There’s nothing wrong with choosing a job that you know are going to expect all-nighters, probably un compensated all-nighters - but make sure you choose it knowingly instead of pretending it’s an office hours job. It’d be a rare job in video game production that didn’t involve crunch time, and if you want to work in those roles you can, so long as you accept/embrace that. If you’re the sort of person for whom 2-3 months a year of crunch time is going to destroy your relationships/family/mental health, you should probably choose a different industry. There are lots of 9-5 ish coding jobs that involve zero or minimal outside-office-hours work. Don’t fool yourself I to pretending your “dream job” is one of those if there are obvious (or even subtle) red flags that it’s not.
Sure it is. Stay away from jobs that require you to be on call or work nights and weekends. They not only exist, they're the rule, not the exception. Every tech job I've ever had has had occasional spurts of crunch time, but they were relatively few and far between.
To "just work harder", in this case 36 hours, is the easy decision to make when something goes wrong. It smells deliciously of heroics, bravado and top performer mentality. Most importantly, the soul drenching, exhausting late hours, gives the illusion that "we are doing all that is humanly possible to resolve the problem". How tough are we, right?
But as the author points out, heaps of literature clearly show that "crunching", like it's affectionately called in the games industry, is contra-productive. One guy working 8 hours, going home for a good sleep, and coming back to work an additional 8 hours will vastly outperform the developer-turned-zombie that's been at it for 24 hours straight.
At that point, short term memory is gone, stupid mistakes (blunders even) are rampant. Fixing simple issues takes extraordinary amounts of time, because the ability to focus is all but lost. You effectively have tunnel vision and your reactions and logical skills are reduced to that of a drunk.
This is not anecdotal - there are an immense amounts of studies done on the subject. But time and again, the knowledge gets discarded because it's just easier to "work through the night" at a frantic pace, rather than take the necessary step back, let people rest and do the work in an orderly and planned manner. By burning the candle in both ends, at least no one can challenge your commitment to solving the problem.
While it may sound counter-intuitive to go to bed while the house is on fire, it is, at least if 40 years of research is to be believed, actually the only correct thing to do in a software development crisis. Note this doesn't mean "stick 100% to 8 hours and always go home at 17.01", but it does mean if you are still there at 23.00 you are much better off going home, getting sleep and resuming work when well rested.
The games industry seem to be especially vulnerable to this problem. It might be due to the general inexperience level caused by games development being a young mans game, or it might be due to a failure to understand that games, while glorified in the industry, is "just" software, and therefore also subject to all the established rules of software development.
In any case, I agree with the author that Molyneux should know better than to tweet from the rooftops how many hours everybody is working, but I guess he is not thinking entirely straight after 36 hours of work.
Sounds like the job of a software dev in a properly managed company.
The last all-nighter (or actually, the closest I came) I pulled was in 1997. And then we went home at 2AM. I've been doing development work since 1988 and I've rarely failed to leave by 5. Even then, when I stayed late it was -- with one exception due to an a-hole boss -- by choice.
The fact that we think working a 40 hour week is unusual is itself a sign of how prevalent terrible work environments are in software development. Believe me, there are many well-run and profitable companies where "in at 9 out at 5" is the norm.
I've never really worked at a place that expected insane hours. I try not to get hired at places that suck.
I'm not looking to climb the latter or make a career transition.
I personally wouldn't be quiet quitting in a recession. I would try not to be in the bottom 10-20%
On the flip side I think there's still a lot of opportunity for good developers over the long haul.
personal bonuses would fix quiet quitting too.
Too me it's still about fair work for fair pay(whatever that means).
I look for work if I don't have any on my plate and if there's a meeting after 5 I don't complain.
If a company sounds too exploitive(or too many piece of flare aka coming into the office for no purpose) then probably not the best place to work for me.
You've missed my point entirely, which is perhaps a communication failure on my part.
I believe there are obsessive coders who will have lots of money/fun. Some will be valuable to their employers. No company should only look for these coders, which is the policy I was originally trying to refute.
It's much, much easier to find productive 40 hr coders than productive 80 hr coders. The ones coding for 80 hrs are often perfectionists, or they believe they're immune to burnout.
