I'd like to add that there are people who don't have good time management skills. Those people need mentoring to help them recognize the problem and learn methods to organize their time. Should they know this by year 4 in college? Probably. Most people I saw learned time management through pain. Crunch at the end of a project and realizing that they needed to manage time better. This is where I see management could do better.
It's like the team project where half the group shows up on the last day asking what they're doing, except in this case there's not even anyone to carry them.
I wished this kind of thing stopped with college. Shit my day job is like this for a while. Switched teams and it's so nice to not be the only one working on stuff. Prior I was on a team of 3 and nothing got done if I wasn't working it.
Final project for my eng design class last semester went like this. I wrote 6 pages of the report weeks in advance, 2 hours before the deadline everyone else decided to start their parts. I just sat back and watched them scramble to fill the google doc. We got a 46%.
Glad that this happens in all parts of the world. I lived through the same thing, and with experience is that I learned that it's best to get straight to work, instead of goofing of and procastinating, better to have a buffer in case some eventuality comes up, than to have everything come crumbling down because you are racing against the clock out of sheer laziness. Even the quality of your work gets affected due to pressure.
As usual, very interesting and the story was well told. As a Senior Designer I don't think I ever saw anyone goofing around or losing time on unimportant activities that caused any crunch as we know it in the industry. The crunch I have seen is either cause by miss management (as you rightly stated), knowingly accepting a project that is completely out of scope out of necessity for the survival of the studio (much more common than any other reason from my experience) and indeed because it is simply accepted within the culture of the industry so that crunch is planned within the pipeline of production over the timeline (this was the case for over decades at the big companies here in Montreal).
I agree 100% that the indignant cries of your classmates were of their own doing. I do think that some people thrive under pressure/time constraints though. I'm in IT/system administration, not Game Dev, but I often see people who are hit with a deadline for writing a script that solves a complex problem, but don't start right away. I once saw a guy not start a project until a week before the due date given to him a month before, and not only did he complete his task, but I thought the solution was rather brilliant. I think that's the complicated aspect of some of this, because there are so many variables. Are the managers truly trying to squeeze out as much work as possible? Are the people working slacking until the last minute (Even though they can't possibly finish in time if they do)? Are there dependencies that are preventing some work from even being started? Is it okay if those that thrive on crunch are forcing others to as well because of those dependencies? etcetera, etcetera.
@@deltapi8859 I agree that often times when something goes wrong, we search outward for something/someone to blame. I find that it's much more productive to search inward. Even if there were outward circumstances, I almost always find that there were things I could have done to mitigate. That way I focus on things that I could control and improve upon.
I do significantly better under pressure, but I work around far off dealines by planning personal deadlines for different parts of a codebase far beforehand. I don't think personal drive being driven directly by deadline pressure is a legitimate motivation mechanism. How that really works is that you've made a personal judgement on how long something will take, and only feel enough pressure to work once you've entered that danger zone. So if you didn't accurately predict the workload, then your done for
I think maybe an important distinction between the class and real life is in the class, the requirements didn't change all semester. In modern corporate development, the requirements change all the time and can contribute to crunch. In my software engineering class in college, they actually did change the requirements around the midpoint of the timeline on a programming assignment to simulate real industry. That decision upset students who did get started on it early because that put them back on the work for their other classes.
Key to time, budgeting and scheduling management is to understand that the first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time and the final 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
Great story! One thing I've learned over the years is that everything you want normally takes way longer than you think it will, and requires a lot more effort than you think it does. The main reason I think people struggle to achieve certain goals is because they underestimate those two things. Everything is inputs and outputs. If you want a certain output, you have to provide the appropriate inputs for long enough to get the desired output.
One of the cardinal rules of college, If your professor recommends something, just do it. It's the same if you're dungeon Master gives you a hint that there might be dire consequences for your actions. When people are warned they will fail and still fail because they didnt listen to the warning is always mind boggling 😂
> If your professor recommends something, just do it. Sounds-to-me like a dangerous pattern. First its your college professor. Then it's a cop. Then it's a despot.
@@rabbitcreative also it's just not true sometimes lol, plenty of students are warned that trying to learn to a test a day/night before won't work, and while there's plenty examples where that's true, there's also plenty examples of where they're (profs) proven wrong by them
I definitely observed similar things when studying and I'll admit, I can tend to goof off with work from time to time, but I never feel good about it if I can't help it. I prefer when I can goof off because I am waiting on something coming from someone else, so that I have a good excuse. Now, enterprising people might say "well, can't you prepare something else in advance" and sometimes that's true and if I'm very motivated, like early on in a project I'll do that, but if I feel I'm ahead of estimation on deadline and can take a few hours to catch my breath and mentally restore myself for what is to come, that is what I'll do and I'll be able to give my 100% on the coming task as opposed to 60%, because my thoughts will be on the other thing and I'll be exhausted as it is. Some people are slackers though.
14:09 Generally when people are referring to how bad "crunch" is, it's not about crunch it's self; it's crunch culture. The expectation given from a company; it's management, employees, etc. to make you do crunch within your work or otherwise potentially lose your job. Like there is a certain base understanding especially in game development that it is likely to involve crunch especially if you are coming up to the end of release there's always something that just needs to be done asap potentially hours before you hit gold. And that also involves what you said where members on the team are just putting it off or what have you. But there is an explicit culture of expected crunch from management and even employees themselves within big game development companies/studios across the board even when it is extremely unnecessary; excruciatingly mentally draining and exploitative. Management cause an expectation, asking you and your coworkers to specifically give overtimed work, even if it's optional they expect you to do it. So when there is ever a round of layoffs or what have you, who do you think they would prioritise getting rid of in the company? And it generally gets worse since that expectation also goes down onto other co-workers and employees where they put in the effort of crunch and others didn't, they're going to complain about it and be spiteful about it to them. Thinking they did more for the project that other people did and so on and so forth. Whilst all the while in some cases, the management all start to give it some fancy name to normalise it à la "Bioware Magic". This is what people are really refer to when they refer to crunch; the culture of it. It really is something we need to entirely weed out as much as possible within this industry because even past recent rounds of layoffs, it only just adds to this industry to continue being a revolving door of people going into toxic work culture environments just to be used and then discarded of if they dont adapt to it.
I used to be a serious procrastinator, so I understand both sides of this to a degree. I think that class did an EXCELLENT job, because it teaches you how to manage time for large projects, something that we're never explicitly taught. I wish I'd had something like that, even if id've failed it, because I probably would've learned how to time manage a lot sooner.
Another great video, thanks Tim :) I'll be honest and say I'm definitely one of those people who would have left the project until the last few weeks lol! That's why I enjoy my job as helpdesk analyst, I'm aware that I struggle with long term project work that requires a lot of self discipline, so I'm much happier when the work comes to me. Funnily enough, I actually find it less stressful to be very busy and swamped with work than the thought of a project hanging over my head. I think the situations you've described are where a good manager can really shine. Just applying some gentle pressure without giving the feeling of constantly looking over their employees shoulder can be a good motivator. That being said, it's not your managers job to organise your time and you do need hold yourself accountable/responsible for your own work.
I agree that laziness may lead to crunch. If you goof off and then you feel the breath of a deadline you keep forgetting it's all your own damn fault. But what's the real ratio here? How often it's management's fault and how often it's just people being indolent?
I’m not sure of a numerical ratio, but it’s usually management’s fault. Their job is to manage the schedule, and make adjustments if time is running out. But there is a limit to both those adjustments and the ability to predict issues before they occur.
