12 ms·

An insider's look at what he gave up to create a classic game

155 points by aaronbrethorst 10y ago

coldcode 10y ago
I know the feeling. At my first startup a long long time ago I worked 100 hrs/week for 4.5 months and almost died. You can somehow get through but it takes too much out of you. Game companies do this routinely of course.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Does the middle and senior management put the same time in? I guess they have a much higher financial stake in things so even experiencing the horrible results first hand might not dissuade them.
  - eru 10y ago
    They also often got where they are, because they put in the extra time. Not so much because it actually made them productive, but because it made them look productive. Also, there are people who naturally deal less-badly with long hours---and they tend to rise to the top here.
mrdrozdov 10y ago
This doesn't exactly seem like the healthiest (or most efficient) routine. > A pattern emerged in my days during this period. Get up, get washed and dressed, wash down a couple of caffeine tablets with some strong coffee, pick up a red bull, a coke and some cereal bars on my way into the office. Once at work I’d be at my desk non-stop; all meals would be eaten at my desk, though sometimes I’d not eat at all. When I did eat, it would usually mean a sandwich from the supermarket for lunch. Work would often provide dinner, invariably takeout. Sugary caffeinated drinks and sweets would sustain me for the rest of the time. Working 80 hour weeks is not okay, but working 40 hour weeks is also probably not okay when you're relying on this sort of sustenance. Thanks incredibly for sharing your experience and helping build such a renowned game. Hopefully people can take away from your experiences strategies to avoid a similar fate!
- inDigiNeous 10y ago
  Yeah I dont understand this either as a programmer. Maybe this works in a big team better, but alone at least there's no way I can work even 8 hours productively every day, realistically it's more like 3-4 hours of intense thinking, maybe on a good day I can do 6-7 hours, and sometimes even more, but continuing this pattern will really affect the level of code and problem solving in a major way. Better to take breaks, do something else, just relax for a day or two even if nothing is coming out, and then continue when it comes naturally.
  - Joeri 10y ago
    They might have shipped sooner had they let everyone work normal hours. It's not just that the studies agree sustained crunch is a bad idea, I've seen several times in person that sustained crunch beyond the first few weeks lowers overall productivity. People start goofing off, or just staring at code without making much progress, or writing huge mountains of code when a little stream of code would have sufficed with more forethought. And the code that they do write they have to revisit later to fix all the bugs caused by sloppy coding.
    - Retric 10y ago
      I have personally seen someone in crunch replace a few terse lines written in 15 minutes that worked. With pages of boilerplate code and a few dozen files that must have taken days. His response, I did not understand what you did. Ask? I mean no wonder that team was working 80 hour weeks. If you stop thinking then even very simple problems become monumental challenges.
      - aedron 10y ago
        Whenever I work more than 10-11 hours, I usually come back to the code the next day and wonder WTF I was thinking. Problems with straightforward solutions solved with large amounts of garbage code, wonky designs, lots of stuff that just gets thrown out wholesale. It is literally counterproductive.
    - 10y ago
mfoy_ 10y ago
For what it's worth, I LOVED Fable. I'm amazed to hear that the original plan was to have it as an open world instead of the load screen sectioned maps. I can't imagine how much harder that would have been. Also strange to hear they made that compromise very late in the development.
spdionis 10y ago
All that said, Fable is one of the best RPGs ever made.
- ccvannorman 10y ago
  It was the first one I experienced where buying real estate in the game became more important to me than any quest or character
eterpstra 10y ago
Side note... The tech/startup world has realized relatively quickly that 100 hour workweeks are detrimental to productivity, retention, and overall success. Seems like articles such as this come out on a weekly basis, along with other articles on 'progressive' practices such as unlimited vacation, flex working hours, mandatory time off, half-day Fridays, etc... and it's only taken a dozen or so years. The medical profession, on the other hand, has struggled with this for almost a hundred years. The norm was for residents to work 100+ hour weeks, for 3-5 years. Non-stop. Only recently have they given themselves a pat on the back for achieving a '[mandatory 80 hour workweek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#Towards_an_80-hour_work_week)' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#To.... Seems odd that people building apps and games have figured out that working insane hours is bad, but the people responsible for treating the sick and wounded are still chugging along, bleary eyed and overworked.
- munificent 10y ago
