Working in The AAA industry

[The Benjamins]

1 minute ago, dragosudeki said:

Brook's law:

"adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"

 

Moreover, bigger team would require a lot more people to pay, and I would think that budgets are extremely sensitive in the games industry where a long project doesn't necessarily mean profit.

 

All I can say is that you should just appreciate and give respect to every form of art. Games are just an entire compilation of various art forms. Avoiding them because people put hard work into it is one of the most disrespectful things you can do in my opinion.

But I think its wrong if they schedule lets say 1000 man ours for a job but in reality it takes 2000 man hours to finish, that is poor management. 

[dragosudeki]

2 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

But I think its wrong if they schedule lets say 1000 man ours for a job but in reality it takes 2000 man hours to finish, that is poor management. 

There really is no such thing as perfect management.

 

Hofstadter's law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

[The Benjamins]

2 minutes ago, dragosudeki said:

There really is no such thing as perfect management.

 

Hofstadter's law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

I understand that, but I worked at a place were ever job ( yes every) was late. we have 3 - 9 month lead times. and at minimum every job was a month late. and they would book jobs they know they can't fulfill in time just to keep the numbers up. because of every project was "rushed" even if I  released a job 1 month early the "rushed" jobs would force it to be late. and due to every thing being late, they expect you to work not paid overtime and they payed below industry standards. they also couldn't figure out why most new employees only lasted a month before leaving.

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, patrickjp93 said:

She got paid 6 figures likely north of 200k. At that point if you want fewer hours you make your skills scarce or you submit yourself to the demands of the labor market. Writers and project managers are a dime a dozen.

If that's the case then sure: back breaking job for a high paying salary it's completely ok. Though most developers (Like people actually coding or doing artwork not fucking project managers of course) don't get paid anywhere near that.

 

So partially conceded: she might just be a bad example of a real problem.

[rashdanml]

8 hours ago, rdical1412 said:

But she goes on to say people shouldn't be encouraging those type of games. Its made of developers blood. How do you Feel about it?

Your computer is made by the blood and sweat of unpaid Chinese interns. 

Your clothes are made in third world countries by unpaid or underpaid labour (often child labour). 

 

To be frank, every part of your life probably exploits the blood and sweat of people who are less privileged than you are.

 

The only real solution to stop "supporting" any of these industries that exploit people is to stop living. Or at the very least, sacrifice a large part of your life. 

 

-------

 

People who work in game development are usually passionate about what they do. If they feel like they're "made" to work 80 hours per day, they're in the wrong industry. 

[kuzko]

23 minutes ago, dragosudeki said:

Brook's law:

"adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"

 

Moreover, bigger team would require a lot more people to pay, and I would think that budgets are extremely sensitive in the games industry where a long project doesn't necessarily mean profit.

 

All I can say is that you should just appreciate and give respect to every form of art. Games are just an entire compilation of various art forms. Avoiding them because people put hard work into it is one of the most disrespectful things you can do in my opinion.

Art? yeah, you mean the whole thing that's created, sold, used and tossed as a product? I agree we all have a definition of art, and I'm not criticizing the workforce, just people framing the project and their acts.

 

BTW, look at what ubisoft does : a lampost is a person, a waterhose is a person, etc, scalability in mind with multiple studio's worth of work combined. If Naughty dog was constrained, that because they accepted a poorly conceived project. that was someone's job to refuse this to happen... they let it.

 

Being a responsible citizen doing it's duty, not supporting bad behavior in product conception by refusing such thing to exist is a DUTY, nothing else. 

 

Though, on the final work, I can alway see that what they did is a pretty looking game.

[rashdanml]

57 minutes ago, alexyy said:

or just set realistic deadlines. 

Not an option when shareholders are concerned. 

[SSL]

11 minutes ago, rashdanml said:

Not an option when shareholders are concerned. 

 

Sounds like we're onto something here.

[kuzko]

23 minutes ago, dragosudeki said:

There really is no such thing as perfect management.

 

Hofstadter's law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Than you did not take Hofstadter's law into account...

 

It seems you like eponymous laws, then this one is relevant.

Parkinson's law of triviality: "The time spent on any agenda item will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved."

 

That's the issue, if you don't spend money on a project at it's start by staffing it, and you get late because you do not give the project headroom, it ain't going to help. Though, I concede that because of the dumb delays needed to survive, that's hard to do a project management through functionality delivery like Frontier does with elite dangerous or RSI with Star citizen.

[Misanthrope]

19 minutes ago, rashdanml said:

Not an option when shareholders are concerned. 

True, yet I would argue that many, if not most of the AAA big publishers and many studios, just don't have a right to exist.

