Develop Conference: Mark Rein and Miles Jacobson claim best devs are ready to make sacrifices
Passionate developers are happy and willing to experience crunch, two leading studio heads have said.
Speaking at the Develop in Brighton confernece, Sports Interactive MD Miles Jacobson and Epic Games VP Mark Rein said that many developers are willing to do overtime in order to ship the best product that they can.
"I’m sure we crunch just like everyone else," said Rein.
"But passionate people will want to ship the best product they can. We’ve been successful at managing our resources both financial and human.
He added: "We just went through a lawsuit, and when you see how hard the lawyers work, they crunch harder than many developers.
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"My dad was a doctor, and he put in more hours than most developers. Firemen and policemen work just as hard, but they just don’t have blogs writing about it."
Rein and Jacobson also said they do not offer most workers overtime pay, although the Epic VP explained that employees at the studio were paid well in bonuses.
Jacobson also clarified that his studio never enacted enforced crunch, and that it was important that if this overtime work did take place, that a studio head also worked just as hard.
"We’ve never had enforced crunch at our studio, ever," said Jacobson.
"If they want to do a little at the start and lots at the end, then that’s their choice. If people want to get the reputation of working in a studio where the games are great, then there’s going to be extra work going in.
"As long as the studio heads are working as hard as everyone else you don’t normally get any complaints. It’s normally when the bosses come in a couple hours a week and aren’t working much."
Rein added: "The difference between companies like Epic, Valve and Sports Interactive is that we really do share the wealth. It’s not like you’re just working super hard for someone else to go home and have a swimming pool."
That's easy to hear bosses talking about crunching, when they don't pay their employees who work more than 8 hours a day, and harvest the profit of their labour. Unpayed work is slavery, no matter what fancy word you want to choose. If your employees are working as hard as you do (though most of the time they work harder than their employers), maybe they should get the same salary, and all profit should be shared equally among all the workers in your company. Don't you think that would be fair?
They might be willing to crunch, but does crunching make you make better games? Definitely no to that if you ask me. To me crunch = bad planning. But yes we have crunched also, and we totally admit we didn't plan as good as we could have.
Poor payment for over-performance and profiting from people's passion is perfectly predictable practice.
Still, it's turned out nice for some.
Cruncing is a false economy... crunch for two weeks and I find you have to have two weeks of slacking to compensate. At the very least, any creativity or enthusiasm is lost for more time than what was crunched. It's only really possible on the last lap of a project when the end is in sight... and I mean in sight not like the last 3 months. Again, I would say 2-3 weeks and expect to be exhausted. And even then it's not a great way to launch a product if it's online and you need your guys to be ready to respond to the inevitable flow of changes/updates.
not only is it counter-productive but it is rarely about passionate people putting in the extra hours. Passionate people stay late when there isnt a deadline because they enjoy it and want to work on things while its fresh in their mind. I've done it myself and I know lots of others who have. Crunch is all about the expectation that you will work for free to dig management out of a hole and the unspoken understanding that anyone who doesnt isnt a team player. That is bullying and should be stamped on wherever its found.
Developers only crunch out of fear of losing their jobs (their passion is purely to stay employed).
Well-paid studio boss accuses poorly-paid underlings of being lazy compared to well-paid lawyers shocker.
Why are Develop giving this drivel a platform? Enough of the "passion" emotional blackmail, enough of the nonsensical analogies to lawyers and doctors, enough of abusing, bullying and taking advantage of your stuff. Just enough.
Crunch needs to die in a fire.
Trying the classic "If you _really_ loved me you would do it..." line, using examples of non-creative professions who do indeed work lots of extra hours to try to reinforce his false conflation of passion for games and willingness to overwork.
Seriously, we have been developing games for over 30 years. Other sectors have managed to work out how to do proper project planning and costing so there is no excuse for this any more.
NO-ONE should ever be made to feel guilty for working their contracted hours then going home.
IF extra hours are required then they should be communicated up front, tightly restricted and properly compensated.
It is disgusting to see company bosses still using this version of emotional blackmail to cover for either inadequate planning or planning retrofitted into marketing and financial schedules.
If your project has any "crunch", that means the Producer failed. No one makes a schedule where every one goes into crunch mode in the last months. That means there was feature creep, or just poor planning.
And what Producer in their right mind would advertise poor planning?
