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Last week I was surprised that my personal story of crunch time turned out to be somewhat controversial. In fact, I figured people would blast me for calling ten hour days crunch time at all -- weekends and all-nighters: that's real crunch.
Further, by illustrating the topic with a real-world example, I've probably drawn the Eye of Sauron to our little serious games studio. So, in the little time I have left of freedom, before being dragged away by the labor police to some bourgeois hoosegow, I'd like to broaden (and depersonalize) the topic, because it really has me thinking...
Are Americans getting lazy?
Since we have an international readership here, I'd love to hear some perspectives from outside the US especially! Legal issues aside with regards to the weekly number of hours and compensation (these vary state to state and country to country), and assuming all other factors are equal, such as education level and experience, are game developers from outside the US willing to work harder and longer than their American counterparts?
Sometime within the last few months I heard a radio article that relayed a Chinese adage about wealth and human nature that has been bouncing around in my head ever since. The main idea was that the first generation of wealth works very hard to achieve it, and passes that ethic down to the second generation. However, by the third generation that gets squandered by a sense of entitlement and plain old being spoiled (both the wealth and the work ethic.)
This seems to be a generally true statement about human nature, and I wonder to what extent it can be applied to the US at large? Could we be playing Guitar Hero while Rome burns? While we rail about overtime and demonize any crunch as a deathmarch, is someone else drinking our collective milkshake? Are union organizations, once so vital to worker safety and counterbalancing capitalist exploitation, today biting the hands that feed them? I am thinking more broadly than our industry here since it is not widely unionized, but labor/management relations is one place this line of thought will inevitably lead.
Before tossing me into the fire, I have some examples (dang, I wasn't going to personalize this...) of different perspectives that might relate:
- A Chinese friend who now lives and studies in the US gained this opportunity (her words) by leaving the village to work in a factory. Hard work, long hours? Yes. And she was delighted to do it, as were many of her coworkers because it led to a tangibly better life.
- Two graduates of a highly respected US game development school (not a cheap one) are hired and last less than a year in real development. Too hard, too far from Mom, getting into something less stressful and/or more prestigious.
- A business associate from the UK moves to the US to start a company because opportunities there are not equally available to all social classes (his words.) Comes to the US to compete with the "hard working Americans." Really, is that how we are perceived abroad?
My own experience was forged in the crucible of Los Angeles, deep in the entertainment mines where light is seldom seen and the angry rants of auteur film directors lash with nine-tails of pure salt crystal. We, the workers, did whatever it took and liked it! There was an implicit sense that there was a line of people behind us ready to take our jobs. The pay was merely adequate, and it was tough on a young and growing family in every way.
It was a given that, because we worked in an industry where there was more available and eager labor than jobs, we were fortunate to have even the chance to pay our dues. In retrospect, we were exploited, albeit legally. We chose to march up hamburger hill, but eventually found rewards at the summit. Given this, I am loath to take advantage of production staff, yet yearn for a greater sense of urgency from many younger Americans.
In saying that, I don't believe there is anything inherently special about the US. I assume there are bright, hard working, innovative, well-intentioned people everywhere. I harbor no particular competitive desire to outperform other nations in the global market. It's just that, well, Americans are the people around me that I see and work with every day. I like them and it saddens me to see a good life slipping away for many.
Having moved from LA to the rust belt a number of years ago, I have seen firsthand what it looks like when an industry collapses and thousands of jobs are lost to competition. Instead of redoubling efforts, however, I often see blame, fear, and xenophobia as a result.
Is the games industry headed down the same path as the steel industry? I see studios closing, jobs being lost in the thousands, and quality oversees competition breaking new ground with products people like being delivered through business models that are innovative. Are they willing to sacrifice more to succeed? Is there a difference in governance or culture that facilitates this success? Is this a mis-perception to begin with, with the current situation is simply being linked with the overall economic climate?
Am I just a GenX guy who doesn't get Generation Y mores and sensibilities? Is there a hidden treasure in the attitude of "I need constant praise, but can totally multitask" that is ideally suited to the information age?
Has the US reached a critical mass of third generation wealth?
Have I earned the curmudgeon achievement yet?
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But thousands of other jobs are also gained from competition. The competitors may attract more employees, even people just entering the work force. Maybe in the short run your particular company will have to increase layoffs because your profits are going down while your competitor is attracting more consumers. I think the answer to your concern lies in economics. It won't be laziness that brings down the game industry (or any other industry). It will be a lack of good ideas.
First, lazyness and unsatisfaction are diferent things, and people who looks for the games industry loves their work, but they aren't their work. Company always see their 8 normal hours and the 2 crunch hour their employees "give" them...