 

To elaborate, some studios and publishers have managed monumental successes. Like out of this world ammounts of money thrown their way. Those products hit all the high marks with an extremely large audience so obviously they were incredibly successful. So naturally many other suits want in on that apparent cash cow.

 

The problem is many don't really know what's involved: They don't realize a game like GTA V has a dev studio with decades of experience behid it and has released over a dozen of games to establish a franchise and a wining formula. There's no ammount of man hours or marketing budget you can throw at a single game to make it win the hearts and minds of a generation of gamers that have known about your franchise for most of their childhoods and adult lives.

 

In other words, any company can decide to make a beverage and sell it but why would they be crazy enough to think they can even approach someone like Pepsi or Coca Cola that has penetrated the culture around the world for decades?

 

Gaming is often criminally misunderstood and most AAA developers need to have more realistic expectations. You want the next GTA V? Invest on a new IP to start small but very strongly. Keep at it, release consistently good games. Maybe in 15 years you can be ready to break industry records with your revenue. That's what's going to take instead of yelling at some poor fucking coder to put up more 18 hour days and code more to somehow get there. You're going to flop if you aim that fucking high every time.

 

And that's what the AAA industry is doing: setting themselves up for impossible goals they will never achieve.

 

[dragosudeki]

2 minutes ago, kuzko said:

Than you did not take Hofstadter's law into account...

 

It seems you like eponymous laws, then this one is relevant.

Parkinson's law of triviality: "The time spent on any agenda item will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved."

 

That's the issue, if you don't spend money on a project at it's start by staffing it, and you get late because you do not give the project headroom, it ain't going to help. Though, I concede that because of the dumb delays needed to survive, that's hard to do a project management through functionality delivery like Frontier does with elite dangerous or RSI with Star citizen.

We're talking about a volatile market. You might then overstaff a project, then have to layoff part of the workforce because sales were less than predicted (Much worse to terminate someone). Again, this entire article is about the crunch time (time spent closer to release). And if you actually read the reasons around Brook's law:

1. It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive

2. Communication overheads increase as the number of people increases.

3. Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing.

It's the same idea to how adding more cores to a CPU won't make all your applications run faster.

[kuzko]

8 minutes ago, dragosudeki said:

We're talking about a volatile market. You might then overstaff a project, then have to layoff part of the workforce because sales were less than predicted (Much worse to terminate someone). Again, this entire article is about the crunch time (time spent closer to release). And if you actually read the reasons around Brook's law:

1. It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive

2. Communication overheads increase as the number of people increases.

3. Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing.

It's the same idea to how adding more cores to a CPU won't make all your applications run faster.

Since when had EA any kind of remorse or issue with laying staff off even when they're succesful? cf Maxis... and they are quite a big player.

 

Crunching is a consequence of a project management by time frame, for a fixed release date, and that's pretty dumb. And people taking the toll are not an ideal situation either, so yeah, you need to push back the date to get a finished product by burning a bit of money to avoid this kind of situations.

That's the only way I see things get better to workaround the constraints of HR management you mentioned earlier.

Yet, what's blowing my mind is that nobody finds this abnormal to keep people you work with healty by giving the simplest thing of all, time.

[SkepticKrab]

38 minutes ago, rashdanml said:

Not an option when shareholders are concerned. 

This right here, when your project depends on the financial backing of shareholders, some of whom may not entirely understand the complexities and hiccups that occur in game dev, you end up with strict deadlines. Penalty for failure might be losing some shareholders so its either you shut up and put up, or pack up and go independent/casual.

[Misanthrope]

5 minutes ago, SkepticKrab said:

This right here, when your project depends on the financial backing of shareholders, some of whom may not entirely understand the complexities and hiccups that occur in game dev, you end up with strict deadlines. Penalty for failure might be losing some shareholders so its either you shut up and put up, or pack up and go independent/casual.

But that's the thing there's nothing they can do to churn out good games faster. They're just kidding themselves and working everybody to the bone for the benefit or nobody. It won't help employees, it won't produce better games and it won't ultimately making any more money to keep up this crazy rhythm.

 

Look let's say I want a nice, natural shade outside of my house because my neightbor has this massive, beautiful tree on his yard. Do you think that if I pay millions of dollars, go hire scientists, pay them to work 90 or 100 hours per week (or just force em) will get me a 40 feet tall tree any faster?

 

No the only way for me to get a tree that big is to plan ahead or wait 50 fucking years for the thing to grow. There are no fucking short cuts. In many cases there are no short cuts to extremely successful games and franchises in gaming this have been grown over the course of years, decades even.