  The work is very different. If I'm coding and I'm tired, I can go home and get some sleep. When I get in the next day, the code is exactly how I left it. A doctor can't put their patients in suspended animation while they get some shut-eye. The patient's condition may worse or improve. They may make vague complaints that are clues that can only be pieced together if you were around to pick up all of them. Likewise, it's very very difficult for a doctor to serialize every bit of data they've gleaned from a patient to pass on to the next doctor to come on rotation. Because of that "continuity of care"—having one doctor around to continuously interact with the same patient—is really important. It would definitely be great for doctors to work shorter hours, but it does have some real costs. Patients aren't text files.
  - rqebmm 10y ago
    This is all very true, but on the other hand: if you're coding and you're tired it's exceedingly unlikely that your mistake would kill someone.
    - pixl97 10y ago
shkkmo 10y ago
Given what happened with Godus under Peter Molyneux, the terrible mismanagement talked about here is unsurprising to me. Fable, at least, turned into a game worth playing.
madrox 10y ago
I've seen this pattern as engineer and as an engineering director. You can always put the blame for these things on leadership's inability to make decisions. Too much time is spent in the theoretical, "what's possible" headspace that no final decisions get made that gives the team anchor points. It says a lot that the switch from open world to level transitions (a major decision) happened so late. Staying that there was no real plan to get to the end...that's the job of an executive. The best executives I've ever seen, for better or worse, will regularly make decisions on the project so there's a continual sense of marching towards goals. They may not always be the right decisions, but making the wrong decisions can be less damaging than making no decisions.
- Negative1 10y ago
  Great points, but, remember that executive behavior is a by-product of the company culture and environment. I've seen high-ups afraid to make these important strategic decisions in a timely fashion that were rightfully worried. Sadly, some people do not share the sentiment that failure can be just another data point and reward it harshly.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > remember that executive behavior is a by-product of the company culture and environment. Conversely, company culture and environment is a by-product of the executive behavior. The latter probably is a stronger influence in younger, smaller companies, the former stronger in older and larger firms.
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      Yep and the company the author worked at was founded by Peter Molyneux who is infamous for dreaming up stuff that's not possible in the real world with real constraints.
      - madrox 10y ago
        That was my thought. Peter has a history of big ideas that have a hard time translating into final products. Those kinds of minds are integral to a great product, but past a certain point it can also be a hinderance
newobj 10y ago
Programming is a craft, game programming even more so. Passion runs high; people will work longer and harder for less money than at other jobs. The competition in the workplace and in the market is intense. Willful moderation can never be applied systemically in this industry. There are two ways out: 1) six sigma industrial engineering type management of your processes, and 2) lucking into a clever idea that's not hard to implement. 1) leads to a safe, if well-loved, game. 2)is great of course, like in the way that hoping you'll win the lottery is great. Might be tempted to add a 3) de-risking by middleware, but all that does is raise the bar for everyone. Good for consumers, not helpful for devs. My opinions are based on working in the game industry for ~6 years, with months of 100 hour weeks under my belt. Stressed to the point of bleeding out of random parts of my body. Just can't see it ever changing. I just lol at unionization.
- eru 10y ago
  Do people working on game engines licenced so other companies work hours more in line with the rest of the software industry, or more in line with the rest of game development? What about people working on cloud-y games (like WoW) that don't have one big bang release, but have more continuous development?
  - newobj 10y ago
    Don't know. I worked in the industry when Quake, Unreal, and if I'm being generous, maybe RenderWare and LithTech, were the only real middleware options, and most people still just rolled their own engines. I ultimately burned out while working on an MMO, so I think the answer to your second question is that it's no different... because the launch is for sure a very, very big bang release.
    - eru 10y ago
      Thanks. I was thinking more after the initial release of the MMO. There's probably also a difference between people closer to the creation of new content (for all the updates and expansion with firm deadlines) and the people keeping the infrastructure running.
fossuser 10y ago
> The consequences for me were devastating. I was briefly prescribed anti-psychotics at my lowest point. I experienced migraines, complete with terrifying tunnel vision, blackouts, severe depression, anxiety, panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations and thought insertion. That sounds pretty terrifying - wonder if there's a way to be resilient to this or if everyone is affected this way given enough time.
