Crunch time at Naughty Dog.

[milk]

But people, especially on the lower end of the food chain are not disposable labor for the sake of profit and the lifestyles of upper management.

Nobody working at ND really is a the lower end of any food chain. They all have enough oportunities beside staying there, as proven empirically by the fact that many DID leave to go work somewhere else. If ND's work/life balance is unsustainable, that will manifest in their products, and the company will wither on their own. And I think this process is much more accelerated the more the employees embrace a personal culture of responsability than by external intervention. Employees voting with their feet so to speak, by settling at the places that actually deserve their talents, has a way more powerful transformational power than theoretical laws and regulations ever can. That's all in my opinion of course.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Nobody working at ND really is a the lower end of any food chain. They all have enough oportunities beside staying there, as proven empirically by the fact that many DID leave to go work somewhere else. If ND's work/life balance is unsustainable, that will manifest in their products, and the company will wither on their own. And I think this process is much more accelerated the more the employees embrace a personal culture of responsability than by external intervention. Employees voting with their feet so to speak, by settling at the places that actually deserve their talents, has a way more powerful transformational power than theoretical laws and regulations ever can. That's all in my opinion of course.

I actually agree with this. I think workplace health and safety regulations must exist so companies can be held accountable, but it's actually very hard to enforce them unless you're dealing with workplace injuries or deaths, where things can be investigated. Exploring the mental health of a workplace is very difficult thing to do. Pretty much any of this would require a whistle-blower to provide real concrete documentation of exploitation, and it's more likely people will just leave companies when they're unhappy than put themselves through that for work at a game company. People are more likely to stay and fight when they don't have other options and their livelihood is at stake. People at places like Naughty Dog can take their new skills elsewhere easier than they can get a labour board involved and fight the workplace.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I dont usually agree with "if you dont like your job just go somewhere else, your job isnt so bad to begin with". And i dont agree here. There are plenty of reasons for someone not being able to leave a job in their situation, and trivializing that like pretty much anyone can do it at any time is incomprehensible to me. Especially with a game industry that actually has crunch as someone that is considered a common occurrence in big studios, which means your going to basically leave to end up going to the same thing if you have a particular skillset that only works in such an enviorment.

Not everyone at these companies are high level creatives who can do whatever they want...the backbone in every industry are low level workers(or in this case programmers) who dont get much recognition and are looked at as disposable, because they are by way of how companies are structured.

Of course, i'm just one of those people who dont believe in "free market forces" being the ones to solve issues, as we are seeing a lot of problems with that mindset in the world today.

Hard to believe that this whole convo was spun out of saying the game industry should have unions and worker representation. It shouldent be controversial to say such a thing but i guess it is

 

[milk]

There are plenty of reasons for someone not being able to leave a job in their situation, and trivializing that like pretty much anyone can do it at any time is incomprehensible to me.

Changing jobs is a part of adult life for everyone. Some people end up working in a single place their whole lives but even those should had been looking elsewhere and kept track of ther options and oportunities at all times.

It is basic housekeeping for any resposible working adult. Keep your resume and portfolio in order, and an eye in the industry. Don't expect all solutions to come from an union or the state, they will never care as much about your life as you can yourself.

I don't believe anybody with skills needed to work in a game studio absolutely only have skills that can be employed at game studios.

And even within game studios, crunch is mostly a part of AAA high budget projects.

For every ND there are another 100 smaller studios making the next Barbie Funhouse Facebook App.

I think you are judging the industry from a simplistic and apocaliptic lense. It is much broather than you give it credit for, and so are their employees much more versatile and capable than you are recognizing them to be. If I were a ND employee I'd feel insulted by the suggestion I was too dumb to be able to defend my own interests.

I wouldun't be surprised to discover the majority in theses studios actually like the struggle and wouldn't have it otherwise.
Regulations to impede crunch might leave more employees disadisfied than pleased. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Changing jobs is a part of adult life for everyone.

Just because something is a certain way now, doesn't mean that's the way it should be and we shouldn't pursue better alternatives.

It used to be that you'd get a job and keep it for life. It used to be you could afford to live with just one wage-maker in the household.

Maybe in the future, everyone will have stability and balance. Maybe loyalty will come back. The only thing we can be sure of is nothing will change if people don't care to change it and just accept the status quo as immutable.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

@DSoup Heaps of paid overtime for crunch? Lol. Salaried employees aren't getting shit if their hours double in a week. Edit: For example, my company tracks hours but for counting hours against certain projects to apply for tax breaks for the government. If you work overtime the reporting tool won't even let you enter your overtime hours. It maxes out at 40 hours per work week. In the salaried world that's actually very typical, because you do not get paid by the hour and can't earn extra pay for overtime.

