3 ms·

This is a little misleading title. He didn’t crunch for 20 years, but point still valid. Just wondering how much crunch there in game dev vs startup vs FB/Goo

• racer-v 8y ago
  It depends on the startup. If it's well run, you aren't working late every night and every weekend. If it's run by sociopaths who want to keep their employees in a state of perpetual crisis in order to maximize the value of their shares, it's pretty awful.
• munificent 8y ago
  I worked at EA before and at Google now. EA got better over time (and I worked to avoid game teams where crunch was worse), but I had patches of bad crunch. My longest was 9 months of 60+ hour weeks, 6 days a week, 10+ hours a day. Outside of that, I had a couple of more intense shorter crunches. A couple of 80+ weeks. At Google, I don't believe I have ever once worked more than 50 hours in a single week. 99% of the time, I'm right at 40. If I stay a bit later, the office looks like a ghost town by 6:30.
• stevenwoo 8y ago
  I worked 80 hours a week at a startup for about six months where we weren't sure we were getting paid unless we shipped to customers so we had to get things done but I was the only programmer at that time. I worked 12 months in 70+ hours a week crunch on one game project (I found documentation here https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131533/postmortem_blizzards_diablo_ii.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131533/postmortem_bli...) - remember the motivation speech was we had to finish or we were all getting fired but I never felt like it was ever as hard as the startup - it was a larger team effort so I was hardly ever the one thing holding up progress. YMMV.
  • raarts 8y ago
    > six months where we weren’t sure we were getting paid unless we shipped Don't do this unless you own significant shares
    • stevenwoo 8y ago
      Yes, great advice, don't kill yourself unless you have skin in the game.
  • timavr 8y ago
    I remember the leads doing promo videos before the launch and they looked like zombies.