Is it possible to work "normal hours" in the game industry?

[Bamafan77]

Is it possible to have what's considered a normal work schedule(by American standards) in the game industry or even as an indie? A normal work schedule for Americans is around 40 hours/week + 2 or 3 weeks of vacation a year.

I wonder because I've read articles and interviews on guys like Tim Sweeney and Carmack, and it seems like 60-70+ hour weeks is standard procedure. I don't know if that translates to all their employees though.

(BTW, if you frequent Brian Hook's website, you'll know this is a repost from there).

[Sirrus]

Publishers have more near-normal work hours...

Not sure you can find that in a development house.

[James C. Smith]

I have found working long hours to be the “norm” in the game industry. Most developers who are delivering milestones to publishers end up in “crunch mode” just before each milestone is due. Often, the milestones slip and then the crunch time gets extended. “We just need to all pitch in and work our ass off for 2 weeks and then we can ship the product and relax.” But then the schedule slips a week, and then another week, and before you know it you are doing the death march for 4 months. Some companies end up being in crunch mode more than half the time. And some crunch modes are so bad that employees are made to feel guilty if they don’t work on Saturday and Sunday. Or if you go home before 10 PM you are not doing your fair share. This is not a productive way to do business. People start doing poorer quality work and turnover becomes a big problem because no one can keep this up for long. But that is what much of the game industry does anyway.

[cliffski]

i work in the industry as a coder and generally work a 40 hour week. if the game is slipping thats due to bad management and poor scheduling by producers, not poor work by a coder.
coders shouldnt put up with that crap.

[Dan MacDonald]

coders shouldnt put up with that crap.


But they do, because they know if they don't they can easily be replaced by some single guy with no life besides game programming who will gladly work 60 hrs a week for 1/2 their salary...

[Reactor]

As an indie you can work whatever hours you want, providing those hours are getting the job done in time.

[luggage]

I'd worked in the retail industry for a fair few years and a few companies and it's pretty much the same story. Long long hours for not much pay. Worst thing is it can be avoided.

One example was I got hired to help out with a game because it was running way late so I was told. Spoke to the coder responsible and he said he'd been given a list of tasks and to write down how long each would take. He didn't generate the task list, this was done by management. After writing down how long each task would take a manager went through it. Said manager totalled it all up and it added up to more time than was left on the project. Manager panics and went through with the coder saying, "that can't take 5 days, it'll have to take 2". Just to squeeze it in to fit the schedule. 4 weeks into the game, coder is behind schedule so they draft other coders in to help out.

There'd be times where I'd be asked, "how long will it take for you to write so and so?", "2 weeks", I'd reply. "oh. it shouldn't take that long. You'll have to do it in 4 days". Then there'd be late nights.

Of course it didn't help that the management never factored holidays into schedules and presumed everyone would do overtime from the start.

So project on and it was all hands to the pump to get it done on time. No project and it was all hands to the project writing demos to get a project.

Being an indie is great sometimes :)

[Stefan Maton]

Having been a long time in game development I've never known anything else but the tight schedule for projects. There were 2 worst projects. In one I had 5 month crunch time, in the other almost 8. Not because the coders were bad, but because management had scheduled bad milestones with the publishers. If a milestone wouldn't have been hit, money didn't come and we wouldn't have been paid.

As James said : If you're not working as hard as the others, you're not doing your work. It's even worse if you're the lead. I've been working for one company (the 8 month crunch) which flawed me because I had a chat with one of graphic artist while eating a friday night at 11 pm waiting for the system to recompile the entire project. I was told that I don't have to chat during work time. My boss really asked me what I was spending my time on. He asked my if I was just twirling my thumbs. We were working 16-20 hours a day. I slept beside my computer for 4 month back then.

Unfortunately, there are younger people coming into the industry who are willing to work over time with less money than you would take (because you have a family to feet and a mortage to pay). I've been asked to sell my house if I wanted to get a job. "Well, sell your house and relocate here..." for a 6 month contract work...


