Beamer wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 13:46:
1) No one is arguing that 2 months of 7 day weeks is a good thing. We are arguing that some crunch is a good thing. 2 months of 7 day weeks is bad. 2 months of 5 12 hour days is not. Hell, I have friends that consistently work 100-120 hours a week. I'm over 60 every week.
Beamer wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 13:46:
I'm over 60 every week.
Beamer wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 13:46:
Hell, I have friends that consistently work 100-120 hours a week. I'm over 60 every week.
Beamer wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 13:46:
When you're on salary there is no "overtime." You're responsible for getting your work finished, not being in the office a certain amount of time. It's a "perk" of being on salary.
paying people OT for poor results... there are all kinds of laws and regulations in place about this sort of crap
Again, you only ever need to get into crunch when someone screwed the pooch somewhere on dates and making sure milestones were met on time and under budget.
Beamer wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 14:22:Again, if the project manager did his job correctly and schedule correct tasks with the correct amount of time things wouldn't need overtime.
I've said again and again that the industry sucks at project management, in large part because they tend to promote the best at their job rather than seek good leaders/managers, and in part because they fear "suits" that tend to be quite good at this.
But you'll have crunch regardless. It's an inevitable part of any project.
Again, if the project manager did his job correctly and schedule correct tasks with the correct amount of time things wouldn't need overtime.
Beamer wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 13:46:
2) When you're on salary there is no "overtime." You're responsible for getting your work finished, not being in the office a certain amount of time. It's a "perk" of being on salary.
Development is about getting into the zone and staying in that zone as long as possible.
During crunch all of the bugs a game has when it ships are produced. Since crunch to meet the release deadline directly implies NO Q&A.
Cutter wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 12:23:Beamer wrote on Jan 17, 2011, 12:04:
Or market demands. You can't simply blanket blame management. Sometimes unexpected things come up, or sometimes you need to hit a certain window or else you're screwed.
Uh, yeah you can. Crunch time particularly in this context does mean management dropped the ball big time. Crunch time in fact is very bad news. The reason 8 hours is a standard is because productivity starts to drop off after about 6 hours for most people so 8 is generally all you can milk them for, anything beyond that starts getting into exponential declines in productivity. Anything beyond 10 hours starts building into serious resentment and virtually no work done, or bad work done which may need to be redone...which sounds like the case here. That's a huge red flag for this game. There's zero gain to the average worker for forced crunch time and they resent it, which results in poor work for a poor product that was poorly managed from the get go.