- newobj 10y ago
  I was working on a system that was doing CSG of AI nav meshes. If enough floating point error crept in, eventually the a shared of edge of a navmesh would split apart and you'd be left with the AI walking around non-existent obstructions. Spent an unimaginable amount of time trying to deal with this. One night when I was walking back to my apartment, I walked over a section of the sidewalk that had plywood laying on it. The edges of two pieces of plywood had about an inch gap between them, and I remember my heart jumping in panic as though I was "seeing the bug" again - basically hallucinated my work problem into real life. That was towards the end of working in the game industry...
  - chillingeffect 10y ago
    Under good conditions that can be a fun thing. I once spent a whole evening changing parameters, drawing black and white fractal trees. When I walked out into the night, I perceived RL trees as the software would render them. I wonder how much of this overlap goes on without us even realizing it :)
    - newobj 10y ago
      True! Though in this case, after months of fighting the problem, not so fun, and more a sign of my impending mental collapse :P
    - eru 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
Raphmedia 10y ago
I never understood how some people who work in tech have no ability to say no. I understand that passion runs deep but that's no reason to become a slave. There is no way whatsoever that I would work 80 hours a week for an extended period unless I were working on my own startup or company and the time that I invest would benefit me in the future. And even then, I wouldn't do it.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Because someone else will say yes. Even if you win the battle you'll lose the war. I imagine that's why raising awareness, engaging in public discourse about it and pushing for reform or change industry-wide is a common theme. And you're probably working on games because you're passionate about them so considering the hop over to a job doing $boring_thing vs. crunch time abuse is choosing between a rock and a hard place.
  - eru 10y ago
    But not everyone else says yes. Working in software is still a sellers market. If you are any good, you have choices. You are right about working on games. They do bank on people's passions more than in CRUD software.
  - prawn 10y ago
    I think the games industry is to males what magazine journalism can be to females. Seen many (including friends) putting in loads of hours and working cheaply, because the competition for spots is so intense.
danso 10y ago
I got into computer programming because I wanted to make video games. By the time i graduated, I no longer had that interest and I don't have any feelings of missing out (though I'm deeply envious of how indie devs like Lucas Pope and Toby Fox -- Papers, Please and Undertale, respectively -- have been able to create such artistic and clever and commercially popular work)...but I would love to experience a standard game dev cycle/crunch. Other types of user-facing software development I can imagine...but how software engineering interacts with the artistic components of development (nevermind playtesting and marketing) is something that seems so different to what I've ever worked on. Side note: Eurogamer had an absolutely epic insider write up of Lionhead...I'm surprised it didn't make front page but it was one of the best things I've ever read about the industry, and I've never played the Fable games https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lionhead:%20The%20inside%20story&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lionhead:%20The%20inside%20sto...
rwallace 10y ago
This is a good example of an important general point: human social instincts are a really huge security vulnerability. The price we pay for adaptability is that we can't have a hardwired instinct of what's normal, so the solution evolution came up with was to program us to take our cue on that from the people around us. The downside is that if we put ourselves in an environment where people are doing bad things - working overtime, doing a PhD, taking drugs, bullying, working for a totalitarian regime, basically anything whatsoever - it won't be long before our brains start telling us it's perfectly normal and finding excuses for the harmful effects. Look at this guy: he admits it ruined his life, but he still thinks it was okay because he liked his initial group of co-workers. Conclusion: do not put yourself in an environment where the people around you are doing bad things. If you are already in such an environment, talk to someone outside it, get their view on the matter, and take it seriously. And if you think you aren't in such an environment, consider doing that anyway as a reality check.
- mizzao 10y ago
  Doing a PhD...?
  - dfabulich 10y ago
    Most PhD programs have negative return on investment, mostly because the academic job market has a glut of postdocs looking for work. ("But but but look at all of my smart grad student friends getting their PhDs! They can't all be doing something irrational, can they?!")
    - mizzao 10y ago
      I guess, if your benchmark for a satisfying life is to maximize discounted future cashflow.
      - smoyer 10y ago
