4 ms·

How do you end crunch? Teams always work at a more relaxed pace when the deadlines are years out. You can't beat Parkinson's law no matter how generous you are

How do you end crunch? Teams always work at a more relaxed pace when the deadlines are years out. You can't beat Parkinson's law no matter how generous you are with the estimates. We've all tried methodologies to counter this problem and create a continuous, sustainable pace. Unfortunately there's something deep in human nature that prevents us spreading that effort out evenly from day one.

Insanity 4mo ago
The games industry is notorious for this, yet far from the only industry working against deadlines. Deadlines are a good way to timebox work, but they need to be set in a realistic way rather than an optimized happy-path. I do understand there are certain periods where games _should_ release to make more sales, and for most games that's probably true. But this is GTA VI, they can miss the launch window by a month and it'd probably hardly impact their sales.
- SpaceNoodled 4mo ago
  They've missed their launch window by years now.
  - Insanity 4mo ago
    I mean the ideal sales window within a year, e.g period leading up to Christmas.
    - kbenson 4mo ago
      Of which year? GTA6 has been in development so long they could miss that period slightly in a year and decide to wait for the next year and polish it up and they likely wouldn't run out of things to fix or make better.
- walthamstow 4mo ago
  Movies are just as bad, animation and vfx shops get crunched to hell. Fashion houses ahead of fashion week too.
- cineticdaffodil 4mo ago
  Well, GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten, so after the first crunch, ever more crunch to get the 2nd attempt to the finnishing line.
  - csallen 4mo ago
    > GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten How do you know? This sounds like an unverified rumor.
    - slumberlust 4mo ago
      I agree this is unsubstantiated. I follow NXL and Giantbomb and havent heard thus reported.
- socalgal2 4mo ago
  GTA6 in isolation is not the issue. Coordination with the entire rest of the ecosystem is. Ads are bought and paid for 6 month before launch for certain time slots. Store shelf space is reserved. Miss the deadlines and those downstream companies suffer. Their promotion time slots / space, is unbooked and it's too late to fill it with something appropriate. So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by November". They make this promise in April. Don't deliver and they don't do business with you next time. Maybe GTV6 is an exception here, that doesn't change the general point. You could try to argue that companies shouldn't even start that process until the project is finished. Step 1: finish project, Step 2: book ads/shelf space, Step 3: 6 months later, ship it. But sitting on a finished project for 6 months is like not investing your money for 6 months. A lot of money is lost. Money can comes out of salaries
  - spopejoy 4mo ago
    > Store shelf space is reserved I thought this would be over by now, I certainly haven't bought physical this decade. Who is buying physical, parents of young kids?
  - kbenson 4mo ago
    > So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by November". They make this promise in April. Make smaller promises but make them more often, and shit changes more often. Be clear about features 3-6 releases out, and when and why features get bumped. Companies delivering software are already doing this because they often can't deliver in 6 months and telling the customer it will be in the nest release a year from now does, as you note, make them stop doing business with you, so instead now you can tell them it's just delayed by a few months which they can maybe deal with. Games don't really work like this, but games also don't seem to really work the same way at all and have different incentives.
  - kelnos 4mo ago
    The downstream stakeholders (ad networks, retailers, etc.) need to be more flexible and tolerant of these events. If they had to deal with them regularly, they already would be. There's no law of nature that says things have to work exactly this way. Meanwhile we have software devs and artists and product people damaging their mental health and suffering burnout for this. It's a video game. It's not worth it.
cyberax 4mo ago
> How do you end crunch? Two words: overtime pay. This makes crunches disappear as if by magic.
- nightski 4mo ago
  I'm confused, wouldn't this incentivize crunch? You could make a lot more money that way.
  - hnaccount141 4mo ago
    Typically overtime pay requires approval from management
    - nightski 4mo ago
      I don't think they are in a place to deny it if they are fighting a video game launch deadline.
      - gmadsen 4mo ago
        It aligns incentives to reduce crunch as much as is feasible
      - xmprt 4mo ago
        When management needs to pay more for crunch then it will prove whether the deadline is real or fake. eg. If we don't meet this deadline will it materially affect the business... or is it not really needed and it's better to save on the overtime pay.
  - cyberax 4mo ago
    It will incentivize the management to prohibit working overtime and/or hire more people.
- Jach 4mo ago
  Many game studios have overtime pay and yet still crunch.
jachee 4mo ago
Easy: No one should do unpaid labor. Period. “Crunch time” has traditionally been deployed by games management as a license to free slave labor from game developers. Failures of management’s planning are imposed as emergencies on the devs.
- ETH_start 4mo ago
  Employees are idle during a lot of company time too. There's give and take on both sides.
  - jachee 4mo ago
    No. Management will take and take and take during “crunch time” then immediately layoff large chunks of staff before they give anything back. It’s happened scores of times. No company is as loyal to its labor as it expects labor to be to it.
    - ETH_start 4mo ago
      And employees will take and take when not tightly supervised. How could you even begin to deny this?
      - jachee 4mo ago
        That is a management failure. And a management failure should not result in unpaid (slave) labor.
        ETH_start 4mo ago
        It's a contract violation by the worker. Even if no one's watching them, they promise to do labor for the money that they receive. And then when they don't do the work during the time that they're supposed to be working, they still get paid for it. That's theft against the employer.
retired 4mo ago
Change videogames so they aren't big-bang releases but make them monthly releases. Building a piece software for years and then releasing it all in once reminds me of the 1990s. Nowadays we continuously deliver. Euro Truck Simulator 2 works with that model. Every few months they release a new part of the European map. And every few months they release new truck models.
jayd16 4mo ago
Hourly pay rate with OT. That'll clear up the crunch or at least compensate the workers.
- Xunjin 4mo ago
  The world is not that simple, let's say you do pay overtimes, the salary in this industry is already low, will that be worth it to the employee?
  - kelnos 4mo ago
    I mean, that's what collective bargaining is for, no? Get the hourly rate and overtime terms to a level that the employees are happy with.
saghm 4mo ago
I've spent the last 5 years or so (out of a career coming up on 11 years at the end of this summer) working on early development for products outside of the video game industry that hadn't yet been at release when I joined the team, and somehow none of them have ever made me crunch. The better question is why companies making video games so overwhelmingly make their devs crunch when it does not seem to happen anywhere close to as often anywhere else in tech even when the release timelines are similar. I'm sure some people might argue that there's something inherent in the economics of video games that forces it, but demands for more fair labor practices have historically always been met with protests that it would be impossible for companies to survive if they were adopted, and yet somehow we managed not to run into total economic collapse by banning child labor, mandating 40-hour workweek, etc. It seems far more likely that management does it because they've been able to get away with it so far, and unionizing is has generally been a pretty effective way for labor to stop letting them get away with unfair labor practices (hence why management is always so aggressively against it).
magguzu 4mo ago
Don't reveal super far away release dates.
kelnos 4mo ago
> How do you end crunch? You (as an employer) accept one of two things: either 1) scope is reduced when you get closer to the deadline and find that you are behind, or 2) deadlines will have to be moved. It's not like other industries, or even other software companies don't have deadlines and feature sets they want. And some of them do have a form of crunch that I equally rebel against. (I've never worked at a company where we had several months of crunch, though; at most it was a couple weeks.) They end up doing fine, dropping features from the first release, or pushing the release date out if they have to. These are video games. No one should be ruining their mental health or getting burned out because a corporation decided they need to ship exactly their vision on a particular date.

