Maybe Norway has long hours, but I know France and Germany tend to have even shorter hours than us in the UK... the most hours for a programming job I''ve seen was 40, and my last one was 37.5. I did about 1 hr overtime a month. That wasn''t game programming though, it was databases and web stuff. Game programming tends to have a lot of enforced overtime, but the ''official'' hours are still not all that many.

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quote: Original post by Magmai Kai Holmlor
I wouldn''t expect 9-5 hours in any, shall we say, salaried position. Those are the hours you would work at Sears or OfficeMax.

Expectation usually range from 40-50 hrs/wk. It''s up to you, but I wouldn''t accept a job that demanded 50+ hrs on a regular basis.

I work at a large corporation, and I''d say the majority of the salaried workers work 9-5, 10-6, or similar.

The norm in Norway is 37,5 or 40 hrs/week, but most programmers I know work a steady 45-50 hrs/week.

Never ever work with Xing Interactive as an indie but go trough the self publishing model and publish otherwise with Dexterity software! Dexterity got very good referentions.

When I was a dev manager for a large AV / Security company in the US we actually worked very sane hours -

However - and I truly believe this - the reason we were not working 100''s of hours a week like some of the other teams at the company, was because we planned, organized, and designed our products before we started coding. The AV teams were always working insane hours, namely because they were always fixing the 100''s of outstanding bugs or "hacks" to get something to work from the previous version. This also kept out workload interesting because we were always writing fresh code and expanding the product - which is the fun part of development IMHO. My roommate and close friend was the QA manager and we worked *Very* close - QA and Dev were competitive but *NEVER* adversarial which I think helped significantly as well.


So, when you are asking about "what company" has sane hours I think you need to narrow your perspective - especially if you are talking a large company. Most game companies are rather small but Blizzard does have 200 or so guys there, enough for separate cultures to exist I presume. Many times, you get fairly normal work schedules and then crunch time hits. I would suggest that you scrutinize the people in charge of development to see how (s)he runs the team: Do they pay attention to milestones or just blow them off (this NEVER works - you are always late ). How well do they adjust schedules - do they schedule at all. Do they put slack in the schedule for the delays (and they ALWAYS happen) that show up. How homogenous is the dev team, if someone gets hit by a pink bus (sick, injury, etc) does everything come crashing down or can others pick up the slack.

Keep in other metrics in mind as well: Companies like Blizzard and id seem to enjoy "it will ship when it''s done" type schedules as they always ship a blockbuster. If the company you are looking at has never shipped a single game the publisher is probably going to watch them *much* closer. Tune your expectations for "development practices" accordingly. Most people are writing games because *they love to do so* this is mutually exclusive to "having to work". I imagine it’s easier to get into a new company but the demands will probably be greater. A well-established company will have less pressure but is harder to get into - etc.

I''ll jump off the soapbox here and let someone else have the mike. Hope this helps..

#dth-0

Working those long hours in my opinion is the equivalent of using brawn over brains.

How many of you have been tired and followed an idea that was stupid and wasted ten or more hours on it? What possible use is working long hours in that case? What these people don''t understand is sitting and thinking before you do something means you are more likely get it right the first time.

Getting away from work at a reasonable time means you are refreshed when you come back the next day and you can think clearly and hopefully get some good ideas.

A view from the inside :

Yes, there is such a thing as a normal 40 hour work week. Don''t expect it to come if you''re a rookie, and don''t expect it to be predictable based on the company you work for or the project you''re working on.

I''ve worked on projects where the crunch time was a mere 2-3 weeks of 60-70+, and the average was a comfortable 40. I''ve also been on projects where there was 4 _months_ of 60-70+ hours.

The bottom line is that you (as "the company") have to balance between several factors.

- Schedule, as dictated by publisher/way-upper-management. We have a phrase where I work : "you can ask us to be on the Moon by 6pm today, but that doesn''t mean we''re going to be able to build and Saturn V rocket and get there". A whole lot depends on exactly what is expected of the project. If you''re a launch title for a new console, expect the worst. Unyielding schedule, high demands. If you''re a cushy 14 month sequel to a successful project, and you can keep your feature creep under control, its probably not going to be too bad.

- Project chemistry. I''m talking about the team members. Some teams just click, others don''t. Even within one company. You''ve all seen the piles of games that appear to be getting somewhere but then get delayed 4 years and finally are cancelled. The reason? Chemistry. Some teams just have a huge problem pulling together and getting over the hurdle to finish the game. If you''re on a project like this, expect to work long painful hours and find yourself not getting any closer to the end. Team chemistry counts for a _lot_ and can seriously alleviate pain in the long run (especially in the latter 25% of the project).

- Project focus. You could have a team of highly motivated people, with a great management team and plenty of money. If your game sucks, get ready for a lot of work making it not suck. Suckage is not necessarily measured by the "final" product. Most likely somewhere near the 50% mark producers and designers (and others) will start fretting because they see holes and flaws in the game idea. A game with no direction is the absolute surest way to blow a schedule and cause agony amongst the developers.

There are a dozen other factors, but those are some pretty high level ones. Don''t be fooled into thinking that because a game takes 2 extra years to finish means that the schedule was "casual". Blizzard has a reputation for being a complete burnout sweatshop - and they don''t even have profit sharing. Imaging crunching/semi-crunching for a _year_, shipping a million seller and not getting a bonus out of it. Bleargh.

As a programmer, you can learn techniques to lower your own demands. The more experienced you get, the better you are at avoiding mistakes early. No one can make up for crappy design or last minute implementation changes. But, if you planned and executed your personal systems correctly the first time, chances are you won''t need to work those insane hours. Beyond that, though, "normal" hours are dependant on lots of factors.

I am not an addict ... on a usual weekday I spend a little over half of it (12+ hrs) on ''a'' computer.. sometimes I''m in college and use the labs.. the majority is at home. Weekends are a little *worse*: from the moment I awake[8-9a.m... late,grr], to the time I decide its bed time [2-4a.m.]. Is this bad?

maybe I''m just deranged.

Well, I contracted on a couple of games before going open-source/indie and "normal hours" were nine to five - nine in the morning until five the next morning! And the odd weekend, that is, every first and third weekend of the month. :p

Turnover was mostly the problem there, and the fact that the folks creating our artwork assets were in Europe. That made it all quite exciting, a lot more than necessary.

So now my day gig is doing embedded systems programming for consumer electronics and you know what? It''s not a heck of a lot better as far as hours go. It''s mostly an eight-to-sixish kind of thing, maybe weekends continually before trade shows or during the month or so of crunch time that precedes shipping. The planning is typically better, and the pay is about double what I''d make as a full-time game programmer, and the work is more interesting in many way.. ever try to cram a realtime application into a chip with 32K of flash and 1K of RAM? It''s a different world. I still write games, just in the evenings and on my own time - where I don''t have some insane producer or marketdroid changing the specification every five minutes to make some publisher happy. And with the salary I make I can afford all the tools I need to do it on my own. Oh, yeah, and as an embedded programmer I don''t get laid off at the end of a project.. lol.. thats an occupational hazard in the games biz.

Some people really like being fulltime game programmers, I''ve met some folks at GDC that passed up non-game positions that came with 30% raises to stay in the biz. It all depends on what you want to do with your life, I guess! Me, I can write games and I still make a fair amount of cash and don''t have to worry about retirement.. or, as one person put it, "there are no old game programmers".

hey do game programmers get paid well?

I know some people might think that it shouldn''t be about money, but when you''ve working 40+ hrs and overtime using all your expertise and knowledge which has taken years to learn, don''t you deserve to be paid well?