I recently asked my boss wether we get paid for overtime work or wether we get time off work to compensate.
He said we get neither and that its pretty standard industry practice but they will try to be nice to us and give us a few hours off if we need to see a sick family member etc. Im fairly new(a year or so) to 3D art and design so I just wondered if this is really true, Im not going to make a fuss about this, my job is decent and the other employees and work environment are really good.
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In my experiance (all 1 and a bit years of it) i have found that it is most certainly not uncommon for companies to expect overtime for nothing and have met very few that actually pay you for it. Having said that most are flexible when it comes to paying for company outings, christmas parties, and time off over xmas which isnt part of your annual leave.
I did do a bit extra at home sometimes, but on the whole we were 9 to 5
More about compensation etc. here, started by the famous EAspouse:
http://www.gamewatch.org/phpBB2/
At my company, it's no overtime pay at all. a.) to avoid staff filing overtime and not actually doing any work, and b.) encourage everyone to spend quality hours at work and take off at 6.
My last job paid used to pay a full month's salary for 2 weeks crunch, but crunches ended up happening every 4 months or so, and some of my teammates wouldn't go home for weeks at a time. All down to unrealistic scheduling on management's part. Even with the generous compensation, no one was happy...like shep says, we stayed because we felt obliged.
9am-4am shifts were not unheard of during monthly milestone crunch.
We got a really good producer in mid-way through the project and overtime/crunch vanished.
The week after he left, things reverted back to the way they were before...
Most overtime i see these days, other than the times where it's all hands on deck to get an important build out, is entirely voluntary - people putting in the extra hours to make stuff as good as it can possibly be, rather than fighting againts bad management. This is generally rewarded come royalty time
we've done comp leave in the past, after mental crunch time. Then, crunch was due to extreme ambition and not many people to do it, and again not bad management. Boy did it pay off though, and i won't hear a word against it
what do you mean by "royalty time"?