[vvanders]

Nope, nope, fuck you.

Voluntary crunch leads to a culture of overtime. You won't be considered a "team player" if you decide that you don't want to spend weekends and extra hours in an industry where you make 40% less than your peers.

I feel even stronger about this after having a kid. There's no way I'm destroying the relationship I have with my family for your product. I saw it again and again when I was in the industry(at least 3 divorces on the last project I worked on) and I'll never go back.

[vvanders]

Also there's solid data against crunch. I've posted the game outcome project before. They sampled hundreds of developers and found a very negative correlation with crunch.

He's true that voluntary crunch is less worse than mandatory but it still has a negative impact.

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20141216/232023/The_Ga...

[fenomas]

This level of hate is unfounded - the author specifically condemns the kind of situation you're describing. He's arguing that teams must maintain a culture of normal working hours, to keep energy and morale high even into the project's final weeks, just in case a brief crunch becomes unavoidable.

Unless you're saying that you saw three divorces caused by a project where nobody worked any overtime until the last few weeks, you're attacking a straw man here.

[vvanders]

Not quite, from the article:

> Perma-crunch is stupid and destructive, but voluntary crunch by people who are trying to push the medium is a good thing. Hard work is not bad or evil. Great things can happen when you’re willing to push.

The thing with voluntary crunch is it becomes institutionalized and part of your company culture. If you don't pitch in you're managed down and out since there's always some poor soul willing to do your job.

At least until they burn out in 3 years(look up the Gamasutra GameDev Salary, average tenure is just under 3 years).

That said some of the best people we hire are ex-gamedev.

In the industry you're trying to find the intersection of sane hours, good pay and stability. If you're in the top 5% of studios you might find that but a large majority of people never even see one of those 3 things.

[trhway]

>The thing with voluntary crunch is it becomes institutionalized and part of your company culture.

Just say No. What i like about voluntary crunch is that it is voluntary. At the current job we don't have them - it is a BigCo after all, life-work balance, you know. At one of the previous jobs we had semi-voluntary crunches. Well, i would just get up at the standard time, pack my laptop and say Bye! to all the guys who semi-voluntary stay out for the semi-voluntary crunch. Was rated as the top performer anyway :)

I come from USSR/Russia, the country which has been relying a lot on heroism of the people through various moments in its history. One thing becomes obvious when you learn all that history - heroism is usually required as result of preceding idiotism performed by some other people.

[fenomas]

> The thing with voluntary crunch is it becomes institutionalized and part of your company culture.

That's exactly what the author argues teams must avoid. His premise is explicitly that a little crunch isn't harmful as long as it's not an institutionalized part of the company culture.

[ZenoArrow]

A little crunch is harmful too, just less harmful.

Crunch is rarely a necessity. If the deadline can't be moved, and you're going to miss it, work on cutting the workload (drop features, etc...). If the project can't have any corners cut, then move the deadline. If neither of these is an option, then do what you have to do and find new managers for the next project, because they should've been more on the ball and planned for potential slippage by giving a time buffer to avoid crunch.

[fenomas]

I don't think the author would disagree. He's saying that if you avoid crunch 99% of the time then crunching for the last 1% isn't very bad and might even be good. He's not saying you can avoid 99% but the last 1% is inevitable.

[ZenoArrow]

> "the last 1% is inevitable"

I don't think it's inevitable at all. If you plan for slippage by not being too optimistic with time schedules then it can be avoided.

[FussyZeus]

I agree, and as a consumer of games I find crunch stupid and unnecessary. If a game needs another week just DELAY IT A WEEK. This idea that once marketing sets a date of completion that it's a total must-make is complete nonsense.

[ludamad]

Except it isn't. An entire company could be jeopardized for missing eg a holiday deadline.

[FussyZeus]

That's quite possibly true now, though I'd argue that is largely because game publishers killed the goose that laid the golden egg by shipping tons of totally broken games and ruining the idea of pre-ordering. Likewise I think that process could be reversed by showing fans that the company brass actually gives a damn about their product enough to delay it when it needs more time.