        Maximizing discounted future cash flow often gives you the option of scaling back those hours you're trading for cash. Want more leisure time? Earn more during the hours that you are working!
smoyer 10y ago
I'm having a hard time being sympathetic ... He joined a team that was goofing off, which made it an extremely fun place to work. Wouldn't life be easy without deadlines? So when they actually had to produce something, they were far behind where they should have been. The fault for this situation probably lies with the management but ... as a developer (who's ostensibly getting paid), you should expect to do work at work. He also states that he was sad to see the "Big Blue Box" culture and company disappear. That company would have instead gone out of business if someone (the parent company?) hadn't stepped in and changed things.
- harryjo 10y ago
  People being jovial doesn't mean they aren't working. It just means they aren't stressed out about deadline or other pressure. The deadline is extrinsic (At best, arbitrary at worst), missing a deadline doesn't mean the product was not getting made.
- yitchelle 10y ago
  That is also my feeling after reading the article. He almost seems to stress that his best moments at work were the parties and the lunch time football games. Sure they contribute to the well being of a project team, but shouldn't the best moment be shipping the product out the door?
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  He was doing what he was told to do. If that was the wrong thing, it is 100% management's fault.
draw_down 10y ago
I guess this just comes down to a difference of mindset - I work my job because of the concrete benefit I get from it. (Mostly money, but also work schedule, environment, etc.) I'm not interested in being driven to grind my life to dust for a shot at little bit of hero-glory. To be totally honest I hadn't heard of this game or this person before.
tsunamifury 10y ago
I recently spoke to someone who left Apple, who was able to list three people who died on his team due to overwork. Died. People acclimate to awful things when isolated in a monoculture. It is not worth it.
- j1o1h1n 10y ago
  FWIW, this is a well recognised problem in Japan * http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/11/15/editorials/getting-a-grip-on-karoshi/#.V0_IBfl95hF http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/11/15/editorials/ge...
stcredzero 10y ago
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way ...." -A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens This is very relevant to the Bay Area tech scene. This area literally has the income disparity of a 3rd world country.
reedlaw 10y ago
I don't mean any disrespect to the author or his team but this sounds much like Stockholm syndrome (1). I see symptoms even in many "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" posts. Yes, we work long hours but we play games at lunch. We have snacks and drinks! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Agentlien 10y ago
Crunch is a serious issue for the entire video game industry. It's only made worse by the idiotic treatment of unhealthy stress and unrealistic deadlines as a badge of honour. In fact, rumours about the terrible way game studios treat their employees, along with a brief firsthand glimpse of it during a summer job, is the reason I didn't immediately go into the game industry after graduating. Despite the fact that I had dedicated myself wholeheartedly towards pursuing a career as a game programmer ever since I was a kid. After 3.5 years working on the development of surgical simulators, I finally took the plunge into the game industry. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made. When I first started working at Ghost Games (an EA studio) I heard a lot of horror stories about the crunch of the previous project. What made me put this aside and take the job was how everyone at the interview spoke sincerely about how crunch is a bad thing, the damage it had done to the studio and all the ongoing efforts to ensure it wouldn't happen again. In the end, the project I joined (the reboot of Need For Speed) finished without anything which could reasonably be called a crunch and I only had to put in a few hours of overtime, including one Saturday. This made me feel so relieved and I'm now looking forward to a long career in this field. Of course, EA has a history of crunch as bad as the next game company, but there is a strong feeling that they've realised that it's a problem and they are doing everything they can to mitigate it. It's simply not good for business to burn through talent at a rapid pace and build a reputation for ruining people's lives.
erikb 10y ago
I don't really understand why people put themselves through that stress without getting a personal equally high payout. I mean, the stress he faced was pretty much as big as the ones startup founders face. But startup founders have a chance to end up rich or with a much bigger business. What could he gain from it? A bonus? And as a side note: If the text about his work sounds like your work, you can gain a lot of more performance, fun and results if you spend some of your time learning more indepth how everything about your job works. The debugging drudges become less once you know enough. And not all of it can be learned just by doing.

