He never said it was okay. We all know that it is wrong for it to be in the company DNA. But to state that it is in the DNA is still an accurate statement. I feel like this isn't hard to understand at all.
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Kojima is crunching to meet Death Stranding's release date
- Thread starter Lant_War
- Start date
Sorry but no.
The problem is cultural and structural (labor laws).
Crunch is biological is honestly one of the worst arguments I have ever heard in my life. And I'm holding back what I actually want to say.
It's like you completely ignored my argument about how it hurts minorities and women. Is it by extension then justifiable to have them underrepresented in tech? It's biological!
Crunch is a choice to maximize profit by minimizing cost at the expense of employees. Employees that can't crunch get punished
It's in the company dna to have a culture that punishes women and employees with Dependants (frequently minorities)? That's the result of crunch. To try to spin that as a positive is something.
So what level of crunch is ok? Honest question. Overtime is a part of work sometimes and I don't think that's too much. But when does overtime turn into crunch?
Nobody knows it seems, but everyone seem not to care and either already handwaive it or condemn it without information. Meanwhile I'm left without answers as to how the EN twitter is handled, since the 2 tweets seemingly don't say the same thing.
What. How about you calm down a bit?
I just said that crunch (= the increased workload in the time leading up to a deadline) is kind of part of life (even outside of work). From my experience at least. That's it. Never did I even imply that it's "biological that women and minories can't work in tech", hell, I'm a minority myself. Crunch, to the degree that game devs are doing it, is not okay, as I said. Working 90h weeks is simply absurd. HOWEVER, at least from my personal experience, crunch is not completely avoidable (though, again, not to THAT degree).
I also noted that the US' labour laws are terrible. Where I work (Europe), my boss and I both automatically get a written warning once I'm longer than 10hrs on the clock with my PC also shutting down on its own. Once that happens more than three times, HR will be notified, as I have grounds to sue for working longer than 10h/day. So I'm legally not allowed to work more than 50h/week (so a maximum of 10h overtime is allowed during crunch periods, paid of course).
I feel like crunch devolves into knee jerk reactions of it's fine for company I like but not company I don't.
By that same token we say crunch but nobody has a firm definition of what it means. Is it 50 hour weeks for a month or 100 hour weeks for three months? There is a huge difference. And the two should not be considered equal.
Is his title artist, or Director/Producer? There's a difference. One has to manage people, and shouldn't force/pressure their subordinates to working longer and harder than they should.
No one tried to spin this as positive, imo it's much worse when nobody asks you to crunch but you feel the environment makes you feel bad to leave early.
Yeah this is the biggest amount of hot air ever. Kojima said theyr'e in crunch time and then people decided to make up whatever they want about what that means. It could be absolutely shit work conditions for the next 3 months, or it might just mean they're in high gear and working a couple extra hours a day/week. Or he could just be referring to himself. Who knows? There are no employees coming out and saying anything one way or the other, so there's really no reason to be vehemently condemning or defending him when all we've got to go on is a single vague-ass tweet.
I am extremely calm.
Yes, those laws don't remotely exist in the US. You also get better leave and vacation benefits.
The situation you describe above is so much milder compared to what crunch actually looks like that I think you can't even use the same word.
Speak for yourself.
They're perfectionists! Was unequivocally a positive spin.
Well you did make it sound like you were going out of your way to defend Naughty Dog, like they are the only devs in the industry that have passion in their DNA to deliver great games. It's kind of a slap in the face to every other dev out there. ND has gone through a bunch of crap from harassment to this over the past few years but everyone seems to turn a blind eye to them because they are a "darling dev".
You know I wrote an entire book chapter about how painful and destructive the making of Uncharted 4 was for the people who worked there, right?
I expect Kojima to work late simply because he is a man who loves to work and is obsessed with it. However that should never extended down to standard salaried employees. I can't judge them too much since we don't know if they're doing a month of 50 hours weeks, or if they're doing multiple months of 80 hour weeks. Big difference.
The reality is they are probably doing more than they should and that is always worth calling out for every studio that does it, even if that is literally every studio. Though I would like to see the actual details about the time they are working before being too accusatory.
For the hundredth time, no one is saying this.
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At the end of the day is a Kojima game. See what happened to Days Gone, they have to push the release date because the game wasn't ready.
I have not read your book. I was just referring to your post which seemed like you were making "excuses" for ND. The whole "Passion in their DNA" just rubbed myself and a lot of other's on here (including devs) the wrong way.