[SkepticKrab]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

But that's the thing there's nothing they can do to churn out good games faster. They're just kidding themselves and working everybody to the bone for the benefit or nobody. It won't help employees, it won't produce better games and it won't ultimately making any more money to keep up this crazy rhythm.

 

Look let's say I want a nice, natural shade outside of my house because my neightbor has this massive, beautiful tree on his yard. Do you think that if I pay millions of dollars, go hire scientists, pay them to work 90 or 100 hours per week (or just force em) will get me a 40 feet tall tree any faster?

 

No the only way for me to get a tree that big is to plan ahead or wait 50 fucking years for the thing to grow. There are no fucking short cuts. In many cases there are no short cuts to extremely successful games and franchises in gaming this have been growth over the course of years.

Its the nature of America's corporate culture, they need to turn profits within an unreasonably short time frame (monthly, quarterly, etc.). It may work for some business models for a while but eventually you will hit a wall where people won't be efficient enough to make the money within 40hr/week. Then investors might start looking at running shifts to stay open 24/7, then automation, then what? The profit chasing buck has to stop somewhere.

 

Its a model that won't work if you are planning to build a sustainable brand like say Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto, great products like that don't happen overnight, they take years of careful planning and execution.

Naughty Dogs is a studio I don't care about, their products don't appeal to me because they seem rushed with little thought for details, similar to yearly EA releases.

 

Anyways, her fault for not understanding the studio she worked for all this time.

[TopDollar]

The facility I work at operates 24/7 365 days a year and performs vital services to the US. This means that engineering is often expected to have coverage 24 hours a day, weekends included. Burn out is definitely a real thing. Can hit you even if you make a lot of money and love what you do. Even in the couple years I've worked here, I've seen it happen to several coworkers; resulting in a high turn over rate. Now if you couple that with a company that doesn't treat its employees very well and you have a real recipe for disaster.

 

Not trying to make any judgments of anyone here or anything, but I will say that it's a lot easier for me to relate to the article here since I've seen, and experienced it myself up to a point, the effects of burn out due to job expectations.

[Curufinwe_wins]

16 minutes ago, TopDollar said:

The facility I work at operates 24/7 365 days a year and performs vital services to the US. This means that engineering is often expected to have coverage 24 hours a day, weekends included. Burn out is definitely a real thing. Can hit you even if you make a lot of money and love what you do. Even in the couple years I've worked here, I've seen it happen to several coworkers; resulting in a high turn over rate. Now if you couple that with a company that doesn't treat its employees very well and you have a real recipe for disaster.

 

Not trying to make any judgments of anyone here or anything, but I will say that it's a lot easier for me to relate to the article here since I've seen, and experienced it myself up to a point, the effects of burn out due to job expectations.

I've seen it myself as well with my work, and with my mother as my sister and I were kids (I am a NE, she is a IE person). Learning particularly from her early jobs as I was a kid helped me really focus more on finding a good environment (with reasonable general OT expectations) than going for that money/prestige position (although that is easy for me to say when my industry pays plenty well enough for my purposes).

 

 

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

8 hours ago, SkepticKrab said:

If you don't love what you do for a living it will seem like a chore, which is what I'm getting from her whining about 80 hour work weeks. I worked seven days a week as a System Administrator for a company for 3 years (even worked on most holidays, several overnight implementations etc.) and I never complained because I loved doing it so much. 

Again, if you don't love what you do, find something else to occupy your time.

 

Fortunately or unfortunately, not everyone gets to do what they love doing. 

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Project related industries are like that. Just don't put your work over your health.

[Derangel]

1 hour ago, kuzko said:

Than you did not take Hofstadter's law into account...

 

It seems you like eponymous laws, then this one is relevant.

Parkinson's law of triviality: "The time spent on any agenda item will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved."

 

That's the issue, if you don't spend money on a project at it's start by staffing it, and you get late because you do not give the project headroom, it ain't going to help. Though, I concede that because of the dumb delays needed to survive, that's hard to do a project management through functionality delivery like Frontier does with elite dangerous or RSI with Star citizen.

AAA games already cost north of $50-$60 MILLION to make on average with some even breaking $100m. Spending exponentially more when games are still relatively cheap to buy really isn't an option. Are you willing to pay $70-$80 (or more depending on which part of the world you live in) per game in order for studios to massively increase budgets on projects?

[Misanthrope]

11 minutes ago, Pohernori said:

 

Fortunately or unfortunately, not everyone gets to do what they love doing. 

That's something more people need to realize: people need to abandon the romantic notion of "Love what you do and you won't work a day on your life!" - Bullshit when your house payment is due or you need to pay your water bill or buy food nobody is going to give you anything for free because you haven't found what you love yet.

