(Rhetorical) What does it mean when the young are old, and the old are young?

Maybe the old feel no need to demonstrate their vast knowledge. Maybe they know the limits of that knowledge (e.g. having heard the stories from ex-Bungie employees, they nonetheless don't presume to push what could be a biased narrative at every opportunity). Maybe irony bores them, and celebrating good news related to something they love feels better than the little rush they'd get from being a wise ass.

Is that what you see? I can get that. Have you ever crunched? I, myself, don't think so.

Since I started working in tech I've had many late nights, but nothing like crunch. I worked as an office manager for a small company where the owner and I sometimes pulled all-nighters because we'd bitten off more than we could handle. Before that I worked 80-hours a week for three months at a time. So no, I haven't crunched, but that doesn't limit my ability to imagine it. I've considered working in the industry, but crunch is a major deterrent. I'm happy to see movement toward a more reasonable schedule.

I say this because if you ever had, I expect you wouldn't be so surprised at the response. What you are reading, for the most part - isn't youth demonstrating vast knowledge for the sake of it. They are war stories. (That's my take on it)

War stories are fine. Guess I just expected a more positive response.

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."

I would agree with your team hating the forced 15 minute breaks. When I'm in the flow a break is the worst thing ever, but a meeting is worse than a 15 minute break. I'd prefer a manager protect my flow and also help me to be able to arrange my day so that I don't burn my eyes/brain out staring at a monitor for 5-10 hours straight.

No argument here. I was a terrible manager when I worked in video games. Who puts a guy with no management training, just out of college, being paid only $9.75/hr. in charge of a team of 300 people? Activision, that's who.

I applaud the sentiment & desire behind your policy though :) . The "sharpen the axe" principle. If I'm stuck on something or burning out that forced 15 minute break could certainly help.

(Rhetorical) What does it mean when the young are old, and the old are young?

Maybe the old feel no need to demonstrate their vast knowledge. Maybe they know the limits of that knowledge (e.g. having heard the stories from ex-Bungie employees, they nonetheless don't presume to push what could be a biased narrative at every opportunity). Maybe irony bores them, and celebrating good news related to something they love feels better than the little rush they'd get from being a wise ass.

Is that what you see? I can get that. Have you ever crunched? I, myself, don't think so.

I say this because if you ever had, I expect you wouldn't be so surprised at the response. What you are reading, for the most part - isn't youth demonstrating vast knowledge for the sake of it. They are war stories. (That's my take on it)

What does it mean when the young are old, and the old are young? ;)

(Rhetorical) What does it mean when the young are old, and the old are young?

Maybe the old feel no need to demonstrate their vast knowledge. Maybe they know the limits of that knowledge (e.g. having heard the stories from ex-Bungie employees, they nonetheless don't presume to push what could be a biased narrative at every opportunity). Maybe irony bores them, and celebrating good news related to something they love feels better than the little rush they'd get from being a wise ass.

I can't even begin to guess the number of people the industry's lost to 100-hour weeks months on end. You could get years of happy and increasingly skilled productivity out of an artist or designer, but you wring them dry in eighteen months to hit the ship date and they never work on games again.

No crunch at Bungie would be cool. The happiest people I knew there just left at six every day and went back to their lives.

e: i would call crunch worse than being in a phd program and that's something else

Agree on all counts.

Huh, interesting. We definitely slop a few of our effects in as "good enough for TV but not 'feature quality' from time to time." Which is a little embarrassing to say, because my typical role is to be the guy who fixes the effects that are definitely not good enough for TV.

Effects are a different story. The film I spent a year cutting had a year after that of VFX. 900 shots.

Jeebus!

No crunch at Bungie would be cool. The happiest people I knew there just left at six every day and went back to their lives.

e: i would call crunch worse than being in a phd program and that's something else

I have a question for anyone who would know.

You say 80-100 hour weeks. Does this mean people are in 7 days a week? Or is the 80 hours over 5 days (16 hour days)?

You know what discourages crunch in my industry? The Union contract. A sixth day is 2x. A seventh is 3x. Anything more than 5 consecutive is 2x. More than 6 is 3x. Anything over 8 per day is 1.5x. Over 12 is 2x. Over 14 is 2.5. Anything over 40 per week is 1.5x. Over 60 is 2x.

An acquaintance made 20 grand in three days because Michael Bay worked him for 72 hours straight. And even then he said he'd never do that again.

Not saying there is never crunch, but it's not really perpetual. Unless you are on a comic book movie.

Most developers are salaried with no overtime potential. That's part of why the system gets abused. Standard contracts are rare, but developers don't have a ton of power.