It's very entertaining hearing your story regarding a large project class at UVA, because the same sort of class still exists and has many of the same issues! I'm a recent graduate from the UVA school of engineering in computer engineering, and we had a number of project focused classes as requirements. They try to reduce the odds of a student getting stuck crunching with mandatory checkpoints throughout the semester, but there were always a few students in these classes who ignored them and were stuck crunching, in my experience. (I mostly stuck to them, and generally did okay!)
man I love the format: topic, topic definition, your story and the explicit moral of the story. great story as always by the way! and yes, I used to procastinate as school but I've never complained about time or blamed on the professor, I always knew that was on me. Of course, now being graduated I do not understimate goals and task on time estimation. Have a great Tuesday Tim! cheers.
I’m in the midst of being absolutely destroyed by engineering finals and your recent uploads have made for nice breaks during studying lol. Thanks Tim.
We had a similar class where OVER 50% was done with a project. It was the intro to Digital Signaling, so the projects were basically creating logic circuits on graph paper. I believe mine was an elevator logic controller with at least 3 floors. I managed to get a queue working, and signal blocking so that if someone was inside the elevator and pushed a target floor, it wouldn't necessarily stop on the way to pick up more people. The bare minimum was to have essentially a dumb platform that had a button on the lift side that went up and down, but features obviously added complexity and that got you a better grade. I didn't start right away, but around midway of the course. It was a 3-month course starting from "This is what we mean by digital signal, this is an AND-gate..." level. It took me a good three weeks of casual work, or and hour here and there so it was not actually a hard assignment, just time consuming. Drawing the signal work, all the logic gates you needed, creating buffers and blocking signals, very basic stuff if you paid attention in the class and understood the material. Some classmates, mostly those intending on not going to embedded/electronics, were blowing off the course and they obviously didn't even want to get the materials, let alone give it a try. But as all other classes ended, and we were out partying until late into the night, I come home and check the IRC channel and there are people now realizing that they have a single night to create something that could be returned for a passing grade. I loved the intro class, I found thinking about how to approach a simple problem with even simpler tools and drawing out the logic matrices was fun. So I helped. One guy had to make a detector that could tell which way a disc painted half black half white was spinning, the other needed some sort of simple calculator matrix that I can't quite remember. But in that last night slightly plastered I worked out a decent prototype of both and tutored them enough that they kind of understood what the logic was supposed to do so they could at least draw out the same logic on graph paper in their own doodles instead of mine. Both of them stayed up all night and managed to turn in something that enabled them to pass a class by morning.
Time management is a skill that took me a long time to figure out and I still struggle with it. Though I also didnt know I had ADHD for the longest time or how to manage that. I remember doing my senior project half my team took forever to even respond to messages. I had to take a lead role in managing what we can do with this disconnect and it made the project a fraction of what I was aiming for. But then I looked at a girl in a different group who always complained about people in her group. I looked back realized she made it 1000 times more stressful by doing all the heavy lifting. She ended up driving a wedge deeper into the group making it even harder for the others to work with her. I guess what im trying to get at is that it seems easier to just ad more weight to your pack instead of taking the time to empty yours and distribute the load.
I'm sure someone's asked and it's probably been answered, but I likely missed it- just WHAT is the cool spinning glowing ball on the display case behind you sir? Thanks for putting out so many of these daily dives into your life. It's the highlight of my evening after work getting to see what you're talking about next 👍.
I feel like the nuance of this conversation is lost because to us outsiders crunch is Just the horror stories and the terrible processes and outcomes, while for industry people like yourself it's a much more broader category of events. I don't think doing overtime just before shipping a game and people not seeing their families for months are in the same ballpark. That's why I appreciate your perspective.
As a software engineering grad, I totally understand the issues and more often than not, it is the project team members time management issues. There was once for a class project, we needed to make a functional Sudoku game. We didn't need to write algorithm logic to generate the puzzle, we just need to make the game a functional one. Many teams didn't do anything until the last few weeks before submission. The lecturer then had us demo our game on the submission day and explained how our game works, how our GUI was designed and the scripts behind it. Many teams resorted to other friends giving them a similar one and couldn't explain anything, for some the game wouldn't even work. Those that took that module and project seriously got A grade while many others had to retake the module in the next semester.
To me it really seems like a management failure if you let your employees not work for months (and probably miss deadlines, etc. Without changing someting till the last weeks). I feel like the univetsity example only highlights how important intermediate goals are in contrast to only one big goal in the end. If one is aware of these issues, it is ones responsibility to try and circumvent them, in my opinion(at least if you are interested in success). Either way, thanks for the insight!
You’re right, and that’s why milestones are a great way to schedule intermediate development goals. And while some people need monthly ones, some need weekly, and a few daily. And some people will complain about the milestones being too long, but when you shorten them, they complain about being micromanaged.
I actually quit a QA tester job at a small game company exactly because of the kinds of people you're describing in this video. I could tell that in the near future I would be asked to stay longer at the office to test things that should've been done MONTHS ago. At the same time, I was seeing people play with nerf guns in the office, or add "pranks" into the build instead of working on what they actually had to do. I tried talking to management and nothing was done, but it wasn't just management's fault. Some of those people would just do that no matter what, and they weren't fired so they dragged the whole team down.
The task is an important task that often crops up in software very, very often: scheduling. It's not an easy one, and there are next to no easy or optimal solutions. I've written schedulers in daemons to figure out how incoming input should be prioritised and grouped for processing. I've written realtime scheduling loops to allow sensor platforms to communicate with each other. I've written I/O control loops to give back fast availability results from a domain registrar I worked for that included a scheduler that pooled queries from multiple sources and spat them back. I've written game loops that have to take input, adjust related entities in the game's simulation while making sure that the sprite multiplexor caused minimal flicker, and any audio that needed to be played had enough CPU time while possibly streaming data in from a disc, hopefully a HDD. I'll be writing yet another scheduler this Friday to help make some network infrastructure more responsive. Schedulers are everywhere. Where there are tasks that need to be juggled in some form, there will be schedulers. You're very lucky if you somehow avoid them and very unlucky when you encounter a task best solved by one and you don't know how to implement one.
Honestly, learning to set your own time management and understand how much time you actually need to do your work is such an underrated life skill that doesn't really come into focus until your last years of university. Me and my peers who did an industry year before finishing our CompSci degrees just treated it like work by the end. We were still stressed to the eyeballs finishing deadlines, but afterwards we could just relax and focus on exams like they were nothing.
As a programming teacher (high school), this sounds very familiar… I have a lot of students who are used to being able to do things at the very last minute. They think of themselves as "good under pressure" and their previous experiences tell them that when a techer says "you need to get started right away", they don't have to listen because it'll work out anyways. This is the curse of the high-achieving student… Sooner or later though, often in my class, they hit what I like to call "the Wall"; the point in your journey where you can't just surf along on being kinda smart and good on your feet and good under pressure. Suddenly you NEED to study, you NEED to put in the work. I mean, I was the same. I didn't reach the Wall until college; I just surfed on through high school by having some basic smarts and being decent under pressure. I think the sooner you reach the Wall, the better. Because then the bad habits haven't solidified quite as much. And I think it's almost impossible to TELL someone they need to start studying; as long as their experiences tell them otherwise, they won't listen. They need to get burned, at least once, to understand and change their behavior.
Tim: Tells a story to make a point about time management and crunch. Me: I wonder what the full spec of that project were, it sound like an interesting challenge.
Sounds like the story that always happen during my college time. Reminds me to what my lecturer said about "Lightning Printing" which is other way of saying "Working on your homework as fast you could".
Hey Tim! I was wondering if you had some fun anecdotes and insights about how to integrate stealth mechanics within non-stealth games like The Outer Worlds or Fallout. It seems like many games in that genre end up with the "Skyrim Stealth Archer" syndrome where one playtstyle is so safe or so dominant that players tend to gravitate towards it, but I'm curious what measures you can take behind the scenes to prevent it.