 

Adults often need to abandon such stupid ideas and get some fucking money on their account. Because other people depend on you and because nobody's gonna fucking help you but yourself. You need to do whatever it is you're good at and that produces you the least ammount of stress to do. For many that will be coding or data processing and such but I resent the implication that I am somehow worst at my job because it's not what I've been wanting to do since I was an 8 year old kid: I'm not a fucking kid anymore, I can do jobs and be damn good at them without "loving" what I do.

[slanensis]

9 hours ago, SkepticKrab said:

If you don't love what you do for a living it will seem like a chore, which is what I'm getting from her whining about 80 hour work weeks. I worked seven days a week as a System Administrator for a company for 3 years (even worked on most holidays, several overnight implementations etc.) and I never complained because I loved doing it so much. 

Again, if you don't love what you do, find something else to occupy your time.

 

 

I believe that ANYTHING that is done for over 10 hours a day is inhumane, and even sometimes negatively affects a human being's physical health. Even if he gamed professionally for money, he would not play for 12 hours. It is not humane, and at this point, not fun anymore. Maybe you REALLY liked your job, but I personally believe that you need to relax your work hours or something because you are basically hurting yourself. But that is just my thought, I am just a middle-school kid, fcking tired of that much studying, and I, like you, would like to work 12 hours a week on a job like yours, or like Hennig. 

[SkepticKrab]

35 minutes ago, slanensis said:

I believe that ANYTHING that is done for over 10 hours a day is inhumane, and even sometimes negatively affects a human being's physical health. Even if he gamed professionally for money, he would not play for 12 hours. It is not humane, and at this point, not fun anymore. Maybe you REALLY liked your job, but I personally believe that you need to relax your work hours or something because you are basically hurting yourself. But that is just my thought, I am just a middle-school kid, fcking tired of that much studying, and I, like you, would like to work 12 hours a week on a job like yours, or like Hennig. 

That job was last year, I moved to Canada and work 2 jobs now, both part-time, and I still wouldn't mind finding another job. The jobs I do now (Tutoring and Custodian/Service) don't have the prestige or technical aspect of what I used to do but I still enjoy them somehow, knowing I'm making an effort to make something perform better is what makes me want to work more.

It could just be me though, I like work of any form I guess

[straight_stewie]

11 hours ago, rdical1412 said:

Developer of Uncharted 4 was not happy with the work ethics at Naughty Dog. They were made to work For 80 Hours a week.

ALL, let me repeat that, ALL jobs that fall under the category of software development or any type of science/engineering will eventually have you work many hour weeks. 

Even at an unnamed educational software company (you know the one I'm talking about), sprints happen. And when sprints happen, 120 hour+ weeks are not unheard of. Infact, it used to be commonplace and common knowledge that, in the software industry, you would work 120 hour weeks regularly.

80 hour work weeks during sprints in R&D industries is pretty good. I doubt that guy knew just how good he had it.

BTW, only people who are considered "talent" get good jobs that place that much responsibility on their shoulders. This developer just killed what could have been a very nice career.

[Snadzies]

80 hours a week is both mentally and physically exhausting, makes you less productive and can very much even be dangerous.

 

You NEED time to rest and relax, to be with your family, to do normal day to day tasks.

Hell, unless you sleep at work you don't have enough time to simply get home and get enough sleep before you come back.

 

Even a few days of that and your physical and mental state will start to decline making you more likely to get sick and a potential hazard should you drive.

Your focus and reasoning and problem solving skills will start to be effected making you more likely to mess up or it will just take you longer to do tasks than before.

The continued stresses make people more irritable and create a hostile workplace as people snap at each other, argue and fight about things that normally wouldn't phase them and just compounds even more stress on everyone.

 

The toll on a person's physical and mental state and the risks to other people it creates is just not safe or healthy no matter how much you love your job.

A human is not a machine and we need time to relax every single day.

[MageTank]

4 hours ago, alexyy said:

or just set realistic deadlines. 

This is the gaming industry. Either a product gets rushed out, and is finished with patches and DLC's to meet a specific release (think of the games that sell around Christmas or other holidays) or they end up on the backburner for decades and fail to meet the hype of a game that took 10+ years to release (Duke Nukem Forever). The burden publishers put on developers is very real, and its often their fault when we get unfinished products, not exactly the fault of the developers. That's not to say lazy developers do not exist; it's just that the majority of them do like what they do, and take pride in their work, they just have to follow orders to get their paycheck. Sometimes those orders are "cut corners, get the product out now". 

 

The irony is, Amy Hennig now works for EA, a company known for cutting corners on pretty much everything. I am certain she will have the hours she wants now.