Yeah, my “80 hours” was an overstatement. Though maybe you can replace it with 60 and the message will still stand.
Indie game development isn’t very profitable, and unemployed game developers can easily switch to normal software jobs instead. So for every one who starts their own indie thing, there’s probably several more who leave the industry.
Yeah, leaving the industry is extremely common, but in my opinion not outcome-optimal for the employers who are driving their employees to extremes (or, more commonly, not encouraging normalcy). There are indeed young recruits who are willing to come in and spend huge amounts of time and effort on game projects, but there is huge variance in work quality in this group, such that the flipside of fast, positive work from a talented, unstable, young programmer is the risk of losing time on poor work from a weak, unstable, young programmer… with little way to know the difference. A senior engineer at 40 hours is substantially better than a junior engineer at 80 hours, and so companies probably should invest more to keep talent on future projects, which is of course hard to do when crunch rolls around on the current project.
I used to hear this saying around the industry: “When you’re on the outside of games, it seems like nobody is looking to hire good talent. When you’re on the inside, it seems like there’s nobody talented applying.”
Yeah, my “80 hours” was an overstatement. Though maybe you can replace it with 60 and the message will still stand.
Indie game development isn’t very profitable, and unemployed game developers can easily switch to normal software jobs instead. So for every one who starts their own indie thing, there’s probably several more who leave the industry.
Yeah, leaving the industry is extremely common, but in my opinion not outcome-optimal for the employers who are driving their employees to extremes (or, more commonly, not encouraging normalcy). There are indeed young recruits who are willing to come in and spend huge amounts of time and effort on game projects, but there is huge variance in work quality in this group, such that the flipside of fast, positive work from a talented, unstable, young programmer is the risk of losing time on poor work from a weak, unstable, young programmer… with little way to know the difference. A senior engineer at 40 hours is substantially better than a junior engineer at 80 hours, and so companies probably should invest more to keep talent on future projects, which is of course hard to do when crunch rolls around on the current project.
I used to hear this saying around the industry: “When you’re on the outside of games, it seems like nobody is looking to hire good talent. When you’re on the inside, it seems like there’s nobody talented applying.”