The secret life of a games programmer

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/secret-life-games-programmer

by kostyk • 10 years ago

84 62 10 years ago

lmm• 10 years ago

Do those extra hours even result in anything productive? I suspect you'd get more done in a regular 40-hour week - but of course it's much easier to measure how many hours you were at your desk than how much you did.

People need to stop enabling this kind of nonsense - a big part of the problem is so many people want to make games that they'll put up with terrible working conditions to do so. Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization - but in a parallel to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line, everyone believes they're the best programmer, so no-one wants to do that.

dagw• 10 years ago

Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization

I don't know. I've worked with ex game developers in Norway and Sweden, two countries with fairly strong unions, and the story is basically the same. The companies are very good at convincing you that you really want to work under those conditions and that doing so makes you awesome. They also know that if they insist on 'realistic', union approved, working conditions, the publisher/studio will just hand the next game off to another, less difficult, team. Hell, I've known people to straight up lie to their union rep about their working conditions because they don't want the unions stepping in and 'ruining' things.

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

That sounds like exactly the conditions that an industry-wide unionization would fix. But that would be hard, because its so easy for a software shop to up and move. Unlike heavy industry in the 'age of unions', which had large fixed plants with heavy capital investment. So unionizing geographically, one business or industry at a time, was workable.

seivan• 10 years ago

My experience as well.

yoklov• 10 years ago

Do those extra hours even result in anything productive? I suspect you'd get more done in a regular 40-hour week - but of course it's much easier to measure how many hours you were at your desk than how much you did.

More or less.

There are times when it's more productive than this, usually towards the end of a project when all that's left is bugfixes, polish, adding in special cases here and there to make certain parts of the game more playable/obvious/fun/etc.

But most of the time it's as you said, or even worse. The first couple weeks of crunch you might get 1/1 hours work to hours productive, but after a month or so of 80 hour weeks you're just working 80 hours to get 40 productive hours out of it. If that.

Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization - but in a parallel to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line, everyone believes they're the best programmer, so no-one wants to do that.

I'm not an expert on unions (by any stretch, really, so correct me if I'm wrong), but I worry this would have a lot of unrelated negative consequences for the game industry, like making it very difficult for indie studios to get off the ground, which IMO would be more negative for the industry than crunch is (if I'm not mistaken about this being a likely possibility).

(Also, it seems very strange to me to separate game and non-game programming in this way. Where is the line drawn?)

brightball2• 10 years ago

Ultimately the only thing that will fix it is the same thing that fixed working conditions elsewhere - unionization...

Except that comes with it's own significant detrimental side effects, not the least of which are incentivizing labor from countries without unions.

horsecaptin• 10 years ago

You think people aren't already flocking to countries with cheap programmers?

estefan• 10 years ago

You can identify programmers as the people with their headphones on, frowning at the screen.

Yes!

martiuk• 10 years ago

Yep, even when walking between two places in the office (the toilets) for example, I'll have my headphone in and connected to my phone, just so I can't be distracted by the inevitable drive-by interruptions.

Jemmeh• 10 years ago

As I've read a lot lately: Headphones are the new walls.

smrtinsert• 10 years ago

Why do people thing they would enjoy being a game developer? Do they assume they would have critical design or decision making input, or do they just love coding physics/graphic rendering software. I never got the appeal. I like games too, but I would never think making them in a large studio would be fun.

A simple game by myself as the complete owner on my own time seems way more fun by comparison.

cableshaft2• 10 years ago

If you work on small teams and/or for a small studio, then you will have quite a few opportunities to influence the design or decision making. I worked for three small studios and influenced the design of every game I worked on.

Getting paid 60% of what I could get outside the industry and the crunch time lowering that wage further, and screwing up my health, and leaving me with zero time for a social life eventually got to me, though, so I got out of the industry, despite my passion.

I now design board games in my spare time while working on enterprise software at a Microsoft shop, and get paid a lot more, and if I ever have to stay late (which happens every once in awhile) they credit me the time to take off in the future so I'm only working 40 hour weeks.

littletinman2• 10 years ago

This has been my strategy for the last few years. I've been making games on my own dime for just a few years but I now have two self published games on Steam, and a few Micro-Consoles, and a Job in entirely different industry with great benefits and hard stop 40 hour weeks.