I know paid overtime isn't a universal thing, it's most definitely more common to organisations in some countries than others and ultimately it's a complex mix of your labour laws (minimum wages, maximum/capped hours, flexible working etc), the size and sincere attitude to workers of your company and their finances.

In my round 30 years of professional employments (in July this year), I've yet to work in any organisation where paid overtime wasn't just a thing. Now that has shifted a little in the past decade and I'll get on to that.

That said, there is some reasonable expectation of crunch in pretty much all jobs. There is no way most businesses can provide a perfectly even workload at all times of the year. You might be at a business where sales massively increase at quarter end because your customers tend to spend the remainder of their budgets at quarter ends, or year ends. People will move on to other things if it becomes unreasonable and actions aren't taken to minimize the damage to themselves.

There still seems to be a sizeable chunk of jobs with no crunch, for example there are many clerical jobs which are just a solid 9-5 and there are many people doing the same type of work. But some sort of shifting workload is often the norm, which brings me back to the shift away from paid overtime. So it used to be the norm but I've noticed rather than paid overtime, many employers would prefer people work flexibility. What this means is you work less when it suits you and your employer, and you work more when needed - again when it suits you and your employer. This can and does work, it works well where am currently and where I was before. Lots of people don't have balanced balanced personal lives any more than work are an equal distribution of work 24/7/365.

When my last job introduced flexible working, I was a manager and I was sceptical. I figured this would be a management and logistical nightmare but it just happened organically. It helps if you and your colleagues care about the job.

I think the real problem is if you have a significant portion of your workforce that is burning out, of which employees leaving is a good indicator, and you do nothing to address it. The story around Naughty Dog is that they've lost 60-70% of the employees that worked on Uncharted 4.

I don't think people leaving a company after a big project is that uncommon, not looking at the CVs are folks in the games development world - it seems like a very transient place and it's a good thing as long as people are not leaving because somewhere was a terrible place to work. People bringing, taking and sharing experience, ideas, and propagating goods practice is healthy for an industry.

Changing jobs is a part of adult life for everyone. Some people end up working in a single place their whole lives but even those should had been looking elsewhere and kept track of ther options and oportunities at all times.

This is an interesting one, I know a lot of people who worked for the same employer all of their life, some even doing the exact same job. I've worked for myself and several larger organisations and as I mentioned above, if you look the CVs of many in the games industry, their project credits are often varied showing they've worked at a lot of companies. I think in part this is because there are so many game developers and the skills are very transferrable.

 

[BRiT]

Throughout my entire professional career, I have never had any salaried position that included paid overtime in the US. Ever. That is the definition of Salaried.

Most of the time in current day positions, you're working 50 to 60 hours normally outside of crunch time, easily 5 10s and a few hours on the weekend or after hours during the week. If your manager is human, they will have unspoken agreement of taking unofficial comp-day for when you had to go outside the 60 hour range. Like working over the weekend 20 to 32 hours on major deployments would get you 1 day off during the next week. However, all of this is unofficial and not accounted for in the time tracking systems. They also don't track actual hours, so in all time tracking systems you're only allowed to record 40 hours even if you worked 72 that week. The systems prevent any higher hours than 40 on Salaried employees.

The only potential is for all the hard work to be shown as appreciated through the company bonus structure, but those all depend more on how well the company does than it does on you. Bonus is pronounced "bone-us", as companies always find ways to not reward employees. You could work 75 hours a week for entire project timeline and if company has a bad year you get the real "bone-us" of nothing.

That's not so say there wasn't a great company or two in there during the time, but that's more on having a great manager and someone who knows how to show appreciation. Before the dotcom collapse era, at a couple places I was at the CTO would reward normal workers upto 100% of your salary as virtual stock grants in the company as appreciation. At both places it was extremely rare for them to do, at one place only handful or less people ever had that happen.

But, do you know how that turned out? Having 3x my yearly salary as virtual stock amounted to all of "a dinner and a movie" when the company was acquired during the collapse.

Since then, that style of compensation has been mostly eliminated since people around long enough, for the dotcom collapse or financial housing meltdown, remember it for what it was, empty promises. It shows more as a strong negative than any possible positives.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Throughout my entire professional career, I have never had any salaried position that included paid overtime in the US. Ever. That is the definition of Salaried.

