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I was doing a pre-interview chat with a large AAA game developer the other day, and asked about work/life balance. He said something like "Part of the price we pay for getting to work on such awesome stuff is that our families suffer." (seriously he actually cited the negative impact to family as an acceptable cost) It seems this attitude is not longer as prevalent as it once was, but it's definitely still out there.
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Jul 30, 2012 21:16
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DancingMachine posted:I was doing a pre-interview chat with a large AAA game developer the other day, and asked about work/life balance. He said something like "Part of the price we pay for getting to work on such awesome stuff is that our families suffer." (seriously he actually cited the negative impact to family as an acceptable cost) Pro tip: Don't work there. ;-) Edit: Alternatively, work there but only work the hours you feel like working, if that's good enough for them they'll keep you, if it's not then you don't want to work there anyway.
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Jul 30, 2012 21:59
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Did that interviewer really tell you that the price you would pay for your awesome job would be personal misery? Because that means the job actually isn't awesome. At all.
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Jul 30, 2012 22:02
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DancingMachine posted:It seems this attitude is not longer as prevalent as it once was, but it's definitely still out there. It sounds like this would be more common a mindset nowadays, due to the surplus workforce and wage freezes and layoffs more common post-2007.
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Jul 30, 2012 22:27
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Hughlander posted:Hearing a lot of that lately. Three friends at Jagex all left in the last two months. So many people left recently. A good friend is off to work for Bioware (Awesome job, cant say no). The rest just left through attrition or better jobs elsewhere. That being said, Jagex has a zero crunch Ethos. It's 9-6 mon-fri and no extra hours ever.
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Jul 30, 2012 22:51
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GetWellGamers posted:Yeah, if you're not "salaried", if you work more than eight hours a day or forty hours in a week, whichever comes first, overtime pay is the law in California. Every place I've ever worked has had overtime pay, if they don't feel like paying it, their only recourse is to make you leave. (Or if you're wal-mart, force your employees to clock out and then keep working anyways for an hour or two.) There are a lot of positions within the industry that should be hourly and aren't. It's pretty exploitative, particularly when you consider that many of said positions have a ton of built-in overtime expected of workers.
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Jul 31, 2012 00:51
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I absolutely don't believe in working long hours for long hours sake, or using crunch time as an excuse for trying to cram more poo poo into a game. But I don't think the problem is necessarily just with crunch itself. It's with how crunch is managed - crunch should always have a clear target established, employees should be rewarded for achieving goals set out by crunching, and the total amount of crunch worked by any one employee should be really carefully managed. A personal pet peeve of mine is that I don't really believe that anyone should be sticking around in crunchtime if they don't have work to do RIGHT THEN. A lot of crunchtime is just people dicking around, which wastes everyone's time and makes everyone stay later. Sure, that social time helps build the team, but a way better time to do team building is when you're *not* working 10-12 hour days. I also am a huge fan, where reasonable, of letting crunch time work get done remotely over VPN. It's a lot less lovely on people's families that way. I really think overtime pay, or actual logged and properly managed comp time, is the ideal solution to a lot of the issues with crunch. It helps discourage using crunch time exploitatively on the part of project managers (since it becomes really loving expensive) and also makes workers feel better about things when they get the huge OT paychecks. I guess just my personal experience is that crunch isn't the problem, working in a lovely environment where you don't feel like you're crunching for a reason is the real problem? This experience comes from several studios and different positions, not trying to call out any place/role in particular, btw.
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Jul 31, 2012 00:56
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DancingMachine posted:I was doing a pre-interview chat with a large AAA game developer the other day, and asked about work/life balance. He said something like "Part of the price we pay for getting to work on such awesome stuff is that our families suffer." (seriously he actually cited the negative impact to family as an acceptable cost) If you want your lawn to look pretty, you can drown it in nitrogen supplements, and sure as poo poo that grass will grow and look nice and dark. But you'll end up killing your lawn by the end of the season and have to replace it with sod. And then next season, you'll do the same thing because hey, who has time to properly maintain a lawn? You gotta have the best lawn in the neighborhood in mid-MARCH, dammit! Compare that with your neighbor who practices a regimented water supplication, bi-annual re-seeding, and feeds with a time-release fertilizer. Sure, his lawn may not fully mature until the middle of May, but he never has to pay out to replace his sod again and again. Lawn analogy.
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Jul 31, 2012 01:08
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DancingMachine posted:I was doing a pre-interview chat with a large AAA game developer the other day, and asked about work/life balance. He said something like "Part of the price we pay for getting to work on such awesome stuff is that our families suffer." (seriously he actually cited the negative impact to family as an acceptable cost) The crazy thing, I was told almost this exact thing in an interview once too. Large well known AAA developer (Also engine maker). Family life is hugely important to me and I didn't continue with the interview process.