Nintendo is a fantastic example of this, I would say this happens to a good chunk of their titles, Zelda especially. Yes it's always a bummer, but Nintendo also hasn't had an Arkham City or a Division where the game comes out half finished, full of bugs, with the promise of "we'll patch it later."

[ry_ry]

On the other hand, Star Citizen.

It's wild profits undermine my point slightly, granted, but games like duke nukem forever suffered hugely from When It's Ready, poor expectation management, and final products ultimately not living upto the hype.

[FussyZeus]

Duke Nukem wasn't a case of crunch though, it was a case of severe mismanagement and lack of any real direction. Crunch would not have saved it. The vast majority of titles given a delay of two weeks or even a month or two in extreme cases would not undermine sales.

[InclinedPlane]

The problem with crunch is similar to the problem with open plan offices, there's very much a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that worms its way into people's minds. A studio will work on a title on a tight schedule, and they'll go into crunch, and get it out close to schedule and have a successful launch. Then they'll start to believe that crunch is good. Similarly, people in open plan offices will have serendipitous discussions that will result in some positive collaboration outcome or some sort, and they'll start to believe that open plan offices are good too. But this is just falling into the trap of thinking that the way it happened is the only way it could have happened. It also ignores all of the costs, including opportunity costs, of doing it that way. We don't have the ability to pop over to parallel timelines and ask our multiverse selves what the over under was on trying things a different way. More so, because we tend to be more averse to loss (another common rationality error humans typically make) we tend to view change that might result in "losing" something we see as having valuable as scary and risky, even if it would overall be beneficial.

Consider the costs of crunch. The quality of work diminishes. Morale diminishes. Stress rises, personal lives are negatively affected. People become bitter about their employers. People become depressed. And so on. And this is true even when crunch only happens sometimes, or even rarely. As a consequence of all those things sometimes you lose good people. Some of them seek greener pastures, and often these are the most talented and experienced people. Why? Because they have the easiest time finding work elsewhere and often they know how valuable they are and don't like being abused and misused. Especially if crunch involved doing work that wasn't a good use of their abilities and talents, which is very often the case. Also, sometimes people burn out, and either leave or stay while still being burned out, and you lose a lot of talent that way too.

All of this talent loss and destruction has a real, tangible impact on the company. It becomes harder to execute on things, especially challenging projects. But the thing is, none of this is objectively obvious right away, it takes time, often years, for it to become apparent. And because of the tendency for every project to be unique in its own way, it can be hard to pin the blame for diminished success on these things, unless you were already convinced of the idea already.

This is a huge problem, because it means that companies which crunch too much, which in game dev is almost all of them, are constantly losing high-tier talent as well as losing team cohesion (and talented, gelled teams is how you get shit done in software and in games). That means everything is operating all year round not only at reduced capacity and capability (lower development velocity, lower quality, etc.) but also at a less advantageous ratio of output to cost (talented devs and artists are worth vastly more than they are paid, as are gelled teams). And that's aside from all of the talented, experienced people who won't work for you because they refuse to tolerate the working conditions.

All of that adds up to much, much larger costs than the meager seeming advantage that occasional crunch gets you (and permacrunch gains you nothing).

The reality is that the reason why crunch is still tolerated is because there is too much eagerness to be in game dev. So many people view it as their dream job, and that means they tend to tolerate a lot of bad behavior from their employers, especially when they're younger. By the time they grow tired of it and move on or burn out there's going to be a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand other engineers just chomping at the bit to take that spot and fulfill their dreams too. A lot of managers in game dev don't see anything but headcount and dollar signs, and it's so much easier to con some eager beavers into crunching their way to ship something that's good enough than to take the time and effort to get it right.

[HillaryBriss]

> So many people view it as their dream job, and that means they tend to tolerate a lot of bad behavior from their employers, especially when they're younger.

Same thing applies to acting and production jobs in film/TV/theater.

We all wanna be where the magic happens.