He said a few things that sounded quite nice, and it's true, an employee who cares about what they're producing has no problem working late, but that doesn't need underlining. That's true anywhere. If crunch, as industry employers define it (not overtime or seasonally busy periods) worked, then we wouldn't still be here "flogging this old tosh" as one comment put it. It would be so obvious, both in terms of profit and satisfaction across the board, that we'd never even have to see these reports at all.
It seems highly inappropriate to compare people who work on a video game to people who make sacrifices, or sacrifice themselves, to save lives. Developing might be big business but it's not feeding orphans or transplanting hearts. This falls wrongly on all accounts: There are many different types of policemen and many firefighters volunteer or work part time as they're needed. These guys aren't paid that well, either, and yes, do complain, but they aren't working in a business (an entertainment business, to go further). Not only that, there's a shortage of people willing to do those jobs -- jobs we all need filled very badly. We need another half baked video game like a hole in the head. The ONLY thing any of those jobs have in common with video game development is a high level of stress, and there is no reason video game development should be such a high stress job. If any analogy should be made it should be closer to the realm of toy store employee, who might have to work late some nights, might have a difficult and detail oriented task depending on the title, and who has to go through a killing season come the holidays. But even the toy store employee knows what's going on when Christmas comes, and is unlikely to be fired afterward, unless they knowingly signed on as temporary help.
I'm not implying anything about the company or people named above. In general, no matter what the industry, if employees are passionate about a task but not the product, it's the employer's job to find out why, not assume they're lazy. If they're stressed, it's the employer's or industry's job to ask why, not just claim it's not true. If they are fearful, or confused, it's the employer's job to discover why, not just assume it's the employee's fault. Loyalty goes both ways. Assuming the employee was hired in the first place for their knowledge, background, and passion, it doesn't make sense to suddenly consider them bereft of passion for no good reason.
My studio has worked for years now with Epic and I have to say that they are one of the best companies I've worked with. Midway, Arari, Infogrames, Accolade, Psygnosis, all of these demanded people to work unpaid overtime. That has never, ever been the case with Epic. They're very laid back, very honest and they have one of the happiest work forces I've ever known - at all levels, from the latest recruit right up to the CEO.
If you want to know how happy the work force is, look at staff turnover. Here in North East UK the big studios all expect unpaid overtime - and they all have problems retaining people.
We've always been good to people, like Epic, and those people have rewarded us with their great work.
So, yes, I totally agree with what is being said here.
'Crunch' is bad - but with properly managed studios it doesn't happen... Epic are one of those... Others include such as Valve (I'm told), ourselves, Double Eleven, etc ...
Before going to work anywhere, always, always speak to the people that work there and see how happy they are.
Maybe this is why less students are taking computer science at Uni!!! The industry can destroy your passion if you get into the wrong company. Games companys are finding it hard to get good staff - I wonder why. I got sick to death of the promise of a big bonus that ended up being very small. I left the industry after 10 years working at the top along with many other people I know who have left the industry for the same reasons. Even though I finished all my work at the end of each day, I felt I had to stay back doing nothing just to stay in the good books with management and not lose my job when the typical round of redundancies came at the end of each project. It's all about the management getting there biggger bigger, bigger bonus for getting the game out on time, while the real workers bonus is decided on how many games the project sells.
If you want your employees to work hard, pay them properly.
It's that simple.
To my knowledge, the standard working week was developed in world war 2 for maximum efficiency in munition factories over a long period of time.
If you crunch for extended periods, you're losing human efficiency.
Sure its practical as a short term solution, but you tend to get more negatives than positives after any more than 2 weeks.
but hey, the games industry is all about quantity over quality eh?
Great discussion here. Unfortunately though any comments including lots of swearing and direct abuse will have to be deleted. Let's keep it constructive.
I can understand that Mark Rein rationalizes exploitation to ease his conscience, but are we really interested in his admission that Epic suffer from poor project management? I think not.
Crunch isn't always a result of poor project management. Games like football manager have to be released in autumn to coincide with the major football tournaments with the needed data only being made available late each year.
It's far too easy to utter those words, 'project management', and magic incantations such as 'agile' and 'scrum' but these methodologies are not the be all and end all solutions to everything.