Currently I'm working for a company that does speech recognition on PDAs and I'm trying to do my 40 hours/week work because anything else beyond that number doesn't pay out... not for me...

[mahlzeit]

Sounds like you guys need a union. :)

[EpicBoy]

But they do, because they know if they don't they can easily be replaced by some single guy with no life besides game programming who will gladly work 60 hrs a week for 1/2 their salary...
This is a large part of the problem. I try to work a 40 hour work whenever possible but, as you said, there's always someone with no life standing in line who is willing to live in the office for 1/2 your salary. So you put in more hours because, well, you have to.

[EpicBoy]

Sounds like you guys need a union.
It's just the reality of the industry. It's a business that attracts young people straight out of college who view it as their dream job ... so they're willing to sacrifice everything in order to do it. They typically burn out within 5 years but that doesn't matter because every year, like clockwork, a new batch of fresh meat is graduating and ready to take their places.

[serg3d]

It's just the reality of the industry. It's a business that attracts young people straight out of college who view it as their dream job ... so they're willing to sacrifice everything in order to do it. They typically burn out within 5 years but that doesn't matter because every year, like clockwork, a new batch of fresh meat is graduating and ready to take their places.

No wonder "mainstream" game industry produce such a pile of crap. No expirience get accumulatred in the field.

[EpicBoy]

That certainly explains BurnOut3, Thief3, Full Spectrum Warrior, Fable, ... oh wait.

[gpetersz]

I worked for 1.5 year(s) for a company that worked for
SEGA and SegaSOFT. How did you say? Crunched? So we did
tons of overtime (my record was 46 hours at work).

I did not resist it (I married just that year) so got back to program
databases (hey did I mentioned that I worked as a pixel-artist? :-))
cause I graduated as a programmer.

I full agree with your opinion guys.

I now have a "peaceful" 40 hours/week job (sometimes a bit more but
then it turns OVERPAID as well, meaning they pay the long hours) but
my enthusiasm for making games just didn't left me. So I teamed up
with other indies (in cellphone and PC gaming) and I draw for them, beside
I started an own project where I program as well.

Practically this way when I DO organize my time, it turns out VERY GOOD.
I plan that when I built a more or less stable income (from past project's royalties and upfront paid comissions) I leave my ORACLE databases...

:-)

[Coyote]

I think it's very possible to have a game studio work a 'normal' 40-45 hour work-week 95% of the time. But there are several factors to consider:

#1 - Game DEVELOPMENT isn't where the money is. So attracting experienced MANAGEMENT is as difficult as attracting experienced development. So you end up with a majority of game development houses where middle-management is made up of heroic-level developers who are expected to impart their talent, skill, and work ethic for those they manage. Unfortunately, these guys aren't always great managers, and the only tool they have in their bag of tricks for meeting deadlines is overtime. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

#2 - Especially with a young team of idealistic gamers who haven't had their soul crushed by the industry yet, it's very hard to tell them "enough is enough" - nor do you want to. They are making a name for themselves, and if they think putting in a weekend at the office will allow them to make this cool feature work or add a creature that was in danger of being cut, they'll do it.

#3 - With the survival rate of small game studios being so dismal (especially over the last 5 years), a lot of employees are willing to put in the extra hours if they think it's the difference between staying employed an extra six months, or being out on the streets.

#4 - A lot of those 'extra hours' may be going into extended lunch hours or after-hours sessions spent playing Unreal Tournament and Counterstrike against fellow team members. (It's, ummm, competitive analysis! Yeah, research! That's the ticket!)

[EpicBoy]

A lot of those 'extra hours' may be going into extended lunch hours or after-hours sessions spent playing Unreal Tournament and Counterstrike against fellow team members. (It's, ummm, competitive analysis! Yeah, research! That's the ticket!)
Well, that's what the cycle generally turns into. If you start working 12-14 hours a day as your standard routine, then you start to incorporate things into that schedule beyond work. Playing games, watching TV at the office, running errands on a long lunch, etc.