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Jul 31, 2012 01:25
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Well, while we're on the subject of healthy work environments: Heard about this article on the radio as I drove to work this morning. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/07/30/email-survey-overtime.html Is it really getting that bad with smartphones? I'm the only guy in the office without a smartphone. I can feel my clock ticking...
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Jul 31, 2012 01:31
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SGT. Squeaks posted:The crazy thing, I was told almost this exact thing in an interview once too. Large well known AAA developer (Also engine maker). Family life is hugely important to me and I didn't continue with the interview process. You guys can just come out and say it was Epic (joking sort of). http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/118441-Epic-VP-Says-Passionate-Developers-Are-Cool-With-Crunch http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22945
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Jul 31, 2012 01:38
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cgeq posted:Well, while we're on the subject of healthy work environments: Absolutely. I can't say anything about the games industry, but my partner had an office job for the better part of the last two years that provided her with an iPhone and expected her to always be available. Pdf documents received at 9pm? Those better be in the system in the morning.
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Jul 31, 2012 02:41
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Kunzelman posted:Absolutely. I can't say anything about the games industry, but my partner had an office job for the better part of the last two years that provided her with an iPhone and expected her to always be available. Pdf documents received at 9pm? Those better be in the system in the morning. Might be studio-specific, but it's avoidable... unless you're a team lead. Good luck, then.
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Jul 31, 2012 02:49
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cgeq posted:Well, while we're on the subject of healthy work environments: It's bad but I'm sure the article exagerates it... that article posted:The benefits and flexibility of going mobile clearly come at a price, indicates the May poll of 1,000 working American adults that was conducted by Good Technology, a California company that makes software allowing people to work on their smartphones away from the office It's a fluff piece talking about a study funded by a company that wants you to buy into working on a smartphone after hours. Hardly fair and balanced.
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Jul 31, 2012 03:08
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StoicFnord posted:So many people left recently. If your friend at BioWare is a producer, it looks like we'll be working together! If he needs any help getting setup, I'd be glad to help him out. vvvvvvvvvvvvvv I'm afraid not  Do you recall what studio / project he is at?
Birudojin fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Jul 31, 2012 |
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Jul 31, 2012 03:56
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Bioware, you say? Don't suppose you know Christopher Bain? He isn't returning my e-mails and we had a real nice chat at Comicon. 
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Jul 31, 2012 04:01
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Resource posted:Pro tip: Don't work there. ;-) Heh yeah, that position had definitely moved to the bottom of my list. I'll not contribute to the validation of this approach. Much as I would love to work on Super badass blockbuster 7: The badassening.
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Jul 31, 2012 06:36
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So glad I'm just a sysadmin in a game company. No crunch, almost no overtime. I turned down a company smartphone after the first one was stolen so I was able to shake out the habit of constantly checking my emails, even on weekends.
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Jul 31, 2012 09:02
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StoicFnord posted:So many people left recently. Well, we've had two projects shuttered this year and a lot of layoffs as a result. Off the top of my head I could only think of about five people still around from the ~40 person department I started in two years ago A lot of people have been leaving rather more voluntarily too though...Also, 'zero crunch' is not entirely true at all. We have crunched before(I haven't personally but some teams definitely have) and we will again.
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Jul 31, 2012 09:11
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floofyscorp posted:Well, we've had two projects shuttered this year and a lot of layoffs as a result. Off the top of my head I could only think of about five people still around from the ~40 person department I started in two years ago Remember, the projects are "on hold" and not "cancelled with extreme predjudice". Which dept had Crunch? That blows goats. The last few people I liked that left were 'pushed'. Man, so much drama. I am glad I am shot of the place in the end, even though the people inside were ace.
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Jul 31, 2012 09:41
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StoicFnord posted:Remember, the projects are "on hold" and not "cancelled with extreme predjudice". Stellar Dawn had a couple months of periodic 'voluntary' crunch time last year when it was starting to look like they might actually have a viable product on their hands, and 8Realms spent most of the past year working past 8pm and beyond from what I heard. It's pretty tame compared to the horror stories I hear from other studios, but the point stands that saying 'we don't crunch at all ever'(no longer an official soundbite of ours, from reading recent interviews) is sadly bollocks.
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Jul 31, 2012 10:55
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floofyscorp posted:We don't cancel anything in this company. Even FunOrb isn't officially canned :I FunOrb will persist forever. It is eternal and undying, just like the great elder gods. Heck, it still makes a profit. I am now proper pissed off that crunch was enforced on the Stellar Dawn team. The fact the project failed was nothing to do with the Devs, who worker their arses off on it, but the fact it was PM to death. making the heroes work longer is just going to suck life out of a team. 5 years there and out. I think that's a decent innings.
