The amount of overtime a company demands of its employees mirrors the quality of its management, the least effective “needing” the most overtime. Ideally, management will bring a game in on time, on-target feature wise, with no amount of overtime. Although most industry veterans know that this ideal is rarely achieved, we argue that in order for the industry to truly mature, this ideal needs to become the industry standard, the rule rather than the exception.

A company’s management will come under numerous conflicting pressures as a new game is developed. Publishers constantly push for new features, and alter deadlines and milestone goals. This has to be balanced with limited budgets, and the risk of overstraining staff.

Managers fail in their responsibility to protect their developers from unreasonable, inopportune requests from publishers. The issue ought to be brought up early on in contract negotiations, ensuring that the company and its developers do not suffer from untimely and potentially damaging changes in the product requirements, setting clear milestones.

Instead, in most cases, staff is expected to react and respond to ever changing ad-hoc deadlines and random feature requests. Managers employ a variety of techniques to persuade their staff to work longer (usually uncompensated) to meet these new goals and deadlines.

The impending potential cancellation of a project is commonly brandished, and expected to be taken at face-value, regardless of its actual truth. Typically, management informs employees that the publisher is seriously concerned about the status of the game, and that unless development steps up dramatically, a real risk exists of being shut down, an implicit, direct threat to their jobs, ie their source of livelihood.

This approach is used more often in smaller development shops, especially those working on a single title, where the cancellation of a project would actually lead to the closure of the company. Larger companies (such as EA, UbiSoft, etc) also engage in such practices, with the threat to people’s jobs, in this case, being referenced not to a publisher, but to a more senior executive, far removed from the grunt work.

Whether the threat is fabricated, or entirely accurate as is sometimes the case, product development staff are expected to bear the burden of poor management, not that forced overtime is likely to “save” the project anyway. Developers buckle down and work longer hours, worried about keeping their jobs, more often than not without extra compensation, with only the prospect of a repetition of the same modus operandi ad nauseum.

The irony is that developers who fear losing their jobs can succeed elsewhere. The games industry is not struggling. Quite to the contrary, it is booming, with plenty of jobs available almost everywhere. Once developers realize their own value as assets to the industry as a whole, and to their employers in particular, they’ll cease fearing the loss of a job, and begin asserting their own professional expectations. Silent victims, they certainly do not need to remain.

False promises, of potential bonuses is another method of choice, designed to pacify workers long enough to deliver. Either they never materialize or they fail to properly compensate for the overtime and stress on employees. Various companies will play the bonus card to try to motivate workers. Usually, if there is any bonus, you are competing against your fellow workmates for a fixed pot. It can lead to a secondary mind game, where you feel pressured to work long hours just to maintain an equitable share of the potential bonus, even if in the end it represents a minimum-wage compensation for your time.

This leads to our next point, the recurse by management to peer-pressure to extract longer working hours from their employees. Peer-pressure can be applied using a good cop, bad cop routine. Publicly, employees are told things that play on their pride, and passion for game development: “Come on, this is why we got in the games industry. We love to make games. Imagine how proud you will feel when your game is on the store shelves. There are only a few more weeks left, so let’s really pull together and get this game finished. We’re all in this together”.

Management thus manipulates employee emotions, trying to instill a us vs. them mentality (“them” usually being the publisher) to encourage employees to stick together. The flipside is that employees who refuse to tow the company line, who go home on time while their coworkers stay late are maligned by management. There is usually a strong sense of camaraderie within the development team, and when one member takes a stand, guilt and resentment associated with leaving coworkers behind are inevitable.

Management will take these employees aside and hammer home that they are letting the rest of the team down, a reckless form of manipulation that dismisses the employee, his/her concerns, and ignore the core issue of failed HR management and absence of corporate leadership. That is where the responsibility lies; it is wrong and unfair to dump it all on developers.

Yet, with few individual exceptions, developers have yet to challenge the status quo. Tomorrow, we conclude this series by examining why this has been the case.

Posted by Raoul on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 4:48 pm.