The company grows up with more worked time (in theory), but why should people who is working not achieve anything? not even some more money? you the lunch hour and then are 9h took from work, then you take 2 at traffic and 2 preparing to go and when come back from work, it sums 13hs, more 2 unpaid crunched time then you have 15hs a day. The good part is that you lose (or not find) a date, you can't work on your own projects, you can't read and maintain yourself informed, you can't study anything else to improve yourself, and you will not come with a good solution tomorrow because you simply went asleep too tired...
It's not lazyness, you simply don't do only work at your company, your life is not only that...
I personally do lots of overtime where I work, I come sooner, come in saturday, sunday and holidays...
But don't come when I have a freelance paying me more than my overtime hours. I do it and it's not even the games industry, but I need to save this money to go study in Seattle :(
Now, to address this post - you've got it backwards. Americans, generally, get exploited by their employers. In more civilized countries, the workers have explicit protections against stuff like crunch. Moreover, they don't have the cultural brainwashing (that you appear to have) that working more is better.
Work to live, not live to work.
Yes, people in developing countries put in a lot of hours for little pay, and are willing to continue that when they arrive in the US. In the developing world, it's bust your ass or die. Comparing yourself (and your fellow Americans) unfavorably to someone with that mindset is pretty crazy.
Finally, to address something from your last post where your workers "wanted" to crunch. Sure. Lots of young guys have no lives and want to work, for various reasons. Either pay them for it, or don't and kick them out of the office at 5. Anything else is unethical.
Anyway of course people WILL want to keep a little later to polish their project worked from 4 years just to fix what the publisher didn't paid for and to balance the gameplay changes that came from upstairs, and people will do it from free because they love what they do :Z
Nicely put, guys.
Exec staff and management are seen as not working as hard as the "ordinary workers", while getting compensation many times that as the "ones doing the REAL work". Individual contributors feel exploited, and with the horde of recent games-school grads hammering at the door, they feel they dare not object for fear of their jobs being lost. Managers get patted on the back for convincing their team members to crunch, then go home to their families at 6pm. The view, -right or wrong-, is that it's management that is lazy, disingenuous and greedy, not the individual contributors.
For what it's worth, this isn't unique to the games industry. Having come through the dot-com days in the general software industry, I've seen firsthand how compensation structures have been changing. Creation of different classes of stock (VCs and founders have a different class of stock which is typically not diluted to the extent that later investors' stock class and is convertible to cash in a buy-out before any other class of stock, which is itself better than the employees who are last in the stock totem-pole), blending of sick time and vacation time into "paid time off" (two weeks of sick time, two weeks of vacation are now three weeks of PTO), and higher co-pays on benefits are much more prevalent now than ten years ago, at least in my experience.
People are willing to work more if they think they will participate in the added benefit. More and more, they simply don't believe that this participation will happen, regardless of what they're told by executives and management.
Now, whether this perception of being exploited is accurate is another matter. In some cases, it's completely true. In others, not at all. But perception affects performance, and it is the -duty- of managers AND people with an "O" at the end of their job title to crunch with the troops, and to recognize that heavy crunch is a gift from the troops to the company NOT an entitlement. People know when they are being used, and when they are being lied to.
If I'm here at 11pm and my team members are too, I'd bloody well better see the light on in the corner office, and it had bloody well better be a factor in my performance review and my team members' reviews too.
You say that you feel like the work ethic in America has changed, and you are completely right. A few decades back, people worked for the same company most if not all of their lives. Companies had some ounce of loyalty to the people who worked for them, and the people who worked for them were content in the knowledge that they were set until retirement.
Whatever happened to all that? How many people do you know in the industry who have been working at the same company for more than 10 years? And of those, how many are in mid-management positions or above?
I think the reason why so many people object to how you talk about your team selflessly putting hours of overtime in for free, is that they don't expect the company to take that into account in the event of a crisis. I'm not talking specifically about your company, but rather in general terms of the industry, all industries, as a whole.
Chances are, when it's time for performance reviews, the people who do the overtime will not get the salary raise they deserve, or a few extra days of PTO based on the amount of overtime done, or stuff like that. At the same time, the people who don't do PTO might very well be let go, because they 'don't fit the company culture', or are 'unmotivated', or whatever.
That the people doing overtime do it because they love the job is beside the point. Chances are they made choices and sacrifices early in life to be able to do a job they love. If they are doing overtime with any regularity, they are still making sacrifices: every hour spent working is time not spent with friends and family, pursuing hobbies, etc.
And I believe the reason why people have a problem with this 'unrequested overtime' is that it isn't acknowledged. People aren't getting kicked out of the office, but neither are they getting paid for it. It's like getting paid under the table, but the other way around. Since this is in direct benefit to the company, people are skeptical.
