Ars Technica posted an article today by Andrew Groen about death marches and the culture of overtime in games. It's not a new story. In fact, it covers a lot of the rumours and stories I rather blithely brushed over when I said "I've seen examples of most every rumour you hear out there, and heard 1st hand from people who've lived the rest."
As with previous versions of this story, Mr. Groen paints a pretty grim picture. Flagrant disregard for years of research on overtime and worker productivity. Exploitation of employees, forcing them to work long hours to make horrible games they don't care about. Early burnout and retirement by industry stars.
But I don't think that's a complete or accurate picture. Mainly because it lacks solid numbers to back it up. Every single assertion Mr. Groen makes is, at its heart, an anecdote. I can provide counter anecdotes for each and every point he makes from my own personal experience. I can also find anecdotes that back up most of what he says and know people who can back up the rest.
The problem is, there's no comprehensive survey to tie it all together, to put those anecdotes in their proper context. He's not talking about a real study or doing quantitative analysis himself. He's just retelling an old story about overtime and exploitation, employees buying into the machismo and visions of creating cool games.
That doesn't mean he's necessarily wrong, though!
It's just that he's not necessarily right, either.
We just don't know, because there aren't enough people gathering real numbers to say for sure.
Do I think the industry has problems? Definitely.
Does the industry need to address the OT issue? Mmm... that's more complicated.
Yes, chronic OT and death marches are bad. But some OT, carefully focused and used wisely, can result in pretty amazing things. Both in the end product, and in the team chemistry. Ask anyone who's gone through it - the guy that leaves before the crunch is rarely missed as much as the one that leaves after.
Will these problems be fixed any time soon? Doubtful.
Until the industry grows up a bit... probably even unionizes, I don't think we'll be able to really address these problems. And I don't think unions will happen as long as most of us are salaried. It allows them to ... encourage ... us to work OT, but it also means they're competing with other salaried positions for similar skills. And for us programmers, that means not a bad living. It's hard to organize a union when most of the potential members have a pretty high standard of living and even sympathize with management and buy into a bit of the mythos of OT.
So yeah. There are issues in the industry. But writing won't-someone-please-think-0f-the-games-worker articles won't solve it. Those of us in the industry now are the only ones who can start to solve it. And the only way we can do that is by gathering data to understand what's really going on. Only then, only once we know where we are, can we figure out the road to get us to where we want to be.
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