Insanity 4mo ago

The games industry is notorious for this, yet far from the only industry working against deadlines. Deadlines are a good way to timebox work, but they need to be set in a realistic way rather than an optimized happy-path. I do understand there are certain periods where games _should_ release to make more sales, and for most games that's probably true. But this is GTA VI, they can miss the launch window by a month and it'd probably hardly impact their sales.

SpaceNoodled 4mo ago
They've missed their launch window by years now.
- Insanity 4mo ago
  I mean the ideal sales window within a year, e.g period leading up to Christmas.
  - kbenson 4mo ago
    Of which year? GTA6 has been in development so long they could miss that period slightly in a year and decide to wait for the next year and polish it up and they likely wouldn't run out of things to fix or make better.
walthamstow 4mo ago
Movies are just as bad, animation and vfx shops get crunched to hell. Fashion houses ahead of fashion week too.
cineticdaffodil 4mo ago
Well, GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten, so after the first crunch, ever more crunch to get the 2nd attempt to the finnishing line.
- csallen 4mo ago
  > GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten How do you know? This sounds like an unverified rumor.
  - slumberlust 4mo ago
    I agree this is unsubstantiated. I follow NXL and Giantbomb and havent heard thus reported.
socalgal2 4mo ago
GTA6 in isolation is not the issue. Coordination with the entire rest of the ecosystem is. Ads are bought and paid for 6 month before launch for certain time slots. Store shelf space is reserved. Miss the deadlines and those downstream companies suffer. Their promotion time slots / space, is unbooked and it's too late to fill it with something appropriate. So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by November". They make this promise in April. Don't deliver and they don't do business with you next time. Maybe GTV6 is an exception here, that doesn't change the general point. You could try to argue that companies shouldn't even start that process until the project is finished. Step 1: finish project, Step 2: book ads/shelf space, Step 3: 6 months later, ship it. But sitting on a finished project for 6 months is like not investing your money for 6 months. A lot of money is lost. Money can comes out of salaries
- spopejoy 4mo ago
  > Store shelf space is reserved I thought this would be over by now, I certainly haven't bought physical this decade. Who is buying physical, parents of young kids?
- kbenson 4mo ago
  > So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by November". They make this promise in April. Make smaller promises but make them more often, and shit changes more often. Be clear about features 3-6 releases out, and when and why features get bumped. Companies delivering software are already doing this because they often can't deliver in 6 months and telling the customer it will be in the nest release a year from now does, as you note, make them stop doing business with you, so instead now you can tell them it's just delayed by a few months which they can maybe deal with. Games don't really work like this, but games also don't seem to really work the same way at all and have different incentives.
- kelnos 4mo ago
  The downstream stakeholders (ad networks, retailers, etc.) need to be more flexible and tolerant of these events. If they had to deal with them regularly, they already would be. There's no law of nature that says things have to work exactly this way. Meanwhile we have software devs and artists and product people damaging their mental health and suffering burnout for this. It's a video game. It's not worth it.

