6 ms·

Yup, it's an endemic problem that has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry.

Yup, it's an endemic problem that has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry. Ironically if you look at Gamasutra's yearly survey you see a huge cliff of experience right at the ~3 year mark as those people get burned out and the cycle repeats.

ryandrake 9y ago
I think for a lot of these people, they have never worked in any other company and maybe dont even realize work can be done another way. I’d love to ask an actual employee at one of these places: Do you realize crunch time is rare or nonexistent for most other companies? If so, do you stay where you are purely “because games?” I remember joining a particularly toxic company and mentoring one of the junior guys there. It was his first and only job out of school, and he thought work was simply supposed to be toxic—like this was normal.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Sadly I think it's just that they're young and don't have a lot of responsibilities yet so it's easier to take on the brunt of it. I know before I went into the industry it was at a point where crunch was widely known. Heck, some people bragged about it like a badge of honor/rite of passage. A lot of it was maturing and realizing that there are more important things in life then giving every waking hour to a company that may throw you out on the door as soon as the title is shipped(or even sooner). I mentioned it a little further down the thread but I saw 3 different divorces at the last studio I worked at, largely due to spouses just not being there for each other due to the long hours.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    What gets me is that in almost no other industry (besides maybe investment banking) would this mentality even make sense. “Boss had me putting in roof shingles for 16 hours straight with no overtime—it was awesome!” “We had crunch time in the garage for six months where I never saw my family. I’ve finally made it as a real mechanic!” Could you imagine hearing any of that?
    - bluGill 9y ago
      Having been in construction for a while, the only difference in attitude is they get overtime. It was well known that you work the first 40 hours just to get to the big money of overtime. There was plenty of bragging about how many hours you worked and how few days it took to frame a house (our record was 2.5 days on a small cookie cutter house we built a dozen times before). It was also known that you could get a union jobs that paid a little more per hour, but because there was no overtime you made less money (you were not allowed to work overtime, not to be confused with they would illegally cheat your out of your overtime). At the time I couldn't have paid my bills on union a union paycheck, but after overtime I could pay my bills.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Most of the industries that have been that bad have been somewhat curtailed by unionization. Hollywood is the clearest parallel to the Game Industry, and most of their abuse is stopped by unions, where they exist. The current direct parallel in Hollywood right now seems to be the Special Effects/CGI/computer animation shops which currently have an average lifespan of two years, aren't strongly unionized, and see a similar turnover/crunch as the Games Industry.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/
- ethbro 9y ago
  I'd hazard to say (and a lot of this is from some undergrad time in an architecture program) that's an additional factor with younger devs. Undergrad college teaches you to lie to yourself about your productivity. In the sense that time is equated to value (rather than work product being value). Which I think infects a lot of things. If the game can't be delivered on schedule, and butts-in-seats time is perceived as valuable by a company, then instituting death march crunch hours seems reasonable. On the other hand if a company values actual results, and a game can't be delivered on schedule, then it has to make a very different decision: push the schedule or increase people assigned to the project. I'd argue that the end result of crunch is usually pushing the schedule anyway (because either more work can't get done, or sleep deprived work has more bugs), but I can see how the two perspectives would look very different to management. And explain a lot of dysfunction.
thex10 9y ago
> has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it Why is the onus to change the industry on the inexperienced folk (who likely don't know any better) rather than the bosses/leadership who theoretically get paid the big bucks to figure out how to properly run their organizations?
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  Because the bosses/leadership are getting paid the big bucks to keep things as they are. If they felt the need to change things, they would have already. As such, they've felt just fine trading their humanity for money.
- vvanders 9y ago
  The big bucks dudes(to be clear here we're talking about publishers, not developers) are incentivized to keep the status quo. They get a constant stream of new talent that works at sub-par rates. Very few studios are independent at this point so it's rare for any of them to have leverage. Since all the capital is organized around the big publishers unless you have a breakout success(which can be harder than the startup space) they can dictate terms and conditions. There used to be a fun clause where upon studio bankruptcy the code/assets would revert to the publisher. Seems reasonable right? Well what would happen is the publisher would start denying milestones for frivolous things, usually at peak headcount ~4mo from ship. This very quickly puts the studio in the red and they fold since they can't sustain a lawsuit and employ 100+ people while not getting paid. The publisher would then get source+assets, re-hire the team that was suddenly out of a job at 80% rate and ship the game with no royalty clause to the original studio + get IP. That's the kind of exploitation you see in that industry.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    It's very similar to many of the abuses the Hollywood studio system has done over the decades. Hollywood seems to make it clear that the only working answer to making that somewhat sustainable for the talent, for the creative people, for all the people that aren't overpaid executive sharks and don't want to be entirely chewed up and spit out, is to unionize.
ropeadopepope 9y ago
Wow. That's exactly how long I lasted in the video game industry. 3 years.
knuththetruth 9y ago
I think the answer is obviously some kind of labor organization, akin to the various creative "guilds" that already dominate the entertainment industry. Everyone else who works in entertainment already figured out that the execs will run you into the ground without this protection.
scruple 9y ago
> due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry. I mean, I guess. I'm in my late 30s and I just got sucked in to a project that was behind schedule by miles to try to meet an impossible deadline. The expectation seems to be that the 90 hour week I had last week is going to be repeated again this week and, most likely, also next week, come hell or high water, and any sort of common sense or evidence about how short-sighed this effort is be damned. I like my job, for the most part, but this has me considering my options. My point is, I see this as an upper management issue. I can't fault people, including myself, for doing what we have to do to keep the paychecks rolling in, and especially when the power dynamics are as uneven as they are. You are right that younger people (and, also, let's not forget our friends in this industry on work visas) are less capable of dealing with the issue than veterans. But, from my point of view, it's not us who are wrong. Instead, it's the management chain who is unaccountable to their bad planning, poor decision making, etc... who create this situation.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  That's why people are calling for a guild. A way so that developers can push back against this, and not have to worry about being fired.
  - scruple 9y ago
    I'd love to have something of a union to back us up, I honestly don't see any way to improve the situation otherwise.
    - VRay 9y ago
      I think a lot of the HN crowd has enough experience and clout to keep from getting exploited, but I'd personally love to be a part of a large union where I can help mentor junior engineers and get help in turn from more senior ones. I think beyond shared negotiation, what a union could really help with is managing younger engineers' careers. I stuck around in a bad first job way too long because I just didn't have enough experience or exposure to successful engineers to realize how crappy my job really was.
watwut 9y ago
Young people are looking forward to overwork themselves, because older people heroize overworking yourself. Often by bragging how much they worked and exaggerating or leaving out down times or that late night coding was actually 70% beer drinking, often claiming that crunch is necessary or price for good product. And oftentimes by using crunch as argument for why the person who works 90 hours a week should have more say in things. When discussing crunch itself, crunch is talked about as bad. In any other context, it is praised and heroized.

