My favourite overheard conversations when it comes to managers and schedules are:

Manager: “Why do you have that 2 week dip in the schedule?”
Scheduler: “That’s the Christmas holiday period. You volunteering to work over Christmas?”

Manager: “I’ve fixed your schedule and saved months of time.”
Scheduler checks new schedule.
Scheduler: “You applied the wrong calendar. You’ve now got everyone working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

When I was working at 3DO, I saw both sides of the coin. I loved M59 and willingly stayed late and worked holidays and weekends to make it better. On my next project, crunch became a necessity because we had only a few months to do the project, in true 3DO style. I grew to hate the project, even though I wasn’t really working more hours than I put into M59. There’s a world of difference between “I want to do this!” and “I have to do this….”

Perceiving that one has a choice of either meeting a deadline or making a quality product is what perpetuates things like crunch time. It’s not just management that needs to shift expectations, it’s design teams that are so used to doing things “the old way” that they can’t comprehend what a little nip and tuck can do for them in the long run. These days, there is no apple cart in any industry that doesn’t need some upsetting in order to make cider – and games are at the place in their lifespan where they either become business-like or they fail.

That doesn’t mean the fun needs to come out of the jobs, but that certainly means they need to understand that crunch only hurts their own pockets. No one works to lose money but that’s essentially what crunch is all about. It is devastating at a personal and corporate level.

I agree with Keira that a more skilled marketplace will change certain aspects of how games hire their staff but if management isn’t turning over (or having deep, meaningful revelations over dinner) the effectiveness will be mitigated. As young an industry as gaming is, management doesn’t turn over as quickly as it would in, say, the Xerox culture. A businessman running a company of designers is radically different than a gamer running a company of designers.

Why is Scrum such a buzzword right now for us? Because we suck at managing both projects and time. Nobody wants to crunch anymore but nobody knows how to stop it. To me, it’s not that hard a task. I’ve done this in other industries (including the ubiquitous entertainment industry). It’s not painless but it works. Whether its Scrum or any other kind of method, it requires a very strong leader who is open to tweaking the very systems meant to tweak the broken battlefield. And it requires a team willing to “suffer” a few hours between 9am and 5pm to avoid having to work from 5pm to midnight.

At GDC one evening, I was talking to a recruiter from another major game company. I was interested in talking to some of their engineers to network a bit–we so rarely get to meet anyone that can’t come to our desk! But I couldn’t, because they were all back at the office crunching.

I do think, however, that on the whole skilled programers/designers are going to be making more of a name for themselves, and there is going to be a lot more competition in the marketplace. Hopefully this will lead to an increase in quality, rather than trying to cut overheads. I’m sure there will be companies trying it both ways, but on the whole I would guess the ones that look after their employees will do better.

I also insist on having a more-or-less complete design doc before creating engineering estimates. Otherwise it’s just a WAG!

I always say to do estimates by lifecycle phase. Don’t estimate coding until the design is done (or 90%), testing until coding is done, etc. I prefer to allocate the same number of hours to QA as were given to coding. The estimates tend to be very accurate that way but difficult to convince people that you can’t estimate everything up front. Otherwise you’re just going the 3 weeks/6 weeks route for small/big projects.

As for cutting QA, well, you don’t want the reputation of Acclaim or the “bring out the gimp” theme, eh? It’s ok, your users will test for you, right? And smear your name all over the internetz.