Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The company is incentivizing employees to “crunch,” an industry term referring to working late evenings and weekends outside of regular work hours, by promising them perks some workers say are paltry.

Though today I wouldn't manage a project to rely on crunch, nor expect anyone to crunch, it's still new to see a software development crunch described as something out of the ordinary and that needs incentives.

Starting with my first real software engineering job, crunches were something that just happened. And I didn't question it, because it wasn't that different than being a kid and coding into the night, or being in school with long "lab" hours.

My read of the tone of the WaPo is that the reader is supposed to see a crunch more like an hourly store clerk being expected to keep working after they've punched out on the time clock, rather than what used to just be the norm for software teams that wanted to ship.

Probably this is a good change, since we should be focusing on managing the project and greasing effectiveness in ways that mean hitting external deliverables, not assuming we can crunch.

The games industry is on a whole different level.

My friends who've gone into 'normal' software development will work on things out-of-hours from time to time, especially if they're doing something interesting, and they're sometimes on call - but they're also making enough money that if they'd rather work a 4 day week, they can afford to.

My friends who've gone into game development report frequently working 10 hours a day Monday-Friday, and then going into work on both Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, they reported that the last time we saw them - you can imagine how hard it is to maintain friendships after a few years of such a work pattern.

I'm a bit over a decade removed from that industry but that largely lined up with my experiences(and from the tabs I've kept on things it doesn't seem like much has changed).

There's a constant stream of developers who have a high degree of interest in games so not only is crunch incredibly common but also compensation is significantly less(was about 1/2-1/3 standard SWE rates when I was in the industry). Combine that with publishers who pull recording industry contract style shenanigans and it's just a brutal industry. Tons of really interesting technical problems but even as someone who knew what they we going into at the time I advise people to think very carefully if it's a career option they want to pursue.

100% this.

I'm about 15 years out. But I did the math on my hourly rate in the industry and it was about $25/hr. Some of the smartest, most fun people I've ever had the pleasure of working with, for sure. But while I was working the rest of my life was thrown by the wayside.

I quit after we shipped and rode my mountain bike for a year. It sucked because I didn't want to write code, a thing I'd previously loved. But it came back after a year of not working and a year of contracting part time.

There were opportunities to get back into games, but I turned them all down. I just don't want to get back into that environment.

I'm assuming stock grants or residual payments are never part of the deal either, right? That's just completely exploitative of their dev talent.

> Employees said they were offered more stock to stay on based on their position and seniority, from around $5,000 in value for entry-level workers to upward of $50,000 for more senior employees.

Even $50k for a senior employee for years of working hard overtime is a joke compared to any other industry.

I got a $20 starbucks giftcard, once.

I've aware of royalties in some really, really rare cases(think north of 10M sales, in the < 1% of game sales category), but even in that case from what I heard the publisher had a cap on the upper limit per year in the contract.

It's part of the deal where I worked. I think the whole bad framing of game development is a bit one dimensional. It is a dream job in a very tough saturated market, often with perks inside the office, awesome release parties, passionate coworkers etc. You are missing out on the huge paycheck and work-life balance, but you got many other things. Already it is a privilege to have a job working on games. Not forced to work there, not forced to have a fun job for average pay.

My contract is for 38hrs a week so I work 38hrs a week. Teams I've been on have had "crunch", ie. team members working back late in some misguided effort to ship "on time". What I find interesting about this is that management never asks for it, it's just implied.

I've got the "oh you're leaving" when I get up at 5pm and leave, but never pulled aside by management for it. I don't really understand why others partake.

They'd have to incentivise the hell out of me to get me to do that.

I only ever saw an hourly contract once in my entire time in that industry and it took 2-3 weeks to sort out due to the fact that HR had never done one before at a pretty large-sized dev shop.

In all the places I worked there was an informal crunch period and then a very explicit one. Even during one of the formal crunch period I would catch shit for leaving at 10pm even though I was in at 8am. There was definitely a visibility aspect that if you were staying till 1-2am and rolling in at noon that was considered that you were contributing "more". There's a couple shops that do a decent job but large swaths of the industry are completely dysfunctional.

There's also a confirmation bias where if a successful game ships with crunch it is perceived as one of the contributing factor to their success and then further drives crunch across the industry.

Crunch in software will always result in bugs and missing features, I don't know why execs don't get this.

Especially with games where they apparently MUST be out by Christmas.

The execs do get it. They consider bugs and missing features a small price to pay for hitting release date, when hitting release date means people buy your game for their kids.

