> 60-75h/weeks is still crunch and can be sustained for ~6+ months without total burnout. And really this level of crunch is fairly common in our industry.
How is this not an issue to you? It would be one thing of software developers were this highly specialized group of people where you have a pool of a few hundred in every state. Developers aren't scarce though. For every mediocre developer, there are 5 more than replace that person.
Scarcity aside, why would you want to subjugate yourself to that lifestyle? Most people aren't even productive for a full 8 hours/day, so how does adding 4 more hours in a day make business sense?
I don't care for our industry to unionize, because I don't want to be beholden to some organization fighting for basic human decency. But when people brazenly say, "Yeah 60 hours is fine! You have months before you burnout!" Good for you, but I have interests and people that don't involve work.
If you're a certain kind of asshole - the kind of asshole who finds a certain kind of management role attractive - the reward isn't system efficiency, product quality, or even just product shipping, the reward is in the sense of power that comes from bullying economic inferiors who depend on you for a pay check and can't answer back to unreasonable demands.
It's drama, it's danger, it's excitement, and it's probably fuelled by a coke habit.
If you enjoy that kind of power you'll happily kill a company to experience it.
Games dev isn't unique in this kind of toxicity, but it's more pressing because projects are often huge group efforts with massive resources and long time scales where most of the work is done by young and relatively inexperienced employees who are motivated as much by the games scene as by a pay check.
In the same way that #MeToo called out sexual harassment and abuse, we really need a corporate equivalent that calls out toxic working conditions created by insane management.
We had that moment years ago with EA Spouse, sadly it didn't really move the needle very much. That's probably because there's other places where people with skillset from gamedev can find a saner environment.
How is this not an issue to you? It would be one thing of software developers were this highly specialized group of people where you have a pool of a few hundred in every state. Developers aren't scarce though. For every mediocre developer, there are 5 more than replace that person.
Scarcity aside, why would you want to subjugate yourself to that lifestyle? Most people aren't even productive for a full 8 hours/day, so how does adding 4 more hours in a day make business sense?
I don't care for our industry to unionize, because I don't want to be beholden to some organization fighting for basic human decency. But when people brazenly say, "Yeah 60 hours is fine! You have months before you burnout!" Good for you, but I have interests and people that don't involve work.