A ton of people say that you have to work extremely long hours if your in game design/programming. So I'm curious, do those of you in the industry work from 8-past 10 everyday? Do you HAVE to work weekends? What happens if you refuse to work overtime or on the weekend everyday? Is it worth it or is it easy to get burnt out?

t wrote:

>A ton of people say that you have to work extremely long hours if your in game design/programming.

Yes, it's true that overwork does happen. Not all the time, not at every company, and not for every person.

>So I'm curious, do those of you in the industry work from 8-past 10 everyday?

No.

>Do you HAVE to work weekends?

Not every weekend.

>What happens if you refuse to work overtime or on the weekend everyday?

It depends.

>Is it worth it

It depends.

>or is it easy to get burnt out?

It depends.

Very few people do work those extremes.

Most of the time it is a normal, regular work day. Often the college students and unmarried youth will stick around all hours of the night and come in mid-morning, but that is not something we ask for around here. There are a few places that are bad places to work, that really do treat people as slaves, but they are the exception and not the rule.


There is a 'crunch time', which is the time just before the publication deadline. Games usually have a hard deadline with strict QA requirements that the studio cannot move without serious financial penalty. Very few other pieces of software have such requirements.

Crunch time can be non-existant or very mild. It can also be a multi-month marathon. It really depends on how the game has been developed and managed (or mis-managed) and how realistic the goals are given the workers and the deadlines. Since everybody loves to have all the latest extras in their game, resulting in lots of scope creep, it is too common to have a difficult last few weeks rather than an enjoyable time of adding nice touches here and there. For some, that might mean working a few extra hours and spending a few hours on Saturday in the office. For badly run projects it can mean the boss requires 70+ hour work weeks for months on end. Left unchecked, projects will grow to consume endless hours of work, so it needs to be kept under control through careful management.

What happens if you refuse to work the specified hours? The same thing that happens at any job if you refuse to work the specified hours. There is a moral judgement asking if the management is asking too much or the employee wants too little, but it is a free market economy. Employees will be fired or quit under bad situations, and employers who can't keep employees around will quickly be out of business.

Finally, yes, it is easy to get burnt out, but that is true of every job. If you don't enjoy what you are doing you will tire of it. If you are overworked you will tire of it. So make sure you aren't overworked and enjoy what you do.

What would the hours generally run at the big companies like THQ, EA, etc?

What are the salaries like?

Is it more, less or the same stress and hour-requirment as a IT guy or network specliast? what about web developer?

t wrote:

>What would the hours generally run at the big companies like THQ, EA, etc?

40 hours a week. Generally.

>What are the salaries like?

Read the Salary Survey.

>Is it more, less or the same stress and hour-requirment as a IT guy or network specliast? what about web developer?

Gee. I don't know about the life of an IT or network or web guy. I can only speak for game guys. Good luck figuring this out! (Hint: if you can't handle stress, give up on the game biz idea right now. We only want people who can roll with the punches life dishes out.)

I never get stressed out, but I do have set hours I want to work and set hours I dont want to work. Such as, I dont want to have to work until 8 Pm everynight, I'd rather work 8 hours a day and go home to my family.

I also dont like having to worry about getting paid, I like knowing that every other friday I'll get that 2,500$ paycheck or whatever and be able to pay the bills rather then worry.

So should I give up on the field? I dont get stressed out, or worried about much but I do have certain things I'd like to go my way.

Quote: Original post by tleisher
I never get stressed out, but I do have set hours I want to work and set hours I dont want to work. Such as, I dont want to have to work until 8 Pm everynight, I'd rather work 8 hours a day and go home to my family.

There's not much choice. You have regular hours for 80% of the year. The 2 months before ship you will end up working 80hour weeks. Depending on the company there are either dictated hours during crunch or you just have to get your work done. But either way you're going to be working weekends; this isn't an 8hours a day industry, even in non-crunch it's typically more like a 45hour work week with fairly frequent late night stays to finish something up for a demo.

Quote: Original post by tleisher
I also dont like having to worry about getting paid, I like knowing that every other friday I'll get that 2,500$ paycheck or whatever and be able to pay the bills rather then worry.

This is not a problem in the games industry. You get a reliable paycheck all the time (unless maybe if you're working for some sketchy startup

-me

I love games, I always have and I always come up with good (at least to me they're good) and I would love to make them for a living. But growing up my dad had a job where he had to be on call, and spent long hours and sometimes spent the night at work.. I know what this does to kids and I dont want this to happen to mine.

I dont mind working weekends, but I would rather be able to spend 3-4 hours with my kids a night at least before they go to bed.. so that would put me at getting home by 6-7 PM.

This isnt possible working in games is it?

Quote: Original post by Palidine
There's not much choice. You have regular hours for 80% of the year. The 2 months before ship you will end up working 80hour weeks. Depending on the company there are either dictated hours during crunch or you just have to get your work done. But either way you're going to be working weekends; this isn't an 8hours a day industry, even in non-crunch it's typically more like a 45hour work week with fairly frequent late night stays to finish something up for a demo.

Those numbers vary by company, management, skill, experience, and luck.

That 8 wks at 80 hrs means that either (1) the workers slacked off, replying on gd.net too much [looksaround], (2) bad management choices, or both.

"Bad management" is the biggest killer. These include:

* Feature creep without compensation from the publisher or studio. "We have to do it because other people are doing it, and we can't give you more people, time, or money. In other words, we expect you to do this extra work for free."

* Bad scheduling, such as forgetting that a 40 hour work week doesn't mean actually programming for 40 hours each week, not including time for unknowns, time for bug, human errors, and design changes, not counting time for meetings, and omitting other overhead.

* Bad planning, such as bad critical path management or omiting required tasks.

* Bad personnel management, such as assigning the wrong people to a task, having poor morale, or have a rotating staff because the owners/supervisors/budgeting doesn't provide enough compensation to keep the developers from being headhunted, or they understaff the project.


The difficulty is the tiny profit margin and solidly fixed deadlines. A business needs to make money, and it is hard to make a profitable game in the US because of market saturation and high expectations. So some companies adopt bad management practices in order to make it look good enough on paper to get funding and keep the contracts. The good companies to work for don't do that.

How many bad companies are out there? Who are some of them? Do companies like Activision, Ubisoft, THQ, etc impliment these bad management practices?

I dont mind going in to work early everyday (7 AM) if I could get it all done and get out by 5 PM.