155 points by aaronbrethorst 10y ago

I know the feeling. At my first startup a long long time ago I worked 100 hrs/week for 4.5 months and almost died. You can somehow get through but it takes too much out of you. Game companies do this routinely of course.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
Does the middle and senior management put the same time in? I guess they have a much higher financial stake in things so even experiencing the horrible results first hand might not dissuade them.
- eru 10y ago
  They also often got where they are, because they put in the extra time. Not so much because it actually made them productive, but because it made them look productive. Also, there are people who naturally deal less-badly with long hours---and they tend to rise to the top here.

mrdrozdov 10y ago

This doesn't exactly seem like the healthiest (or most efficient) routine. > A pattern emerged in my days during this period. Get up, get washed and dressed, wash down a couple of caffeine tablets with some strong coffee, pick up a red bull, a coke and some cereal bars on my way into the office. Once at work I’d be at my desk non-stop; all meals would be eaten at my desk, though sometimes I’d not eat at all. When I did eat, it would usually mean a sandwich from the supermarket for lunch. Work would often provide dinner, invariably takeout. Sugary caffeinated drinks and sweets would sustain me for the rest of the time. Working 80 hour weeks is not okay, but working 40 hour weeks is also probably not okay when you're relying on this sort of sustenance. Thanks incredibly for sharing your experience and helping build such a renowned game. Hopefully people can take away from your experiences strategies to avoid a similar fate!

inDigiNeous 10y ago
Yeah I dont understand this either as a programmer. Maybe this works in a big team better, but alone at least there's no way I can work even 8 hours productively every day, realistically it's more like 3-4 hours of intense thinking, maybe on a good day I can do 6-7 hours, and sometimes even more, but continuing this pattern will really affect the level of code and problem solving in a major way. Better to take breaks, do something else, just relax for a day or two even if nothing is coming out, and then continue when it comes naturally.
- Joeri 10y ago
  They might have shipped sooner had they let everyone work normal hours. It's not just that the studies agree sustained crunch is a bad idea, I've seen several times in person that sustained crunch beyond the first few weeks lowers overall productivity. People start goofing off, or just staring at code without making much progress, or writing huge mountains of code when a little stream of code would have sufficed with more forethought. And the code that they do write they have to revisit later to fix all the bugs caused by sloppy coding.
  - Retric 10y ago
    I have personally seen someone in crunch replace a few terse lines written in 15 minutes that worked. With pages of boilerplate code and a few dozen files that must have taken days. His response, I did not understand what you did. Ask? I mean no wonder that team was working 80 hour weeks. If you stop thinking then even very simple problems become monumental challenges.
    - aedron 10y ago
      Whenever I work more than 10-11 hours, I usually come back to the code the next day and wonder WTF I was thinking. Problems with straightforward solutions solved with large amounts of garbage code, wonky designs, lots of stuff that just gets thrown out wholesale. It is literally counterproductive.
  - 10y ago

mfoy_ 10y ago

For what it's worth, I LOVED Fable. I'm amazed to hear that the original plan was to have it as an open world instead of the load screen sectioned maps. I can't imagine how much harder that would have been. Also strange to hear they made that compromise very late in the development.

spdionis 10y ago

All that said, Fable is one of the best RPGs ever made.

ccvannorman 10y ago
It was the first one I experienced where buying real estate in the game became more important to me than any quest or character

eterpstra 10y ago

Side note... The tech/startup world has realized relatively quickly that 100 hour workweeks are detrimental to productivity, retention, and overall success. Seems like articles such as this come out on a weekly basis, along with other articles on 'progressive' practices such as unlimited vacation, flex working hours, mandatory time off, half-day Fridays, etc... and it's only taken a dozen or so years. The medical profession, on the other hand, has struggled with this for almost a hundred years. The norm was for residents to work 100+ hour weeks, for 3-5 years. Non-stop. Only recently have they given themselves a pat on the back for achieving a '[mandatory 80 hour workweek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#Towards_an_80-hour_work_week)' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#To.... Seems odd that people building apps and games have figured out that working insane hours is bad, but the people responsible for treating the sick and wounded are still chugging along, bleary eyed and overworked.