It eventually dawns on you that if you worked a solid 8 hours, you could go home at a reasonable hour and do those other things on your own time in your own home.

Unfortunately, a lot of game companies equate employee worth with how many hours your butt is in contact with your chair so sometimes you can't win...

[Applewood]

Is it possible to work "normal hours" in the game industry?
No (Adding 8 more pointless characters now) ********

[Ratboy]

It's possible, it just requires a supervisor who knows what's really important.

I've had a lead artist take me to task for leaving at 5, and had this little conversation with him:

"Am I behind schedule?"
"No, but -"
"Are you unsatisfied with the work I do?"
"No.'
"Then what's the problem?"
"....."

Never had trouble with him again. :cool:

[EpicBoy]

I've had similar conversations and was met with, "Well, everyone else works late" as the supporting argument against me. If that's how they are measuring the employees against each other, you really don't have much choice - you either start working more hours or you look for a better job.

It would be nice to imagine that your employer is measuring quality of output and productivity rather than "hours at the office", but you'd be surprised how often that isn't the case. The people with no lives are generally the people who reap the most rewards...

[Dan MacDonald]

Honestly though, that's not just a game industry thing. When I worked at Microsoft I worked with a team of east Indian guys on work visas. They were really smart and really nice, probably over qualified for the jobs they were working. I was married with a kid and they had no family, friends, or obligations outside of work. In fact all there peers were at work so they routinely worked 14-16hr days. I was working 10-12hr days and doing good work, but because of how Microsoft's "employee review" system works I was routinely passed up for raises and promotions, despite being good at my job and working 50+ hr work weeks.

[Ratboy]

So far it's worked on two of five or six supervisors over my retail career. When I was at FASA Interactive, I had six years of previous game experience under my belt, which made me the second most experienced person there next to the lead programmer, and I very seldom had to explain my habits.
Also, being an artist, I tended to be finished with a project long before the programmers were done. That doesn't happen as much these days, now that ingame content is so much more sophisticated and time-consuming than it used to be.

edit: Oh, hey, another ex-MSer! God, I hated their employee review routine. It's much better to contract for them then go through that backbiting grinder. Plus, as a contingent staffer, you get paid overtime :)

[kerchen]

One of the things that attracted me to my current (new) employer (Stardock Entertainment www.stardock.com) is that they are pretty committed to a 40 hour work week. Of course, Stardock is totally independent and self-funded, so there are no publisher/investor demands throwing a wrench in the works. So, outside of California and Austin, there *are* sane development houses. :)

[Linusson]

This is not an answer to your question, but I thought that it could be an interesting read.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/

[vidalsasoon]

I would never work for a game developer. It's either at a finincial institution or as an indepentent. There is this thing called life that I put some importance on.

[HairyTroll]

This is not an answer to your question, but I thought that it could be an interesting read.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/

Wow. History repeats.... Achievement (http://www.despair.com/demotivators/achievement.html)

[Ratboy]

This is not an answer to your question, but I thought that it could be an interesting read.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/And here's another: http://www.livejournal.com/users/joestraitiff/

That all makes me cherish my time at MS and Viacom New Media. VNM's management may have been utterly clueless, but at least we got to go home at night. EA sounds nightmarish.

[mahlzeit]

You can whine about it, you can escape it, or you can do something about it. I wasn't really kidding when I mentioned a union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_union). They were started exactly for these reasons: to reduce the power that employers had over employees. It sounds like the game industry in the USA isn't so different from the rest of the industry 100 years ago.

[cliffski]

agreed 100%. I wouldnt mind if i thought 12 hour days are productive. but they aren't.

[PoV]

[edit] Nevermind... someone beat me to it. I should have thought there was a good reason this topic was back in action.

