A counter-example: Supergiant (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Friday, September 13, 2019, 20:24 (1685 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Instead of posting another topic, I'll hijack yours, as it's at least sort of relevant.

I just read this article at Kotaku about Supergiant, the developers of Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, and now Hades.

The studio has made changes over time to ensure that everybody takes care of themselves. For example, Supergiant began as a company with unlimited time off. But, Rao explained, this created an “invisible pressure” to never stop working, because developers always had endless vacation time in their back pockets. These days, Supergiant still offers unlimited time off, but employees are required to take at least 20 days off per year. “This is us saving us from ourselves,” Rao said. “That changes our psychology to ‘How do I spend this minimum? Where do I put it? Am I doing a summer break, or am I doing every Friday for a little while?’”

As another example, he pointed to Supergiant’s approach to emails on the weekend—namely, that there shouldn’t be any after 5 PM on Friday, even if somebody’s really excited about a new feature or idea, because that risks roping other people into work on the weekend. “It doesn’t mean someone can’t get really excited about something and do something if they want to,” said Rao. “It means the company is not going to ask you to, and you shouldn’t accidentally pull more people into a process that they didn’t necessarily intend to do.”

There's more good stuff in there, the article is worth a read. It seems they have a really excellent attitude towards work, recognizing that folks don't all have the same habits, and that sometimes it's okay to pull some long hours if the person wants to. There's a huge difference between being passionate about something and staying late a few nights to do something you're excited about, and being forced to stay late for weeks on end to meet a deadline.

Supergiant has been a developer whose games I like quite a bit--I'm glad to hear that the culture there is so great and effective.