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[Frozenprince]

In every job I've had in my career we've always actively pushed crunch and its always led to a sup par product being launched because of obvious work being done in a slap dash "just get this shit out the door" manner.

Half my job is routinely fixing the after effects of crunch on our launches.

 

[Calabi]

I don't understand how anyone read that article and took it as a ringing or positive endorsement for Crunch. His life is ruined and he's still addicted to the high.

There is no resolution to the problem, it's an acknowledgment of his flawed, broken psychological state.

It's something to acknowledge as a reaction to being a "work martyr," and something that needs to be spelled out with the results to understand what not to do.

The industry conditions and exploits these kinds of people who then in turn continue the tradition of burning their teams out. The zealots and addicts become the managers and leads who inflict pain on their underlings in order to finally accomplish their unrequited creative visions.

Yeah that's what I thought. I read it as ironic. Its not endorsing the problem, its telling it from the inside how these people at the bocttom try to justify it. It really slathers on the sleezyness of it to highlight the ridiculousness and why you wouldn't want to do it.

 

[TransTrender]

I hope this book doesn't give management or executives any bad ideas because they'll try to spin this in to a positive. He'll probably sell a bunch of copies but boy do I disagree with him. Everyone I know that's works in gaming, both above the line and below the line, freaking hate crunch.

 

[Clunker]

Employers regularly exploit the "passion" of their employees in order to extract longer hours, lower pay, fewer vacation days, fewer benefits, etc. Employers make it seem like they're doing their employees a "favor" by enabling them to do what they love, despite the obvious drawbacks to quality of life.

Some employees unfortunately buy into that fantasy. If some people didn't buy into it, employers wouldn't keep doing this. Exploiting passion is especially insidious in creative industries.

This whole sad debacle (and reading this, I don't feel angry or anything - I just feel sad) reminds me of the harsh blowback Fiverr got when it launched its new ad campaign that championed workaholics. It's genuinely upsetting when people get so addicted to unhealthily-high-stress work environments that their sense of "normal work load" becomes calibrated up to "backbreaking and inhuman." My wife, who works in graphic design, sees this a lot and honestly falls victim to it more than I'm comfortable with.

As the New Yorker writer puts it so eloquently, speaking about how Lyft was celebrating a female driver who had the "go-getter" mentality of picking up and completing a paid drive while going into fucking labor:

Perhaps, as Lyft suggests, Mary kept accepting riders while experiencing contractions because “she was still a week away from her due date,” or “she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet.” Or maybe Mary kept accepting riders because the gig economy has further normalized the circumstances in which earning an extra eleven dollars can feel more important than seeking out the urgent medical care that these quasi-employers do not sponsor. In the other version of Mary’s story, she’s an unprotected worker in precarious circumstances.

...

It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news.

A ton of creative industries thrive on young 20-somethings willing to work for peanuts and put in 70-80 hour workweeks because they can. But that shit isn't tenable.

 

[Fafalada]

I sure as hell hope so otherwise what sort of shoddy software development management are you running?

When deadlines hit, process "overhead" - retrospectives, time-tracking, proper sprint planning etc. is usually one of the first things to suffer. And that's assuming it was there in the first place.

Mind you the problem is systemic in nature - it can't be solved just by pointing at productivity charts (I've been through that too).

 

[Chozoman]

We must not forget the lessons of the EA Spouse.

 

[BetterThanNothing]

Don't know how it is for other fields, but the vast majority of preventable costs for a product in software development(across the board, so video games included) are those that are a direct result of maintenance that is almost always a result of a mismanagement of time and expectations. Crunch only makes this worse, especially in an industry where launch days are so crucial to the adaption of the product. Ship a broken game and see your reputation stained well beyond the point where the issues being criticized are fixed. Bad news spreads faster and sticks longer than good news. No one cares that you patched something that should have been fixed in the first place.

Moral issues aside(destruction of social life and health, the inevitable burnout that comes from frequent overwork, etc), there are very substantial mounds of evidence that point to the issues of 'crunch'. It's almost always bad. Resource management is where the problem lies. People wouldn't have to work 80 hour weeks of grueling technical difficulty if managers were more practiced in meeting deadlines.

 

[Fafalada]

People wouldn't have to work 80 hour weeks of grueling technical difficulty if managers were more practiced in meeting deadlines.

No amount of project management can get around situations where a mandated scope changes to 4x the original plan, on a deadline that's half of the time you'd reasonably want for original scope.
It's not that working 80hour weeks helps much there either - but people are good at convincing themselves it does.

 

[Pachael]

I read the article and can relate a lot, unfortunately. That said I'm more interested to see where this goes because of the below (and to continue the ND discussion)

I read this entire book last week: It's raw and fascinating. This excerpt does not do it justice, and it's hurt by the headline/lack of context. It's clear by the end of the book that crunch is harmful and that the author has a lot of demons he's struggling with.

EDIT: Just saw Tim's tweet. Gets me thinking about Broken Age again and the team's struggle in getting the game out / bugfixed / scoped sufficiently, especially when the budget realities hit and they split the game into two parts.

 

[Videospel]

We must not forget the lessons of the EA Spouse.

Thanks, that was an interesting read. I know this is a common practice, but what I don't get is why you can't just leave work at 5 pm? Could they fire you if you don't stay until 11 pm or whatever they demand? I'm pretty sure you didn't sign that contract.

 

[TrebuchetGames]

Crunch too much and its definitely dangerous and not good for your health. I work in the UK where crunch is not as bad as the USA (from what I've read/heard). But even working a few months or a month or crunch can really affect your ability to work effectively.

The more years you do it, the less you want to do it especially if there is a lack of reward for doing it. The problem was always the younger people coming in who would do 7 days a week and not go home because they were young and didn't have a family (or the single people in the team). The older you got, the smarter you become but then are looked bad upon because you only did 50 or 60 hours in a week.... lol.

Very glad those times are over.

 

[Zombegoast]

Oh yes the fun of having to make a game in 3 months as my final project for college and staying up until 4am every Monday to turn in our work.

 

[Masonica33]

I thought this was pretty good. I'm a musician, and I can't say I've ever crunched as hard as anyone in the games industry ever has, but I've experienced a few month long crunches. I find it exhilarating. I love having a reason to detach from every other human expectation of me aside from delivering quality, powerful art.
I empathise with this guy's entire vibe. I am an intensely self-destructive person, and crunch too is destructive, but it's a destructive energy that is also highly creative and focused. I live for it.

 

[Reg]

Why won't anybody think of the shareholders?!?

 

[Chozoman]

Thanks, that was an interesting read. I know this is a common practice, but what I don't get is why you can't just leave work at 5 pm? Could they fire you if you don't stay until 11 pm or whatever they demand? I'm pretty sure you didn't sign that contract.

Most contracts will have some verbiage related to overtime and the need to work extra. It's usually worded so vaguely, that it can be taken any way.

It becomes a social pressure thing. If EVERYONE is there for crunch, it's difficult to just be like, "5:00, see you guys tomorrow!"

It is also an accepted practice for the industry, (thankfully not at my current job), so people just gear up for it and bite the bullet.

Finally, you want to assist your team. You want to complete your passion project. You have to placate the publisher/higher ups.

The take away is that it's a toxic practice that speaks to poor planning/estimating and generally leads to more problems than it solves.