[Greg Squire]

This is not an answer to your question, but I thought that it could be an interesting read.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/

I know a lot of the games industry is overworked and underpaid, but 85 hour weeks is ridiculous! Remind me to never work at EA.

[moonpxi]

*Warning!! Newbie question ahead*

Are all/most game developers that bad? I still have glimmers of hope that my favorite developer houses are paladins of the work force, not slave ships where clueless/ruthless management/publishers beat the drums..

[EpicBoy]

Any company that doesn't set it's own deadlines will be a meat grinder. Any studio owned by a publisher or other outside entity that they have to deal with and answer to: meat grinder.

Even independants (id, Valve, Epic, etc) aren't immune, although the situation does tend to be much better since they can tell the publisher where to shove it if need be. In that case, it depends on the culture of the company (for example, I've heard that id and Valve are in perpetual crunch - its expected that you'll be living at the office).

[James C. Smith]

No. Not ALL game development companies are that bad. But as I said in my original post, I believe it is the “norm”. We always tried very hard to not run our company that way. When Reflexive was making retail games for publishers we had 25 employees at our peek and were working on big RPG projects for the likes of Activision, Atari, and Interplay-Black Isle. We had monthly milestones and drop dead ship dates. The worse case scenario was one game slipped 3 months. All our other games shipped with 7 days of the scheduled ship date. There were occasions when we had most people working 60 hours per week but they never lasted for more than a week, they did not happen more than a few times per year, and we never expected people to work 7 days per week or more than 10 hours per day. In other words, there was an occasional “crunch time” but it was not frequent or prolonged. We made sure that 95% of the time we were in a sustainable operating mode with normal business hours. That is the only way to retain skilled and talented employees. Developers with nearly constant crunch time always manage to attract some young eager developers but by the time those people gain any experience they are burned out and leave. High turnover is not the way to build a strong business.

Reflexive is no longer making such big games but we still have deadlines and ship dates and we still have a fairly large crew of developers (by Indie standards.) Most of them have been with us for more than 5 years. Having that kind of experience as team is very valuable. I am sure there are some many other game development companies out there who realize the value of retaining employees. Surely not all of them are as short sighted as the majority who work their employees to death.

[Coyote]

It's impossible to escape the periods where you have to rise to the challenge, put in the extra hours, and maybe put your life on hold for a little while to achieve goals & deadlines. That's no big deal. And it's not limited to the games business.

What disgusts me is where this sort of thing becomes not only expected, but mandatory, for extended periods of time. That's a clear sign that management is either completely incompetent, or it is absolutely unethical. Or both. Heroics performed on the part of the team should remain just that - heroics. Because they believe in the product, or have enough of a vested interest in the company do pull out all stops to make sure it succeeds.

But if the only trick a manager has up his sleeve is to mandate unreasonable hours (with NO compensation in the form of extra money or extra time off to make up for it), then something is broken. And when this becomes not just a last-ditch effort but a constant problem throughout the project, things are FUBAR.

But get some good management in there who understand development and have some level of management skills beyond shouting "Work Harder, Work Harder!", and a reasonable budget ... and yes. It's possible to work "normal" hours *MOST* of the time in the industry. I know some studios that do. You'll have periods of insanity, but they won't be the norm.

[James C. Smith]

An open letter from the IGDA about this very issue

http://www.igda.org/qol/open_letter.php

[WildFire]

Hi Bamafan77

I'm currently in a position where I can get away with 40 hour weeks. I usually work from 8 am to 4 pm. I'm the only one in the company working "regular" hours.

Don't expect this to work for you in an entry level position in a game company. If you get such a job, take it with the attitude "I am here to learn as much as possible - so I can get out and start my own game company in 1-2 years time"...

[Jim Buck]

The IGDA Quality of Life roundtable session(s) at GDC earlier this year were the second most interesting set of sessions (Steve Pavlina's being the first). They unveiled their whitepaper - which is an awesome read.

