I broke down crying: Canadian video game creators face grueling crunch hours | Hacker News Reader

I broke down crying: Canadian video game creators face grueling crunch hours

cbc.ca

47 pointsmonsieurpng10 comments

My fist job was with a company that had also hardware projects and we had a hard deadline to not miss the re-stock of supplies of big retailers. So since management decided to change one of the core features 6 month before the deadline we worked on weekends in exchange for money. I was young, felt very close to the team and also needed the money to pay off my student loan. After a summer without weekends to relax I was pretty burned out and I realized how the money wasn't worth it.

After working there a while I also realized how the company used the coolness factor of the products and the feeling of belonging to the team to get people into working a lot while paying less than the rest of the industry. I think this is also often done in the game industry

My question is: after your first crunch time, don't you think about priorities in life? Also, at least the programmers won't have a really hard time to find other jobs why do you stay in this rather abusive industry?

The industry filters first against people who don't want to crunch or to move: the old hands of game development are almost uniformly workaholics and willing to uproot themselves to a new country for each gig. They are numb to these particular pains. But most people are not, and it shows in the turnover numbers.

The second promise that keeps people in tends to be built around having multiple tiers of employee: the ordinary worker, and the lead/senior/director/etc. - where the higher rank gets more sway and less vulnerability to layoffs, as they are the "core" of the studio identity, and as a core member they hold some more bargaining power and creative freedom. Most of the employees are there to fill in the ordinary stuff - the small props, environmental details, and minor features.

Even with the programmers this holds true: the core technology groups of the large publishers tend to be at some distance from the teams working on a product. These top level people are also the folks that can most easily crossover from high-profile tech in games to high-profile tech in another field. Many of the people who write shipping code that is not the core engine(customized gameplay features, event scripts, etc.) get positioned - willingly or no - as specialized grunt labor, making a career move harder later. There's a lot of little stuff shaping narratives here.

On that note, one of the things that is on the table for game unionization efforts is standardization of job titles.

> standardization of job titles

I've long thought that this was needed industry-wide. As it is, job titles are largely meaningless. It shouldn't, and doesn't have to, be that way.

We're brought up in this hierarchical system where you're told you're supposed to be churning through the meat grinder of competition and failure and growth every day or you're a worthless nonhuman waste of space. Most people have a very hard time saying no to a manager no matter what is asked from them when this is the only system they've ever known.

> Most people have a very hard time saying no to a manager no matter what is asked from them when this is the only system they've ever known.

And, let's be honest here, that is one of the two main reasons that companies prefer young devs. (The other main reason is that young devs are cheaper.)

During my master's I interviewed at EA in Montreal and knew about Ubisoft's presence there as well. It was always enticing as a career prospect. But to be honest I always heard stories about how horrible it was to work for video game companies during crunch time, and how that happens at least twice a year, and I basically made a conscious decision to avoid that industry. This was more than 10 years ago. And it continues...

It may be worse now, but the computer game industry has long been one of the worst in terms of the conditions that devs work under. It is, perhaps, the most cutthroat sector of our industy.

That's why I left it -- I can do exciting, impactful, cutting-edge things in other sectors without having to endure death marches and crunch times.

Obligatory Coupland reference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPod

Just work for a small game company that doesn't ship products or advertise physically and hence has much less crunch requirement (much easier to delay a digital product). Plus, typically the Owner is working himself as a designer or programmer, so any crunch for the team means crunch for him.

With the launch of the Epic Games Store and the coming explosion of platforms, plus mature middleware like Unity and Unreal, times are great for well-organised Indie teams.

Smaller companies tend to have less financial room to maneuver, though. Delaying a release means delaying revenue while at the same time still having to pay salaries, etc. Sometimes, a company can't afford that delay.

Still, my personal bent is that I'm more likely to be willing to do that for a small company (whose owner I likely work with, and I have a greater personal investment in) than a large one.

That's one of the several reasons that I prefer to work for small companies.

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