I absolutely love programming games! It's the most fun programming I've ever had in the 10+ years of writing code. Nothing beats showing off your creations with family and friends and them "getting it."

I've gone back and forth of whether I should join the industry but with a kid and high priority of family time, I just can't do away with what's actually important to me. I've never regretted working a solid job to support an awesome hobby.

Tiktaalik• 10 years ago

If you're lucky you have some unique, weird system you have to build. If you're unlucky you're doing something mundane you've done a dozen times before. I would think this would be the same with many programming jobs.

One time I was tasked with implementing a system that simulated traffic in a city for an open world style game. That was a really interesting problem that I enjoyed working on.

LordKano• 10 years ago

This isn't game development specific, but in 2014, I made the move from programmer/developer to analyst.

ALL of the joy had been sucked out of development.

Work/Life balance was fine but the technical work/administrative work balance was completely off.

ajuc• 10 years ago

I'm working in "regular" B2b company. I make games in free time. I dreamt of being game programmer since I was 8.

I went to a gamedev job interview recently (messed up the 2nd stage (un?)fortunately), the first stage was some small tasks about 3d graphic, gemoetry, collision detection, etc. It's just so much more fun to me than "parse xml, put stuff in db, render html". I don't know why, maybe simply because it's different? I always enjoyed small scale math problems, and I don't really get to do that in my regular job.

sbov• 10 years ago

This is what most of my friends who used to work in the games industry have done. It's not about the games for them anymore, it's about solving the problems. And they make significantly more money doing it elsewhere (one almost 4x as much).

leggomylibro• 10 years ago

Graphical programming is a lot of fun. That might just be personal preference, but objectively it's at least very different from enterprise programming. There are lots of interesting problems, and you can see the fruits of your labor pretty literally. Plus, knowing how to create a solid engine opens up the freedom to work on ideas that you are actually passionate about.

One problem is that lots of people want to be game developers, so the working conditions and pay can suffer. But the consensus among indie developers who I've talked to is that the pay isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and it's still worth spending a few years 'paying your dues' at a large company, if only to learn about how the development process works in the real world; there's a whole lot more to making a game than writing a good engine. Unfortunately, game development also suffers from Publish or Perish Syndrome, so it's hard to get a foot in the door with large companies unless you've already shipped a game.

I'm saying all of that as somebody who thinks that they would enjoy being a game developer, but I've never worked in game development so most of what I'm saying is secondhand information. It's enough to make me happy to stick with learning on my own time for now, though.

corysama• 10 years ago

I worked on a very large team making a AAA game and it was tremendously fun. Games are at the intersection of high-end art, tech, design and commerce. Working with 150 highly skilled, highly diverse and highly enthusiastic people on a focused 2 year project was wonderful --even though I only controlled a few small corners of it. And, even though we had several months of schedule overrun and the stress that entails.

bsenftner• 10 years ago

I'm sure it is different for each team member, but for myself, having been in & out of the games industry since '82, it is all about creating mini-realities, mixing math + physics + illusion to simulate life. I started teaching myself how to code in '77 because I knew computers would be able to run simulations, and I'd just learned about this new thing called 3d graphics. Having been a fan of animation, I knew they'd come together. And they did. And I was there, one of the original researchers of 3D graphics and animation. And it was a blast that lasts to this day. I'm sure my presence has influenced the industry, even of few know my name. Its a piss poor career with shitty psychological working conditions nearly the entire 3+ decades I've been trapped in it. I'm glad I was there and would do it all over again, maybe with a few punches in the face to the appropriate coworkers at the right times during my 2nd go.

iagooar• 10 years ago

Management will always talk about having a healthy work-life balance but the implication is there that you could be doing more, fixing more bugs, taking on more work. [...] feeling like your effort is constantly being judged means you end up doing it again and again.

This resonates with me! I have experienced this kind of management schizophrenia many times, telling you that you have flexible working hours, that you can manage your time yourself, that you should take your time, do things right... And then, on the other side, appears the pressure to deliver, the "questions" that suggest you might need to "hurry" a bit more, to deliver more stuff, to cut some corners if necessary...

crpatino• 10 years ago

There is a technical name for that in psicology: Double-bind.

