The solution: paid overtime. Time and a half after 8 hours, time and a half after 5 days, and those multiply.
This is why film scheduling is a serious discipline and software scheduling is a joke.
This is why film scheduling is a serious discipline and software scheduling is a joke.
As paid overtime becomes more common, people start factoring it in production costs, and standard hour salaries are adjusted accordingly. When people negociate they get told "don't worry, with X hours of overtime you'll get a pretty good pay" and we're back to square one.
For a real world examole of that, Japanese companies have had these kind of deals for a few decades.
I'm generally all for Devil's Advocate, but when it comes to giving workers reasons to _not_ demand more, I need to see some really compelling evidence of serious harm before I'm willing to tell people to reconsider.
makeitdouble isn't saying workers shouldn't demand more; they're saying that paid overtime doesn't solve the problem of crunch time. It makes crunch time acceptable, and (potentially) gets factored into renumeration packages in the long term.
If you want to solve the problem of crunch you need a solution that removes it, not one that pays people to continue doing it.
But either way: I don't necessarily view crunch time as a thing that can or will be solved. I just want the game to be more fair than it is now.
That way if you’re overflown with overtime it’s in your compensation, if you manage to not do any overtime you’ll benefit from it.
It’s arguably harder to negotiate, but I think it would be the best way forward. Now, if the choice is between nothing and paid overtime, yes it’s worth it getting paid overtime.
Creating a regulation that says “workers in this sector get overtime pay” is probably easier than creating an industry-specific minimum wage.
In France it often was a separated contract you had to sign, but most people above “junior” level were pushed into it. It works pretty well in some companies, and heavily abused in others.
And I will add that we constantly complain about how there are just a few hours daily of truly useful work. Adding more money will not change anything. Paid overtime also can give people the wrong incentives.
Edit: what I mean is that we should not plan for overtime. Of course it should always be paid.
I live in a country with a 40-45 hour max work week. After that, you pay 1.5x rates. Saturdays are 1.5x rates for salaried workers and Sundays and public holidays are 2x. There are very serious legal consequences for trying to skirt the system.
As paid overtime becomes the norm, it becomes another metric to track. Project managers that routinely run into overtime are punished. The same as any other expense caused by analysis failures.
You seem to think paid overtime suddenly incentivises a company to just up the price of their product. Like it was equivalent equivalent the rising price of materials. It just doesn't work that way.
Not everyone is a piss poor planner who can't react to changes in environments. Plenty of projects I've worked for have been pretty close to budget. When overtime is required, we talk to the customer. Their money, their decision ultimately.
If your costs unexpectedly skyrocket, you're not keeping customers.
I'm getting a little bored of these "qualification by differnce of opinion" reasoning. You've gotta actually qualify your opinion
Not everyone is a poor planner, but deadlines become firm when large marketing spends are deployed, as they are in the gaming industry.
(Of course, you can disagree with that.)
My personal take is that the overall discipline of managing software projects is so woolly and ill-understood to begin with that the incentives aren’t really there beyond the obvious fairness of actually paying people for the work they do. You don’t need a cost to competently push back against unrealistic processes.
Now, if the employees unionised like in the film industry, it might happen.
150% salary for weekdays+saturdays overtime (200% if at night) and 200% sundays and bank holidays. ~400 overtime hours a year hard limit.
I worked in both types, usually contractors are treated as second class citizens, e.g. some perks don't apply to them.
I have yet to see a company where contractors are majority.
When I was made to work three nights without sleep for some imaginary deadline, and staff came in on the fourth morning and they had to pry the gold CD out of my hand as I was asleep on the floor under my desk - that was the end for me.
https://www.amazon.com/Abomination-PC/dp/B00001ZT3Z
I left and became the World's #1 seller of Beanie Babies. (True story)
Yes. I live in the Netherlands and we have this. I am a software engineer and working in a free sector (meaning I don't have a union or common branch contract) but it's normal that overtime pays extra. It's also the reason I rarely work overtime. Plus it's fairly common to be compensated in time. So if I work on a Saturday I get 1,5 off on my paid vacation sheet. Sunday pays out 2.
The first step to getting there is a union.
Mainstream economics would suggest that high productivity and plenty of competition between employers gets you benefits. That's what worked for programmers rather well. Thanks also to low barriers to entry for new companies.
(Especially if you compare programmers to people in other industries, also in other countries and in other historical eras. That would make the impact of unions vs the factors I outlined above more apparent.)
In any case, feel free to form or join a union, if you want to try it.
And, of course, all this while gaming is a booming industry attracting (and requiring) workers in droves.
[0] https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-ceo-and-others-blamed-for-institu...
It totally is!
So first, I suspect crunch time sort-of works. In the sense that it allows you to bring out a product a bit sooner, but burn out your people in the process.
The game industry is as bad an employer as it can get away with, because so many people are eager to join. That's why the game industry can mostly get away with low pay and crunch time.
Working your standard programming job at Boring Inc is less cool, so people demand more in return. More money, more perks, better treatment.
It's all about equilibria.
So if you want to 'fix' the game industry, the way to go about this is to make the alternatives more appealing.
There are plenty of example where regulation (or similar) tried to fix unsavoury industries by fiat. Eg look at Orange in France. Orange is the former French telecoms monopolist. As such, they employ way more people than current management wants.
But firing people is extremely hard in France. As unintended consequence, management has no incentive to make the life of marginal employees bearable, and every incentive to avert their eyes from bullying, etc.
Cue the French complaining how 'neoliberalism' causes suicides at Orange. https://www.dw.com/en/france-orange-top-bosses-caused-employ...
This is the whole thing, you've laid it bare here. The games industry is exploiting it's workers' passion.
If there were game workers' unions, we'd see a lot less of this type of behavior, as has been shown time and time again.
I have no clue how a union is supposed to help here. Perhaps they can restrict who can work in the games industry? Just like they keep non-union people from appearing in Hollywood movies?
The current state of employee "choice" between companies all colluding to offer the same conditions is no choice at all.
Someone could break rank, hire programmers for a dollar more or an hour less crunch time, and still make a killing, wouldn't they?
If you're not working for EA, Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda, Valve, Bungie, Epic, Rockstar, or Riot Games, you are almost certainly not working on a major video game project, and certainly not on a game that will make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.
And conversely, if all of the developers on, say, World of Warcraft were to strike tomorrow, Blizzard would not be able to afford to replace them. That's the power of a union.
I have no idea where you got this idea that it's easy to start a gaming company. Unless you plan on making a mobile game, they're a very hard industry to enter, like all other art industries.
Unionise.
Please unionise all you want, but don't force me to be part of your union or adhere by what you negotiate.
It also wouldn't surprise me if major game studios have a handshake agreement to never offer paid OT. It would probably be easier to avoid a class action lawsuit for that than salary fixing a la Google and Apple et al.
As a customer in retail you seldom negotiate explicitly with Burger or Walmart or Amazon directly, you just vote with your feet (and wallet).
Investigate your potential employers before you take a job. If you like none of them, at least pick the lesser evil, or move into an adjacent industry. (Eg lots of game programmers are more than welcome in Internet or in finance etc.)
How would you test / falsify this?
Tangentially related: https://socialgoals.com/
But I suspect it has more to do with most big films being made in relatively similar ways.
It would be interesting to compare different film industries in different countries and different times.
Eg classic Hollywood studio system, modern Hollywood, Bollywood, etc.