I guess what I am trying to say is this: if you have people going above and beyond the call of duty for your company and your game, the least you can do acknowledge it. Unrequested overtime shouldn't reflect on performance reviews, because it is outside of company requirements. Crunch yes, this, no. But, the company should acknowledge the extra effort these people go to, and reward it in some way. Maybe not with a promotion or a pay raise, but with dinner vouchers, or family tickets to a local theme park and such for those with families (this would go over especially well to anyone who stays at work late but has a wife and kids), or special interest gift cards, etc.
So, even if it's intangibles, tokens, and gestures, I think a lot more people would be less condemning of unrequested overtime if this free giving spirit went both ways.
In this reading, crunch time will be only one of the capitalistic practices back-alleyed by the criminalization of effort as European-style, state-mandated ceilings on work weeks are imported into the States. (No doubt this will occur under the guise of "health care" or "economic justice" or some other such socio-political advocacy.)
I don't expect all that to happen tomorrow, or even during the current spell of Obamamania, but probably well within the next 25-50 years, yes, crunch time as we knew it will become but a memory.
Long-term predictions are fun to make. :)
On a side note:
"... Chinese adage about wealth and human nature that has been bouncing around in my head ever since. The main idea was that the first generation of wealth works very hard to achieve it, and passes that ethic down to the second generation. However, by the third generation that gets squandered by a sense of entitlement and plain old being spoiled (both the wealth and the work ethic.)"
Funny... I was saying the same thing 15 years ago. The three-generation thing (as my theory had it) used to be tied to the 55/60-year Kondratieff cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave), but the advances in end-of-life medical care the West has enjoyed over the past century have, I suspect, delayed -- but not avoided -- the next inevitable reset.
"Chinese adage"? Next thing you know, they'll be claiming they invented gunpowder.... :p
This may put a slightly different cast on some of the things I've said. For one, our options are limited with regards to compensation. For instance, there's no viable vehicle for non-profit sharing. Further, the motivations of our staff are somewhat more internally driven toward serving the students than might be seen in a typical corporate entertainment environment. A week doesn't go by where we aren't engaged in a tough discussion about features or spending when someone asks "what's best for the kids?" That usually makes the solution clear.
Too, the word "balance" doesn't just mean spending time with our families. It implies that if the weight is heavy on one end of the scale, an equal weight must be applied to the other. Once a year we generally put in a month or so of overtime. The rest of the year is fairly abundant with benefits, flexibility, and opportunity. People are definitely rewarded through salary, leadership opportunities (if they want this) and the ability to work on projects they feel passionately about.
I don't think Americans really are lazy - that's just a little stirring for the pot. The folks I know work hard and care a lot. My larger concern is that "crunch" is a continuum, from 1 extra hour one time, to 6 days a week at 12 hours a day for the duration of a project. When we demonize the concept outright, there's no room for discussion about some important larger issues. I believe it can be done ethically and fairly. Making it optional and giving absolute equal compensation through comp time or overtime is a good idea, I will strive to make that happen in the future. On the other hand, if other people and other companies are willing to work harder, that raises the bar for all of us! If our organizations don't prosper, that doesn't help management or workers. It's disingenuous to place the blame and responsibility solely on either party, and outside factors (such as the economy) and competition most certainly do affect the situation.
As a nation, I fear that we are losing the ability to think beyond ourselves; to sacrifice today for a greater good tomorrow. Simply holding a "what's in it for me" attitude and assuming "companies are evil" is both archaic and self destructive. Should companies exploit their workers and overpay their execs while laugh in the back of the limo as they cruise to the country club? Duh. I feel like that angle has been pretty well established and covered by our community.
So, once again, thanks for a stimulating discussion!
Also, you're talking about "sacrificing for the greater good" in the context of EMPLOYMENT? Are you kidding me?
The relationship between employer and employee is strictly commercial - the employer pays for the employees time. That's it. As another poster noted, the days of being a company man - having that job for your life - are well and truly over. What makes you think that a company deserves your loyalty?
These posts by you are stunningly naive.
You guys keep harping on capitalism like its the worst thing, its precisely BECAUSE of capitalism, that there are videogames in the first place. I know id rather have crunchtime in an airconditioned office, than on some communal farm in the soviet union with a commissar breathing down my neck.
Jason, if a pithy label is important to you, let's go with "willfully idealistic." I've been through too many successes, failures, companies large and small, teams, projects, managers, disillusionments, and bubbles to be truly naive. Game development is changing. There are now real opportunities in smaller organizations, remote development teams, indie studios, and in serious games that offer an alternative to crippling cynicism.
What part of "you get paid for hours you work" is anti-capitalist? The only reason they are able to get away with it is because the employees, like good little workers, accept it rather than fighting for their CAPITALIST right to be paid for their work.
As for your latest comment Eric, it's pretty content free. Perhaps you could make yet another post justifying yourself?
