This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
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This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
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Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#2There is nothing that I agree with here. Crunch = Producer fail. Feature Creep = Producer fail.
The suggestion that "scheduling is hard", no sh*t Sherlock, that's why you don't hire a 20 year old Producer who did one title at this last company.
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#3If game development paid overtime, game scheduling would be as well developed as film scheduling is. When a film goes over budget, the director and producer usually get their share cut.
I've written about this before. [1]
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#4I see a lot of cases of people saying estimation is impossible, which upon closer inspection turn out to be a different argument: "perfect foresight is impossible".
The Nirvana Fallacy, in other words. Because it's not perfect, it's worthless.
Of course perfect estimates are impossible. You need to make them anyhow. And if you don't make them explicitly, you'll make them implicitly, and they'll be worse.
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#5Nope, nope, fuck you.
Voluntary crunch leads to a culture of overtime. You won't be considered a "team player" if you decide that you don't want to spend weekends and extra hours in an industry where you make 40% less than your peers.
I feel even stronger about this after having a kid. There's no way I'm destroying the relationship I have with my family for your product. I saw it again and again when I was in the industry(at least 3 divorces on the last project I worked on) and I'll never go back.
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#6I see a lot of cases of people saying estimation is impossible, which upon closer inspection turn out to be a different argument: "perfect foresight is impossible". The Nirvana Fallacy, in other words. Because it's not perfect, it's worthless. Of course perfect estimates are impossible. You need to make them anyhow. And if you don't make them explicitly, you'll make them implicitly, and they'll be worse.
That's not the problem. The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and crunch.
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#7I see a lot of cases of people saying estimation is impossible, which upon closer inspection turn out to be a different argument: "perfect foresight is impossible". The Nirvana Fallacy, in other words. Because it's not perfect, it's worthless. Of course perfect estimates are impossible. You need to make them anyhow. And if you don't make them explicitly, you'll make them implicitly, and they'll be worse.
That's not the problem. The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and cr…
> The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem.
That's not unique to game development. Or software. Or any industry, really.
> The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and crunch.
Of course, but that's because the estimate is not being treated as an estimate. It's being treated as a plan, or a goal.
I read a book called Industrial Megaprojects in which the author, talking about civil and industrial projects on a gigabuck scale, lamented the same problems.
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#8Nope, nope, fuck you. Voluntary crunch leads to a culture of overtime. You won't be considered a "team player" if you decide that you don't want to spend weekends and extra hours in an industry where you make 40% less than your peers. I feel even stronger about this after having a kid. There's no way I'm destroying the relationship I have with my family for your product. I saw it again and again when I was in the ind…
Also there's solid data against crunch. I've posted the game outcome project before. They sampled hundreds of developers and found a very negative correlation with crunch.
He's true that voluntary crunch is less worse than mandatory but it still has a negative impact.
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20141216/232023/The_Ga...
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#9"scheduling is hard"?? Yeah, if you have no fucking clue what you are doing I guess everything is hard!
Shipping successful products on time and in-budget is not rocket science! The right people are out there...you just have to hire for it.
Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
#10All those words and none of them touch upon the obvious financial bullshittery of being expected to work as much as double time for the same salary.