... One guy, within actual seconds of being promoted to team lead, started giving the only girl on his team a backrub and said to her, "So... I hear you're attracted to men with power." He was fired so quickly the rest of the people there didn't even have time to gasp. ...

Somehow I didn't know it was possible to both laugh out loud and totally face palm at the same time, in one fluid motion.

Geeze. >_<

I worked 13 out of every 14 days. And yes, I made boatloads of money. $60k in 8 months on $9.75/hour, iirc.

I think working almost every day is worse than working a 5 day week with longer days. I am sure more days is better for productivity, but not for life.

It sucked balls. My mom would leave voicemails like "Are you dead?" and I still wouldn't call her back for two weeks. The hours, ultimately, are why I quit the whole industry. My life is worth more than that to me. It worked out.

That's why I left the job I described. I wanted to do more than just work. I knew I would eventually move out of a field job, but the lifestyle didn't get much better. You can't have a family life and do that. One of my guys quit after he missed his sister's wedding. A couple quit after getting married. Every single married person I knew that stayed working married within the company. One of the last rotations I was on I stayed over 4 extra days just so one of our other engineers could go on a date before crew changing with me. She ended up marrying the guy, and when I finally met him at their wedding I told him he owed me big. ;)

I'd LOVE, LOVE to see some comments from the contractors, engineers and testers, regarding Timmins statements.

Me too. Wasn't there that big story a few years back about Bungie's awful treatment of contractors? I'd be curious to know how that's going now. The entire gaming industry feels like it needs a drastic change, honestly. I'm no solely shitting on Bungie here. It feels like a fundamentally broken system, and I honestly can't see how anyone works in the industry. I certainly wouldn't, passion be damned.

Ten years ago I thought they would have to unionize to protect the programmers from abuse. Nothing about that has changed.

Because they never unionized.

Huh, interesting. We definitely slop a few of our effects in as "good enough for TV but not 'feature quality' from time to time." Which is a little embarrassing to say, because my typical role is to be the guy who fixes the effects that are definitely not good enough for TV.

Effects are a different story. The film I spent a year cutting had a year after that of VFX. 900 shots.

I'd LOVE, LOVE to see some comments from the contractors, engineers and testers, regarding Timmins statements.

Me too. Wasn't there that big story a few years back about Bungie's awful treatment of contractors? I'd be curious to know how that's going now. The entire gaming industry feels like it needs a drastic change, honestly. I'm no solely shitting on Bungie here. It feels like a fundamentally broken system, and I honestly can't see how anyone works in the industry. I certainly wouldn't, passion be damned.

Ten years ago I thought they would have to unionize to protect the programmers from abuse. Nothing about that has changed.

Honestly, when I read most of these types of articles (which seem to be coming out more frequently recently) about leadership style changes and management changes within Bungie... it just seems like a no brainer to me.

The most important thing I took from my 7 years in the Army was how to be a leader and how to manage your employees. It's something that the Army has excelled at for decades now, and not merely in a military manner.

When I see articles like this, it just makes me thing like... maybe more video game companies need to invest money into sending managers and leaders to corporate leadership classes, or something similar. It's a necessity to have good leaders and managers in such a stressful environment such as video game development.

YES! Holy god, YES. There were, as far as I could tell, zero management courses when I worked EA, Fox, Mindscape, and Activision. None at all. You know how you got to be a team lead? Be being reliable. That's it. Heck, at Activision they would promote terrible employees simply because they'd been there a long time. One guy, within actual seconds of being promoted to team lead, started giving the only girl on his team a backrub and said to her, "So... I hear you're attracted to men with power." He was fired so quickly the rest of the people there didn't even have time to gasp. And being production team lead just was "Hey, who wants to be the team lead?" and whoever volunteered was it. At the time I volunteered, the team was two people. At the end of the cycle, it was 300. I don't know how they expected me to be a good manager, because I definitely was not one. I had to go out, on my own, and read loads of management handbooks in order to become better at it (years later and in a different industry).

Anyway, yes, they need to provide management training BADLY, but they won't because (a) corporate views testers as swine (b) they're 90% right, only about 10% of the testers they hire are any good, mostly because they hire literally anyone so they can make the shareholders happy with how many testers they hired, (c) spending more money on management training would not directly result in more money for the company, and would thus make the shareholders unhappy... It's a bad, bad environment that would benefit greatly from training.

PS: The military guys I've worked with have all been terrific, both in the game industry and out. Always reliable!

I agree with most of what you've said. Some good sage wise words there.

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.

