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7 Reasons Why You Should Care About This Stuff (this means you too, Boss)

7 Reasons Why You Should Care About This Stuff (this means you too, Boss). François Dominic Laramée IGDA Quality of Life Committee Chairman and Congenital Troublemaker fdl@francoisdominiclaramee.com. Myth #1: “Crunch works – and nothing else does.”.

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7 Reasons Why You Should Care About This Stuff (this means you too, Boss)

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  1. 7 Reasons Why You Should Care About This Stuff(this means you too, Boss) François Dominic Laramée IGDA Quality of Life Committee Chairman and Congenital Troublemaker fdl@francoisdominiclaramee.com

  2. Myth #1: “Crunch works – and nothing else does.” • “It’s our experience that late night crunch introduces so many bugs as to make the work almost worthless in the long run.” – Rod Humble, EverQuest team, Game Developer magazine, May 2004.

  3. Myth #1: “Crunch works – and nothing else does.” (cont.) • Team 17 hasn’t missed a deadline since going to a 40-hour week. • Blue Fang works proactively to minimize crunch. • So do Vicarious Visions, Edge of Reality, BreakAway, etc.

  4. Myth #2: “Crunch doesn’t cost the company anything.” • “People who are awake for 24 hours are unfit to drive a car.” – Harvard Group • Response time equivalent to 0.1 blood alcohol • Medical interns who work 30 hour shifts make 36% more mistakes. • Tight deadlines multiply the risk of heart attacks by 6. – Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, December 2004. • “Sleeping only 4 to 6 hours a night for 14 nights is equivalent to going 3 days without sleep.” – Linda Cook, National Institutes of Health • And the impaired people don’t even notice it.

  5. Myth #2: “Crunch doesn’t cost the company anything.” (cont.) • And those drunken zombies are performing code check-ins at your office right now… + CRUNCH =

  6. Myth #3: “You have to work harder to succeed!” • “[On average] Americans work 350 hours more per year than Europeans – and 70 hours more per year than even the Japanese, whose language contains a word, karoshi, that means ‘death from overwork’.” – Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation

  7. Myth #3: “You have to work harder to succeed!” (cont.) • Time off is an investment. • 76% of Canadians are forced to give up as much as 2 weeks of their vacation every year (10% have to give up 3 weeks or more.) – Ipsos-Reid • Germans (and many other Europeans) get 6 weeks’ paid vacation time every year. • Heard anyone complain about the quality of BMWs and Porsches recently?

  8. Myth #4: “Our employees are hardcore; they’re willing to pay the price to make games!” • “All applicants must be obsessed with games.” – Every game development job ad I’ve ever seen anywhere • Most studios are understaffed. • IGDA Quality of Life Survey: Fewer than half of current developers consider games to be their only career option. • Our HR business model is a fantasy that doesn’t even fit our current staff, much less the folks we’ll need to hire away from Pixar and Google next year.

  9. Myth #5: “OK, the boys are unhappy, but where will they go?” • Out of the industry, that’s where! • IGDA Quality of Life Survey • 34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years… • 51.2% will be gone within 10 years… • And only 18.4% of the people who responded are 35 or older.

  10. Myth #6: “OK, fine, if our veterans leave, we’ll hire rookies.” The Sikorski CH-124 Helicopter…

  11. Myth #6: “OK, fine, if our veterans leave, we’ll hire rookies.” (cont.) … crashing upon take-off, Feb 24th, 2003.

  12. Myth #6: “OK, fine, if our veterans leave, we’ll hire rookies.” (cont.) • “Inexperienced, out of their league technicians make dozens of mistakes a year.” - La Presse, 2005-01-13. • Parts installed upside down. • Dirty rags left in sensitive equipment. • Tanks left empty before a flight. • Oil and Fuel pipes connected to the wrong faucets. • A live torpedo without safety bolts. • “Their overworked (senior) supervisors are driven to error as well.”

  13. Myth #7: “Well, we don’t have crunch here, so we have nothing to worry about.” • Quality of life is about more than free time. • Family-friendly policies • 82.9% of female developers have no children – QoL Survey. • Recognition (including proper credits) • 43% of employees feel debased by their immediate supervisors – CareerBuilder.com • A healthy, reasonably quiet working environment. • Meaningful work. • Job stability, or at least mobility.

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