[Hiro_Antagonist]

An interesting follow-up:
http://www.igda.org/qol/open_letter.php

As for my own answer to the question, I believe you *can* work normal hours in this industry, but obviously not if you work for a company that dictates that you work unreasonable hours.

The solution then becomes: work for a company with a reasonable work pace, or create your own business that manages to juggle reasonable work hours with sustainability (and eventually profitability).

In my observation, the roots of this problem are:
1) The bigger any company gets, including game developers, the more the humanity gets abstracted out of the picture from the people making executive decisions. This problem is a little worse in the gaming industry, because you often have publishers dictating timelines to developers, but the publishers aren't the ones doing the work! As decision makers get more removed from the actual workers, they end up sticking up less for them.

2) Almost all businesses (except non-profits) are in business for one reason and one reason only: to make money. Smaller business owned by a single person or small group of people sometimes have more 'noble' missions, but at every single public company, the goal is to make as much money as possible, *period*. This is not unique to games. This is the case everywhere. If someone isn't doing their job of making as much money as humanly possible, that person will be fired and someone else will be brought in to do better.

3) The games industry is full of people who passionately *love* games. They want to eat, breathe, and sleep games. They are willing to give up their spare time to make them, both to immerse themselves in the dream and to get ahead. Unfortunately, this eagerness allows gaming companies to get a lot from their employees without really having to push too hard. The EA spouse is a case where someone hit the snapping point, but historically, game industry workers are willing to (relatively) silently work a lot of free overtime.

I started my career at Microsoft many moons ago as a contractor working up to 100 hours/week. I was lucky, because I was paid overtime at my job, and my efforts *did* pay off in career growth. The downside is that I'm now burned out, and find it basically impossible to work more than 60 hours/week at my peak.

Part of my mission statement in starting my own company was to find a healthy and sustainable balance between my personal life and business efforts -- to try to work (generally) 40 hours/week while still turning a profit (or at least staying afloat.)

I've worked at a lot of companies outside of the gaming industry, and it's very clear that some companies value having a reasonable workload for their employees and some don't. I recommend to everyone when interviewing: Ask what your expected work load will be at your new job, and if it's more than your comfortable with, respectfully explain it doesn't sound like the job is for you.

Life is (or should be) so much more than your job.

-Hiro_Antagonist

[EpicBoy]

Ask what your expected work load will be at your new job, and if it's more than your comfortable with, respectfully explain it doesn't sound like the job is for you.
Better than that, find an employee at that company and email/talk to them privately and candidly. Odds are, the interviewer won't give you the straight truth - especially if it's bad news.

[Hiro_Antagonist]

Better than that, find an employee at that company and email/talk to them privately and candidly. Odds are, the interviewer won't give you the straight truth - especially if it's bad news.

Agreed. I think it's perfectly kosher in final stages of negotiation to ask to speak to an employee or two. (Just make sure you don't end up talking to the resident cheerleader, or you're going to get a misreprentational view.)

On the flip side, I have to say I'm surprised that most of my previous employers I've asked *have* been honest about hours. I would expect any hiring manager to round down, but I think very few would flat-out lie.

-Hiro_Antagonist

[Daegul]

On the flip side, I have to say I'm surprised that most of my previous employers I've asked *have* been honest about hours. I would expect any hiring manager to round down, but I think very few would flat-out lie.
To be honest, I don't really see a reason for them to lie - they'd only be causing themselves problems further down the line.
But then I guess not all interviewers will be that rational! ;)

[EpicBoy]

They could easily lie. Once you move your family and start work there, how long will it take you to leave once you discover that what they said wasn't quite the truth? 6 months? A year? They'll probably get at least once crunch out of you anyway...

[Ratboy]

Somebody leaked an internal EA Memo (http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/business/ea-promises-changes-in-leaked-internal-memo-026800.php) on the whole wage slave flap. It's interesting that Rusty calls the wage & hour laws "outdated."