I did a CPU scheduler in college, it was not that big of a deal. Also did a full C compiler without using lex and yacc. That was a much bigger deal but still not something to require crunch. There were a couple really late nights getting the states layed out and correct and once that was done the coding was not bad. I think the real issue here is some people are far quicker at coding and I noticed that right away in school. A few people could pound it out very quickly and most people were much slower and some people were hopelessly slow. It's probably not popular to say it but the 80/20 or even 90/10 rule applies to programmers very strongly. I would also say that it is still a a management issue because like you say many are leaving early or coming in late and I am sure many of them while they are there have much less output. Some of the people I've dealt with would have basically negative output once the tasks get complicated enough and the team is large enough. Imagine if NASA was run by a bunch of MBAs, what a disaster it would be. The moon landing would never have happened for sure. Yet that is often how a lot of the most complex software is made and a lot of terrible employees never get corrected or even get special commendation because they are good at appearing busy or simply promote themselves. From watching these videos I think a big reason fallout came out well is that it started with a few good people and the idea and technology were more or less set before any kind of release or schedule was dreamed up. That would be the ideal way for all game projects to work because the software part needs to be hammered out and certain early on. Otherwise you get a buggy mess or else you wind up making the exact same walking simulator every other stupid company is making.
It gets complicated when people WANT to work, but cant, because there is a bottleneck or some previous step is not finished. Like in your class. Imagine you have to work with someone else, who just delays working on the project since there seems to be enough time left or is otherwise busy.
Had a project in my 3rd year where you had to create a dynamically allocated hashtable that stores the total occurrences of word pairs in a batch of text. It needed to grow by a specified factor whenever the hashtable reached a specific size, and if any memory leaks were detected it was an instant fail. The project was given (I think) day 1, and the professor warned us to start soon cause it’s 10% of the grade. I think like 80% of the class has memory leaks every year. Very few people fulfill the full requirements and the memory leak requirement is often dropped
I procrastinate and crunch too often but I suppose I can be "proud" that I never complain, I own it. Reminds me of a Europe between World World Wars history class I took and people complained about a map being on the test. People are very complain trigger happy haha.
I'm currently in technical school for an associates, and I struggle a lot with time management. I tend to get stuff done in large chunks, and I just can't do the "read a little bit a day" thing to get through a book chapter - I need enough time and energy after work to plow through one class just to make sure its all fresh in my mind, and if I can't do that every night, stuff piles up on my Friday and Sunday off days.
Yep. On my pathway I realized just how lazy most college students are. Only a portion seemed to do all the assignments, and an even smaller portion actually studied regularly to achieve high grades. This seems less prominent in grad school, but it makes sense. Felt like a good amount of undergrad folks were just there to have a good time and waste their future earnings by accruing debt.
Took the same approach in university. Was able to manage my time, but as consequence had very few in-program friends. Two decades later I still question what would have been more valuable; the good grades or the “connections” going into the real world.
@@slayasloth Yes, which is what I decided had the most value at that time. Unfortunately, the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” holds weight, even if it shouldn’t. My thought here is I believe there was a social cost by always hitting the lab instead of the pub. Obviously will never know for certain without a time-rewinder.
hey Tim can you talk a bit about numerous sequence breaks that you implemented in your games ? like in fo1 talking to the dumb mutant at necropolis will grant you a quick access to the military base and in the same game you can convince morpheus to take you directly to the master and I'm pretty sure there also was an interesting one in arcanum but I can't recall the details at the moment sadly
People coming in late and leaving early is a management problem. If they can institute a crunch period they could also enforce people sticking to their hours and track short term goals.
I am very much aware of crunch I used to have to study a lot before the exams when I wasted time doing other things When I took proper notes and did my homework it was very easy to study for exams Seems like it's the same in the office world
You worked first, played later, those who played first and worked later failed is how I describe it. Generally that is how I got through engineering school also, ie not much time for fun.
I think the problem in the end is that good management requires clear-eyed accounting for the failings of human nature; you are repsonsible for the output of the people under you, even if they are goofing off. And so it ends up kind of being personally frustrating to see people you know were doing nothing complaining, but unless management thinks they have somehow managed to hire the world's only 100% productive workforce they have to account for this. Of course, this does result in a fallback to your previous maxim of "money" when one inquires "then why doesn't management simply allow more time"...!
People need to start realizing college isn’t real life, the purpose of academia is not to mimics real life. The environment and settings are fundamentally different, and have different rules and objectives. So no, don’t tell me “it’s just like in real life”
I don’t mean to sound rude, but most people are either just too stupid to see the long term vision, or are on a team and want equal pay, but don’t want to contribute equally. Your list of reasons why a project has problems is so accurate. I won’t name my employer, but you summed up about 30% or more of the employees.
Can I give more than one thumbs-up to this video? lol I went to a technical art school with an accelerated timeline and half of the classes were like this (though maybe not as intense), so it was pretty much drilled into our heads when it came around to graduation. Hearing about 'the crunch' of nowadays makes me think of similar thoughts to yours, though I'm not as articulate about explaining them.
As someone who has done some programming but didn't take many computer science or engineering classes in school. I'd be interested to hear more about your time in school.
Fairly tangential but i still get the occasional nightmare that i have a huge project/essay due very soon i forgot about. I've been out of school for close to a decade haha
Interesting video Tim! I'd like to hear your opinion if mental health/disorders were taken into consideration. Does workflow depends on staff's mental health condition and if it were to be hindered, how would it disrupt workflow and could potentially lead to further crunch. Do companies have recreational activities to help boost morale or is it ought to be expected that developers should already have an established type of discipline to keep the project moving forward. Also if you're reading this, hearing your insights is very comforting to me, these videos helps relief a lot of stress that's built up from a busy weekend and it helps me decompress a lot so thanks.
You have to put your working hours on a timer if you want to get some actual work done. By actual work I mean, work in silence or with non-disruptive background music. Most people that work in video-games do maybe 1 or 2 hours of *actual* work a day at best, and the bigger the company is the worse this metric gets. The 8 hours they work on paper are most made of slack work, that is working but paying less than 50% of your attention to the work and instead: listening to videos or podcasts on the background, checking your phone every 5 minutes, chatting with coworkers, having meetings, reading and writing emails. If you are a game developer none of these are actual work, none of these things will get a game done, these are padding you put in between the actual work.
Hi Tim, can you do an updated video on the Fallout TV show? Would love to hear your thoughts on the new 'updates' to some of the Fallout 1 areas in the later episodes (avoiding revealing mega spoilers to the chat).
In my experience - most crunch happens because of scope creep, arrogant developers, and/or poor communication between the devs and management. You can place blame for these things on both sides for sure. But I don't think it really compares to the story you've told. Doing one clearly defined thing alone is very different than doing it in a team, in an "agile" environment, where goals might be constantly shifting.
I put in my earbuds for once to watch Tim’s video and noticed pup was quietly snoring throughout 😂 is this a common occurrence?! I feel like I’ve missed out until now
Aborbs To comment on the video contents itself - if you were ever to do a crunch pt.3 - I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on if you happened to find yourself in crunch circumstances TODAY (knowing what you know now) how would you approach it to give yourself the best opportunity of a positive outcome / least amount of pain caused to you or your team?