There are 2 acceptable responses to that, plus a taboo one. The 2 standard responses is either to try to uphold an unrealistically high standard (the neurotic overachiever type), or you can take the blame for not doing it and sacrifice your sense of self worth (the dilbertesque, paper pusher type). Both private and public sector have plenty of uses for workers of either type.

What is not permitted is to react like a grown up and point out to the inconsistency of the "mixed messages". I have read that this typically gets responded with hostility from higher-ups (who typically are not fully conscious of the dynamics of the game, or see themselves as just transmitting the requirements from upper management).

Of course I barely have a handful of first and second hand data points, but those seem consistent with the model as explained above.

noxToken2• 10 years ago

The double-bind was a hallmark of a past job. Anytime a meeting, an event that the upper brass was hosting, or training was labeled as optional, there was always a heavy emphasis to attend on the day of.

Monday morning: ${Executive} is coming down to talk about ${something unrelated} on Thursday. Attendance is strictly optional. This is doubly so if you're working on something critical.

Tuesday and Wednesday morning: Don't forget about the talk on Thursday. You don't need to go, but it would be nice if you attended.

Thursday morning: Don't forget about the talk this afternoon. Plan head down there about 12:45.

dood• 10 years ago

In my experience the double-bind is typically a result of doublethink/cognitive-dissonance, which explains why people react poorly when it is pointed out.

Of your 3 solutions the first two are non-starters for me, and have found the third very tricky. So I prefer two other options - walk away from the situation, or calmly accept and subsequently ignore chastisement.

The latter solution is interesting, since often anger expressed by the person doing the binding is because they themselves are also in a (potentially self-inflicted) double-bind. They want to express their anger at you, but don't necessarily feel ill-will toward you, knowing subconsciously that your actions are reasonable and rational. Of course, dealing with this is a lot easier said than done, and I'd seek to walk away as soon as possible if it happened with any regularity.

jorgecurio• 10 years ago

good god, this article is basically me working at a local startup 5 years ago.

When you have someone who only makes decision based on outcomes from a black box process with the counter productive passive aggressive nagging of when will it be done vs. someone who understands the stress,emotions (yeah programmers have them too),art and approximate effort management to avoid burning people out will be a godsend.

You can absolutely become the latter without technical expertise, I would say empathy is the biggest tool of someone who manages programmers.

The cigar smoking hunch back Soviet union styled factory owner who keeps saying he survived the dot com bubble like it was some world war and getting angry when programmers are trying to 'subvert' him by intentionally missing deadlines. I think it's good that these type of industrial revolution era work management culture is slowly eroding.

But yeah the disconnect between those on the front lines everyday with headphones on vs. the schmoozing politicizing manager with 30 years of restaurant experience is not going to be a good cultural fit. Eventually, everyone abandons you, people check glassdoor reviews and then you are finished, you can't hire anyone anymore without some insane turnover.

kozukumi• 10 years ago

As I have mentioned before my wife works in the games industry (producer not programmer) and her opinion is that the games industry treats programmers like shit. Maybe a true mad genius programmer isn't treated so badly but the 99% are seen as code monkeys that can be fired without a moments notice. It is a pretty horrible environment from the sounds of it.

searine• 10 years ago

Articles like this make me glad I went into science.

If I'm going to work 16 hour days, 6 days a week, I may as well be getting something useful out of it.

zodPod5• 10 years ago

Living the life described in this article makes me WISH I had gone into science. lol I don't want to work 16 hrs/day 6 days/week but, I'd rather be in science. I'm almost 30 though and own a house and 2 cars and have a wife and stuff so it's probably a little late for a full out career change... :-/

abrookewood• 10 years ago

Mate, your 30! That is soo not too late for a career change. I've known people who jumped ship at 50 and never looked back. If you're honestly not happy doing what you're doing, start planning to do something different.

phaser• 10 years ago

Games developer here. Yes, I do work insane amount of hours and I would get paid a lot higher for my skills almost anywhere.

Why? We use technology not to 'disrupt' some industry, get bigger returns for a financial firm or big data problems with users information. Instead, we create software with the sole purpose of making people happy, And we also get the chance to tell stories that will influence thousands maybe millions of minds.

So we are in a never ending search for big insights about the world and ways to encode them into fun games. I'll never grow tired of that.

