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Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

Crunch has zero advantages, period.

We're not talking about a extra week of hard work here and there, it's months of sustained 80-100hr work weeks. You're so exhausted after just a few weeks that you make a ton of stupid fucking mistakes, which compounds the whole situation.

If crunch worked you'd see it more widely across our industry, however it has the benefit of both burning out people and putting them in a state where their output is lower than it could be at sustained reasonable hours.

Any asshole who thinks otherwise needs to be called out on it.

Source: Ex-gamedev, where I watched crunch crater two different studios.

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I guess it kinda depends on how your company does "crunch".

I've been lucky in that in the crunches I've been involved in, although I've worked nights and weekends, we had a good division of responsibilities and guards against overworking. So while the team was through a multi-week crunch, I personally would be working only for a week and half stretch. But perhaps that is not what you mean by crunch.

I guess my point is that occasionally it isn't bad to have a tight deadline and give it your everything to get it to work. If you do get it done, it feels mighty good. But I agree that it wouldn't be something I would like to do on a regular cadence.

A week and a half isn't crunch though, I'm talking about sustained long hours over a month or more(usually 4-6 months).

Working a strong week is totally fine if followed by some recovery time. As long as it doesn't go longer than 2 weeks that's possible to do without destroying productivity, although you still run the risk of burning out your employees.

I think the original idea of 'crunch' is that short period but games (and, in my experience, vfx) tend to just normalize that constant long hours (though they'll hire you saying that hours only get bad at peak times without mentioning that it's always a 'busy' time).

60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry.

The difference is Google/software as a service, does not have the same kind of hard deadlines. But, when you start talking about major launches and boxed software or startups you really do see crunch.

PS: By crunch I mean unsustainable pace leading up to a hard deadline.

15 hour days for 6 months? Nope, fuck you.

Not only are you doing worse work than you normally would at a sustainable rate but you're also putting tons of pressure on people's home life. I saw 3 divorces at my second studio from people working hours along those lines.

If you really think that's sustainable then you have no place in this or any other tech industry. We aren't in emergency service or work in an environment where lives are on the line. Those hours have no place here.

> We aren't in emergency service or work in an environment where lives are on the line.

Obviously these jobs have occasional acute long work times but I'd say that jobs where lives are on the line is precisely where society doesn't want chronically sleep deprived workers.

It's 10 to 12.5 hour days six days a week. My sister is an animator for Disney and they do this every other year. But they also have significant bonuses associated with these crunches it's not unpaid overtime.

Not something I want to be part of, but 30+k bonus for six months of hell is a choice many people would happily take. Hell look at fishing boats they do 15 hour days of hard and dangerous manual labor. But, again they tend to pay people for that effort.

> 30+k bonus for six months of hell

30,000 / (35 * 2 * 4 * 6) = ~$17/hr = ~34k/yr

That seems like a poor deal for putting your family through 6 months of hell.

> Not something I want to be part of

Then don't fucking endorse it!

What does the 2 represent? I assume the 4 is 4 weeks and the 6 is 6 months. The 35 must be the high end of 60 to 75 (instead of, say, the average), minus 40 hours. A normal non-crunch work week is more like 45 hours due to breaks and meals, not counting the commute.

30,000 / (22.5 * 4 * 6) = ~$55/hr = ~$110k/yr

Overtime.

That's better than what I thought you were doing, dividing by 2 years or a 2-week pay period. But I don't think it makes sense to adjust for overtime here anyway. Would an $8/hour retail worker say, "I don't want to work overtime for the holiday crunch. Those extra hours are like working for only $8/hour after adjusting for overtime"?

First your not even using my range assuming 60-75 just means 75 and assuming a normal week is only 40. People still get sick and go to dentist appointments etc during crunch. They just don't take 2 week vacations.

So, it's closer to 46$ / hour: 30,000 / (52 weeks * 1/2 year * 25 hours)

Anyway, if you consider doing this 1 out of 4 years that's 60k extra for a 'hell' year not bad for a 22 year old. And again 30k is for entry level people it can go up quite a bit.

Alternatively, many Animators only work crunch they end up working 6 months a year and taking 6 months off.

> People still get sick and go to dentist appointments etc during crunch. They just don't take 2 week vacations.

Yes they do and they catch a ton of shit for doing it. I got tore into one day because I dared to leave at the early hour of 11:00pm having got to the office at 8am that morning.

Look, it's obvious that you haven't been on one of these death marches and so you don't really understand what type of a toll that it puts on a team. My example of hourly rate was to point out that it's an awful trade on one side for putting your family through 6 months of hell.

If money was really the important factor here then people wouldn't be working for entertainment companies because compensation is worse across the board(from engineers to animators/artists and designers). I work with a ton of ex-gamedev people who've made the transition out and there's literally no comparison.

Your $46/hr rate for instance doesn't even crack based Google SWE pay, not including their bonuses.