ryandrake 9y ago

I think for a lot of these people, they have never worked in any other company and maybe dont even realize work can be done another way. I’d love to ask an actual employee at one of these places: Do you realize crunch time is rare or nonexistent for most other companies? If so, do you stay where you are purely “because games?” I remember joining a particularly toxic company and mentoring one of the junior guys there. It was his first and only job out of school, and he thought work was simply supposed to be toxic—like this was normal.

vvanders 9y ago
Sadly I think it's just that they're young and don't have a lot of responsibilities yet so it's easier to take on the brunt of it. I know before I went into the industry it was at a point where crunch was widely known. Heck, some people bragged about it like a badge of honor/rite of passage. A lot of it was maturing and realizing that there are more important things in life then giving every waking hour to a company that may throw you out on the door as soon as the title is shipped(or even sooner). I mentioned it a little further down the thread but I saw 3 different divorces at the last studio I worked at, largely due to spouses just not being there for each other due to the long hours.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  What gets me is that in almost no other industry (besides maybe investment banking) would this mentality even make sense. “Boss had me putting in roof shingles for 16 hours straight with no overtime—it was awesome!” “We had crunch time in the garage for six months where I never saw my family. I’ve finally made it as a real mechanic!” Could you imagine hearing any of that?
  - bluGill 9y ago
    Having been in construction for a while, the only difference in attitude is they get overtime. It was well known that you work the first 40 hours just to get to the big money of overtime. There was plenty of bragging about how many hours you worked and how few days it took to frame a house (our record was 2.5 days on a small cookie cutter house we built a dozen times before). It was also known that you could get a union jobs that paid a little more per hour, but because there was no overtime you made less money (you were not allowed to work overtime, not to be confused with they would illegally cheat your out of your overtime). At the time I couldn't have paid my bills on union a union paycheck, but after overtime I could pay my bills.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Most of the industries that have been that bad have been somewhat curtailed by unionization. Hollywood is the clearest parallel to the Game Industry, and most of their abuse is stopped by unions, where they exist. The current direct parallel in Hollywood right now seems to be the Special Effects/CGI/computer animation shops which currently have an average lifespan of two years, aren't strongly unionized, and see a similar turnover/crunch as the Games Industry.
Terr_ 9y ago
https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/
ethbro 9y ago
I'd hazard to say (and a lot of this is from some undergrad time in an architecture program) that's an additional factor with younger devs. Undergrad college teaches you to lie to yourself about your productivity. In the sense that time is equated to value (rather than work product being value). Which I think infects a lot of things. If the game can't be delivered on schedule, and butts-in-seats time is perceived as valuable by a company, then instituting death march crunch hours seems reasonable. On the other hand if a company values actual results, and a game can't be delivered on schedule, then it has to make a very different decision: push the schedule or increase people assigned to the project. I'd argue that the end result of crunch is usually pushing the schedule anyway (because either more work can't get done, or sleep deprived work has more bugs), but I can see how the two perspectives would look very different to management. And explain a lot of dysfunction.