TraderDuck2• 10 years ago

Not to shit on you in particular, but you seem to have a bit of a chip on your shoulder about other forms of software development being done.

Everyone rationalizes what they do. People working in those other industries will usually tell their version of your story: "I'm not working on some shitty game that will be forgotten in a year... I'm working on building a social revolution!!!!"

Sorry. For the most part it's all about someone's bottom line. Indie game development isn't any purer than working for startup X on Bush st. that has similar lofty goals about "making people happy."

get bigger returns for a financial firm

This is especially funny to me. If you're working for even a Mojang-sized studio, I hate to tell you but: You're definitely using technology to get bigger returns for a firm.

Sure, it's not a financial firm. Let's not pretend that the differences are all that meaningful. Instead of stock market returns, game studios just seek to maximize the return they get on game development time.

EDIT: s/Riot/Mojang. I didn't realize how large Riot has gotten.

I'll never grow tired of that.

Great. And EA will never get tired of people working themselves to death for what inevitably amounts to minimum wage given the hours worked. Guess it's win-win.

zodPod5• 10 years ago

All points well said. You spoke my mind really. I felt the same way. All of the stuff that I've worked on, it's not just so some company can get richer. The story is that we're helping people. They also will likely use our products for a lot longer and get a lot more productive use out of it than any game.

Side note: Didn't Mojang get bought by Microsoft? Are they still considered small? (NOTE: I've not researched this is a serious, not-loaded question..)

EliRivers• 10 years ago

So we are in a never ending search for big insights about the world and ways to encode them into fun games.

So what's with the raft of dull first-person shooter franchises that aren't fun to play? I suspect it's more like any other industry; churn out what sells.

ramy_d3• 10 years ago

People like junk food. EDIT: and there's nothing wrong with that. But the games industry has grown immensely as an art form thanks to independent game developers.

nradov• 10 years ago

Do games actually make people happy? I used to play a lot of games thinking they would make me happy, but they hardly ever did. Mostly the games turned out to be a lot of extra unpaid work for no tangible benefit. Just grinding away trying to reach the next level, another cut scene, a higher score, etc. So I've pretty much quit playing.

x5n1• 10 years ago

The game of life is mostly like that. Most of the stuff that's suppose to make you happy does very little for you other than give you a reason to waste time and effort. The stuff that makes you happy is usually free but costs time, time you don't have because you spent it all trying to get money to buy stuff that doesn't make you happy.

ionised• 10 years ago

They make me happy.

Maybe you're playing the wrong type of games.

I find MMOs/MOBAs and a lot of loot-roulltte style games to be devoid of any value for me.

Paul_S2• 10 years ago

"If you like games and you’re a programmer, go work for a firm that will pay. You will earn enough to buy all the games you want."

This and similar advice have been repeated through the decades and have stopped no one. I heard that line. Didn't stop me. I dispensed this line and have stopped no one. Life is a different thing when you're young.

Let me have another chance at giving out unwanted advice:

If you enjoy programming games get a regular job that you work at 9-5 and use the time you would've spent working unpaid overtime at a games studio to work on a game at home. You will have creative control and freedom to choose any tech and tools you want - neither of which you'd have at a games studio. Do I even need to mention a normal salary and other benefits at this point?

whitegrape• 10 years ago

Sometimes I think that most of the people dispensing the line are doing it out of some sort of strange culture-preservation instinct guarding against the naive newcomers who'll burn out immediately since nothing is as was dreamed... Everyone in the industry I know is aware they could get better compensation elsewhere, and I suspect all or almost all of them knew that before getting in to the industry. It's a job very similar to that of a porn star. But you know all your coworkers know, so you each must have some underlying passion for the gig that's significant enough that you'll suffer through the crunch. Some even really like the crunch.

Your last advice seems even less effective than the standard to me, in that it's totally ineffective against someone who says "yeah but I want to work on Halo" whereas there's at least a snowball's chance in hell that if you say "MS will pay and treat you like shit if you work on Halo" they might reconsider...

noxToken2• 10 years ago

Your last advice seems even less effective than the standard to me, in that it's totally ineffective against someone who says "yeah but I want to work on Halo" whereas there's at least a snowball's chance in hell that if you say "MS will pay and treat you like shit if you work on Halo" they might reconsider...

