It's a tough thing realizing that what you thought you loved, isn't for you. I can only suggest working in environments where crunch is the norm, so you can develop techniques to handle it more effectively. Or working/moving somewhere where the pace of life isn't so insane. I worked in TV for many years, crunch is a way of life there.

Aside from the well known big Silicon Valley companies, you can try to get hired at SpaceX. They appeared at previous GDC's and are really seeking game developers to work for their flight software, especially if they are good at low-level programming. They take their work seriously, but also pride themselves in standing out from the older, more bureaucratic aerospace companies which they argue are a lot slower in testing and validating software.

From what I hear, SpaceX is not a place to go if you don't like crunch. Check the reviews on GlassDoor and look at what they say about the hours...

OP, there ARE game companies that work without crunch and have flexible hours. Keep looking until you find one - or start one.

Hi all. I'm a regular contributor to these forums but for (hopefully) obvious reasons have opted to be anonymous on this post (since it could adversely effect my current job situation).

Hmmm... regular contributor with 2 posts? Or is this your 2nd account? (I believe this is prohibited?)

There is one thing I hate, though, and I don't think I can deal with it anymore: crunch.

Crunch is not that bad everywhere. You seem to be depicting a situation much similar to south-west USA.

My area isn't particularly fond of overtime nowadays (most businesses have been shrinking hours the past 5 years, and it is not uncommon to get a 37.5h week).

What would be a suitable industry for me to move to? Should I (and if so, how should I) share my concerns with management?

Programming is used in many industries. I have seen many transit to non-game related software (either large 'services' or government systems, web companies, e-marketing, digital strategy companies with hosting solutions, etc.) Any company that needs strong IT support is likely to need good programmers. Of course, much of your experience may not translate well (everything related to game development and more often than not, any 3d experience for example) but they will certainly appreciate your logical approach to problem solving which, in essence, is much similar.

As for sharing your concerns, I've always kept a fairly transparent approach with my management wherever I've been, and more importantly when discussing with other companies (I never want it to come as a surprise). The intent is not so much to get a new offer from them (that's a bit lame) but to get a bit more clarity from high management's goals for mid/long term which sometimes help making big decisions ("will crunches go down?" in your case, would be a relevant topic of discussion).

I've rarely seen any form of management pre-emptively fire someone because they shared concerns. Rather, I feel that good upper management likes this type of information as it gives them clarity for planning reasons, etc. It's also good feedback to get better. Of course, their business model may required this form of crunches, or you may yet hear from them that they're tired of it too and that it is the result of issues they are trying to fix (something along the management pipeline is preventing them from making adequate evaluations upfront which results in unnecessary crunches).

Personally, I think that 50h/w for 4 weeks is just about the most a crunch should be (allowing you to finish things properly without having any justification to 'hire someone'). Everything beyond that could've been avoided earlier with more hands on deck (unless the critical path didn't allow you to split the project this way, in which case the timeline might have been at fault).

Avoid Web design and Web development like the plague! This is a great summary of why it sucks as a job based on my real world opinion. The customer is always right except when they're NOT:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

Really, I think most roles that interract with the customer have that kind of insane scope creep of useless features.

Completely depends on the customers/management.

Where I work, we make the client give us a mockup fo what they want. We give them a wireframe, they accept/reject it with changes, and once it's accepted, we start work. Any changes to that (Besides small change requests, really) require additional money in the contract.

We did have 1 project where the scope nearly trippled in size on the front end side of things, and later this year, they're going to approch us about a "version 2" of it.

Yeah I agree feature creep is part of all development work. However Web design is different because there's a mentality spread by hosting companies with their site builder software that "Web design is so easy ANYONE can do it", so everyone, even those who are unqualified to have any opinion, have very technical opinions and insist on telling you that sure it's possible for a website to enable your webcam, download all your emails from your address book and run on a Nokia 3310 WAP phone, because... Well just because...

Actually, that reminds me of one client who insisted we port a site (We have a shared portal that changes depending on login account type. So sites have their own brandings) to run on IE5.

Our portal's primarilly used by doctors/medical providers who have their own computers set up in office usually (And also admin rights). We simply made a redirect for older IE versions that say "If you're using windows and have reached this page, please click about > information to view your browser version. If you've had issues using our portal in the past, and your version number is less than 11.0, please click here to install software that will fix those issues (links directly to a chrome download). If not, click here to continue".

Of course, we already KNEW their browsers were outdated, and that they're running windows (IE). The funny thing is that after a couple days, we tracked basically all of the people who tried to use our site with older browsers (We actually had people try to IE5/IE7) switch to Chrome without complaining.

I asked someone from our marketing department how that could be possible, since we've always told people to upgrade/change their browser when they reach us for support, and they never do, and he said that having them check their own browser version makes them feel smart, and that they'd feel accomplished by fixing it "for themselves", instead of being told what the problem is by support.

We never ended up porting the site to IE5 (obviously), but the requests for it dropped completely after that.