When people who work in the games industry say they crunch because they're young men with poor boundaries who would do anything to make video games, and when industry veterans literally write PowerPoint decks about hiring suggesting targeting young men with poor boundaries because you can get them to crunch since they will do anything to write video games, I choose to believe their words. This lines up with external evidence.<p>Scheduling software is hard: granted! But do we see 90 hour crunch on <i>every single shipping product</i> in the US software industry? No, that's ludicrous. Do we see 90 hour crunch on substantially every shipping software project in, I don't know, the Japanese software industry? Oh we do! Curious! Does that industry also write schedules which assume crunch? I mean it sounds far fetched but no, literally in the design document written in the <i>first week of a three year project</i> there are exhortations about how understaffed we are (Why?) and how tight he schedule is (Why?) and how required heroic efforts are (Why?). And does the Japanese software industry hire people with poor boundary control and ruthlessly inculcate lower boundaries? Great Scott it does!<p>Crunch in the video game industry is not an accident. It is a policy. Do not work in video games.
If 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.<p>I've written about this before. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557954" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557954</a>
There is nothing that I agree with here. Crunch = Producer fail. Feature Creep = Producer fail.<p>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.
"It’s your entire job to say no to stuff like this [asking for more time]."<p>No, as a manager it's your entire job to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen. How did you let the project lead get into this situation? How irresponsible was it to basically gamble - not just with money, but with other people's time and careers - that the project would be on schedule? "Oh, but that's the way games get made." Right, so now you're just normalizing deviance.
>Scheduling isn’t just a problem in videogames, this is all kinds of software development.<p>And yet, somehow, videogames still manage to be worse about scheduling and effort estimation than pretty much any other kind of software system. Why is that? Why do managers of video game development teams feel like their industry is a special snowflake in software, that it's not bound by the same constraints as enterprise CRUD apps?<p>EDIT: Literally every point he brings up regarding feature creep and estimation applies equally to enterprise CRUD apps. So as bad as estimation for enterprise applications is, I never hear about people working 80-hour weeks for years on end to bring Widget Planner 3.55 (Now With Fruble Support!) to fruition.
I 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".<p>The Nirvana Fallacy, in other words. Because it's not perfect, it's worthless.<p>Of <i>course</i> 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.
> Keep in mind that when you’re giving a quote like this, you are basically making a promise to get the job done for a certain price.<p>Favorite quotation from this article. So much insanity and stress flow from this.<p>But hey, this is a team. We're all in it together. If things go wrong, count on my support ... unless it means you'll miss your deadline. What kind of loser-idiot misses their deadline? I asked you how long it would take at the start! Why didn't you tell me six months ago it would take three additional weeks? Let's try this again: how long will it take to finish level 9? I think you know the right answer now, don't you?
"scheduling is hard"?? Yeah, if you have no fucking clue what you are doing I guess everything is hard!<p>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.
When I was younger, I decided that failures in schedules were failures in management. Now that I am older, I feel that failures in schedules are failures in management. Not failures in technology.<p>As patio11 mentions elsewhere in this thread, schedule crunch, except for the very first time, is a deliberate decision.
Nope, nope, fuck you.<p>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.<p>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.