Yes, the US is not a country I would hold up as an example of having good labour laws. And this is a fundamental problem because even companies who do care about heir employees, by doing so potentially put themselves at a competitive disadvantage against companies that do not who can do everything cheaper and for many industries, margins are already thin.

The only company I ever considered working for in the US was Microsoft in the early 2000s. I even went through 4 days of interviews and was offered a post. It wasn't until I started looking at the realties of moving to the US, like health insurance, the need to have a vehicle, insurance etc - that I decided to decline and realised living in the US wasn't for me, even for a few years.

Most of the time in current day positions, you're working 50 to 60 hours normally outside of crunch time, easily 5 10s and a few hours on the weekend or after hours during the week.

For most Europeans, and there are always exceptions such as social care and health, these kinds of hours are crazy. The cap on routine (some exceptions) working patterns is 48 hours a week and that itself isn't typical - those are edge cases. My conditioned hours for the last fifteen or so years has been 36 a week, which average 7.2 (seven hours, twelve minutes) a day, i.e. your common 8am to 4pm, 9am to 5pm work day including an almost-lunch hour (48 minutes). Six weeks (and one day!) paid leave - not counting the 8 public holidays we have. Some of those years have included some crunch, where you flexible working is preferred - and it's not always possible to be that flexible, or paid overtime. 1.5x hourly rate Mon-Fri, 2x hourly rate Sat/Sun/Bank Holidays.

 

[manux]

One thing in addition to what BRiT wrote is that many companies at least in silicon vally have "unlimited" vacation time which in reality means no/minimal vacation days. That comes back to how good of a manager one has. Upside is there is a lot of money to be had for good performers, downside is that a ridiculous amount of work is needed to get there. I'm not complaining as long as it's choice and not a slavery. I see it very much as a choice and a freedom to choose company/kind of work that consumes all of your life. It could change easily otherwise if all the jobs were like this.

One additional negative I see on this work culture is that if one isn't careful it easily becomes appearance competition. Long hours but lazily done(long lunch break, lazy around the office) and meaningless check ins during weekend. Would be important to have environment where performance/result not hours matters. This entirely depends on company/manager.

Naughty dog sounds like a typical silicon valley company. I know they are not, but it gives good mental model to think about west coast technology jobs. Though gaming companies I suppose pay less than companies with "regular" jobs.

 

[Scott_Arm]

If I were a betting man, I'd bet Naughty Dog does not pay any overtime. I'd expect that you are never asked to work overtime, you're just giving deadlines that can't be accomplished without overtime. Some people will be fine with this because it's in their nature to work long hours, they have no spouse or children or dependents etc. Usually the worst part comes when you realize you're working extra hours unnecessarily because of failure to plan or failure to communicate, which were the main issues people brought up in the naught dog crunch article. Examples were continuing to work on things that had been scrapped from the game without being communicated.

Where I live in Canada companies legally have to pay overtime past 44 hours a week. Hours are not tracked in pretty much any place, unless you're paid by the hour, including the government. Your boss will very very rarely tell you that you have to come in for extra hours, and they'll chastise you for not taking your vacation (because they don't want to pay out the hours), but they won't adjust your deadlines for vacation and your deadline will probably be tight enough to require extra working hours anyway. For me, my hours go through good periods and bad periods and it does somewhat even out, so I don't mind. But I'd say everyone I know goes through periods of working overtime without being compensated as required by law.

 

[Scott_Arm]

@DSoup Attrition is good. You always need new people coming in or your company will stagnate or age out. 60-70% seems pretty high though. I believe that was the number in the article.

 

[milk]

It used to be that you'd get a job and keep it for life. It used to be you could afford to live with just one wage-maker in the household.

Maybe in the future, everyone will have stability and balance. Maybe loyalty will come back. The only thing we can be sure of is nothing will change if people don't care to change it and just accept the status quo as immutable.

I did acknowledge that, didn't I? And what I said is even if you do have a hell of a stable job, you should always be prepared for change. Betting all your money on perpetual stability is just irresponsable. The world is not stable. Last century saw two world wars, the 1930's worldwide recession, and those are just the major worldwide events. Today we are going through a biologically caused crysis.

Any sane person takes the message home that one should be ready to adapt and for change. And that is not a bad thing. Changing your way of life certainly takes effort and even courage, but it is thanks to adaptability that humanity is this resiliat, and to change that it can progress. To expect total social stability is not just mediocre, its a disservice to progress. It's cowardly selfish.

 

[Malo]

Today we are going through a biologically caused crysis.

So it wasn't China who was responsible, it was Crytek!

 

[milk]

So it wasn't China who was responsible, it was Crytek!

