What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to work 80 hour weeks?
Nothing worth it. I've talked to people who have been through the investment bank meat grinder and who got out. One guy went to Silicon Valley. He said tech firms have their own issues but treat him far better.
The gist is: there's a culture of abusive working practices that appears to have becomes self-perpetuating in the way that hazing rituals at US colleges or the army sometimes do. Much of the work is horrendously inefficient, for example, writing long reports for managers that are then never read, or which are read and then ignored, or in which only a single figure is actually needed. Other problems involve managers who have no idea what they want so constantly change their requirements, causing work to be scrapped and redone, but with arbitrary and ludicrous deadlines attached.
Additionally managers think nothing of setting someone a new task to write a large report at 9pm on Friday night, then demanding it be delivered to their private home at 6am on Saturday morning.
Because the workers are young and ambitious, they tolerate this even though they can see that a lot of it is work for work's own sake. And presumably the only ones who make it are the ones who have become inured to the notion that arbitrary work is some measure of self-worth, and thus try to select "the best" by pushing people to the limits and seeing who breaks.
This culture is entirely absent in tech, where if someone is asked to do a task there's a general expectation that the task actually matters and has been thought about - at least a little bit.
I'm just constantly curious why the games industry gets so much shit from every possible angle for employing young ambitious people who are willing to put themselves through the grinder to work on something they enjoy, but when the same thing(actually worse, considering most people there actually don't enjoy it and are in it just for the money) happens in finance that doesn't get any coverage whatsoever, it's just "part of the ritual".
Finance pays a lot better. Game industry just leeches off from enthusiasm of youth.
Or, to put in other terms: games industry squeezes people who joined the industry for a chance of self-expression whereas finance industry squeezes people who generally joined for the money and the grind.
Squeezing is not nice but at least in finance you know what you got into.
Right but that's not always true, is it? There was such a huge backlash for rockstar and their overtime on RDR2, but I know people at Rockstar, the bonuses are insane and people there work themselves so hard hoping for that bonus. Isn't that the same in the finance industry? Work really really hard to maybe get in that crazy pay bracket where you're basically sorted.
I'm not particularly trying to defend the games industry here, I'm just curious why the popular culture lately is so keen to cover the hard work being put into games but not into other industries which work even worse hours.
I presume on the average finance industry employees are better paid than gaming industry, though. At least stereotypically your average banker is a well off professional whereas the game industry stereotype is closer to the abused creative industry wage slave (who needs unions?).
RDR2 was a guaranteed hit. Even if it sucked, it still would have sold a million copies. R* could have delayed it by a year a la Cyberpunk and still been fine.
The fear is when you’re in a company where your project might lose funding if you don’t complete eight months’ worth of work in two months time. That’s when the games industry goes from abusive to masochistic.
I think you're just projecting what you're familiar with. People who know people in investment banking (or big law) are very familiar with practices there and there are also any number of books that have been written about it.
I suspect it’s to do with the money involved. That game developer doing months of crunch is likely already underpaid (compared with a similarly skilled and experienced dev working in another industry) when one only considers their contracted working hours. The person working similar crunch hours in finance is likely making tens of thousands more. For better or worse people tend to think very little of bankers and the prevailing attitude is that they’re making too much, instead of the more sensible approach that others are paid too little.
It does get coverage, often when something terrible happens like an intern committing suicide. But finance has been like this for decades and lots of people are aware of it, it's not news. The games industry crunch-time phenomenon is less well known outside of the software industry.
Also, my impression is that after the EA "wivesgate" thing or whatever it was called, practices at the bigger studios got better. But maybe that's just rumour and speculation. I'd expect long hours at small firms no matter what industry they're in, by the nature of being smaller.
I guess in finance it's cultural knowledge that this sort of thing goes on, there are not many surprises. The work-life balance of the games industry is not so embedded in our collective consciousness.
I only vaguely recall the conversation. I think they were cultural. Tech was more full of people who genuinely bought their own hype, even when it was self-evidently ridiculous. Basically the sort of issues that the show Silicon Valley picked up on. It wasn't anything super serious from a work/life balance perspective. More of the "feel" of the place.
Nothing worth it. I've talked to people who have been through the investment bank meat grinder and who got out. One guy went to Silicon Valley. He said tech firms have their own issues but treat him far better.
The gist is: there's a culture of abusive working practices that appears to have becomes self-perpetuating in the way that hazing rituals at US colleges or the army sometimes do. Much of the work is horrendously inefficient, for example, writing long reports for managers that are then never read, or which are read and then ignored, or in which only a single figure is actually needed. Other problems involve managers who have no idea what they want so constantly change their requirements, causing work to be scrapped and redone, but with arbitrary and ludicrous deadlines attached.
Additionally managers think nothing of setting someone a new task to write a large report at 9pm on Friday night, then demanding it be delivered to their private home at 6am on Saturday morning.
Because the workers are young and ambitious, they tolerate this even though they can see that a lot of it is work for work's own sake. And presumably the only ones who make it are the ones who have become inured to the notion that arbitrary work is some measure of self-worth, and thus try to select "the best" by pushing people to the limits and seeing who breaks.
This culture is entirely absent in tech, where if someone is asked to do a task there's a general expectation that the task actually matters and has been thought about - at least a little bit.