I had a project similar to this for an algorithms and data structures course, I also started asap and got a perfect grade, the people who started at the end of the semester did NOT do well and were begging me for help by the end of it lol
Hey Tim 👋🏻 I recently watched your bad games video and it left me compelled to ask you a few questions!! :-) Do you think it’s important to be analytical of negative qualities/aspects of a game? And when does it cross the line from constructive feedback to narcissistic/venomous toxic behavior? *Context to the question if you’d like to read* I was very critical of devs and using lots of broad generalizations. But I had 0 clue what I was talking about. I knew nothing of how the industry worked and how much control higher ups and executives of corporations have over the finished product and I never considered how folks in the industry go pour their hearts and souls into a game and that no one goes out of their way to make a bad game on purpose. I think a lot of the the vitriol you see online stems from either narcissists or passionate folks who don’t quite understand the process. That still doesn’t excuse the behavior regardless.
Hey Tim - what jumps out at me about your story is that both you and the young lady not only understood the value of time management but also had a plan for managing the project as well. Leading up to the class/project, were you taught how to think through projects, identify key milestones, plan the processes needed to meet each milestone, etc.? I ask because I believe there's a lack of teaching how to scope projects thoroughly and plan the work so it isn't overwhelming. If you say "yes, we were all taught how to do this", then the fault 100% falls on the student. I could be wrong, but I would attribute a lot of what's considered "crunch" to individuals not knowing how to manage their workloads.
Part of that class was learning how to do software engineering projects. We met a couple times a week, and every time, the professor reiterated that we should have gotten started, that certain modules should be written first, and he provided data sets for us to test with. In a real sense, the project was an exam in coding and management.
So what I hear is that managments job is to balance the inherent cost of setting a deadline too far away with the cost of nosing into your business too often :D
I think an interesting question is: why did that happen? What were the reasons that you and the other student worked one way on that project (and succeeded), and so many others worked another way (and failed)?
I wish I knew. It was our fourth and final year of engineering school. Other students had talked about this class for years. We were all prepared for such a class. And yet...
I ran a free online bootcamp to teach people how to build real-world cloud projects. We had 10,000 registered, with 50,000 other people in the backlist. The concern was how are we going to grade all these people? This bootcamp went on for 4 months, I published a 100 hours of videos, ran office hours. Every week I knew what we wanted to build next but I didn't all the instructions down, we built the bridge as we crossed it. Every week, 40% of students dropped off. Near the end we had 500 submitted (incomplete), 100 (completed, but major bugs) and then about 30 people shipped it working, and 3 people who actually did what I asked which was to go beyond the instructions. It made grading easy because it widdled down so fast. When I asked other private schools about this completion rate, they all said that pretty much what it looks like at our school. So yeah Tim story still holds true here.
Hi Tim, love your content, but I have to disagree a bit on what you're saying with this story. How often does a software project actually stay on track from beginning to end with no requirements changes? Your college course had the perfect conditions of a correctly scoped project with no requirement changes. A project like that in the real world is like finding a unicorn. The software engineering industry is infamous for either not being able to give correct time estimates (tripling estimates being a rule of thumb used all-around) or for having project managers changing requirements on you. And that's not even counting getting blocked by other teams, who are subject to their own delays, priority changes, or even re-orgs. I can only imagine it's worse in the games industry, as you're more subject to changing market trends and having to invest in potentially throwaway prototypes to determine if a game/mechanic actually works and is fun. Ultimately what you're describing with people not putting in the base amount of hours is a management issue, through and through. If they're not putting in the required effort, it's management that should be stepping in and addressing it, ultimately managing them out if the behavior persists. But I wouldn't be surprised if the reason this behavior is tolerated is because those underperforming people can be relied upon to deliver in times of crunch, and in the end make up for and even overcompensate for their periods of underperformance. And that makes me suspect they have those periods of underperformance to protect themselves and prepare for crunch they expect to happen, crunch that is often no fault of their own. If management breeds a culture where crunch is tolerated, there's no one else to blame.
I agree that management needs to step in when people are not putting in the hours...but the people not putting in the hours is THEIR issue. Solving it is management's issue. Depending on when the problem is discovered, the solution can be task reassignment, scope reduction, crunch, or even firing. The point of my story is that these people were well-prepared for this class. Smart, educated, warned...and still this happened. These students were the equivalent of senior personnel, meaning they were expected to need less management and in fact, manage other people if needed (and it wasn't!). And if this can happen on a small, well-defined project, imagine what can happen on a big project where some features are poorly defined because R&D is needed first. It's not all management's issues.
I have always wondered what people do at work for 8 hours every day. Modern software dev is slow for no real reason. Yes, even accounting for meetings. There's a lot of presenteeism in dev imo. I think most workload can be done in about 4 to 6 hours of coding a day.
Random question, but I’ve read Deus Irae and I’ve noticed some similarities between themes, setting (obviously) and characters with your fallout series. Perhaps an inspiration?
I think this is mostly about culture. I trained as an army officer, and EVERYONE were one with the crunch. We had hard deadlines, difficult project etc... This is because army culture teaches you to spend your time well, punishes you if you don't, rewards you if you do. I see what you describe from lazy cultures, not lazy people.... A lot of places I've worked, wants that level of self management, but does not tell the employees, and does not reward or punish the presence or lack of it because it is "self evident".... And that is the big disappointment of Leadership.... People will relax and have a good time if you let them, not because they are lazy, but because of.... Reasons....
Yeah sounds like your usual managers' perspective. "It's those pesky workers slacking off". Students & software engineers work modes are nothing alike - it's not a useful comparison (unless you also write 18-week-long tickets in your company but then you've bigger problems than crunch)
You are saying this about programming, but I'm under impression this is true for many (all?) other engineering sectors, I could say the same coming from structural engineering, where your calculations need to be finished on time so the structural elements can be produced on time etc., there is little about reducing a scope (imagine;), but ultimately sometimes, especially at the end there is crunch, really hardly avoidable and few times I have seen everything was pushed back at your leasure, typically meant debt for the company which down the line caused bankruptcy... it's just a harsh reality
Hey Tim, a question: Did you expect people to read game manuals before playing your games, like before then? Or was it completely fine to jump in, and have the player figure out how the game works? Do all your games have Game Manuals?
Hey Tim, Just wondering about the deadline that makes the crunch happen. Would you mind talking to crunch vs pushing out the release date, and how the release date is usually reached in the first place? i.e. Is it imposed by the publisher, or estimated by the team and then set in stone e.t.c.
Once a contract is signed with a publisher for a particular game with a listed set of features, you know how much money they will give you and from that, you have calculated a completion date using your known burn rate. Pushing out a release date requires more money and hence more negotiation with the publisher.
That's more put together/dedicated than 90% of the college students I remember. Nice job with planning and recognizing the size of the project.
I'd like to add that there are people who don't have good time management skills.
Those people need mentoring to help them recognize the problem and learn methods to organize their time. Should they know this by year 4 in college? Probably.
Most people I saw learned time management through pain. Crunch at the end of a project and realizing that they needed to manage time better.
This is where I see management could do better.
Honestly that project story really makes me reconsider how much time I spend on my research papers, thanks Tim!
It's like the team project where half the group shows up on the last day asking what they're doing, except in this case there's not even anyone to carry them.
I wished this kind of thing stopped with college. Shit my day job is like this for a while. Switched teams and it's so nice to not be the only one working on stuff. Prior I was on a team of 3 and nothing got done if I wasn't working it.
Final project for my eng design class last semester went like this. I wrote 6 pages of the report weeks in advance, 2 hours before the deadline everyone else decided to start their parts. I just sat back and watched them scramble to fill the google doc. We got a 46%.
Glad that this happens in all parts of the world. I lived through the same thing, and with experience is that I learned that it's best to get straight to work, instead of goofing of and procastinating, better to have a buffer in case some eventuality comes up, than to have everything come crumbling down because you are racing against the clock out of sheer laziness. Even the quality of your work gets affected due to pressure.
