NTSC-RePlay 012: Risky Business

[Dogg Thang]

I spent no more than a few weeks in a games company in Liverpool back in the PS1 days. It was very clear it wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the animation but the culture just seemed all wrong for me. The big red flag for me was that it was normal for people to work until around 10pm and anyone who left earlier was judged harshly. But the reality is that, because people had a mindset that they were working late, they felt fine about spending large chunks of the day talking about football or clubbing or whatever and it all seemed horrendously unproductive while allowing for no other actual life. I’m sure it’s very different now, at least I hope it is, but it was also a studio full of what felt like a very narrow type of guy. And no women.

I visited a couple of other studios at the time and had an interview in another and, while I saw people making better stuff, I saw very similar cultures and it just wasn’t a fit for me.

So I went back to TV animation, became creative director of a company a few years later and made it a rule that nobody could work after 5.30pm.

[nonny]

I'd work for you... I think the culture is very similar in finance and I've never aligned to it. I now work in software delivery in a bank and if I'm there past 4.30pm it means I'm going to the pub and waiting on people. I never got this work late mentality or having to look like you're already busy... if you're smashing your work out and clocking off on time that's good.

[Dogg Thang]

That’s it exactly. Being seen to be working long is not the same as working well. Not even close.

[Neon Ignition]

I'm not even closely aligned in terms of what I do but for the team I manage I've always taken the same stance. Barring the rare occasion where something specific necessitates staying a bit later I've always held that people are done at 5pm. It's all time management and if things ever got to the point where the workload far exceeds the teams ability within the working hours then it's a capacity issue, most often a need to expand the team size rather than have people work extra, burn out and leave. Simply leaning on crunch/working extra hours is an absence of management

[nonny]

There's a huge difference to a team all wanting to stay back to fix something, like a unanimous decision to get it done that they came to... I would never, ever tell someone they need to do more hours.

I've worked some crunch during my time in software QA but I've never enforced it and never will.

[Asura]

I have a friend who worked at Codemasters and now at Pixeltoys (Warhammer 40K: Freeblade)

Need to check out a review of that; I enjoyed Battle Sister.

EDIT: Ah, no, I thought this was a VR game.