[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.

[fenomas]

> I don't think it's inevitable at all.

I said the author is not saying it's inevitable.