3 ms·
Third. Happened to me on my first real gig. Weekends, nights, 4 all nighters in a row. Not a game company, but ad agency.
by seivan 14y ago
Third.
Happened to me on my first real gig.
Weekends, nights, 4 all nighters in a row.
Not a game company, but ad agency.
- derefr 14y agoI kind of wonder: what happens to people who start work at a game company, but just clock 9-5 and stubbornly refuse to work more? Are they fired, shunned, badmouthed in the industry? I never hear about them--kind of like I never hear about lazy medical interns, I guess.
- jacquesm 14y agoIt tends to suck you up. You might go there with the intention to do 9-5, but as a project starts to take shape and the deadline looms you can't help but try to do as good as you can and then a little more. I think if you can't stand high pressure environments then you will self-select for something a little bit more leisurely paced. Surely there are such people in the game industry, it's even possible that whole companies can operate on a 9-5 schedule, just my bad luck that I haven't seen any :)
- wtracy 14y agoI don't know what's normal across the game industry, but I know that Valve uses a stack-ranking system: Every year, the least-productive 10-20% of the company gets fired.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoDo you have a source for that? Gaben is an ex-microsoftie, and I doubt he would repeat their mistakes verbatim.
- wtracy 14y agoThe Valve New Employee Handbook: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dualogy 14y agoOh, they figured out how to measure "productivity" in a largely creative line of work? Surely they're not measuring LoC #s?
- derefr 14y agoRecalling another HN article I read on Valve's process, and what Microsoft's own stack-ranking system is like, I think the parent's use of "ranking" is/was literal: each employee lists all the other employees in order of what they think their productivity is. These ranking-vectors are then multiplied together to give an average ranking. So nothing is being "measured" any more than polling the populace about the length of the Emperor's nose is "measuring" it. It's more a way of saying, the justifiably least-popular 10-20% are fired.
- iso-8859-1 14y agoIt sounds absolutely terrible. What prevents the organization from being filled with evil people just supporting one another? How come a organization filled with quiet hard-working people doesn't outmatch them?
- da3da 14y agoNo, they are ranked by their peers.