People who can motivate themselves to do any task are always going to be valuable employees, but I don't agree that employees should be expected to make sacrifices to be considered as a good employee, I just think passion can easily be mistaken for sacrifice when it's just a by product of an employee deeply engaged in doing something they are getting great satisfaction from.
Someone who is making a sacrifice at the same time every year has clearly not decided what they want, since if they did it would not be a yearly sacrifice but a preplanned decision to choose a job with crunch over whatever endeavours are sacrificed each year.
So it could be argued that a studio that has a self induced crunch amongst employees has managed to master the art of employee management, and created an atmosphere capable of inspiring them to devote seemingly sacrificial amounts of hours, passionately coding late into the night.
I do personally find myself more productive when I am nearer to a deadline, and given the skill set required to be a programmer it's likely that most programmers, especially the best, work better under pressure and therefore crunch is just an emergent outcome that can be averted by employing regular deadlines, which might in itself incur a micro crunch of some sorts, but yielding a much more manageable work/life balance.
Great comments from MR_K. (Just to clarify my own earlier comment, I don't disagree with the article above. I disagree with a certain idea of crunch and, as an aside, respectfully disagree with the quoted comparison, since that choice of analogy makes it sound to readers as if extreme pressure in game development is warranted.)
I don't believe in ever making absolute statements. Each studio, etc., is set up differently. Once someone says EventX is "always" caused by this or that, or that SituationB "always" ends up needing so in so, you know the discussion needs to get deeper ... What I think people really need in the work-life conversation is a firm definition of the ever-infamous 'crunch'.
I don't consider annual busy seasons crunch. Neither do I consider it "crunch" if the experience being described was a new employee's first time through a standard situation. That's a matter of the employee having been unprepared and/or unadvised -- possibly trained or mentored incorrectly by leadership. That's all a different conversation.
Many people work well with deadlines. I'm one of those, for instance. I can say that I would much rather have significant deadline responsibility with a planned busy season than a laid back year without much firm scheduling. The first, for me, creates a situation where the busy season is something enjoyable. It's almost like an academically oriented school trip, or a business trip ... You and your acquaintances experience a exciting change in routine together. You all get tired, sure, but at the end you celebrate and remember well what you did and accomplished together. The second, for me, CAN be refreshing but takes a special case. It often creates a lot of problems unless everyone is completely on the same page. It promotes boredom, engenders its own brand of stress (many times interpersonal), and often results in unplanned chaos without warning (as far as employees are concerned).
I've seen myself, over and over, work unexpectedly hard when engaged. I've taken on more responsibilities, extra work, and extra hours, even when I didn't totally have faith in all aspects of the situation. I've also seen myself grow resentful and bored in situations where it became apparent that hard work was wasted, or employees were better off wasting time, sitting or standing around to cover for bad leadership, someone's lack of knowledge, skill, or planning, or to fulfill rediculous expectations for appearance's sake (such as staying late when nothing is being accomplished).
Those last are generally what I would describe as management and production problems. No business is exempt from having them and they are, at their core, issues of resource management. They still do not, on their own, describe crunch.
I'd describe crunch as a periodic production panic created by bad decision making. Emergencies are either created by making unnecessary changes at the last minute, or caused by complete failure to communicate, then trumped up to employees as unavoidable. When a stable company has a known busy season for valid reasons and it does not tend to result in loss of revenue or employees, that's not crunch. When a company with regular project cancellations, time management problems, or production issues appears to rush through any emergency in order to save massive cuts or closure, possibly preceeded by a hire frenzy and advertising or partnership campaign, that's likely crunch.
Crunch needs to be clearly defined in these discussions so that people entering into the industry know what things to expect and what signs to look out for. Concerned family and employees need to be clear on when they're really in a bad situation and when it's something else. Maybe I'm the one misunderstanding and there really ARE a lot of young employees out there who have never been truly busy and don't understand what to expect, but I have trouble swallowing that.
First: Police and Firefighters often have unions and most definitely get overtime pay. They may do the work because they love it ("passion") but they're also directly compensated for that.
Second: Your average lawyer or doctor make more than your average game developer. Lawyers and doctors also talk about the human cost that these situations have and assume there rebound time in ways that most game development studios don't. Also note that lawyers in particular have exceptionally high rates of substance abuse, are more likely to have relationships that end in divorce and higher rates of depression. This is something both professions have concerns about. You don't see hospital heads saying, "If you don't like it, leave."