Jesus christ. Did I use the word "passion"?
Here is what I actually wrote:
If you want to interpret that as me defending Naughty Dog rather than musing about deep-rooted cultural problems and using Naughty Dog as an example of those problems, that's on you.
Holy shit there are a lot of crunch time apologists in this thread.
Tech needs to unionize, pronto.
Tech needs to unionize, pronto.
Game looks sick: https://gamingbolt.com/death-strand...dergoing-adjustment-kojima-shares-new-screens
Even if the game is not perfect at launch, we can forgive Kojima and his team, they can adjust things later and correct them, just like how NMS was given another chance to shine after launch.
Even if the game is not perfect at launch, we can forgive Kojima and his team, they can adjust things later and correct them, just like how NMS was given another chance to shine after launch.
You missed the case for a lot of folks where the base pay is so low (adjusted for price of living) the "voluntary" crunch is forced on the workers for economic reasons.
That's the reason 'institutionalized' is the the word for it. Talking with people from studios with long history of overtime - In many cases, while they highlight it as a problem (at least to themselves - personally) they usually have no thoughts to offer on doing it any other way, or better. And by this I don't mean just people on the floor - it includes going all the way up the production chain.
I'd say that ultimately the whole thing would be a lot less of a problem if people got formal training (through regular education, or during work-onboarding) on how to manage their work-life balance. It's entirely too easy to be passionate about what you do beyond what's healthy for you - and consequently the project(s) you're involved with.
I feel like it pretty much describes anyone with a big assignment on a deadline
"Kojima is crunching to meet Death"
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I should read the whole Title the next time, almost choked on my food.
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I should read the whole Title the next time, almost choked on my food.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I don't think it's as simple as "just delay the game to 2020, Kojima", as some posters are suggesting.
Unless they just stop paying their bills and employees until the game comes out, delaying means an increase in budget.
Even without crunch, which director wouldn't want more and more time to make sure the game is perfect? It's not like they want to get it out as soon as possible, with a bunch of cut content as it always happens in any game.
Unless they just stop paying their bills and employees until the game comes out, delaying means an increase in budget.
Even without crunch, which director wouldn't want more and more time to make sure the game is perfect? It's not like they want to get it out as soon as possible, with a bunch of cut content as it always happens in any game.
Any organization that is dealing with regulatory issues in general has likely been in business long enough that they could have planned for the requirements and work effort successfully without the need for crunch. GDPR work, as an example, was a huge hit for most tech organizations and many had to crunch to complete the work in large part because they tried to add the tickets to manage GDPR into their existing work streams and schedules without removing tickets or otherwise modifying scope of the projects. They just hoped that their workers would miraculously get everything done while also delivering changes for GDPR.
This is kinda the entire point of modern agile development methodologies including SCRUM. Your product should always be in a shippable state and you should be able to adjust what the team is working on at least every 2 weeks to handle any urgent requirements or changes.
So this is complicated. Even in well organized projects, a very momentary crunch can occur. Usually these are just 1-2 day affairs and usually the result of a live site incident or other breaking change.
In these cases, it important to either compensate the individuals on call to handle the issues or provide time off after the fact to recover.
A good industry example of this is Google. Any employees at Google who are in an on call rotation can only be on call once every 8 weeks at most. In exchange for agreeing to be on call, they receive a significant pay bump, around 15% of an already huge salary, for doing so.
One thing people fail to understand is how counter-productive crunch time and long hours is if it extends for longer than about 1 week.
Part of why I became a PM was because I was sick of seeing tech workers getting burned out. It didn't take long. After just 1-2 weeks of crunch, most had lost all benefits of crunching.
Sure, you can work your team 50-60 hours a week. Once you do for more than a couple of weeks, productivity plummets. After just a couple weeks, if you have tracked your velocity properly, you will rapidly see worker productivity drop below what you were previously getting out of them in 40 hour weeks. This often causes teams to crunch even harder and add weekend work. This once again causes a momentary bump in productivity followed by an even deeper drop just a couple weeks later.
By the team you finally ship, you have screwed your organization. You will lose employees. This is a permanent loss of tribal knowledge and in many cases key motivational figures throughout the organization. The good people will go find a more sane job. You will mainly retain the employees that cannot find another job or are afraid to try to do so.
For those that stick around, it can take months for them to recover from a crunch, even if you give bonus time off.
