no-crunch development (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, August 05, 2017, 00:56 (2755 days ago) @ Kermit

I... I don't know how I feel about this article.

"The craft and skill-set of making other people succeed," he said. "Your manager is responsible for your happiness, your engagement; how you're actually doing as a person, how you're doing in your craft as an engineer. They're also responsible for your career planning. That's what management means at Bungie."

This is brilliant and exactly right. The manager's job is to empower their employees and ensure they have all of the tools they need to succeed.

Bungie was in a state of crunch for virtually that entire period - based on Timmins' definition of crunch as, "whenever you're working at least 50 hours a week."

This is a joke, right? 50 hours? I never worked less than 60 hours a week in the 13 years I tested video games, except for the six months I worked 30 hours a week while being full-time enrolled in college. "Crunch" meant 80-100 hour weeks. Listen, I get that we shouldn't normalize more than 40 hour work weeks, but there's overtime and then there's crunch, and crunch in the gaming industry is fucking brutal. 50 hour weeks ain't it. The existence of this line makes much of the rest of the article feel like whining about nothing rather than solving a difficult and chronic problem. The writer undermined the whole thing, right here. Maybe Timmins does define anything over 50 as "crunch" but don't write the article in such a way that it draws a false equivalency between 50 hour work weeks and breaking a company's morale. Especially in this industry.

"The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company," he said. "It is the most I've ever seen humans work in a year and a half. It was brutal.

50 hour work weeks didn't do that. UGH. This article makes Timmins sound like a whiny brat. I bet most of that year and a half was spent around 80 hour work weeks, not 50. 50 doesn't break a man the way 80 does. Last I'm going to say about the hours thing.

"When your company is used to crunching, not relying on crunch to ship is now hard," he said. "Un-ringing that bell is very difficult. It requires changes to planning and culture, which takes a long time to do. It took us years and multiple games to move away from crunch philosophy."

I disagree here. If it took a long time to un-ring that bell, then the problem was the leadership. After your first game, you know how long it takes to make a game. Your experienced coders can say how many man hours of work you're looking at. You have a line producer whose entire job is to know how many hours things take and assign budgets to match. So at that point, you can set a schedule with no crunch, or set one with crunch, but you can't pretend that the crunch time is magically sneaking up on you and taking you by surprise. Back when I was testing, I could tell you that it took in the neighborhood of 300 man hours to properly test every possible combination of clothing and skate deck in a tony hawk game. We could assign 10 guys 30 hours of work and get it done in 3 days or we could assign 30 guys 10 hours of work and finish in a day. Or we could be giant dick bags and decide one guy was gonna do it all and work 100 hour weeks and finish in 3 weeks because hey, fuck that guy, right? But we NEVER got surprised by how long it took. Not once. Occasionally we'd roll the check into a new build because we didn't finish between releases, but - again - we were never surprised when that happened and, in fact, told the coders in advance what checks wouldn't be done in time for their planned pushes.

Here's my take: When your company doesn't really give a shit about its employees, relying on crunch time to ship is easy. When you treat your employees as assets to be invested in instead of expenses to be minimized or resources to be exploited, planning to ship without using crunch is easy.

Still, I'm glad Bungie is at a crunch-free model. There's really no excuse for these established companies to treat their employees like sweat shop workers. They know better, and they've known better for a very long time.

"You should take this seriously, but it's not free," Timmins said. "If I'm a manager, every report I have is about 10% of my time... It's really hard, and you're constantly going to have that pressure: 'Can't we just skip one on ones? Can't we just skip your goals for this period?'

Right here... He knows how much time things take. And then he immediately says he wants to cut corners. DUDE. The whole point of a crunch-free philosophy is that you plan ahead and consider how much time things take. So if you know how long these 1 on 1s take, then you schedule them such that you don't feel the time pressure to get them done by either working crunch hours on them or skipping the quality work altogether, and if you don't have enough man hours in the week to do all of your weekly tasks, you hire help. He's preaching no crunch while exactly providing an example of how management forces crunch on employees. I can see why it took so long to shift... they're bad at it, even if they want to be better. If the 1 on 1s take too much of his time, he needs to divide his management groups into smaller sets of people and hire more managers so everyone gets the attention they deserve.

"The answer is no. People management is more important than that one extra feature."

Or you could hire another manager and divide your workload, getting both done. Rule of thumb: You will be assigned more and more work until you ask for help or break. It's your responsibility to admit when you have been given too much to do. Yes, even if you're a manager.

Destiny brought the final stage of the process: enforced vacation, a measure directly related to, "the crunch you want to do." Bungie gives its engineers 40 days off each year, but whether through paranoia or passion, a lot of employees simply weren't taking the opportunity for a break.

What? I used to force my team to take 15 minute breaks and they fucking hated me for it. I can't imagine forcing them to take 40 days off. Maybe if the entire company shuts down for 40 pre-selected days so that everyone can plan ahead, but you can't just tell mike in backend design that it's his 40 days and don't worry because joey the intern can totally handle his work while he's out. You can't hold a gun to someone's head and tell them to "relax."

Instead you have to tell upper management to chill the fuck out if mike wants some time off, and to guarantee everyone that they'll be able to come right back if they do need time. You go to bat for your team, you encourage them to take the time off, but man... Forcing someone to leave the office can easily be seen as not wanting them there. That's a dangerous game.

"Destiny 2 will actually be our fifth release - we've done all these DLCs - with no full, enforced crunch. We've very proud of that. It took us a long time to get there from the Halo 2 days."

This is impressive as hell. Obviously the wording implies that there was voluntary crunch, but it's still impressive.

it's over by four months and it's not going to fit. On Halo 2 I was that person, and before you know it I'm there every day until 4am and I never see my wife.

This right here is exactly why I quit my job in video games. My boss saw his wife once a month. I had turned off the gas and electricity at my apartment because I was home so rarely. I slept on a cot in the break room and showered at the gym next door. So yeah, crunch is bad. It's really, really bad.

"The majority of it is always having enough awesome ideas and things you want to build, so you always need to have that rigour. 'No, we can't do that, and that's okay.' The second you don't, the whole thing falls apart."

And then the last bit doesn't make sense to me. There's no such thing as "no we can't." You either need more people, more time, or more money, or some combination thereof, and anything is possible. You can't tell your boss "no" unless it's literally impossible (and I don't mean impossible for you, but completely, physically impossible). instead, you tell your boss you can do that in X amount of time, or with Y more people, or at a cost of Z. Maybe he's implying the "no we can't [do that with the number of people we have in the amount of time remaining]" but this article is not giving me total confidence in Bungie's understanding of the golden triangle of labor.

So yeah, I'm not sure what to take away from this read. On the one hand, Bungie has impressively bucked the industry trend of crunch time. On the other hand, they seem to have still had crunch that simply wasn't mandatory, and they seem to have been pulled against their instincts into this mandatory-crunch-free world. Timmons, while explaining how managing people is now a priority at bungie, manages to immediately offer up an example where he admits his inner desire is not to interact with the people he manages in order to save time. What? And the writing is such that it's hard to tell if that's actually what Timmons is saying, or simply a blunder of context made by the author.

Managers are involved in a difficult craft which receives little respect and less formal training. This article tells me Bungie wants to have good managers, but also makes me concerned that they may not have any idea what makes a manager good.