You yourself seem to believe that loving something enough means you can avoid burnout. You can't.
Burnout is part of our physiology. If you lose even small amounts of sleep for long periods of time, your performance falls off a cliff. What's worse is that you don't know you're not at your best.
Look at pro gamers. They love games enough to play them all day, every day, but they still suffer at the end of a long session.
A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable.
This. My experience in the software industry has generally been positive (aside from stints at start-ups)--I've been judged on the quality of my work, and my ability to produce given reasonable time lines. When I dabbled at an interactive agency, though, all of that was thrown out the window--the print folks, especially, where just expected to work 10-12 hours a day, and it would be a matter of pride to pull an all-nighter to meet a silly deadline. At one point, the agency's owner had a mural put in a common area--it was a comic about a superhero who could manage to do anything with a ridiculous time crunch. That's when I decided that industry was not for me.
No one paying you a fixed wage will ever agree that working less hours for them is better than working more.
When I was running startups a decade ago I would regularly ask devs not to work so many hours. Grind culture was a thing, and it made our code much worse. The effect of lack of sleep and a shitty work/life balance is abundantly obvious in a PR.
All nighters are extreme and an unsustainable idea, I learned as much in college. But I do sometimes put in long hours (maybe for a week or two at most) to push through a project I really enjoy, solving a problem for the company that is technically fulfilling. I don't mind much as an employee that I don't own the upside, because I also don't own the downside. I get a lot of satisfaction having built a quality piece of software that the customers got real value out of. I've found the key is to not do this regularly. I view it like running. Normally, you gotta jog, that way you have the reserve strength to sprint when you really need it.
Anecdotally, the place I work for in the US doesn't expect or even want people to work all-nighters, if a project is that under-resourced, it needs to be halted or more resources need to be allocated. Under-resourced projects always fail and waste a lot of time and money. This is only the culture I've observed at my engineering dept though, FWIW.
I'll be completely honest: I work at small indie game dev studio with friends. This means we have to crunch for release, work every day and stay at night sometimes. Nobody force me to do it, but it happens. I love this job, but working like that is bad for long-term performance and will inevitable cause burnout.
As others have said you are being overworked by your employeer. It's not only mean they dont care about your health, but also it means their processes are bad exactly because company itself will only lose in the end: quality will drop, productivity will sink and people will leave.
As about working on your own be it freelance or starting your own company: this way you will only have to work much more. So far I haven't seen any single successful entrepreneur or founder who wasn't working 12 hours a day for at least several years before they get anywhere.
Just want to echo that I believe this to be true, as well. Jobs involving menial, unskilled labor can be almost therapeutic if you're only required to do it 2-3 times a week. I did night jobs while I was working full time as a developer and I would actually look forward to the work. Whereas the other employees who did it 5-6 days a week acted like it was torture.
I work at a place where if you don't work overtime you are considered garbage. Everyone will beat up on you any chance they can because they are bitter. Meanwhile, not everyone has that luxury. Single parents, caregivers, etc. Just because you write code doesn't mean you live a kushy life...
With two comments quoting the same example, you seem really hell-bent on driving this point home. Ok, I'll bite. How often do you get those 11pm requests that will otherwise get rerouted to someone else unless you respond before 8am? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? A few times per year?
Context matters, because believe it or not, most professionals occasionally go the extra mile no matter what industry they are in. I recently dropped off a motorcycle for a repair, and the young guy working at that shop stayed an hour late to get my business. When something breaks in my house, I have hundreds of people jumping at the bit to come to fix it at any given time, before or after work, weekday or weekend.
Nothing is ever perfect in life, but your criticism of your experience as a software engineer would come across as a lot more empathetic if you started off by acknowledging that you made an excellent career choice to start with, and that this allows you unprecedented career mobility, including the option of easily quitting your job should you have the rare misfortune of having landed at any of the few bad apples that do not reward you for your stress with oodles of money that you wouldn't be able to make anywhere else with that amount of effort and work experience.