Because reputation matters nothing? Or because, like EA, they’ve realized that there’s a certain (large) subset of people that will just buy the games anyway, bugs and all, every single time, like they’re in some kind of abusive relationship.

> Because reputation matters nothing

Ask Blizzard. Ask EA. Ask CDPR. Ask Ubisoft. Ask any AAA developer.

All have released absolute dogshit that sold based on their reputations alone. And that doesn't even account for the reports of everything from absurd quantities of mandatory crunch to rape and suicide.

All have eagerly awaited sequels and new IP. All are more profitable than ever before.

Some folks care, but a vast majority do not.

Release dates actually matter for entertainment products.

Remember when "It's ready when it's ready" worked and sold products, much to consumer delight? It's been awhile, but it feels like those folks have been driven out of the industry (or into the niche indie studios).

Six months of crunch time is likely to make it harder to hit the release date, not easier.

Is there any evidence that crunch actually helps?

In my experience crunch time increases productivity for a couple of weeks and is a net negative from then on. Tired, stressed, and sick/absent developers just aren't as effective. Producing poorer code, even at a faster rate, is usually a loss as well.

Any software development organization that practices it would seem to be sabotaging themselves.

There have been studies on overtime and generally this is the finding. Overtime is effective in short bursts(a week to a month) with a clear objective in mind. Beyond that returns are diminished considerably.

It's one thing to work late because someone needs to be at the helm of a business (ie run the register, answer the phones, put out fires and revert builds), it's another to just work people extra hours because the owners failed to execute a plan that will meet whatever product release date they promised to their board or the public or whatever.

Sadly, there's more than a few folks working in the gaming industry that consider "crunch time" something to be proud about (it's an annual event for some franchises).

People are allowed to be proud of accomplishing things.

they're accomplishing a launch date and a paycheck, nearly any other quantifiable metric is reduced or removed during a launch crunch -- aside from all of the negative personnel effects from instigating such madness.

The Diablo franchise is, due to franchise reputation, basically above any scare of competition reducing sales. People waited 11 years from Diablo 2 to 3.

Some finance guy would have to take an extra long time explaining to me why crunching towards an arbitrary marketing launch date (and trampling all of the personal lives and well-being of the personnel) is going to somehow be better for our company's reputation than releasing some of the most volatile pay-to-win/monetization mechanisms in all of gaming. [0]

tl;dr : if at the end of a corporate instigated launch crunch you feel accomplished, more power to you -- but from where i'm at it just looks like more employee abuse with little incentive other than a pat on the back.

[0]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-pl...

Here at Buzzard Entertainment, we value "great management." That's why we're planning six months of crunch time in order to lower productivity and reduce code quality while damaging the physical and mental health of our employees. This will, we understand, make it harder to hit our scheduled release date, so make sure to nerd harder so that we can push a barely adequate version of our next game over the finish line!

They shouldn't be proud of accomplishing things that force unreasonable demands onto others.

Ok, genuine question. I've been in a pretty niche field my entire career. But i've never worked more than 30 minutes a day unless I want to. Is it normal for people in some Dev roles to really do "Crunch" let alone actually produce work all day?!?

If I do bonus hours helping with recruiting or whatever, I get paid overtime and all the work has contract verbiage saying I can't work more than 40 hours a week without super high up approval.

Yes it’s very common. If you’re into any sort of role where have to maintain a production facing service and it goes down there’s that Too.

What services though? I've done enterprise software systems and in the developer position, if it did break, they just rolled everything back. It's been genuinely years, but is that not common? I can kind of understand in game services, but I can't think of another situation i've been in. Given my experience with this was in 2000's with massive java apps.

IME that's only true if your services don't handle state, or if you have a very advanced system for rollbacks.

Yes, for software people, actually working for long hours during crunch time is normal, most everywhere I've been.

IME, people usually don't burn very long hours at work unless they feel they need to.

(I've also seen places where it was nigh-impossible to get much work done, due to organizational dysfunction. But I don't think that can translate to long hours for very long, since people are already exploding at 40 hrs/wk of sitting through their work sabotaged, minute to minute. They'll tend to fill the hours with a combination of heroic sisyphean efforts, decompressing/timewasting, and bitter gossiping.)

(I recently watched a hilarious deadpan video of a day in the life of influencer intern/junior developer at Facebook, where it seemed only little time was spent on work. But that's not normal.)

For me, at least, bugfixing is rather rote work. I could probably do it for 12 hours straight, though I would hate myself afterwards. Coming up with some novel solution to some really hard problem isn't something I can do 12 hours a day, but that's like 1% of the bugs at most.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com