asked you how long it would take at the start! Why didn't you tell me six months ago it would take three additional weeks? Let's try this again: how long will it take to finish level 9? I think you know the right answer now, don't you?

patio11 10y ago

When people who work in the games industry say they crunch because they're young men with poor boundaries who would do anything to make video games, and when industry veterans literally write PowerPoint decks about hiring suggesting targeting young men with poor boundaries because you can get them to crunch since they will do anything to write video games, I choose to believe their words. This lines up with external evidence. Scheduling software is hard: granted! But do we see 90 hour crunch on every single shipping product in the US software industry? No, that's ludicrous. Do we see 90 hour crunch on substantially every shipping software project in, I don't know, the Japanese software industry? Oh we do! Curious! Does that industry also write schedules which assume crunch? I mean it sounds far fetched but no, literally in the design document written in the first week of a three year project there are exhortations about how understaffed we are (Why?) and how tight he schedule is (Why?) and how required heroic efforts are (Why?). And does the Japanese software industry hire people with poor boundary control and ruthlessly inculcate lower boundaries? Great Scott it does! Crunch in the video game industry is not an accident. It is a policy. Do not work in video games.

hacker_9 10y ago
I think you might be missing the point of the article. The metric for measuring a game's success is how fun it is to play. You can't plan fun, that only comes from having a playground and tweaking things until the game play feels satisfying. Note I use words like fun and satisfying - words that are all highly subjective, and can only really be ticked off when you have the game in front of you and can agree it was fun to play. The metric for measuring the success of software on the other hand is directly proportional to the amount of functionality it implements, as defined in the requirement spec. These totally different goals for development are the reason the industries are so different, and why one is harder to plan for than the other.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  You don't have to build the whole game to get started on testing how fun it is to play, you start with an ideas sandbox and go from there. A large part of modern game development is involved in building up art assets, you only need a minimal set of art assets before you start playtesting and refining ideas.

megablast 10y ago

Seems like the solution to this is not to promise release dates, and fixed budgets.

taurath 10y ago
Release dates aren't going anywhere as long as there's a traditional retail chain and marketing spends. You can do a hell of a lot to just pay workers overtime - people in the film industry in LA may work overtime, but if they go overbudget it comes out of the show runners cut. In software overtime is just free time, and they'll squeeze you out like an orange and replace you with a new fresh eyed person when you can't go anymore.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > In software overtime is just free time, and they'll squeeze you out like an orange and replace you with a new fresh eyed person when you can't go anymore. Thankfully, in many European countries software development is under the same rules as any other job, and one is entitled to get either free time or money form those extra hours. Granted not all companies play ball, but then one can make them play ball, if they feel like getting some external help from either unions (we have IT unions) or lawyers.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The "management" exemption is often heavily abused to extend unpaid overtime. It happens at e.g. Rockstar and Jagex.

supercoder 10y ago

I'd never work for this guy