Not to mention that if stress and money are not your thing, go and work as a software engineer at an old school Fortune 500 company. I promise to you that nobody will ever ask you to do anything at 11pm there, and you'll still get paid well.
I agree with you. I've worked developing enterprise software at a big corporation and 40 hours is just the amount expected. 50-60 hours on crunch time is already a lot. Have to say I've been very happy. Although things can go to shit if you have the wrong boss even in a good corporation.
I worked in factory for a while. Wake up at 7am. Be at work by 8am. Work until 12:30. Half hour for lunch. Work until 4:30. Then your day is OVER. You go home and do whatever the hell you want. The stress is lower, the pay is lower and you get much more effective free time. Oh and you don't feel like your brain is about to explode when you go home at 10pm.
tl;dr: yes, there are worse jobs than programming, but not many. The ridiculous amounts of stress is one of the reasons Silicon Valley pays so much more than Industry jobs.
It's definitely possible to have 9 to 5 software jobs with a good work life balance. For the last decade I've worked for small businesses. nonprofits, and most recently a non tech manufacturing company.
All had 9 to 5 schedules with no expectation that you be there outside of regular work hours unless it was a true emergency. In the last ten years, I've had to work emergencies and overtime maybe a total of 6 to 8 hours total, across all the jobs.
I think that sort of culture is easier to find if you look for smaller companies that largely work together in the same office anyway, vs huge distributed multinational organizations that are always looking for commodity labor from anywhere.
The kinds of companies that look for cultural fit, implicitly or explicitly, also tend to plan around this sort of thing, rather than just blindly making their employees keep irregular hours.
What I'm saying is...this is definitely not something you have to accept as normal. Maybe within a specific part of the industry or at a specific level of management, it's a thing, but if you want is a software job that pays a livable wage and still lets you have a regular life outside work, that's definitely doable. Don't go into games, infrastructure, devops, etc. Find some business that doesn't need round the clock presence. Many of those are software jobs in other verticals. They may pay less, but the sanity is worth it IMHO.
A software development job should require 40 hours and no more a week. If it doesn't, then you're either being mismanaged, don't know how to protect your time, or overcompensating for lack of experience. The answer to the first is to find another job. The answer to the second is to learn how to say 'no' diplomatically, and the third is to focus harder on craft and less on production.
Working more than 40 hours as a developer is not doing you or the company any favors, it's perpetuating a myth that overwork is virtuous. It will not make you more productive or make your company any more money. At the end of it all, you'll just be tired.
If someone I worked with tried pulling a 36 hour shift I'd physically throw them out of the building.
In my mind, odds are 90%+ that'd they'd do more damage (more bugs, slowing down other people) than they'd do good in aggregate over that 36 window, and odds that they'd be more productive in a single 36 hour bout than doing shifts with proper sleep windows is pretty much 0.
More than 14 hours or so in a single stretch is highly unlikely to be beneficial to the company/project, with rest in the middle.
More than just being in line with research, this is in line with what I've seen over and over again in real projects, where best project during crunch time is generally had by ensuring people leave and rest. Sure, do longer hours for a short period. Sure, ask people to cut down on time off or alternate work/sleep shifts.
But the moment your developers hits 18-20 hours, I could talk most of them into making horrifically bad decisions and have them think they were logically sound - your ability to reason goes out the window pretty quickly. I don't want people in that kind of state anywhere near projects I work on, because I've seen what they can, and will, do in the belief they're helping out.
> What if they don't have much on their resumes and are excited to make this a successful project, instead of a laughingstock that fell over in the face of scaling challenges? What if they care about each other and want to make this a success for their friends and coworkers?
Then learning to understand that there's nothing smart about pulling stunts like this unless you're doing menial work that you can still do reasonably reliably with next to no concentration or short term memory is even more important.
> I hope they feel happy and like they accomplished a lot in the face of long odds, and you should too.
No, I shouldn't, because if they feel that way they've learned the wrong lesson. They'd also most likely be wrong in terms of their relative productivity with more rest. Unless they were all on illegal stimulants, or his staff consists of mutants, it is simply not worth spending much time even considering the option that this might somehow have been the best way for them to spend their time.
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