munificent 10y ago
The work is very different. If I'm coding and I'm tired, I can go home and get some sleep. When I get in the next day, the code is exactly how I left it. A doctor can't put their patients in suspended animation while they get some shut-eye. The patient's condition may worse or improve. They may make vague complaints that are clues that can only be pieced together if you were around to pick up all of them. Likewise, it's very very difficult for a doctor to serialize every bit of data they've gleaned from a patient to pass on to the next doctor to come on rotation. Because of that "continuity of care"—having one doctor around to continuously interact with the same patient—is really important. It would definitely be great for doctors to work shorter hours, but it does have some real costs. Patients aren't text files.
- rqebmm 10y ago
  This is all very true, but on the other hand: if you're coding and you're tired it's exceedingly unlikely that your mistake would kill someone.
  - pixl97 10y ago

shkkmo 10y ago

Given what happened with Godus under Peter Molyneux, the terrible mismanagement talked about here is unsurprising to me. Fable, at least, turned into a game worth playing.

madrox 10y ago

I've seen this pattern as engineer and as an engineering director. You can always put the blame for these things on leadership's inability to make decisions. Too much time is spent in the theoretical, "what's possible" headspace that no final decisions get made that gives the team anchor points. It says a lot that the switch from open world to level transitions (a major decision) happened so late. Staying that there was no real plan to get to the end...that's the job of an executive. The best executives I've ever seen, for better or worse, will regularly make decisions on the project so there's a continual sense of marching towards goals. They may not always be the right decisions, but making the wrong decisions can be less damaging than making no decisions.

Negative1 10y ago
Great points, but, remember that executive behavior is a by-product of the company culture and environment. I've seen high-ups afraid to make these important strategic decisions in a timely fashion that were rightfully worried. Sadly, some people do not share the sentiment that failure can be just another data point and reward it harshly.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > remember that executive behavior is a by-product of the company culture and environment. Conversely, company culture and environment is a by-product of the executive behavior. The latter probably is a stronger influence in younger, smaller companies, the former stronger in older and larger firms.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    Yep and the company the author worked at was founded by Peter Molyneux who is infamous for dreaming up stuff that's not possible in the real world with real constraints.
    - madrox 10y ago
      That was my thought. Peter has a history of big ideas that have a hard time translating into final products. Those kinds of minds are integral to a great product, but past a certain point it can also be a hinderance

newobj 10y ago

Programming is a craft, game programming even more so. Passion runs high; people will work longer and harder for less money than at other jobs. The competition in the workplace and in the market is intense. Willful moderation can never be applied systemically in this industry. There are two ways out: 1) six sigma industrial engineering type management of your processes, and 2) lucking into a clever idea that's not hard to implement. 1) leads to a safe, if well-loved, game. 2)is great of course, like in the way that hoping you'll win the lottery is great. Might be tempted to add a 3) de-risking by middleware, but all that does is raise the bar for everyone. Good for consumers, not helpful for devs. My opinions are based on working in the game industry for ~6 years, with months of 100 hour weeks under my belt. Stressed to the point of bleeding out of random parts of my body. Just can't see it ever changing. I just lol at unionization.

eru 10y ago
Do people working on game engines licenced so other companies work hours more in line with the rest of the software industry, or more in line with the rest of game development? What about people working on cloud-y games (like WoW) that don't have one big bang release, but have more continuous development?
- newobj 10y ago
  Don't know. I worked in the industry when Quake, Unreal, and if I'm being generous, maybe RenderWare and LithTech, were the only real middleware options, and most people still just rolled their own engines. I ultimately burned out while working on an MMO, so I think the answer to your second question is that it's no different... because the launch is for sure a very, very big bang release.
  - eru 10y ago
    Thanks. I was thinking more after the initial release of the MMO. There's probably also a difference between people closer to the creation of new content (for all the updates and expansion with firm deadlines) and the people keeping the infrastructure running.