I get that there's a prestige and a sense of accomplishment of working at Disney/your dream studio. That still doesn't excuse them from grinding people into the ground with these insane hours.

This is not the pay of Google SWE, these are Animators that start at far lower base salaries. Some people get 100+k bonuses for doing crunch, it's really relative to salary.

Look I have done the whole you work sleep or eat and nothing else for peanuts. That does not mean everyone who works 50+ hour weeks is getting shafted.

As to family obligations, not everyone is in that boat. Sure, working insane hours may not seem like a great way to spend your early 20's, but it's also not required that everyone do this. You can make a solid living without pulling crunch time, but it's reasonable for the option to exist.

Really, step outside your bubble. Some people working 80 hour weeks pull in a few million per year, they have options and still chose that lifestyle.

PS: And nobody is forced to do this, if nothing else quitting is an option.

Considering you cherry picked that and skipped over how I know animators making a significant increase outside of the industry doing similar work makes it clear you're not really interested in a discussion here.

I leave my comments as is, anyone advocating for crunch has no place it any part of the tech industry, full stop.

I have not been advocating crunch. If I was trying to convince you it was a good idea I would say you're expenses are already paid, so a little extra money at 22 can quickly snowball. A little suffering now is an easy ticket to retire by 45.

But, again I am not saying it's a good idea as general practice. Just that it's not nessisarily irrational behavior.

That said, you seem to be ignoring what I have actually said in favor of your own personal rage. I suspect you would be happier setting that aside.

So, you retired at 45?

I am not 45 :)

I do know 3 people who did by working insane hours in their early 20's. Less time to spend money + more money makes saving 50+k per year after taxes viable. None of them kept working those hours for that long but compound interest works much faster with a larger nest egg.

Now, they used a second job to get there, but having your boss pay you for extra time also works.

> 60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry.

How is this not an issue to you? It would be one thing of software developers were this highly specialized group of people where you have a pool of a few hundred in every state. Developers aren't scarce though. For every mediocre developer, there are 5 more than replace that person.

Scarcity aside, why would you want to subjugate yourself to that lifestyle? Most people aren't even productive for a full 8 hours/day, so how does adding 4 more hours in a day make business sense?

I don't care for our industry to unionize, because I don't want to be beholden to some organization fighting for basic human decency. But when people brazenly say, "Yeah 60 hours is fine! You have months before you burnout!" Good for you, but I have interests and people that don't involve work.

If you're a certain kind of asshole - the kind of asshole who finds a certain kind of management role attractive - the reward isn't system efficiency, product quality, or even just product shipping, the reward is in the sense of power that comes from bullying economic inferiors who depend on you for a pay check and can't answer back to unreasonable demands.

It's drama, it's danger, it's excitement, and it's probably fuelled by a coke habit.

If you enjoy that kind of power you'll happily kill a company to experience it.

Games dev isn't unique in this kind of toxicity, but it's more pressing because projects are often huge group efforts with massive resources and long time scales where most of the work is done by young and relatively inexperienced employees who are motivated as much by the games scene as by a pay check.

In the same way that #MeToo called out sexual harassment and abuse, we really need a corporate equivalent that calls out toxic working conditions created by insane management.

We had that moment years ago with EA Spouse, sadly it didn't really move the needle very much. That's probably because there's other places where people with skillset from gamedev can find a saner environment.

No, that rate is still quite evil. That is also unsustainable, and there is absolutely no excuse for any management that decides that their company is more important than an employee being able to live their life outside of work.

> 60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout.

I downvoted you because this is untrue. Research has shown that crunching for more than a few weeks is detrimental to work output.

Not what I said, total burnout = zero work done. Yea, they might only be 1/2 as efficient as someone doing a 40 hour week, but meeting etc add overhead so it can still be a net gain even with dramatic productivity loss.

I currently work in legal/accounting. We do plenty of work in crunch periods varying between 12 to 15 hours a day, including or excluding weekends.

People lose effectiveness within a week at that volume of work. Consistently. They become forgetful, need things re-explained to them, act irritably, produce work that needs additional levels of revision, etc.

If the work is largely rote, that might be acceptable; perform an extra 10% work to quality control the 50-75% surplus in gross work product. If the work is strategic or synthetic, it is often not.

Over time, however, small performance degradations turn into health complications and morale problems. This is intentional. In high churn industries, individuals who are at the top of the ladder prefer that those they're leveraging lower down perform more work, leave before their positions are threatened, and use the corrosion of their health as a shield against the ambition of entry-level staff.

> 60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry.

I think the game industry can get away with this because some people really, really want to work on games, and there aren't many companies in the industry with more reasonable hours that one could switch to. But the rest of us eventually figure out that we can demand to be treated well or we can find another job.

A week or two of crunch time can happen every once in a while at most jobs. But 6+ months of "crunch time" is really a permanent company culture of working long hours.

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