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Jul 31, 2012 12:07
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StoicFnord posted:FunOrb will persist forever. It is eternal and undying, just like the great elder gods. Heck, it still makes a profit.  SD and 8R both failed for largely the same reasons, I think. But I've gotten in trouble before for pointing out exactly what those reasons were so I'll keep my big yap shut this time. For some people at least, moving on from the big J has been a good thing! Many have dived into the exciting worlds of indie games and freelancing and it's pretty cool to see how they're all doing.
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Jul 31, 2012 12:20
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Hey bros, So I've got three openings over on the Starcraft 2/Blizzard AllStars Team. Hit me up if you want any more info on em - 2 for the more programmery types and one for the art-school types: Senior Software Engineer, Server: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=110003V Senior Software Engineer, Tools: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=120002A User Interface Artist: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=120001J If you think you'd be right for the position, want to talk em over, or would like to line up a time to maybe meet in person and hug each other before going our separate ways, hit me up: misc AT 1217design DOT com. I'll try and be checking back on the forums though and see if any questions come up about this though.
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Jul 31, 2012 17:18
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I work at a mobile game studio as a programmer. We've been working on a game for the last 7 months. It was originally set to be released early June, so we crunched 70-80 hour weeks for almost 2 months to meet the deadline. Time was never allotted to actually fix bugs even though a requirement for release was having 0 "effective" bugs in our bug database. Instead, we were getting constant stream of seemingly arbitrary changes from headquarters. These changes never stopped with anywhere from a quarter to three quarters of the development team working on the changes at any given moment in time. We had roughly 600 bugs in the database 2 months from release. With a development team of 10 programmers and after a lot of hard work we reduced the bug count to 0. We ended up solving around 2000 bugs in that time period. So we give ourselves a pat on the back and get excited as our game is about to release and we get to go on vacation. We get called into a meeting by one of our producers who tells us that HQ has more changes and the game will not be releasing yet. But the good news is that we're no longer in crunch mode we're told. (hint: none of this is good news) It's now almost two months later and the game is still not released. We are still working on it for one excuse or another. We still have not been given vacation. There is a daily reason we cannot go gold, either a new rare crash is found by QA, or HQ decides they don't like the look of some UI element.
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Jul 31, 2012 18:00
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Aliginge posted:It sounds like this would be more common a mindset nowadays, due to the surplus workforce and wage freezes and layoffs more common post-2007. IDK about artists and designers, but there is a major shortage of programmers out there. If you're a programmer with more than a few years experience don't get poo poo on go find a new job. If you needed this advice you will also be able to get yourself a double digit percentage raise in the process.
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Jul 31, 2012 18:29
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Jaytan posted:IDK about artists and designers, but there is a major shortage of programmers out there. If you're a programmer with more than a few years experience don't get poo poo on go find a new job. If you needed this advice you will also be able to get yourself a double digit percentage raise in the process.
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Jul 31, 2012 18:34
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Artists are a bit plentiful Good artists and artists with experience a lot less so, but I think in the recent salary survey the average for artists was being pulled down by declining entry level and mid level salaries. Programmers are only on the up and up.
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Jul 31, 2012 18:39
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Watch and learn guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXgoI39-cXA
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Jul 31, 2012 19:25
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keyframe posted:Watch and learn guys: Somewhere, a terrorist cell was just activated.
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Jul 31, 2012 19:46
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I Am A Robot posted:I work at a mobile game studio as a programmer. We've been working on a game for the last 7 months. It was originally set to be released early June, so we crunched 70-80 hour weeks for almost 2 months to meet the deadline. Time was never allotted to actually fix bugs even though a requirement for release was having 0 "effective" bugs in our bug database. Haha, I am dying to know what mobile game studio. Though I guess you can't really reveal this... (blink a couple times if there are clues in your posting history) Really I'm just replying to this because your name lets me make Grandma's Boy quotes. J.P.: "Don't forget... I'm a prodigy." Grandma: "And don't forget, it's my grandson's game!"
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Jul 31, 2012 20:06
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5l-nnR4Bx0
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Jul 31, 2012 20:08
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It's amazing because they make free to play Facebook games with names like "War Commander" they are actually Kerpoop. A flashy video like this screams to me these guys are going to burn through the massive pile of money they have in about 12 months, and you'll see some big layoffs at the end of the fiscal year.
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Jul 31, 2012 21:14
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Wow. Now I kind of want to work at Kixeye.
