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I think games are fundamentally different than web apps in a couple of ways. (1) There tends to be times where having the product ready is much more profitable

I think games are fundamentally different than web apps in a couple of ways. (1) There tends to be times where having the product ready is much more profitable than other times (holiday season) (2) It's a lot harder to rev games. The end result is you often end up on death march slogs. And unfortnately the state of project management is that they're surprisingly hard to avoid. Part of the reason is human nature. If we honestly schedule everything out and see it will take 12 months, it will take longer. Because at month 8 it will look like we have three weeks of work left -- to everyone but the project manager and a senior dev or two -- who realize that there is still an honest to goodness four months of work left. On paper it doesn't look like four months of work, but it is (especially because a lot of things are fixing bugs to things that you don't know yet are broken). So what happens is the pace dev starts to slow down. People start taking vacation, or three day weekends. Before you know it, its month 11 and you're further behind than you were at month 8! WTF!? You can't just ship the game with this quality. Characters disappearing, levels not loading every other time you play them, etc... A web app you could, and just fix it over the next three months. With a game, while you can service it, its a lot harder, and day 1 reviews are super important -- a 70% metacritic score means no one will even care that you serviced it. I'm not saying death marches are a good thing. But I've seen that in certain industries they do seem harder to avoid.

gnosis 15y ago
"I'm not saying death marches are a good thing. But I've seen that in certain industries they do seem harder to avoid." How hard they are to avoid depends entirely on how good the management is at coming up with excuses for them and at using carrots and sticks, and on how gullible and desperate their developers are.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. But if you look at certain industries, like web startups, death marches are almost the complete culture. Try to be employee #1 of a YC startup while being upfront that you work 40 hours a week, period. Not going to happen in many cases. The death march starts on day one in this industry.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    "in many cases" being the operative term there. How many YC startups would kill to get Steve Jobs to work even 1 hour a week for them as employee #1? It's all about perceived value and negotiation. If your company values you enough, they will not make you work unreasonable hours. And if a non-workaholic employee values himself enough, he will not agree to work unreasonable hours. Death marches are definitely a pathology in the computer industry, as they are in the medical field, where residents are forced to work insanely long shifts without sleep. In both cases, people's mental and physical well being is put at risk, the chance of burnout increases, and the quality of the results suffers. It does not have to be this way. What will it take for management to stop understaffing and overworking their employees? And how long will employees consent to being worked in to an early grave? Companies pulling this sort of crap is what really makes me wish the computer field had some effective unions that could collectively bargain for reasonable hours for reasonable pay. I know I'd join in a heartbeat.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      It does not have to be this way. It doesn't, but it will be. :-) I worked on bug, almost full time, about a decade ago, for about a month. A single bug. I hadn't anticipated the bug, and didn't plan for it. I've seen teams spend months trying to hit perf targets. It's the type of thing that isn't uncommon in our industry. I'm not sure how you plan for it. What will it take for management to stop understaffing and overworking their employees? Many tmies its not understaffing. Again, I've seen teams struggle to hit perf targets. If you doubled the size of the team it wouldn't make their lives much easier. It may even make it worse. Our industry is one where you are fundamentally solving new problems (because if someone else solved it, you'd use their code). Now maybe you're saying we need to toss schedules altogether. Things are done when they're done -- and no crunch time. You do it with 40 hours/week for however long it takes. I'd love to see that dream happen to, but I honestly don't think it ever will.
Lewisham 15y ago
I know where you're coming from, and what you're saying is currently true, I do however fundamentally believe that the death march is not a given. It is a choice that the games industry has made because it: a) Doesn't know any better b) Doesn't care enough to change (there are always hungry young fresh graduates to replace those old guys who keep complaining about not seeing their children grow up) It's partly a process thing, and it's partly a technology thing. I'm researching game testing [1]. Perhaps if we can get game testing to be better, we might end up with better processes, such as how TDD helps other software domains. Same goes for other technologies leading to other better processes. Lots of really complicated software gets made every day, but only the games industry really uses terms like "crunch time" and "hero" and "oh thanks for finishing Red Dead Redemption after months of crunch time, here's your pink slip [2]." It has to mature, at some point, I just don't know when that will be. [1] http://www.zenetproject.com http://www.zenetproject.com [2] http://www.next-gen.biz/news/rockstar-san-diego-confirms-layoffs http://www.next-gen.biz/news/rockstar-san-diego-confirms-lay...

gnosis 15y ago

"I'm not saying death marches are a good thing. But I've seen that in certain industries they do seem harder to avoid." How hard they are to avoid depends entirely on how good the management is at coming up with excuses for them and at using carrots and sticks, and on how gullible and desperate their developers are.

kenjackson 15y ago
I'm not sure that's true. But if you look at certain industries, like web startups, death marches are almost the complete culture. Try to be employee #1 of a YC startup while being upfront that you work 40 hours a week, period. Not going to happen in many cases. The death march starts on day one in this industry.
- gnosis 15y ago
  "in many cases" being the operative term there. How many YC startups would kill to get Steve Jobs to work even 1 hour a week for them as employee #1? It's all about perceived value and negotiation. If your company values you enough, they will not make you work unreasonable hours. And if a non-workaholic employee values himself enough, he will not agree to work unreasonable hours. Death marches are definitely a pathology in the computer industry, as they are in the medical field, where residents are forced to work insanely long shifts without sleep. In both cases, people's mental and physical well being is put at risk, the chance of burnout increases, and the quality of the results suffers. It does not have to be this way. What will it take for management to stop understaffing and overworking their employees? And how long will employees consent to being worked in to an early grave? Companies pulling this sort of crap is what really makes me wish the computer field had some effective unions that could collectively bargain for reasonable hours for reasonable pay. I know I'd join in a heartbeat.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    It does not have to be this way. It doesn't, but it will be. :-) I worked on bug, almost full time, about a decade ago, for about a month. A single bug. I hadn't anticipated the bug, and didn't plan for it. I've seen teams spend months trying to hit perf targets. It's the type of thing that isn't uncommon in our industry. I'm not sure how you plan for it. What will it take for management to stop understaffing and overworking their employees? Many tmies its not understaffing. Again, I've seen teams struggle to hit perf targets. If you doubled the size of the team it wouldn't make their lives much easier. It may even make it worse. Our industry is one where you are fundamentally solving new problems (because if someone else solved it, you'd use their code). Now maybe you're saying we need to toss schedules altogether. Things are done when they're done -- and no crunch time. You do it with 40 hours/week for however long it takes. I'd love to see that dream happen to, but I honestly don't think it ever will.

Lewisham 15y ago

I know where you're coming from, and what you're saying is currently true, I do however fundamentally believe that the death march is not a given. It is a choice that the games industry has made because it: a) Doesn't know any better b) Doesn't care enough to change (there are always hungry young fresh graduates to replace those old guys who keep complaining about not seeing their children grow up) It's partly a process thing, and it's partly a technology thing. I'm researching game testing [1]. Perhaps if we can get game testing to be better, we might end up with better processes, such as how TDD helps other software domains. Same goes for other technologies leading to other better processes. Lots of really complicated software gets made every day, but only the games industry really uses terms like "crunch time" and "hero" and "oh thanks for finishing Red Dead Redemption after months of crunch time, here's your pink slip [2]." It has to mature, at some point, I just don't know when that will be. [1] http://www.zenetproject.com http://www.zenetproject.com [2] http://www.next-gen.biz/news/rockstar-san-diego-confirms-layoffs http://www.next-gen.biz/news/rockstar-san-diego-confirms-lay...