It feels like this is always the crux of the problem. Young people full of life just don't understand how soul-crushing certain jobs can be. I was one of those people.

In a past position, I was told that the hours would be long, and the competitive nature drives people to insanity. On the bright side, you'll make some great friends (the ones that you don't hate) and the benefits are outrageously good. All of that was true to the letter. I didn't understand the subtext of work coming before literally everything else (including health), the pay is trash, and life will always be massively in favor of your superiors.

What my teenage self didn't understand was how much of an impact the subtext would have on my life in the future. And if I did (though I'm sure I didn't), it didn't matter. It was what I wanted. It was my calling.

On the other hand, you run the risk of sounding like an someone who, "just doesn't understand the passion" that someone can have for the job - even if you're recounting stories from your past. Too much negativity just keeps the young crowd from believing you.

ramy_d3• 10 years ago

I thought HN would be the last place to see advice that would derail people from diving into their independent endeavours. The reason no one heads your advice is because driven people don't stop to "play it safe". My 2-person part-time hobby project pales in comparison to the 6-person full time team operation and its potential for achievement.

Hobbies will only ever be just that. Some of us are in it to make something meaningful and if that means most of us will fail then it's better to have tried than to wake up 50 years old having never tried at all.

Paul_S2• 10 years ago

I am specifically talking about working as a salaried employee of a game studio. You are talking about starting a business. These are different issues.

stcredzero2• 10 years ago

I thought HN would be the last place to see advice that would derail people from diving into their independent endeavours.

The difference: From what I've seen/heard, working for a Y-Combinator startup is a far better environment than working for a lot of game companies.

stcredzero2• 10 years ago

This is precisely what I'm currently doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22VD_8gi5wc

http://www.emergencevector.com

kbenson• 10 years ago

This has been my impression of the industry for close to two decades now, just from the stories. From what I understand, it's not all that secret for programmers (remember EA spouse?). I remember counseling my step-cousin to be wary when while in college he mentioned he wanted to get into games development after he got his CS degree. It made me feel like an asshole, as it feels like I'm squashing his dreams, but I also didn't feel I could in good conscience not at least say something so he could look into it more if he wanted.

I hold out hope that independent games companies are different, and from what I've heard, they mostly are.

andywood• 10 years ago

Games and graphics are the whole reason I started programming, but after 20 years of on and off game programming, I mostly agree with the article. The technical details of how games and graphics work are very interesting, but the actual process of finishing a viable game is some degree of hellish nightmare. I can relate to the statement about being primarily a problem solver. There are tons of interesting problems in games, but they only make up a fraction of the necessary work. I've shipped a small number of both indie and studio titles, but it took me decades to admit that I'm primarily a problem solver, and probably not primarily a game-maker.

zodPod5• 10 years ago

His mention of the open floor plan thing resonated with me a LOT. I have 2 coworkers who have a tendency to get into discussions who work in the same circle as me in our open floor plan. It makes it really hard to concentrate when they're constantly yelling back and forth behind me. I usually just put on some headphones and zone out but the obsession with open floor plans as somehow innovative is crazy. It's backward. "I want these people to think effectively and clearly and not have distractions. I know! Let's try an open floor plan!" I'm sure that's not the thought process but I can't imagine, other than control or cost, what the other one would be that would cause an open floor plan to be chosen.

All of the above said, it's not just them that are distracting. It's literally just the effect of the open floor plan. Someone is talking 4-5 desks down and your brain has to make the constant decision not to listen to them.

h0w412d• 10 years ago

I have the same feeling toward them. They're chosen for the same reason new technologies are often chosen: because they're new. The people doing the choosing aren't concerned with effectiveness or improvement, only that they're keeping up with the cool new thing.

lowbloodsugar• 10 years ago

In the end I was incredibly lucky, landing a junior role at a major UK studio owned by a console manufacturer just after they had made some more experienced engineers redundant.

Company that fires experienced engineers to hire junior ones? Doesn't sound that lucky.

kosei• 10 years ago

Let me just say that there are game studios that are not run in this way. They may be hard to find, but they do exist - mostly outside of the console space - and I've worked at two of them and know of others. If the OP lives in the Seattle area, I'm happy to recommend a couple of studios that don't treat their employees like slaves.

The secret life of a games programmer

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