As usual, very interesting and the story was well told. As a Senior Designer I don't think I ever saw anyone goofing around or losing time on unimportant activities that caused any crunch as we know it in the industry. The crunch I have seen is either cause by miss management (as you rightly stated), knowingly accepting a project that is completely out of scope out of necessity for the survival of the studio (much more common than any other reason from my experience) and indeed because it is simply accepted within the culture of the industry so that crunch is planned within the pipeline of production over the timeline (this was the case for over decades at the big companies here in Montreal).
I agree 100% that the indignant cries of your classmates were of their own doing.
I do think that some people thrive under pressure/time constraints though. I'm in IT/system administration, not Game Dev, but I often see people who are hit with a deadline for writing a script that solves a complex problem, but don't start right away. I once saw a guy not start a project until a week before the due date given to him a month before, and not only did he complete his task, but I thought the solution was rather brilliant.
I think that's the complicated aspect of some of this, because there are so many variables. Are the managers truly trying to squeeze out as much work as possible? Are the people working slacking until the last minute (Even though they can't possibly finish in time if they do)? Are there dependencies that are preventing some work from even being started? Is it okay if those that thrive on crunch are forcing others to as well because of those dependencies? etcetera, etcetera.
@@deltapi8859 I agree that often times when something goes wrong, we search outward for something/someone to blame. I find that it's much more productive to search inward. Even if there were outward circumstances, I almost always find that there were things I could have done to mitigate. That way I focus on things that I could control and improve upon.
I do significantly better under pressure, but I work around far off dealines by planning personal deadlines for different parts of a codebase far beforehand. I don't think personal drive being driven directly by deadline pressure is a legitimate motivation mechanism. How that really works is that you've made a personal judgement on how long something will take, and only feel enough pressure to work once you've entered that danger zone. So if you didn't accurately predict the workload, then your done for
I think maybe an important distinction between the class and real life is in the class, the requirements didn't change all semester. In modern corporate development, the requirements change all the time and can contribute to crunch. In my software engineering class in college, they actually did change the requirements around the midpoint of the timeline on a programming assignment to simulate real industry. That decision upset students who did get started on it early because that put them back on the work for their other classes.
Of course the topic crunch requires extra work in form of a second part hahaha
Key to time, budgeting and scheduling management is to understand that the first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time and the final 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
Great story! One thing I've learned over the years is that everything you want normally takes way longer than you think it will, and requires a lot more effort than you think it does. The main reason I think people struggle to achieve certain goals is because they underestimate those two things. Everything is inputs and outputs. If you want a certain output, you have to provide the appropriate inputs for long enough to get the desired output.
One of the cardinal rules of college, If your professor recommends something, just do it.
It's the same if you're dungeon Master gives you a hint that there might be dire consequences for your actions.
When people are warned they will fail and still fail because they didnt listen to the warning is always mind boggling 😂
> If your professor recommends something, just do it.
Sounds-to-me like a dangerous pattern. First its your college professor. Then it's a cop. Then it's a despot.
@@rabbitcreative also it's just not true sometimes lol, plenty of students are warned that trying to learn to a test a day/night before won't work, and while there's plenty examples where that's true, there's also plenty examples of where they're (profs) proven wrong by them
@@rabbitcreative Always gotta make something political, huh.
@@IEgOImkAwxeverything IS political though if you have enough awareness, which you clearly don’t.
@@user-yk1cw8im4hthat’s a sad way to approach life
Video wasn’t rushed enough to remain true to the topic. Had to play it at 1.5 speed to fully immerse myself. Other than that no notes, great job.
I definitely observed similar things when studying and I'll admit, I can tend to goof off with work from time to time, but I never feel good about it if I can't help it. I prefer when I can goof off because I am waiting on something coming from someone else, so that I have a good excuse. Now, enterprising people might say "well, can't you prepare something else in advance" and sometimes that's true and if I'm very motivated, like early on in a project I'll do that, but if I feel I'm ahead of estimation on deadline and can take a few hours to catch my breath and mentally restore myself for what is to come, that is what I'll do and I'll be able to give my 100% on the coming task as opposed to 60%, because my thoughts will be on the other thing and I'll be exhausted as it is. Some people are slackers though.
14:09 Generally when people are referring to how bad "crunch" is, it's not about crunch it's self; it's crunch culture. The expectation given from a company; it's management, employees, etc. to make you do crunch within your work or otherwise potentially lose your job.
Like there is a certain base understanding especially in game development that it is likely to involve crunch especially if you are coming up to the end of release there's always something that just needs to be done asap potentially hours before you hit gold. And that also involves what you said where members on the team are just putting it off or what have you.
But there is an explicit culture of expected crunch from management and even employees themselves within big game development companies/studios across the board even when it is extremely unnecessary; excruciatingly mentally draining and exploitative. Management cause an expectation, asking you and your coworkers to specifically give overtimed work, even if it's optional they expect you to do it. So when there is ever a round of layoffs or what have you, who do you think they would prioritise getting rid of in the company?
And it generally gets worse since that expectation also goes down onto other co-workers and employees where they put in the effort of crunch and others didn't, they're going to complain about it and be spiteful about it to them. Thinking they did more for the project that other people did and so on and so forth.
Whilst all the while in some cases, the management all start to give it some fancy name to normalise it à la "Bioware Magic".
This is what people are really refer to when they refer to crunch; the culture of it. It really is something we need to entirely weed out as much as possible within this industry because even past recent rounds of layoffs, it only just adds to this industry to continue being a revolving door of people going into toxic work culture environments just to be used and then discarded of if they dont adapt to it.
If that's what people mean by crunch, then I agree with you. But I suspect that not all people define crunch that way.
I used to be a serious procrastinator, so I understand both sides of this to a degree. I think that class did an EXCELLENT job, because it teaches you how to manage time for large projects, something that we're never explicitly taught. I wish I'd had something like that, even if id've failed it, because I probably would've learned how to time manage a lot sooner.
Another great video, thanks Tim :)
I'll be honest and say I'm definitely one of those people who would have left the project until the last few weeks lol! That's why I enjoy my job as helpdesk analyst, I'm aware that I struggle with long term project work that requires a lot of self discipline, so I'm much happier when the work comes to me. Funnily enough, I actually find it less stressful to be very busy and swamped with work than the thought of a project hanging over my head.
I think the situations you've described are where a good manager can really shine. Just applying some gentle pressure without giving the feeling of constantly looking over their employees shoulder can be a good motivator. That being said, it's not your managers job to organise your time and you do need hold yourself accountable/responsible for your own work.
I agree that laziness may lead to crunch. If you goof off and then you feel the breath of a deadline you keep forgetting it's all your own damn fault. But what's the real ratio here? How often it's management's fault and how often it's just people being indolent?
I’m not sure of a numerical ratio, but it’s usually management’s fault. Their job is to manage the schedule, and make adjustments if time is running out. But there is a limit to both those adjustments and the ability to predict issues before they occur.
It's very entertaining hearing your story regarding a large project class at UVA, because the same sort of class still exists and has many of the same issues! I'm a recent graduate from the UVA school of engineering in computer engineering, and we had a number of project focused classes as requirements. They try to reduce the odds of a student getting stuck crunching with mandatory checkpoints throughout the semester, but there were always a few students in these classes who ignored them and were stuck crunching, in my experience. (I mostly stuck to them, and generally did okay!)
man I love the format: topic, topic definition, your story and the explicit moral of the story. great story as always by the way! and yes, I used to procastinate as school but I've never complained about time or blamed on the professor, I always knew that was on me. Of course, now being graduated I do not understimate goals and task on time estimation.
Have a great Tuesday Tim! cheers.
I think time management is a skill just as important to learn as any other major, whether it be students or a giant studio.
I’m in the midst of being absolutely destroyed by engineering finals and your recent uploads have made for nice breaks during studying lol. Thanks Tim.
