In the videogame industry they have 80 hour work weeks all the time. They can get away with it because of employee turnover. If you burn out and quit, there’s a line of people who’d be happy to take your place.
In other areas you still have managers and executives whose performance is evaluated on short-term results, so they will push the team to work hard, gain political points and move on.
In the videogame industry they have 80 hour work weeks all the time. They can get away with it because of employee turnover. If you burn out and quit, there’s a line of people who’d be happy to take your place.
This does not match my experience. I’ve seen very few people actually work 80 hours a week more than once even in a crunch cycle, and this matches an informal survey result which shows a distribution that peaks around 44 for normal work hours and 57 during crunch (page 21).
I also haven’t experienced there being a line of people ready to take the place of turned over employees. Maybe there are many who would be happy to, but not nearly enough are talented enough to. The game industry has a market for employee talent just like any other, and it were ever the case that there was mass unemployment of qualified game developers, you would see those developers starting companies (as we are actually seeing recently).
I was surprised to see that, according to the same study above, the median tenure in the game industry is only 2 years, which you may have to take with the caveat it doesn’t give details about how contractors and starving indies were meant to respond to the question. The median tenure for the entire U.S. economy is 4.4, but possibly the better comparison is for 25-34 year-olds, for whom the median is 3.0.
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.”
In the videogame industry they have 80 hour work weeks all the time. They can get away with it because of employee turnover. If you burn out and quit, there’s a line of people who’d be happy to take your place.
In other areas you still have managers and executives whose performance is evaluated on short-term results, so they will push the team to work hard, gain political points and move on.
This does not match my experience. I’ve seen very few people actually work 80 hours a week more than once even in a crunch cycle, and this matches an informal survey result which shows a distribution that peaks around 44 for normal work hours and 57 during crunch (page 21).
I also haven’t experienced there being a line of people ready to take the place of turned over employees. Maybe there are many who would be happy to, but not nearly enough are talented enough to. The game industry has a market for employee talent just like any other, and it were ever the case that there was mass unemployment of qualified game developers, you would see those developers starting companies (as we are actually seeing recently).
I was surprised to see that, according to the same study above, the median tenure in the game industry is only 2 years, which you may have to take with the caveat it doesn’t give details about how contractors and starving indies were meant to respond to the question. The median tenure for the entire U.S. economy is 4.4, but possibly the better comparison is for 25-34 year-olds, for whom the median is 3.0.
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.”