fossuser 10y ago

> The consequences for me were devastating. I was briefly prescribed anti-psychotics at my lowest point. I experienced migraines, complete with terrifying tunnel vision, blackouts, severe depression, anxiety, panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations and thought insertion. That sounds pretty terrifying - wonder if there's a way to be resilient to this or if everyone is affected this way given enough time.

newobj 10y ago
I was working on a system that was doing CSG of AI nav meshes. If enough floating point error crept in, eventually the a shared of edge of a navmesh would split apart and you'd be left with the AI walking around non-existent obstructions. Spent an unimaginable amount of time trying to deal with this. One night when I was walking back to my apartment, I walked over a section of the sidewalk that had plywood laying on it. The edges of two pieces of plywood had about an inch gap between them, and I remember my heart jumping in panic as though I was "seeing the bug" again - basically hallucinated my work problem into real life. That was towards the end of working in the game industry...
- chillingeffect 10y ago
  Under good conditions that can be a fun thing. I once spent a whole evening changing parameters, drawing black and white fractal trees. When I walked out into the night, I perceived RL trees as the software would render them. I wonder how much of this overlap goes on without us even realizing it :)
  - newobj 10y ago
    True! Though in this case, after months of fighting the problem, not so fun, and more a sign of my impending mental collapse :P
  - eru 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

Raphmedia 10y ago

I never understood how some people who work in tech have no ability to say no. I understand that passion runs deep but that's no reason to become a slave. There is no way whatsoever that I would work 80 hours a week for an extended period unless I were working on my own startup or company and the time that I invest would benefit me in the future. And even then, I wouldn't do it.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
Because someone else will say yes. Even if you win the battle you'll lose the war. I imagine that's why raising awareness, engaging in public discourse about it and pushing for reform or change industry-wide is a common theme. And you're probably working on games because you're passionate about them so considering the hop over to a job doing $boring_thing vs. crunch time abuse is choosing between a rock and a hard place.
- eru 10y ago
  But not everyone else says yes. Working in software is still a sellers market. If you are any good, you have choices. You are right about working on games. They do bank on people's passions more than in CRUD software.
- prawn 10y ago
  I think the games industry is to males what magazine journalism can be to females. Seen many (including friends) putting in loads of hours and working cheaply, because the competition for spots is so intense.

danso 10y ago

I got into computer programming because I wanted to make video games. By the time i graduated, I no longer had that interest and I don't have any feelings of missing out (though I'm deeply envious of how indie devs like Lucas Pope and Toby Fox -- Papers, Please and Undertale, respectively -- have been able to create such artistic and clever and commercially popular work)...but I would love to experience a standard game dev cycle/crunch. Other types of user-facing software development I can imagine...but how software engineering interacts with the artistic components of development (nevermind playtesting and marketing) is something that seems so different to what I've ever worked on. Side note: Eurogamer had an absolutely epic insider write up of Lionhead...I'm surprised it didn't make front page but it was one of the best things I've ever read about the industry, and I've never played the Fable games https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lionhead:%20The%20inside%20story&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lionhead:%20The%20inside%20sto...

rwallace 10y ago

This is a good example of an important general point: human social instincts are a really huge security vulnerability. The price we pay for adaptability is that we can't have a hardwired instinct of what's normal, so the solution evolution came up with was to program us to take our cue on that from the people around us. The downside is that if we put ourselves in an environment where people are doing bad things - working overtime, doing a PhD, taking drugs, bullying, working for a totalitarian regime, basically anything whatsoever - it won't be long before our brains start telling us it's perfectly normal and finding excuses for the harmful effects. Look at this guy: he admits it ruined his life, but he still thinks it was okay because he liked his initial group of co-workers. Conclusion: do not put yourself in an environment where the people around you are doing bad things. If you are already in such an environment, talk to someone outside it, get their view on the matter, and take it seriously. And if you think you aren't in such an environment, consider doing that anyway as a reality check.

mizzao 10y ago
Doing a PhD...?
- dfabulich 10y ago
  Most PhD programs have negative return on investment, mostly because the academic job market has a glut of postdocs looking for work. ("But but but look at all of my smart grad student friends getting their PhDs! They can't all be doing something irrational, can they?!")
  - mizzao 10y ago
    I guess, if your benchmark for a satisfying life is to maximize discounted future cashflow.
    - smoyer 10y ago
      Maximizing discounted future cash flow often gives you the option of scaling back those hours you're trading for cash. Want more leisure time? Earn more during the hours that you are working!

