How does overtime work at your company??
polycounter lvl 18
Just a random thought I had today. Having only worked at one game company I was just curious how overtime was treated at other companies. After reading all that EA Spouse stuff a while ago, it made working OT here sound like a treat in comparison. You hear OT crunch time horror stories all the time in this industry, but in my experience it just hasnt really been the case.
So the question.. How does your companies OT policy work?
-For me its basically you bank your OT hours as vacation time and take that when you want to and its possible.
So the question.. How does your companies OT policy work?
-For me its basically you bank your OT hours as vacation time and take that when you want to and its possible.
Replies
And we also have what we refer to as "managed crunch" where definite goals are set for what needs to be completed during the crunch period (which also has fixed hours ... no endless nights), crunch is usually limited to 3 week periods followed by at least a week of normal hours. And typcially, we don't work weekends.
some people are persnickety about overtime at Walmart. one guy got jumped onto for having a single minute of overtime, whereas ive had overtime many days and have never heard a word.
but at Wal-Mart it's all about the profits. "We've got to cut back on payroll so that means absolutely NO overtime people." is a regular saying in day-shift management. company's biggest concern is payroll. the second biggest concern is that they dont have enough people... i'll leave you to ponder that one...
The only development people who get overtime at my employer are contract workers. The rest of us work salary and put in the time necessary to get the job done. Sometimes that means extra hours, but not often ... until mandatory crunch. We don't get extra official vacation, but we have been getting good comp time off for the entire team after the project finishes.
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I would say that's pretty much how the vast majority of development houses operate. No paid O/T, but an 'expectation' to put the extra hours in when necessary, followed by unofficial comp time after shipping a game. The problems occur because the term 'when necessary' is vague and its implementation is without guidelines nor control.
In light of the EA spouse case and subsequent class action, EA have just started overtime pay just for the junior guys. Very strange, and should be interesting to see how this pans out.
Ya, I was surprised to hear EA offering paid OT to juniors. Paid OT is extremely rare. They must have really strict schedules and deliverables.
So after about three months of being hired I was told we were going to do a bit of controlled crunch, just one or two nights a week to really push some features, this was fine cause people were diggin what we were doin. Over the course of a few months that morphed into staying 3 to 4 nights a week to eventually I ended up in about 8 months of a insane crunch. Basically this consisted of me going into work around 9:30-10am, and leaving around 10:00pm-12:00am every weekday. Every saturday was 10am-7pm and sometimes sundays. There were no breaks, and all this time was mandatory. This was nuts.
Now here's my oppinion on OT
This more than not will NEVER happen. Publishers have demands, people want to save money, and shit just happens. Overtime sucks but I think no matter where you go in this industry you will find it to an extent.
I Think what we CAN do as an industry is become more mature about it, and dont think of it as simply acceptable. Through proper planning and a concious effort to keep track of what's going on I think that OT can be minimized.
Either way, crunch means something went wrong badly. And the games industry is the SNAFU principle applied.
From Dec 26th until the end of January is the only time we are "allowed" to rack up OT hours. We get paid time and a alf for any hours above 40. It stacks up pretty quick because we work 10hrs a day 7 days a week. But here is the kicker, because somedays we work are holidays for the rest of the company we get "comp days" which don't count toward OT. For comp days we get paid straight time, with an added vaction day later in the year.
Actually they get on your case if you DON'T put in 40 hours a week, but OT isn't required.
Then the bonuses made people dance.
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Do you really find that this makes it all worth it though Rick? Maybe for a little while it does, but I dunno, after 5 years of annual summer crunch here in CA, I'm done with it all. Life's too short, and no amount of $ can convince me that sacrificing my life for a company that is making massive profits from the fruits of my labour is acceptable.
I'll work late when I feel the need to and when Im enjoying it, but unacceptable amounts of forced unpaid O/T? In principle, I just cant accept it anymore. Simple as that. If you can't get the game done in time with the amount of people you have, that's managements fuckup, not mine. Somethings gone wrong, and as Tinman says, the first step is if we as individuals start to look at it as unnaceptable. As long as we do it without question, the situation will never change.
-R
The only time I accepted to stay late was when, like daz said, when I wanted to. There is no way staying late all nights of a week, and come in the weekend healthy. Its just not. Plus after 8hours, You just aint constructive. You wont build proper shit, You will either waste your time all day, and work a bit the night. or work the day and do shit at night. You cant be productive working for to long. There is more to life then Omg I will get the "BONUSES"! and my boss see me working hard!
I do my work, I do it well. but dont expect me to be there all night and weekend.
Oh and yeah, Like Pak said about Ubi LOL. so great. Plus when you cant put more hours then 40h. There is no way you can calculate how much hours it realy takes to do a project properly.
Ben
It might be possible to bypass it if you are hired to fill a contract but then they cant assign you more work than your contract states.
I don't mind crunching during summer, as I hate the heat
I agree though, DaZ. Even after only 5 years, I'm getting tired of the crunch bs. One thing our studio never seems to be able to do is schedule things properly. Our art team always gets their work done on time, without a hitch. But it's problematic when the higher ups suddenly ask for a new completed level in 3 weeks.
full time employees are all too often imprisoned at their studio, sometimes even on weekends. well, no nightshifts for me since i went freelance. that's three years already.
Well, unpaid overtime is illegal in the states as well, really. Afterall, they aren't FORCING us to work overtime, they are basically 'asking' us to. Though, in a meaningfull way (get it done, or you're fired, etc).
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Well here if you fire someone for no reason you have to pay them (2 months salary or incase the worker was incompetent* 1 months salary).
*- it will have to hold up in court
There were many times where we crunched unnecessarily as there wasn't work to be done. Often times, we crunched/came in on weekends for "support", thought "support" was never really needed (I can probably count instances on one hand).
Some of the art team suggested that we could be on-call, because most of us lived within a few minutes of work. That was shot down, because "people would feel bad having to call people in".... Oh, so it's much better to take someone's whole day/night, then to give them an off day/night where they -might- have to come in?
All the while, we kept hearing wonderful promises of time off and compensation that would come once the game shipped. Guess what we got?
Nothing. Nada.
Even in the many -weeks- after the project where we were doing absolutely nothing. We were all just asses in seats. I don't see how that benifitted -anyone-. All we got was continued promises that something was coming. I knew nothing was coming and that they'd just keep giving escuses until they -couldn't- give us time off because of a new project. I was absolutely right.
I wouldn't mind putting in a few extra hours here and there if I ended behind on my task list, or if I really wanted to help someone out. But the kind of overtime we did was totally ridiculous, unecessary, and a direct result of failure to plan (no schedule besides beta/release dates or task lists).
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail; it's that simple.
EDIT: Extending crunching absolutely does not help productivity. Health, productivity, and morale plummeted during our death crunch. More mistakes happen and more time is spent fixing mistakes, work gets stretched out to fill time, and people get goofy/crazy because they don't get any time to unwind. I imagine the effect is greater if you're doing something more mentally taxing like programming/scripting (did I mention the programmers & scripters crunched more than us?). I throughly believe that with a real schedule (and the lack of crunch that comes with it), the game would have been finished much sooner and to much better quality.
More time put in over the norm doesn't equal more work getting done. This was figured out a long time ago (by Henry Ford, I believe); so why does anyone keep doing this?
I could go on about this forever; there's SOO much I haven't covered, but I'll just leave it at that. If you ever work with me some day: ask me and I can tell you some good "war stories"