You are comparing an actual unacceptable situation to a purely fictional (in America) unacceptable situation. This renders your conclusion invalid. What you should really expect is fair compensation for the work that you do.
@Eric: "As a nation, I fear that we are losing the ability to think beyond ourselves; to sacrifice today for a greater good tomorrow. "
The point is that the sacrifice you describe is unnecessary. With good management, this "sacrifice" can be gotten rid of almost entirely -- something you have stated you to not even attempt to accomplish.
"There are now real opportunities in smaller organizations, remote development teams, indie studios, and in serious games that offer an alternative to crippling cynicism."
It is more cynical to expect and accept exploitation by your employer than it is to expect to get paid fairly for the work that you do.
This point of view is pretty one sided. Working for a company with the expectation that in whatever way they exploit you is OK because your situation could be much worse is depressing and ridiculous. Working with the assumption that you somehow owe them more than your contract gives them the right to because they have deigned to hire you is similarly ridiculous.
You have as much to offer them as they do to you, which is why you are a contracted employee, not an indentured servant.
Someone needs to read Atlas Shrugged.
What i dont want is more government legislation telling people how they have to work. Which seems to be most people's reactions to perceived exploitation in the workplace. Capitalism is based on mutually beneficial contracts between the 2 parties involved. If one party is in breach of contract then there would be legal recourse to such a thing. And there is already legislation in place for that.
What if working an hour or two of crunch per day for one month substantially improves the game, and along with it the reputations and future career prospects of every worker credited to it?
It is worth at least entertaining the idea that crunch, within certain limits and in certain situations, can be beneficial.
"What if working an hour or two of crunch per day for one month substantially improves the game, and along with it the reputations and future career prospects of every worker credited to it?"
The argument people have isn't that more work won't make a better quality game, but that it is unpaid work. A salary programmer gets paid the same for an 8-hour day as he does for a 9-hour day. It's not that longer hours (necessarily) are the issue, but that studios are getting that 9th hour and not paying anything more for it.
That's where this 'exploitation' comes in. A studio dictates that now you will work 9, 10, 11 hours a day, and maybe on weekends on well, and they don't compensate for the increase in time. IF they compensated (more pay, etc), then there would be less of an argument on this issue.
@Mike.
It doesn't need to be government legislation. It could be in the form of a union. Game Industry is the only (I believe) entertainment industry with no unions, or at least effective/prominent ones. This doesn't have anything to do with the government, but rather parties.
Yes, because self-regulation and the whole "let the invisible hand of the market sort it out" has worked so well the last couple of years, hasn't it?
It's an imbalanced power dynamic, and telling the employees that if they don't like it they can "just go get another job" is ridiculous.
That is the same case of more of the company telling that you should work for free... My government laws of protection to workers are not perfect, but they're better than nothing, isn't that? "it's better to keep your employment than get fairly paid?"... it's like prefer live slaved
Why is it necessary for a company to provide direct, immediate compensation if the extra hours can provide long-term benefits for the worker? It is almost always in a young worker's best interest to prove how talented they are, regardless of the terms of immediate compensation.
Releasing an awesome game -> better reputation and higher future wages.
That aside, what if the salary already includes the value of the risk of crunching for 1-2 months per year?
Companies cannot mandate crunch; they are not slave owners. Employees can and should talk with their feet, by quitting when necessary. Employees stay, despite crunch, if their total compensation package is already greater in value than the cost of crunching.
There is no inherently imbalanced power dynamic here; one of the most effective ways of securing a higher raise is by speaking with your manager and implying that you will leave if you don't get what you deserve.
If a person doesn't quit their job, then that person obviously thinks doing that job is worth it, even if they -wish- they had a higher wage. Companies pay employees because otherwise, no one would work at their company. Maybe people really are getting lazy and I just didn't realize it. It takes effort to quit a job (even more effort to find a new one) or think about what your labor is worth.
There's lots of reasons why that's a flawed viewpoint - and it is in fact the primary defense management takes against unionization.
"If you don't like the way we abuse you, go get another job."
Tell that to a coal miner. Or an auto worker. Or someone working in a games company in a one games company town.
I've seen it countless of times, especially in developing countries, that some people where working really really hard, but if they actually took a step backwards and thought about how to optimize their way of working, they'd probably could do it in half the time or less!
Also, the more tired people are, the less efficient and creative they are!
There is a sweet spot between how much work you do in a day and how much time off you have to rest and recharge.. it's called an 8 hour work day.
There is probably a correlation between game companies starting to systematically work overtime and games becoming less and less creative and unique...
1) I am privileged that this company will let me work for them.
2) This company is privileged to have me work for them.
Your mindset would probably influence your outlook in your position. It might also indicate where in the food chain your at, and most definitely influence you on how you negotiate your compensation package.