Supporting science, technology, and diversity in games.
Work-Life Balance is Critical; Don't let Alex St. John represent "experienced" developers!
Indie developer Rami Ismail responds to critic of work-life balance in game industry
I read this article today. I wrote an inline response. The bold parts are the article's original text. My responses are the rest of it. Yes, this layout is copied from the amazing nodontdie.com because I couldn't come up with another one this fast.
TL;DR - I was so stirred up from the original article by Alex St. John that I wrote another chapter in the book I've been writing for the past year about becoming a young video game developer. A good way to summarize what I wrote in that chaotic chapter (that will probably make my editor cringe, sorry dude ;)) is as follow:
I will never take for granted the incredible opportunities that came my way after finally earning my first job in the game industry, but I should note that those opportunities meant a few big sacrifices in my life at the time. I had to move across the country (since then I've worked in Japan, the US and Canada) only get to see my family once a year; some of my closest friends even less. It was tough but I was working my dream job and told myself I would make more time to see them "later."
I put in tons of extra hours early on to try to get promoted onto a development team and make what I saw at the time as a real impact, but I also recklessly burned myself out in the process of working 10, 20, even 30 extra hours a week, and suffered from anxiety and depression for nearly a year after shipping my first huge feature as a producer in charge of a team. This anxiety and depression eventually ended up costing me an unmentionable opportunity that I will never be able to forget. As a younger developer, you would hear me make all sorts of excuses about why I had to work the extra hours, but I was just being a young, passionate, idiot!
Only in the past two years did I finally put work life-balance at the top of my priorities list, and have I come to realize that I could have been balancing it all along. I wasn't managing my time effectively, I was young, naive, and anxious, but mostly dangerously, I was giving my entire life to my work. Eventually, I would attach so strongly to my work that my own self-worth was completely tied to the success of my team and the work they did. It was a disaster waiting to happen. By far this was the toughest lesson I have ever learned in my 30 years of life, and there is no way in hell will I stand idly by watching young developers go through the same thing. It's our job to share our learnings and to be responsible leaders in our industry. Take a stand and do something about young developers and companies that don't understand work-life balance and the long term damage it can cause!




Alex St. John does not understand cognitive depletion/spoon theory or apparently how games are made or that passion alone doesn't make a virtual virtuoso like Toby Fox or any of these putative Floridian lightning strikes he claims to have met.
The normalization of 80-hour weeks is a /blight/ on this industry. That kind of overtime is useful if you're coming up on the home stretch of a project and have a critical need to get it done and out the door, sure.
But it /doesn't work/ chronically, and not just because people burn out: people don't work well after an eight hour block, to the point that the work you get may be /worse/ than if you hadn't worked that extra four or eight hours that day /at all/.
This especially true in /software/ where an exhausted mind may continue to produce code that /works/ through sheer slogging through, but is /less coherent/. This starts a chain: the next person to work on it, themselves or someone else on the team, then has to contend with unravelling that ball of code to understand how it works before they can work on any other aspect of the game that that code touches. Time sunk, so they have to work extra hours to finish this next component, which in turn becomes a noodle-ball for someone to deal with...and so on.
Even if your code is well commented (which it may well /not/ be if you're focused on Just Getting This Shit Done so you can go home and sleep), it may not make much sense or, if it's tangled enough, may need to be revised to accomodate other work, costing you yet more time and effort down the road. And RNGesus save you if what you change necessitates changes in other blocks of code it affects.
You wonder why so many big games launch as bug-addled messes despite multimillion dollar budgets and teams a mile wide?
This is why.
This attitude from people like Alex St. John. This blind belief that the human brain is an organ of infinite resource, because they've clearly never been tired a day in their lives or don't appreciate the consequences of their own fuck-ups because they can always pass them off to other people.
I burned out working this kind of schedule in another technical field, working 84+ hour weeks on rotating shifts and spent most of them re-treading work that wasn't done right the first time because everyone was so completely wasted every damn day. A whole lot of nothing done for the time sunk, a self-sustaining cycle of opportunity cost in labor. Now I'm on Disability and have been trying to rebuild myself into something functional for the past ten years because whatever made me able to get up in the morning and /work/, able to go out and /deal/ with /people/ so I could work /with/ them, got completely trashed in this cycle of mental exploitation and abuse.
We absolutely should not stand for it.
Certainly not in a field as /joyous/ as electronic entertainment and edification.
Creation should /not/ mean self-destruction.
Thank you for sharing. I agree wholeheartedly.