cyberax 4mo ago

> How do you end crunch? Two words: overtime pay. This makes crunches disappear as if by magic.

nightski 4mo ago
I'm confused, wouldn't this incentivize crunch? You could make a lot more money that way.
- hnaccount141 4mo ago
  Typically overtime pay requires approval from management
  - nightski 4mo ago
    I don't think they are in a place to deny it if they are fighting a video game launch deadline.
    - gmadsen 4mo ago
      It aligns incentives to reduce crunch as much as is feasible
    - xmprt 4mo ago
      When management needs to pay more for crunch then it will prove whether the deadline is real or fake. eg. If we don't meet this deadline will it materially affect the business... or is it not really needed and it's better to save on the overtime pay.
- cyberax 4mo ago
  It will incentivize the management to prohibit working overtime and/or hire more people.
Jach 4mo ago
Many game studios have overtime pay and yet still crunch.

jachee 4mo ago

Easy: No one should do unpaid labor. Period. “Crunch time” has traditionally been deployed by games management as a license to free slave labor from game developers. Failures of management’s planning are imposed as emergencies on the devs.

ETH_start 4mo ago
Employees are idle during a lot of company time too. There's give and take on both sides.
- jachee 4mo ago
  No. Management will take and take and take during “crunch time” then immediately layoff large chunks of staff before they give anything back. It’s happened scores of times. No company is as loyal to its labor as it expects labor to be to it.
  - ETH_start 4mo ago
    And employees will take and take when not tightly supervised. How could you even begin to deny this?
    - jachee 4mo ago
      That is a management failure. And a management failure should not result in unpaid (slave) labor.
      - ETH_start 4mo ago
        It's a contract violation by the worker. Even if no one's watching them, they promise to do labor for the money that they receive. And then when they don't do the work during the time that they're supposed to be working, they still get paid for it. That's theft against the employer.

retired 4mo ago

Change videogames so they aren't big-bang releases but make them monthly releases. Building a piece software for years and then releasing it all in once reminds me of the 1990s. Nowadays we continuously deliver. Euro Truck Simulator 2 works with that model. Every few months they release a new part of the European map. And every few months they release new truck models.

jayd16 4mo ago

Hourly pay rate with OT. That'll clear up the crunch or at least compensate the workers.

Xunjin 4mo ago
The world is not that simple, let's say you do pay overtimes, the salary in this industry is already low, will that be worth it to the employee?
- kelnos 4mo ago
  I mean, that's what collective bargaining is for, no? Get the hourly rate and overtime terms to a level that the employees are happy with.

saghm 4mo ago

I've spent the last 5 years or so (out of a career coming up on 11 years at the end of this summer) working on early development for products outside of the video game industry that hadn't yet been at release when I joined the team, and somehow none of them have ever made me crunch. The better question is why companies making video games so overwhelmingly make their devs crunch when it does not seem to happen anywhere close to as often anywhere else in tech even when the release timelines are similar. I'm sure some people might argue that there's something inherent in the economics of video games that forces it, but demands for more fair labor practices have historically always been met with protests that it would be impossible for companies to survive if they were adopted, and yet somehow we managed not to run into total economic collapse by banning child labor, mandating 40-hour workweek, etc. It seems far more likely that management does it because they've been able to get away with it so far, and unionizing is has generally been a pretty effective way for labor to stop letting them get away with unfair labor practices (hence why management is always so aggressively against it).

magguzu 4mo ago

Don't reveal super far away release dates.

kelnos 4mo ago

> How do you end crunch? You (as an employer) accept one of two things: either 1) scope is reduced when you get closer to the deadline and find that you are behind, or 2) deadlines will have to be moved. It's not like other industries, or even other software companies don't have deadlines and feature sets they want. And some of them do have a form of crunch that I equally rebel against. (I've never worked at a company where we had several months of crunch, though; at most it was a couple weeks.) They end up doing fine, dropping features from the first release, or pushing the release date out if they have to. These are video games. No one should be ruining their mental health or getting burned out because a corporation decided they need to ship exactly their vision on a particular date.