51–60 of 177 posts
I've been following the Doublefine guys and a lot of their development was put into making developer tools. I suppose I understand that, but when I hear of these 400 person teams building a game that takes 4 years to make, I'm honestly a little bewildered.
As a 30-year old childless white man who left the games industry after a short 8 months in order to get married and spend time with my spouse, I can tell you that the assessment is fairly spot on. If you weren't putting in 12 hours daily, something was wrong with you and it was 'bad for team morale'. I was also pretty horribly underpaid, as evidenced by raising my salary over 200% by leaving. Seems to me the 'white'…
Not really. That kind of environment leads to a lot of prejudiced thinking. You see it happen in the rest of tech, too: people who have the screws twisted on them, willingly or not, cope one way or another... and most people cope by reinforcing their self-esteem with delusions of superiority. That's one reason why we have religious wars over operating systems and programming languages and tool sets that you don't see…
First, most software developers are taught "computer science" (or an imitation of it) in their formal education, not engineering.
Second, software is mostly not engineering. Engineering is very measurable. But software includes a lot of design and craftsmanship. If software dev. were restricted only to the portion that could reasonably be called pure engineering it would be a very, very small subset of mostly systems code. Indeed, a good hunk of software dev. could properly be called merely arts and crafts, under such a strict interpretation.
I think this explains some of the religious wars, because the debates are more aesthetic such as "do you prefer charcoal or pencil" than engineering "which is better steel or aluminum", because purely engineering questions tend to have very much more straightforward answers.
I like to work a lot. I like to work 60 to 80 hours a week. The things is that reward has to be somewhat commensurate with effort. And as a developer you are expected to take a discount compared to adjacent markets. That just doesn't make sense when you have a car, a mortgage, and like to take two vacations a year.
I really, truly, honestly believe that above 9 hours a day for an extended period of time actually ends up hurting your development efforts. You want developers who come into work and WORK. Not work a little, check a little HN, work a little, eat, check a little Reddit. Living at work forces coping mechanisms like this on you because you really only have a finite amount of creative attention.
You'll find no disagreement anywhere on that point. The nature of the games industry is not based on any rational basis - the overwork is cultural, deeply ingrained, and completely irrational. People who are overworked for extended periods have negative productivity - you can't throw a rock without hitting a dozen studies that have proven this decade after decade. This sort of management and process is pure cargo cul…
Please, throw that rock. We had this discussion[1] and the conclusion was that there is no (known to the participants) solid study relevant at least to "knowledge" work, if not for software development directly.
Your actions show your real priorities. How can he really mean what he's trying to do if he doesn't live it himself?
I imagine this article gives me a very limited caricature of what's happening, but I'm busy and will go read something else now.
Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. A lot of suckers want to get into the field, and the employers know this. I know people who work in haute-couture shops. They typically clock in 14+ hours per day, and regularly work insane hours on the weekend. The weeks leading up to a fashion show / collection are brutal. These people have years of experience and managerial responsibilities, yet their sa…
Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job (or market, if you're starting a business) you can find that provides a product that your customers simply can't live without. You just don't want to be selling an elastic product, and you don't want to be in an industry where there's supply-side competition from people who are doing the work purely because they enjoy it.
Healthcare is especially good in this respect. People will (quite literally) die without your product, and the payer is just about as far from the consumer as you can get, which makes demand highly inelastic. Your business isn't profitable? No worries, just double your prices. What are they going to do, stop paying you? And how much competition are you going to get (as a worker) when the work can't be outsourced and you can't hire a kid out of high school to do the work based on his GitHub profile?
So, here's my honest-to-god question. When I was last interviewing for programming jobs in New York, only one of the places I interviewed at (and I looked at a lot of companies) wanted people working more than 40 hours a week, on a regular basis (they were a startup with a fixed runway). All the other places (a mix of established companies and startups) made it very clear that work-life balance is important to them,…
Through the next few years, he got job offers right out of college from some larger studios. Eventually he picked a small, local studio that went bankrupt without releasing a single game. Apparently that took him by surprise, and he vowed he'd never be in that situation again. He took a job at a top-five company (where he was later laid off, proving some irony). He then went to another top-five, and he complained about everything I worried about for him.
When I asked him why he put up with this, why he didn't take his talents elsewhere, his response was romantic. He liked the games coming from these studios, and had always wanted to be a part of it. He liked the games from Maxis, and wanted to be where they were. He liked the games from Blizzard and wanted to be where they were. It didn't matter what the working conditions were, he was there.
It's taken him a few years to get over the romantic idea of working for the company whose games raised him as a child. It's much different on the inside, and it takes a while for that to sink in. I can't speak for the entire industry, but that was his perspective as I've seen looking through the small gap his life has left me peek through.
As someone with 5 years experience in the industry, this article is spot on the money for everything I experienced. It's a huge problem, both by discriminating against people unwilling or unable to put in ridiculous hours, and by driving away those talented women and men who are finally becoming experienced experts when they become so burned out they have to leave the industry. I worked in games for 5 years. I no lon…
I'm a software engineering student about to start an internship(Paid, 4 months) at a major game studio. I am considering applying for a job once I complete the internship if everything goes well. I would like to see if the studio where I will work has a decent workflow. If not I would be willing to tough it out as a generalist programmer while trying to apply to other jobs that interest me in another industry. The id…
My perspective is that who you're working with and how you're working is a lot more important for day-to-day happiness and job satisfaction than the specifics of what you're working on.