We had a similar class where OVER 50% was done with a project. It was the intro to Digital Signaling, so the projects were basically creating logic circuits on graph paper. I believe mine was an elevator logic controller with at least 3 floors. I managed to get a queue working, and signal blocking so that if someone was inside the elevator and pushed a target floor, it wouldn't necessarily stop on the way to pick up more people. The bare minimum was to have essentially a dumb platform that had a button on the lift side that went up and down, but features obviously added complexity and that got you a better grade.
I didn't start right away, but around midway of the course. It was a 3-month course starting from "This is what we mean by digital signal, this is an AND-gate..." level. It took me a good three weeks of casual work, or and hour here and there so it was not actually a hard assignment, just time consuming. Drawing the signal work, all the logic gates you needed, creating buffers and blocking signals, very basic stuff if you paid attention in the class and understood the material. Some classmates, mostly those intending on not going to embedded/electronics, were blowing off the course and they obviously didn't even want to get the materials, let alone give it a try.
But as all other classes ended, and we were out partying until late into the night, I come home and check the IRC channel and there are people now realizing that they have a single night to create something that could be returned for a passing grade. I loved the intro class, I found thinking about how to approach a simple problem with even simpler tools and drawing out the logic matrices was fun. So I helped. One guy had to make a detector that could tell which way a disc painted half black half white was spinning, the other needed some sort of simple calculator matrix that I can't quite remember. But in that last night slightly plastered I worked out a decent prototype of both and tutored them enough that they kind of understood what the logic was supposed to do so they could at least draw out the same logic on graph paper in their own doodles instead of mine. Both of them stayed up all night and managed to turn in something that enabled them to pass a class by morning.
Time management is a skill that took me a long time to figure out and I still struggle with it. Though I also didnt know I had ADHD for the longest time or how to manage that. I remember doing my senior project half my team took forever to even respond to messages. I had to take a lead role in managing what we can do with this disconnect and it made the project a fraction of what I was aiming for. But then I looked at a girl in a different group who always complained about people in her group. I looked back realized she made it 1000 times more stressful by doing all the heavy lifting. She ended up driving a wedge deeper into the group making it even harder for the others to work with her. I guess what im trying to get at is that it seems easier to just ad more weight to your pack instead of taking the time to empty yours and distribute the load.
Good morning, Tim, it’s us, everyone.
Hi commenter, it's me, replier.
@@fullgooseloot Hi replier it's me, recursive replier.
Hi recursive replier, its me, print job
🤣🤣
I really find these stories so engrossing.
I'm sure someone's asked and it's probably been answered, but I likely missed it- just WHAT is the cool spinning glowing ball on the display case behind you sir? Thanks for putting out so many of these daily dives into your life. It's the highlight of my evening after work getting to see what you're talking about next 👍.
I feel like the nuance of this conversation is lost because to us outsiders crunch is Just the horror stories and the terrible processes and outcomes, while for industry people like yourself it's a much more broader category of events. I don't think doing overtime just before shipping a game and people not seeing their families for months are in the same ballpark. That's why I appreciate your perspective.
As a software engineering grad, I totally understand the issues and more often than not, it is the project team members time management issues. There was once for a class project, we needed to make a functional Sudoku game. We didn't need to write algorithm logic to generate the puzzle, we just need to make the game a functional one. Many teams didn't do anything until the last few weeks before submission. The lecturer then had us demo our game on the submission day and explained how our game works, how our GUI was designed and the scripts behind it. Many teams resorted to other friends giving them a similar one and couldn't explain anything, for some the game wouldn't even work. Those that took that module and project seriously got A grade while many others had to retake the module in the next semester.
To me it really seems like a management failure if you let your employees not work for months (and probably miss deadlines, etc. Without changing someting till the last weeks). I feel like the univetsity example only highlights how important intermediate goals are in contrast to only one big goal in the end. If one is aware of these issues, it is ones responsibility to try and circumvent them, in my opinion(at least if you are interested in success). Either way, thanks for the insight!
You’re right, and that’s why milestones are a great way to schedule intermediate development goals. And while some people need monthly ones, some need weekly, and a few daily. And some people will complain about the milestones being too long, but when you shorten them, they complain about being micromanaged.
I actually quit a QA tester job at a small game company exactly because of the kinds of people you're describing in this video. I could tell that in the near future I would be asked to stay longer at the office to test things that should've been done MONTHS ago. At the same time, I was seeing people play with nerf guns in the office, or add "pranks" into the build instead of working on what they actually had to do. I tried talking to management and nothing was done, but it wasn't just management's fault. Some of those people would just do that no matter what, and they weren't fired so they dragged the whole team down.
And this is why sprints are important.
I really appreciate your perspective on the industry. I also enjoy the technical side. Please keep doing all of these.
I didn't understand the programming part of this, but it was still a great account of a task that required *serious* effort.
The task is an important task that often crops up in software very, very often: scheduling. It's not an easy one, and there are next to no easy or optimal solutions.
I've written schedulers in daemons to figure out how incoming input should be prioritised and grouped for processing. I've written realtime scheduling loops to allow sensor platforms to communicate with each other. I've written I/O control loops to give back fast availability results from a domain registrar I worked for that included a scheduler that pooled queries from multiple sources and spat them back. I've written game loops that have to take input, adjust related entities in the game's simulation while making sure that the sprite multiplexor caused minimal flicker, and any audio that needed to be played had enough CPU time while possibly streaming data in from a disc, hopefully a HDD.
I'll be writing yet another scheduler this Friday to help make some network infrastructure more responsive.
Schedulers are everywhere. Where there are tasks that need to be juggled in some form, there will be schedulers. You're very lucky if you somehow avoid them and very unlucky when you encounter a task best solved by one and you don't know how to implement one.
I really like this story, gives a different perspective on crunch
Honestly, learning to set your own time management and understand how much time you actually need to do your work is such an underrated life skill that doesn't really come into focus until your last years of university.
Me and my peers who did an industry year before finishing our CompSci degrees just treated it like work by the end. We were still stressed to the eyeballs finishing deadlines, but afterwards we could just relax and focus on exams like they were nothing.
As a programming teacher (high school), this sounds very familiar… I have a lot of students who are used to being able to do things at the very last minute. They think of themselves as "good under pressure" and their previous experiences tell them that when a techer says "you need to get started right away", they don't have to listen because it'll work out anyways. This is the curse of the high-achieving student… Sooner or later though, often in my class, they hit what I like to call "the Wall"; the point in your journey where you can't just surf along on being kinda smart and good on your feet and good under pressure. Suddenly you NEED to study, you NEED to put in the work.
I mean, I was the same. I didn't reach the Wall until college; I just surfed on through high school by having some basic smarts and being decent under pressure.
I think the sooner you reach the Wall, the better. Because then the bad habits haven't solidified quite as much. And I think it's almost impossible to TELL someone they need to start studying; as long as their experiences tell them otherwise, they won't listen. They need to get burned, at least once, to understand and change their behavior.
Tim: Tells a story to make a point about time management and crunch.
Me: I wonder what the full spec of that project were, it sound like an interesting challenge.
Sounds like the story that always happen during my college time. Reminds me to what my lecturer said about "Lightning Printing" which is other way of saying "Working on your homework as fast you could".
Hey Tim! I was wondering if you had some fun anecdotes and insights about how to integrate stealth mechanics within non-stealth games like The Outer Worlds or Fallout. It seems like many games in that genre end up with the "Skyrim Stealth Archer" syndrome where one playtstyle is so safe or so dominant that players tend to gravitate towards it, but I'm curious what measures you can take behind the scenes to prevent it.
