Rockstar is well known within the industry as the worst place you could possibly work. People who've worked with ex-Rockstar employees have always known. When the EA Spouse thing came out, a lot of us wondered when something would finally break about Rockstar.<p>But Rockstar has a secret -- that secret is that they are sued regularly over working conditions and abuse, and they always settle. The settlement comes with a gag order, however.<p>Genius, I guess, in the evil way.<p>I've been lucky enough to work for a fantastic company for the past six years, and any overwork has been entirely my own decision, and mismanagement has been minimal and more conceptual than actual. Someone high up will make a silly decision about something, and then teams will transparently handle and incorporate it while minimizing impact on people's work environment.
I worked at a very well known animation studio in a kind of Intern position for 8 weeks (I worked on a movie that rhymes with 'Fungle Book Three'), and my short experience sounds very similar to this bloke's. The most prestigious companies that everyone is happy to brag about working are sometimes the worst to work for? I've had nearly 10 jobs and this was _the worst_.<p>What causes it? Talented people continue to work there and middle management and infighting rips everyone to shreds. I worked during 'crunch time' which apparently 'happens on every production'.<p>The most psychotic thing from TFA is where a higher up pulls him in to a meeting room to accuse him of "questioning their authority" over a private email saying "I know the schedule is unrealistic, but guys we shouldn't be watching youtube videos during work hours". Who does that?
"And this was the sort of place where that sort of thing was the norm — the building process and the pipeline was inefficient to the extreme, yet no one who directly managed such things seemed to care — or was competent enough to recognize it."<p>Well, I think the last part is universal - nobody could easily diagnose or evaluate that situation. It took W. Edwards Deming years to create a method to first convince <i>himself</i> that it could be done, and then more years to convince others. This is made worse by intellectual work, where standards of quality are less obvious than "length at 100mm +/- 0.01mm". I'm not saying that standards do not exist, that is a trope that must disappear, they're just less obvious.
<i>It felt like a very unreal situation — working for a supposed “top-notch” company only to discover that some of my coworkers (including senior artists and management) wouldn’t even have been hired as interns at other companies I’d worked at. I’m not exaggerating.</i><p>Is Rockst*r considered a top-notch company? I know their output is quite respected but like Mel Gibson there is a difference between looking good on TV and being Good. Mostly it sounds like a bad case of hero worship.
I keep hearing stories like this from different studios, and most of the time, they're studios that released games I really enjoyed. I would assume the stories are exaggerated or untrue, but they always ring true with my personal experience in game dev as well.<p>I think stories like this are rooted in the fact that the feedback cycle for large-budget video game development is completely broken. For small game projects with small teams and small budgets, you could at least attempt to assign blame for failures and credit for successes to the team members responsible for the result of the project. But when a game project runs for multiple years, with hundreds of developers and tens of millions of dollars spent on development, it becomes increasingly difficult to assign blame for any particular detail. This is worsened by the fact that the success of a game is ultimately up to the whims of the market and other factors outside of the developer's control (like whether any competing titles are released at the same time).<p>The end result is that leads and executives are effectively insulated from the results of their decisions, which is why they can lead a project that ends up years behind schedule and burns through employees with 72 hour work weeks and not get fired. And ultimately, for a large game publisher, it doesn't matter if a few projects run over budget or fail completely as long as they get enough hits that bring in massive amounts of revenue.<p>I'm starting to suspect that 90% of commercial games only ship through an act of God, when an angel descends from the heavens a week before gold master to mysteriously fix 50% of open bugs and get the lead designer to stop using meth. Were this the case, it would definitely explain how certain studios like Bethesda always seem to get 'unlucky' and have their games ship with crippling issues and lots of rough edges, despite the fact that people love their work.<p>The bit about the removal of free sodas and donuts reminds me of: <a href="http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/" rel="nofollow">http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...</a>
Since the site has hit its quota, I'll post my reply here:<p>I had the same experience, just ten years earlier. I was the lead programmer of resident evil 2 for the N64. Project was on time, under budget. Client was so happy it got Angel a little title called "Red Dead Revolver", which R* took over from Capcom when they bought Angel.<p>You want to know how we got the RE2 deal? I'll tell you: Chris Fodor and I noticed that you could spend 5 days a week totally fucking everything up and not get fired. You could <i>lose Nintendo</i> as a client by utterly failing to hit any deadline - and not get fired. You could be lead of a project that didnt ship, and then be lead of another project that didnt ship, rinse, repeat.<p>So we decided to spend monday working on our job, and the rest of the time working on a tech demo. We then presented our ideas to the programmers at the company. Of course, only a few senior programmers voiced their opinion, and their opinion was "that wont work". So then we ran the demo of it working.<p>Diego showed up a week later with a choice of two titles, one of which was porting RE2 to the N64.<p>I was fired a few weeks after we shipped.<p>I used to believe that the role of an employee was to maximize the value for shareholders. I still choose to believe this role, which is basically why I am only employable at start-ups, where it is still true. At any other company, the role of the employee is to maximize the value for the employee and the other employees that think likewise.<p>So welcome to the world of start-ups. You're now unemployable by most everyone else.