Even worse, crunch can easily become an assumed part of culture. Employees will start to plan to do work during crunch. Saying things like "We can just handle that in crunch" or "Don't worry that you are running late. You can catch up during crunch.".
Anyone who thinks crunch is OK, unavoidable, or even a good part of "DNA" or culture is just wrong. It's harder to avoid in new organizations, but once you have a good idea of velocity of your individual team members as well as the organization as a whole, it should not be that hard to avoid.
This is exactly the kind of discourse we need to have about what is considered acceptable versus grinding employees into the ground. It is true that sometimes OT is unavoidable but unless a baseline us determined people are just yelling at each other over ambiguous terms.
So to you crunch is when the employee exceeds 50 hrs a week over a two week period?
Unless of course the regulator cannot provide clear answers on the requirements, which happens all the time as well.
Because even someone here would be hard pressed making a thread out of:
I would argue as a general rule of thumb, over 40 hours a week required or implicitly/culturally required for more than a week can cause the early impacts of burnout to occur.
For 2 weeks or more without any bonus time off or a "corporate penalty" (stuff like paying substantial OT that if maintained would be prohibitive to corporate success) is already too far.
One thing to note, most tech jobs are mentally taxing. Just like your body can get damaged from overwork and take a long time to recover, so to can your brain. As it is, few devs really work for more than 4 hours a day on coding a product. The rest of the time is in planning meetings, lunch, bsing with coworkers, etc... When you "crunch" it frequently means increasing actual mentally draining work by 50-100% per day. Not the 10-20% it first appears.
lol this is true.
i stay late just so i can focus on coding without getting bugged on Skype, on Teams, via email, jira updates or people straight up calling me every time something goes wrong.
my day is already 9-6 thanks to that hour long lunch break in the middle. i dont know anyone who leaves at 5. most stay past 6 to get some actual coding done. and thats on regular days, its pretty much normal to stay past 7 or 8 to meet deadlines.
Rather than focusing on excuses for why you cannot deliver without using crunch, I would recommend asking what could be done to ensure you don't have crunch in the future.
Sure, you might not be successful the first few times you try, but stay positive and adapt.
As an example, maybe you need to hire a couple of people or a government consultant who can keep you abreast of regulation that is pending and the impacts it will have. Start planning for the changes months before the regulations are signed into law so that you are no longer reactive. Instead you are able to demonstrate foresight and already have the new regulations accounted for in your product before it's an issue.
There are many companies who specialize in government regulations as well. Find one for your industry and they can likely consol with you for just a couple of hours and help you ensure compliance with minimal effort. This saves you both time, money, and helps to avoid crunch times.
If DS doesn't release this year I can see Resident Evil 2 being the GOTY front runner.
One of the things I push for with organizations I work with is a combination of focus time and a no meeting day.
Basically, we more or less mandate that no meetings are scheduled with ICs between the hours of 1pm and 4pm each day. This gives the boots on the ground time to get the real work done each day and then an hour or two after to report, update tickets, etc... Before leaving work.
The no meeting day applies to everyone, including managers. This is a solid 7 hours of focus time for all employees. Managers can use this to do things like Backlog refinement, look into metrics, hold 1:1s (I don't count those as meetings), try competing products/services, etc... ICs can use this time to do 2 multi-hour focus sessions with lunch inbetween.
It's become meta for crunch because there were a lot of mental gymnastics to defend perceived crunch for this game but condemn other studios for crunch.Because even someone here would be hard pressed making a thread out of:
If we complain about a set level of crunch for one studio but not another it gets to be disengenuos. However if there is a defined level of what is acceptable OT and not crunch then there can be an honest discussion that isn't emotional garbage.
Reframing said culture as a purely biological impulse does sound like you put a softer and easier to accept slant on it. Fotgive me if I don't habitually follow your reporting enough to know your background in this context.
I have. It did a number on my mental health. It fucking sucks... Oh, I'm sorry for "moaning"
I see selective non-outrage happening in this thread in comparison to a Rockstar or EA crunch thread
That said, there's levels to this type of stuff that without more elaboration or whistleblowing, you cant really comment on it at all
Hope the game is good and they bonuses or some shit
That said, there's levels to this type of stuff that without more elaboration or whistleblowing, you cant really comment on it at all
Hope the game is good and they bonuses or some shit
Weird guess considering its more likely people who moaned are the one who experienced crunch before, and thus know how torturous that is.