Whoopsie. Game head induced typo. Or is it "tipo"? Humm...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I did acknowledge that, didn't I? And what I said is even if you do have a hell of a stable job, you should always be prepared for change. Betting all your money on perpetual stability is just irresponsable. The world is not stable. Last century saw two world wars, the 1930's worldwide recession, and those are just the major worldwide events. Today we are going through a biologically caused crysis.

Any sane person takes the message home that one should be ready to adapt and for change. And that is not a bad thing. Changing your way of life certainly takes effort and even courage, but it is thanks to adaptability that humanity is this resiliat, and to change that it can progress. To expect total social stability is not just mediocre, its a disservice to progress. It's cowardly selfish.

Weird angle. Maybe you misunderstood the point? You cited the way the world is. I just pointed out that it can be changed, and people can change it. "People change jobs all the time" isn't really an excuse for companies to be shitty. It's one mechanic that could be used to try and force change, but there are many options.

 

[milk]

Weird angle. Maybe you misunderstood the point? You cited the way the world is. I just pointed out that it can be changed, and people can change it. "People change jobs all the time" isn't really an excuse for companies to be shitty. It's one mechanic that could be used to try and force change, but there are many options.

My point is exactly that we can't chang instability away from the world. I thought covid had made it clear how fragile our social systems are.

I even accept your POV or aiming for utopia, but given the current state of things, there are A LOT of changes ahead of us to get from here to there, thus why I think we need a culture that embraces and teaches flexibility and adaptability.

The many pockets of miraculous stability and safety that history is sprinkled with don't simply prove eternal stability is possible, they prove they are unsustainable because they always collapse.

Let me be clear, I recognize change incurs a lot of pain, and I to want to build a world with less of that pain. I'm just sckeptical we can do that by getting rid of change itself. We are not that powerful. I think the best chance we have is building people who can deal with change better.

 

[AlNom]

Sustainable chaos.

 

[manux]

In finland there is a law to say how many overtime hours one can do. It's pretty small limit. Trying to do something like that in USA would likely lead into fierce don't touch my freedom arguments, I can work as little/much as I want to.

Those people who sign contracts with no overtime compensation should be smart enough to ask for big enough base pay/stock options/... to make the deal wortwhile. Or perhaps that job is a springboard to advance career/get next job. I keep hearing many people go to apple and sweat few years as that opens up a lot of doors. If one doesn't like specific job/company, exercise freedom and walk away. It is what you make it. If one wants a job that requires hard work then one has to be willing to do that hard work and ask for appropriate compensation. It's not like any company now days can hide the expectation they have for employees and how the work conditions are.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

My point is exactly that we can't chang instability away from the world. I thought covid had made it clear how fragile our social systems are.

I even accept your POV or aiming for utopia, but given the current state of things, there are A LOT of changes ahead of us to get from here to there, thus why I think we need a culture that embraces and teaches flexibility and adaptability.

The many pockets of miraculous stability and safety that history is sprinkled with don't simply prove eternal stability is possible, they prove they are unsustainable because they always collapse.

Let me be clear, I recognize change incurs a lot of pain, and I to want to build a world with less of that pain. I'm just sckeptical we can do that by getting rid of change itself. We are not that powerful. I think the best chance we have is building people who can deal with change better.

I'm not anywhere suggesting an elimination of change and a perfectly stable world*. If you read that into my example, it wasn't intended. It was just an example of how things have changed and how things can change.

* although if humanity got its act together, everything outside of natural forces could actually be managed towards stability. There are and have been very stable cultures throughout history which have mostly been trashed by people. The world is what we make it. We only have an economy and crazy work hours because that's the world that was created from the first people chilling around n the forests or whatever. It could have ended up a very different world with very different choices. It'll end up a very different world in the future too, for better or worse.

 

[PSman1700]

For most Europeans, and there are always exceptions such as social care and health, these kinds of hours are crazy. The cap on routine (some exceptions) working patterns is 48 hours a week and that itself isn't typical - those are edge cases. My conditioned hours for the last fifteen or so years has been 36 a week, which average 7.2 (seven hours, twelve minutes) a day, i.e. your common 8am to 4pm, 9am to 5pm work day including an almost-lunch hour (48 minutes). Six weeks (and one day!) paid leave - not counting the 8 public holidays we have. Some of those years have included some crunch, where you flexible working is preferred - and it's not always possible to be that flexible, or paid overtime. 1.5x hourly rate Mon-Fri, 2x hourly rate Sat/Sun/Bank Holidays.

Yes it is about like that in sweden.