smoyer 10y ago

I'm having a hard time being sympathetic ... He joined a team that was goofing off, which made it an extremely fun place to work. Wouldn't life be easy without deadlines? So when they actually had to produce something, they were far behind where they should have been. The fault for this situation probably lies with the management but ... as a developer (who's ostensibly getting paid), you should expect to do work at work. He also states that he was sad to see the "Big Blue Box" culture and company disappear. That company would have instead gone out of business if someone (the parent company?) hadn't stepped in and changed things.

harryjo 10y ago
People being jovial doesn't mean they aren't working. It just means they aren't stressed out about deadline or other pressure. The deadline is extrinsic (At best, arbitrary at worst), missing a deadline doesn't mean the product was not getting made.
yitchelle 10y ago
That is also my feeling after reading the article. He almost seems to stress that his best moments at work were the parties and the lunch time football games. Sure they contribute to the well being of a project team, but shouldn't the best moment be shipping the product out the door?
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
He was doing what he was told to do. If that was the wrong thing, it is 100% management's fault.

draw_down 10y ago

I guess this just comes down to a difference of mindset - I work my job because of the concrete benefit I get from it. (Mostly money, but also work schedule, environment, etc.) I'm not interested in being driven to grind my life to dust for a shot at little bit of hero-glory. To be totally honest I hadn't heard of this game or this person before.

tsunamifury 10y ago

I recently spoke to someone who left Apple, who was able to list three people who died on his team due to overwork. Died. People acclimate to awful things when isolated in a monoculture. It is not worth it.

j1o1h1n 10y ago
FWIW, this is a well recognised problem in Japan * http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/11/15/editorials/getting-a-grip-on-karoshi/#.V0_IBfl95hF http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/11/15/editorials/ge...

stcredzero 10y ago

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way ...." -A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens This is very relevant to the Bay Area tech scene. This area literally has the income disparity of a 3rd world country.

reedlaw 10y ago

I don't mean any disrespect to the author or his team but this sounds much like Stockholm syndrome (1). I see symptoms even in many "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" posts. Yes, we work long hours but we play games at lunch. We have snacks and drinks! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

Agentlien 10y ago

Crunch is a serious issue for the entire video game industry. It's only made worse by the idiotic treatment of unhealthy stress and unrealistic deadlines as a badge of honour. In fact, rumours about the terrible way game studios treat their employees, along with a brief firsthand glimpse of it during a summer job, is the reason I didn't immediately go into the game industry after graduating. Despite the fact that I had dedicated myself wholeheartedly towards pursuing a career as a game programmer ever since I was a kid. After 3.5 years working on the development of surgical simulators, I finally took the plunge into the game industry. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made. When I first started working at Ghost Games (an EA studio) I heard a lot of horror stories about the crunch of the previous project. What made me put this aside and take the job was how everyone at the interview spoke sincerely about how crunch is a bad thing, the damage it had done to the studio and all the ongoing efforts to ensure it wouldn't happen again. In the end, the project I joined (the reboot of Need For Speed) finished without anything which could reasonably be called a crunch and I only had to put in a few hours of overtime, including one Saturday. This made me feel so relieved and I'm now looking forward to a long career in this field. Of course, EA has a history of crunch as bad as the next game company, but there is a strong feeling that they've realised that it's a problem and they are doing everything they can to mitigate it. It's simply not good for business to burn through talent at a rapid pace and build a reputation for ruining people's lives.

erikb 10y ago

I don't really understand why people put themselves through that stress without getting a personal equally high payout. I mean, the stress he faced was pretty much as big as the ones startup founders face. But startup founders have a chance to end up rich or with a much bigger business. What could he gain from it? A bonus? And as a side note: If the text about his work sounds like your work, you can gain a lot of more performance, fun and results if you spend some of your time learning more indepth how everything about your job works. The debugging drudges become less once you know enough. And not all of it can be learned just by doing.