I did a CPU scheduler in college, it was not that big of a deal. Also did a full C compiler without using lex and yacc. That was a much bigger deal but still not something to require crunch. There were a couple really late nights getting the states layed out and correct and once that was done the coding was not bad. I think the real issue here is some people are far quicker at coding and I noticed that right away in school. A few people could pound it out very quickly and most people were much slower and some people were hopelessly slow. It's probably not popular to say it but the 80/20 or even 90/10 rule applies to programmers very strongly. I would also say that it is still a a management issue because like you say many are leaving early or coming in late and I am sure many of them while they are there have much less output. Some of the people I've dealt with would have basically negative output once the tasks get complicated enough and the team is large enough. Imagine if NASA was run by a bunch of MBAs, what a disaster it would be. The moon landing would never have happened for sure. Yet that is often how a lot of the most complex software is made and a lot of terrible employees never get corrected or even get special commendation because they are good at appearing busy or simply promote themselves. From watching these videos I think a big reason fallout came out well is that it started with a few good people and the idea and technology were more or less set before any kind of release or schedule was dreamed up. That would be the ideal way for all game projects to work because the software part needs to be hammered out and certain early on. Otherwise you get a buggy mess or else you wind up making the exact same walking simulator every other stupid company is making.
It gets complicated when people WANT to work, but cant, because there is a bottleneck or some previous step is not finished. Like in your class. Imagine you have to work with someone else, who just delays working on the project since there seems to be enough time left or is otherwise busy.
Had a project in my 3rd year where you had to create a dynamically allocated hashtable that stores the total occurrences of word pairs in a batch of text. It needed to grow by a specified factor whenever the hashtable reached a specific size, and if any memory leaks were detected it was an instant fail. The project was given (I think) day 1, and the professor warned us to start soon cause it’s 10% of the grade. I think like 80% of the class has memory leaks every year. Very few people fulfill the full requirements and the memory leak requirement is often dropped
I procrastinate and crunch too often but I suppose I can be "proud" that I never complain, I own it.
Reminds me of a Europe between World World Wars history class I took and people complained about a map being on the test. People are very complain trigger happy haha.
Crunch is bad! thanks for another video Tim :)
I'm currently in technical school for an associates, and I struggle a lot with time management. I tend to get stuff done in large chunks, and I just can't do the "read a little bit a day" thing to get through a book chapter - I need enough time and energy after work to plow through one class just to make sure its all fresh in my mind, and if I can't do that every night, stuff piles up on my Friday and Sunday off days.
Totally agree, always the same people at my work with the same problems.
Yep. On my pathway I realized just how lazy most college students are. Only a portion seemed to do all the assignments, and an even smaller portion actually studied regularly to achieve high grades. This seems less prominent in grad school, but it makes sense. Felt like a good amount of undergrad folks were just there to have a good time and waste their future earnings by accruing debt.
Took the same approach in university. Was able to manage my time, but as consequence had very few in-program friends. Two decades later I still question what would have been more valuable; the good grades or the “connections” going into the real world.
What about the serious skills you learned? I’d argue that you probably got that alongside good grades
@@slayasloth Yes, which is what I decided had the most value at that time. Unfortunately, the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” holds weight, even if it shouldn’t. My thought here is I believe there was a social cost by always hitting the lab instead of the pub. Obviously will never know for certain without a time-rewinder.
Have to say Tim it's truly a pleasure watching your videos :)
hey Tim can you talk a bit about numerous sequence breaks that you implemented in your games ? like in fo1 talking to the dumb mutant at necropolis will grant you a quick access to the military base and in the same game you can convince morpheus to take you directly to the master and I'm pretty sure there also was an interesting one in arcanum but I can't recall the details at the moment sadly
People coming in late and leaving early is a management problem.
If they can institute a crunch period they could also enforce people sticking to their hours and track short term goals.
I am very much aware of crunch
I used to have to study a lot before the exams when I wasted time doing other things
When I took proper notes and did my homework it was very easy to study for exams
Seems like it's the same in the office world
You worked first, played later, those who played first and worked later failed is how I describe it. Generally that is how I got through engineering school also, ie not much time for fun.
Great video, time management is such an important skill
fascinating. all students could use a single "time management" project like that.
I think the problem in the end is that good management requires clear-eyed accounting for the failings of human nature; you are repsonsible for the output of the people under you, even if they are goofing off. And so it ends up kind of being personally frustrating to see people you know were doing nothing complaining, but unless management thinks they have somehow managed to hire the world's only 100% productive workforce they have to account for this.
Of course, this does result in a fallback to your previous maxim of "money" when one inquires "then why doesn't management simply allow more time"...!
People need to start realizing college isn’t real life, the purpose of academia is not to mimics real life. The environment and settings are fundamentally different, and have different rules and objectives. So no, don’t tell me “it’s just like in real life”
I wonder if the code to enter mariposa military base was based on something:
010597
It looked like a date to me so i was wondering
I don’t mean to sound rude, but most people are either just too stupid to see the long term vision, or are on a team and want equal pay, but don’t want to contribute equally. Your list of reasons why a project has problems is so accurate. I won’t name my employer, but you summed up about 30% or more of the employees.
finally a video about pringles
You got me again, Tim. I thought this would be about chocolate.
Can I give more than one thumbs-up to this video? lol
I went to a technical art school with an accelerated timeline and half of the classes were like this (though maybe not as intense), so it was pretty much drilled into our heads when it came around to graduation. Hearing about 'the crunch' of nowadays makes me think of similar thoughts to yours, though I'm not as articulate about explaining them.
Clearly an important lesson
As someone who has done some programming but didn't take many computer science or engineering classes in school. I'd be interested to hear more about your time in school.
have we gotten a showcase of your shelves yet? really interesting in all that is there
Fairly tangential but i still get the occasional nightmare that i have a huge project/essay due very soon i forgot about. I've been out of school for close to a decade haha
Interesting video Tim! I'd like to hear your opinion if mental health/disorders were taken into consideration. Does workflow depends on staff's mental health condition and if it were to be hindered, how would it disrupt workflow and could potentially lead to further crunch. Do companies have recreational activities to help boost morale or is it ought to be expected that developers should already have an established type of discipline to keep the project moving forward.
Also if you're reading this, hearing your insights is very comforting to me, these videos helps relief a lot of stress that's built up from a busy weekend and it helps me decompress a lot so thanks.
I own my laziness at university. I had a project just like that and repeated the class. Lesson was learned lol
You have to put your working hours on a timer if you want to get some actual work done. By actual work I mean, work in silence or with non-disruptive background music. Most people that work in video-games do maybe 1 or 2 hours of *actual* work a day at best, and the bigger the company is the worse this metric gets. The 8 hours they work on paper are most made of slack work, that is working but paying less than 50% of your attention to the work and instead: listening to videos or podcasts on the background, checking your phone every 5 minutes, chatting with coworkers, having meetings, reading and writing emails. If you are a game developer none of these are actual work, none of these things will get a game done, these are padding you put in between the actual work.
Hi Tim, can you do an updated video on the Fallout TV show? Would love to hear your thoughts on the new 'updates' to some of the Fallout 1 areas in the later episodes (avoiding revealing mega spoilers to the chat).
In my experience - most crunch happens because of scope creep, arrogant developers, and/or poor communication between the devs and management.
You can place blame for these things on both sides for sure. But I don't think it really compares to the story you've told. Doing one clearly defined thing alone is very different than doing it in a team, in an "agile" environment, where goals might be constantly shifting.
I agree. I just wanted to show an example of crunch where the task is clearly defined and solo, so there is no finger pointing possible.
I put in my earbuds for once to watch Tim’s video and noticed pup was quietly snoring throughout 😂 is this a common occurrence?! I feel like I’ve missed out until now
It’s very common. She settles in under my desk as I’m getting ready to record, so she’s there for a lot of the videos.