thex10 9y ago

> has no sign of going away due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it Why is the onus to change the industry on the inexperienced folk (who likely don't know any better) rather than the bosses/leadership who theoretically get paid the big bucks to figure out how to properly run their organizations?

s73v3r_ 9y ago
Because the bosses/leadership are getting paid the big bucks to keep things as they are. If they felt the need to change things, they would have already. As such, they've felt just fine trading their humanity for money.
vvanders 9y ago
The big bucks dudes(to be clear here we're talking about publishers, not developers) are incentivized to keep the status quo. They get a constant stream of new talent that works at sub-par rates. Very few studios are independent at this point so it's rare for any of them to have leverage. Since all the capital is organized around the big publishers unless you have a breakout success(which can be harder than the startup space) they can dictate terms and conditions. There used to be a fun clause where upon studio bankruptcy the code/assets would revert to the publisher. Seems reasonable right? Well what would happen is the publisher would start denying milestones for frivolous things, usually at peak headcount ~4mo from ship. This very quickly puts the studio in the red and they fold since they can't sustain a lawsuit and employ 100+ people while not getting paid. The publisher would then get source+assets, re-hire the team that was suddenly out of a job at 80% rate and ship the game with no royalty clause to the original studio + get IP. That's the kind of exploitation you see in that industry.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  It's very similar to many of the abuses the Hollywood studio system has done over the decades. Hollywood seems to make it clear that the only working answer to making that somewhat sustainable for the talent, for the creative people, for all the people that aren't overpaid executive sharks and don't want to be entirely chewed up and spit out, is to unionize.

ropeadopepope 9y ago

Wow. That's exactly how long I lasted in the video game industry. 3 years.

knuththetruth 9y ago

I think the answer is obviously some kind of labor organization, akin to the various creative "guilds" that already dominate the entertainment industry. Everyone else who works in entertainment already figured out that the execs will run you into the ground without this protection.

scruple 9y ago

> due to the constant influx of young people willing to take it on the nose to get into the industry. I mean, I guess. I'm in my late 30s and I just got sucked in to a project that was behind schedule by miles to try to meet an impossible deadline. The expectation seems to be that the 90 hour week I had last week is going to be repeated again this week and, most likely, also next week, come hell or high water, and any sort of common sense or evidence about how short-sighed this effort is be damned. I like my job, for the most part, but this has me considering my options. My point is, I see this as an upper management issue. I can't fault people, including myself, for doing what we have to do to keep the paychecks rolling in, and especially when the power dynamics are as uneven as they are. You are right that younger people (and, also, let's not forget our friends in this industry on work visas) are less capable of dealing with the issue than veterans. But, from my point of view, it's not us who are wrong. Instead, it's the management chain who is unaccountable to their bad planning, poor decision making, etc... who create this situation.

s73v3r_ 9y ago
That's why people are calling for a guild. A way so that developers can push back against this, and not have to worry about being fired.
- scruple 9y ago
  I'd love to have something of a union to back us up, I honestly don't see any way to improve the situation otherwise.
  - VRay 9y ago
    I think a lot of the HN crowd has enough experience and clout to keep from getting exploited, but I'd personally love to be a part of a large union where I can help mentor junior engineers and get help in turn from more senior ones. I think beyond shared negotiation, what a union could really help with is managing younger engineers' careers. I stuck around in a bad first job way too long because I just didn't have enough experience or exposure to successful engineers to realize how crappy my job really was.

watwut 9y ago

Young people are looking forward to overwork themselves, because older people heroize overworking yourself. Often by bragging how much they worked and exaggerating or leaving out down times or that late night coding was actually 70% beer drinking, often claiming that crunch is necessary or price for good product. And oftentimes by using crunch as argument for why the person who works 90 hours a week should have more say in things. When discussing crunch itself, crunch is talked about as bad. In any other context, it is praised and heroized.