I'd say at 45 hours you may be fine, above that it starts to add strain to home-life, especially if it's "normal". 45-50 hours may not put MUCH stress on the family @ home, but it does start to affect them. At over 50 hours the strain is notable. I don't think short stints of 50 hour weeks will break moral, but it does have a negative effect. So, I guess I'm saying I agree with Timmins at wanting to keep things below 50 hours a week. There's a cost paid for weeks over 50, and it's not just paid by the company or the employee.

50 hours/week, assuming 5 days a week that's 10 hour days, + an hour lunch + an hour (or more) commute + 8 hours sleep & you're at 4 hours "free" time, take an hour from that if your employees are taking time for their physical health (workout), another 30 minutes to get ready for the day and you're under 2 & 1/2 hours for "home life": help with dinner (1+ hour to prep, eat, & cleanup), help with homework (30-60 minutes), keep up your house & yard (30-90 min), and put the kids to bed (30+ minutes 45+ if you're reading to them), oh, wait I ran out of time a while ago, I still need to volunteer in my community, go to kids soccer games, and find time to spend with my wife so she doesn't go insane from lack of adult interaction or forget that she loves me.

Now when do I get to relax & watch netflix or play a video game? There's the weekend, but it's often filled up with things that I didn't have time to get to during the week. I guess I'll just sacrifice more of my sleep.

Keep that up for very long & you'll have unhappy burned out employees and families.

After working 80-100 hour weeks for so long, anything 60 or less still feels like vacation to me, and it's been more than a decade since I did 80 hours in a week. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I like, but it's all relative, I'd say. 50 hour work weeks are typical in my job as a TV editor.

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."

I would agree with your team hating the forced 15 minute breaks. When I'm in the flow a break is the worst thing ever, but a meeting is worse than a 15 minute break. I'd prefer a manager protect my flow and also help me to be able to arrange my day so that I don't burn my eyes/brain out staring at a monitor for 5-10 hours straight.

No argument here. I was a terrible manager when I worked in video games. Who puts a guy with no management training, just out of college, being paid only $9.75/hr. in charge of a team of 300 people? Activision, that's who.

When I worked in the Gulf of Mexico I left home early in the morning on Wednesdays, and returned home late at night on Wednesday 4-6 weeks later. The next Wednesday I started it all over again. I was on the clock 24 hours out of the day and worked 7 days a week.

I lived on a boat and traveled from rig to rig doing frac jobs. While running a job I could work up to 36 hours straight without sleep. If I got any sleep, it was short cat naps while they tripped tools downhole.

At the dock I never had a normal sleep schedule and worked every hour of the day to get loaded for the next set of jobs. 16 hour days were pretty common. The worst I can remember was a stretch of 2 weeks where I worked 20-22 hours a day. My body was shutting down pretty bad at the end.

I had a guy on one of my crews that ate ephedrine like candy. I wonder if he's still alive today. The last time I talked to him he was shipped off to work off the coast of Nigeria.

Holy shit dude.

I worked 13 out of every 14 days. And yes, I made boatloads of money. $60k in 8 months on $9.75/hour, iirc.

I think working almost every day is worse than working a 5 day week with longer days. I am sure more days is better for productivity, but not for life.

It sucked balls. My mom would leave voicemails like "Are you dead?" and I still wouldn't call her back for two weeks. The hours, ultimately, are why I quit the whole industry. My life is worth more than that to me. It worked out.

I also know it probably would take longer for Cody's line of editing, because he works in film where everything has to be, as we say in TV, "feature quality" which requires far more attention to detail than TV does. I don't actually know how long it would take him, but I could always shoot him a message and ask if I need that info in order to give estimates to my boss.

Regarding shooting.

6 pages per day on a feature film is on the high side. Of course there are simple Indies that you can shoot in 15 days that reach that level, but between 1/8 and 3 is more typical depending on the complexity.

I work in TV mostly, so not familiar with Film. Thanks for the info!

Regarding editing.

This varies greatly. Skyfall was cut in just five weeks. Apocalypse Now took two years to cut. 4-8 months is typical, with bigger action movies usually taking 8-14 months. On something like Mad Max Fury road, simply watching all the footage non stop would have literally taken 20 straight days. The last film I was on is just under two hours and cut for just short of a year. So that works out to just over two minutes per day, in line with your estimate.

Huh, interesting. We definitely slop a few of our effects in as "good enough for TV but not 'feature quality' from time to time." Which is a little embarrassing to say, because my typical role is to be the guy who fixes the effects that are definitely not good enough for TV.

These are the jobs I hope robots replace in the future.

I said a few times that a trained monkey could have done 90% of the job (rigging up, rigging down, lab work, reports). The last 10% where the moments of terror when the fate of an oil well worth 100's of millions of dollars rested in my sleep deprived, progessively less caring, 24-year-old hands.