Aborbs
To comment on the video contents itself - if you were ever to do a crunch pt.3 - I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on if you happened to find yourself in crunch circumstances TODAY (knowing what you know now) how would you approach it to give yourself the best opportunity of a positive outcome / least amount of pain caused to you or your team?
This video is giving me PTSD
I had a project similar to this for an algorithms and data structures course, I also started asap and got a perfect grade, the people who started at the end of the semester did NOT do well and were begging me for help by the end of it lol
Hey Tim 👋🏻
I recently watched your bad games video and it left me compelled to ask you a few questions!! :-)
Do you think it’s important to be analytical of negative qualities/aspects of a game? And when does it cross the line from constructive feedback to narcissistic/venomous toxic behavior?
*Context to the question if you’d like to read*
I was very critical of devs and using lots of broad generalizations. But I had 0 clue what I was talking about. I knew nothing of how the industry worked and how much control higher ups and executives of corporations have over the finished product and I never considered how folks in the industry go pour their hearts and souls into a game and that no one goes out of their way to make a bad game on purpose. I think a lot of the the vitriol you see online stems from either narcissists or passionate folks who don’t quite understand the process. That still doesn’t excuse the behavior regardless.
it is an amazing part 1, an ever better part 2
i like nestle crunch though
Damn I wish I was more like you Tim!
Hey Tim - what jumps out at me about your story is that both you and the young lady not only understood the value of time management but also had a plan for managing the project as well. Leading up to the class/project, were you taught how to think through projects, identify key milestones, plan the processes needed to meet each milestone, etc.? I ask because I believe there's a lack of teaching how to scope projects thoroughly and plan the work so it isn't overwhelming. If you say "yes, we were all taught how to do this", then the fault 100% falls on the student. I could be wrong, but I would attribute a lot of what's considered "crunch" to individuals not knowing how to manage their workloads.
Part of that class was learning how to do software engineering projects. We met a couple times a week, and every time, the professor reiterated that we should have gotten started, that certain modules should be written first, and he provided data sets for us to test with. In a real sense, the project was an exam in coding and management.
So what I hear is that managments job is to balance the inherent cost of setting a deadline too far away with the cost of nosing into your business too often :D
I think an interesting question is: why did that happen? What were the reasons that you and the other student worked one way on that project (and succeeded), and so many others worked another way (and failed)?
I wish I knew. It was our fourth and final year of engineering school. Other students had talked about this class for years. We were all prepared for such a class.
And yet...
Is it not a manager's job though to "crack the whip" as it were for people who come in late / leave early don't meet milestones?
Great story!
Well, basic dialectics, nothing is purely dependent on one side, since absolutes are abstract
Tim that new mic is sounding crunchy 🧑🍳👌
I ran a free online bootcamp to teach people how to build real-world cloud projects. We had 10,000 registered, with 50,000 other people in the backlist. The concern was how are we going to grade all these people? This bootcamp went on for 4 months, I published a 100 hours of videos, ran office hours. Every week I knew what we wanted to build next but I didn't all the instructions down, we built the bridge as we crossed it.
Every week, 40% of students dropped off. Near the end we had 500 submitted (incomplete), 100 (completed, but major bugs) and then about 30 people shipped it working, and 3 people who actually did what I asked which was to go beyond the instructions. It made grading easy because it widdled down so fast.
When I asked other private schools about this completion rate, they all said that pretty much what it looks like at our school.
So yeah Tim story still holds true here.
Hi Tim, love your content, but I have to disagree a bit on what you're saying with this story. How often does a software project actually stay on track from beginning to end with no requirements changes? Your college course had the perfect conditions of a correctly scoped project with no requirement changes. A project like that in the real world is like finding a unicorn. The software engineering industry is infamous for either not being able to give correct time estimates (tripling estimates being a rule of thumb used all-around) or for having project managers changing requirements on you. And that's not even counting getting blocked by other teams, who are subject to their own delays, priority changes, or even re-orgs. I can only imagine it's worse in the games industry, as you're more subject to changing market trends and having to invest in potentially throwaway prototypes to determine if a game/mechanic actually works and is fun. Ultimately what you're describing with people not putting in the base amount of hours is a management issue, through and through. If they're not putting in the required effort, it's management that should be stepping in and addressing it, ultimately managing them out if the behavior persists. But I wouldn't be surprised if the reason this behavior is tolerated is because those underperforming people can be relied upon to deliver in times of crunch, and in the end make up for and even overcompensate for their periods of underperformance. And that makes me suspect they have those periods of underperformance to protect themselves and prepare for crunch they expect to happen, crunch that is often no fault of their own. If management breeds a culture where crunch is tolerated, there's no one else to blame.
I agree that management needs to step in when people are not putting in the hours...but the people not putting in the hours is THEIR issue. Solving it is management's issue. Depending on when the problem is discovered, the solution can be task reassignment, scope reduction, crunch, or even firing.
The point of my story is that these people were well-prepared for this class. Smart, educated, warned...and still this happened. These students were the equivalent of senior personnel, meaning they were expected to need less management and in fact, manage other people if needed (and it wasn't!).
And if this can happen on a small, well-defined project, imagine what can happen on a big project where some features are poorly defined because R&D is needed first. It's not all management's issues.
I have always wondered what people do at work for 8 hours every day. Modern software dev is slow for no real reason. Yes, even accounting for meetings. There's a lot of presenteeism in dev imo. I think most workload can be done in about 4 to 6 hours of coding a day.
Curious -- do you remember what that professor said about how those students could get better at time management?
Random question, but I’ve read Deus Irae and I’ve noticed some similarities between themes, setting (obviously) and characters with your fallout series. Perhaps an inspiration?
I think this is mostly about culture. I trained as an army officer, and EVERYONE were one with the crunch. We had hard deadlines, difficult project etc...
This is because army culture teaches you to spend your time well, punishes you if you don't, rewards you if you do.
I see what you describe from lazy cultures, not lazy people....
A lot of places I've worked, wants that level of self management, but does not tell the employees, and does not reward or punish the presence or lack of it because it is "self evident".... And that is the big disappointment of Leadership.... People will relax and have a good time if you let them, not because they are lazy, but because of.... Reasons....
Yeah sounds like your usual managers' perspective. "It's those pesky workers slacking off". Students & software engineers work modes are nothing alike - it's not a useful comparison (unless you also write 18-week-long tickets in your company but then you've bigger problems than crunch)
You are saying this about programming, but I'm under impression this is true for many (all?) other engineering sectors, I could say the same coming from structural engineering, where your calculations need to be finished on time so the structural elements can be produced on time etc., there is little about reducing a scope (imagine;), but ultimately sometimes, especially at the end there is crunch, really hardly avoidable and few times I have seen everything was pushed back at your leasure, typically meant debt for the company which down the line caused bankruptcy... it's just a harsh reality
Hi Tim, its us, everyone ❤
Good.
I love crunchcat too
Hey Tim, a question: Did you expect people to read game manuals before playing your games, like before then? Or was it completely fine to jump in, and have the player figure out how the game works?
Do all your games have Game Manuals?
You still need to be some degree of good in order for crunch to be effective anyway.
Me watching this… while I should be working: 👀
Hey Tim, Just wondering about the deadline that makes the crunch happen. Would you mind talking to crunch vs pushing out the release date, and how the release date is usually reached in the first place? i.e. Is it imposed by the publisher, or estimated by the team and then set in stone e.t.c.
Once a contract is signed with a publisher for a particular game with a listed set of features, you know how much money they will give you and from that, you have calculated a completion date using your known burn rate. Pushing out a release date requires more money and hence more negotiation with the publisher.