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Jul 31, 2012 21:16
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looks like the starwars MMO is going to be free to play soon. http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/07/31/its-official-swtor-is-going-free-to-play/ I suspect once the conversion to F2P is completed most of the rest of the people in austin will be laid off. which I suppose is going to be good news for people looking for new employees with mmo experience.
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Jul 31, 2012 21:25
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floofyscorp posted:Well, we've had two projects shuttered this year and a lot of layoffs as a result. Off the top of my head I could only think of about five people still around from the ~40 person department I started in two years ago When I was there, a few years back, we had what amounted to crunch for a bit, but I was paid overtime and I know I wasn't the only one. When I had handed my notice in I even managed to have a month notice removed because I was asked to stay late when a bug was noticed on live and I was asked to fix it after hours. Some guy mentioned Ubi as being a crunch horror - I think that varies with studio since Paris had nothing mandatory which I was involved in and it should be against French law to impose it. Similarly in other European places I've not experienced any, which has been overall good news. It's been more the case to see places which have flexible core hours - in one awesome case 11am to 3-30 pm and noone would mention if you krept to those hours only, as long as you were absolutely on time with every project. The last time I in fact did stupid hours was when I was doing computer security and even then 'only' managed 84 hour weeks once every couple of months. It was one of the main reasons I returned to games and I've been very up-front and firm on the limits of what I will do in terms of hours during every interview since. This may have scuppered some interviews but has certainly resulted in some better chances to have useful amounts of free time. Shalinor posted:This is true even if your experience is limited. Your salary will likely double over your first 3 years, if you bounce between studios between projects instead of sticking with just one. Absolutely the case - the best pay rises are from moving companies. I even had a pay rise leaving company A for B and then another when I returned to A from B, despite them being sister companies with shared HR. 19orFewer fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jul 31, 2012 |
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Jul 31, 2012 21:30
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19orFewer posted:It was one of the main reasons I returned to games and I've been very up-front and firm on the limits of what I will do in terms of hours during every interview since. This may have scuppered some interviews but has certainly resulted in some better chances to have useful amounts of free time. ... unfortunately, there are still a lot of developers out there that think that AAA $60 games are the only games worth working on. If you limit yourself to just those, avoiding crunch is quite hard. To be fair, I used to be one of those - and I do still want to work on a AAA $60 game that doesn't suck.
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Jul 31, 2012 21:44
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keyframe posted:Watch and learn guys: Can someone please archive this before the author takes it down out of embarassment? I don't have time to watch it now and I fear it will be lost by the time I get home.
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Jul 31, 2012 22:41
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Hey, I'll be at QuakeCon with Dishonored, probably hanging out near whatever the Exhibit hall equivalent is. Feel free to stop by and say Hi  I'll probably have weird silver/greenish hair...
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Jul 31, 2012 22:43
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Hrm. I need some input on a thing. This is mostly targeted at the couple of people in here that have done casual games, but everyone's welcome to an opinion. I've been working on a casual game with a partner for 1.5 years (from way back before I went indie), and it's about 2 months out from release candidate level. It's in the time management genre (Diner Dash) - my partner blindly loves the genre, and believes herself to understand it intrinsically. I just write the code, she handles the art and design and marketing and business. She's got 14 years in the industry on production side, etc. We're aiming to release on GameHouse.com, more or less. She recently pulled out of our plans for her to go to CasualConnect and demo a 10-level build to publishers because "they'd steal our ideas." This throws up some really, really major red flags for me. People don't say that unless they have serious reservations about their product. I don't think it's very good, but I don't think the genre is good period. It doesn't compete visually with Emily's Memories or any of the other upper-tier games, so at absolute best, we'd be aiming for a middling success due to a relatively unique gameplay/narrative hook. But without good graphics? I think we're basically sunk in the casual space. (and please don't share those shots around, though no idea why you would.) ... so. My options are to dump it, or work for another 2 months or so and just push for release. My partner has always said the estimated total revenue would be $150k-$300k, meaning my cut is $65k-$140k after costs. Now even if it completely bombs, if, in the casual sphere, that means we make $50k? That's still $20k in my pocket for what amounts to 2 months of work. The thing is, I don't know if that's realistic. A casual bomb that made <$10k could well be the more likely case, which just isn't worth my time, even remotely. I don't know how the casual market works, that's always been her side... but my view is that the bottom fell out years ago, and that all those players are now over in Facebook-landia. Understand that I am presently working on my own on iOS/Android-focused stuff, and the current game tests well with just about everyone. So time spent on the above is time spent away from something I'd deem "definitely has potential to pay my bills in the relatively near future." Especially you ex-casual folks... what would you do? Shalinor fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Jul 31, 2012 |
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Jul 31, 2012 23:12
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