Alex St. John: Shut up and be grateful for your 80 hour weeks
"Wage slaves" should "shake off mental shackles" says multi-millionaire. [UPDATE: St. John's daughter blasts his "toddler meltdown"]
[Update] By now you've probably all read Alex St. John's awful post about crunch in the games industry, but you may not be aware that Amilia St. John (his daughter who also got into tech) has replied with a lengthy post of her own. While the entire thing clearly has an air of family drama about it (she and her father have been estranged for years), it's well worth your time to read her rebuttal, which not only slams her father's "toxic waste trash fire," but more importantly talks about why getting more women involved in tech is vital.
"Women make up 29.1 percent of the tech industry, but only 16.6 percent of technical jobs. Women in technology is personal to me, and I feel it is my responsibility to share my experiences with other women," she says. "In a world where so many women are finally gaining the opportunity for a voice, the tech industry is quiet. And what my father seems to so fundamentally misunderstand is that this is NOT, as he insinuates, a result of women "claiming victimhood."
Original story:
If you're in the games industry and you've been on the internet in the last 48 hours, you've probably already caught the whiff of the fire ignited by Alex St. John's guest post on VentureBeat last Saturday: a virulent, aggressive and oddly self-aggrandising screed from a well known and hugely successful industry figure which bemoans the privilege and laziness of any developer who isn't willing to work 80 hour+ weeks in order to further their art.
Predictably, it's roused some passionate reactions.
"I can't begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work."
Whilst we won't link to the original piece here, if you've not read it already it's worth doing so via the lens of Rami Ismail, who penned a response to the post which seethed with barely restrained ire and disbelief.
In his frank assessment of St John's views, Ismail repeatedly questions the core assumptions of the original: that games development "is not a job, it's an art" and therefore anyone performing it has no right to regular hours or fair pay; that "pushing a mouse around" can never be considered hard work; and that anyone who doesn't want to put at least 80 hours a week into it is "taking a job from somebody who would really value it".
A few of Ismail's choice responses (in italics) to St. John's VentureBeat article follow, inline with St. John's original wording in bold.
"Many modern game developers have embraced a culture of victimology and a bad attitude toward their chosen vocations. They complain that the long hours and personal sacrifices great games require are a consequence of poor management."
"And rightfully so, structural crunch is a horrible attitude and can really damage someone's ability to function and enjoy their dream job."
"They want to pretend that they can turn an inherently entrepreneurial endeavor like game development into a 9-to-5 job."
"Wait, only entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial. People that are employed aren't entrepreneurs. The whole definition of entrepreneur is that if you mess up, the risks are for you. The definition of employee is that you work the hours assigned to you for a wage".
"Somehow, these people have managed to adopt a wage-slave attitude toward one of the most remarkable and privileged careers in the world."
"I'll give you that game development is a remarkable job, and I'll give you that it's a generally privileged career, but 'wage-slave'? Isn't that a tiny bit hyperbolic?"
It goes on, and it's very much worth a read, whichever side of that yawning divide you decide you're on. In it St. John also expresses disbelief that anyone could ever burn out whilst working in games, despite his ignominious exit from Microsoft; as well as "shock and disappointment" that his advice to developers to work insane hours for little reward so that their art can make millions for multinational publishers is so often met with rage.
Since publishing, the VB piece has attracted almost universal disdain, prompting St. John to follow up on his personal blog with a few more choice opinions.
"...caused shock and outrage among lazy millennial hipster game developers who think that long hours weren't priced into their paychecks when EA hired them"
"I just wrote a guest column for VentureBeat that apparently... can't figure out why... has caused shock and outrage among lazy millennial hipster game developers who think that long hours weren't priced into their paychecks when EA hired them," he writes. "They're really upset at the suggestion that 'Thinking' isn't really hard work.
"It's really interesting how IMPORTANT it is to these folks to pretend that making successful games isn't ALWAYS hard work and that the people who do it professionally are still SURPRISED that the expectation of hard work is already priced into their salaries when they took the job. It's also interesting that everybody insists on pretending that big companies like EA and Activision don't give all of their employees stock option packages as incentives to make hit games that drive up the companies [sic] share price. EA used to have a lot of unhappy employees who hated the work conditions, they left and founded Zynga. That's how we roll in the game industry!"
He continues.
"I made my first millions along with thousands of other kids at Microsoft working 120hrs/wk for years. It was a big sacrifice. None of the people I knew from that era regretted the incredible experience and skills they developed in that environment or the attitudes they cultivated towards hard work. It paid off for most of them. What's sad is that all of these successful people don't talk about the values that got them there because they don't need the hassle of being screamed down for being 'wealthy beyond good taste'. When did it become gouache [sic] for successful people to talk about what they really did and valued to achieve success?
"I never graduated from high-school, many of Silicon Valleys legendary founders never graduated from college. There's a reason for that phenomena that is worth understanding. Is it interesting how enraged so many people get when somebody successful talks about how their attitudes towards work hold them back? They really WANT to be identified as victims for some reason."
"Is it interesting how enraged so many people get when somebody successful talks about how their attitudes towards work hold them back? They really WANT to be identified as victims for some reason"
Whilst St. John's comments haven't attracted a great deal of sympathy, he's making explicit a culture which still persists at an intrinsic level in many parts of the industry, with a recent IGDA survey suggesting that up to two thirds of developers are still working massive amounts of unpaid overtime, with 70 hour weeks far from rare. Since, the association has followed up by publishing a list of the best companies to work for should doubling your work week for free not appeal.
All the same, big firms still defend the practice. Back in 2009, Rod Fergusson gave a GDC talk claiming it a necessary part of development, comments which were later defended by then Epic president Mike Capps. More recently, Crytek attracted criticism when it proudly announced that it had fed 11,500 dinners to its team during the development of Ryse, thanks to the evenings they'd spent at the studio. Then, several figures came to the defence of the company, including Warren Spector, Fergus Urquhart and Jason Rubin, although to a lesser degree of vehemence than St. John. Others, like Failbetter's Alexis Kennedy, have expressed different opinions, claiming that "Crunch is Bullshit" and a "a slippery steep-sided pit."
Have you been on the sharp end of crunch? Have you imposed it on your team? Is it a necessary evil, the result of poor management, or merely a chance to revel in joyful culture of development for twice as long as you might normally expect to? Have your say below.
If you have jobs news to share or a new hire you want to shout about, please contact us on newhires@gamesindustry.biz
It's quite scary how openly this guy talks on his blog about manipulating staff for the benefit of the business...borderline sociopathic. What's even scarier is the idea that this is a common mindset amongst company directors. But I'm very grateful to St. John for shining a light on it. Ironically his guest article may well have the exact opposite effect to that he intended...
In the site's entire history this is perhaps the article LEAST likely to require an invitation to express an opinion :)
http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pdf
Seems like a utter K***jockey with no respect for the people who help him make his millions!
Exploitation is exploitation no matter how hard you try to wrap it up in sparkly paper and ribbon bows.
compare to Hollywood, or writing novels, or recording an album ie similar art forms.
The games industry just seems overall, to accept it as normal, where other industries dont?
Edited 3 times. Last edit by Petter Solberg on 18th April 2016 5:21pm
As a long-term business strategy, burning out your employees is not good at all.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Chris Tihor on 18th April 2016 5:57pm
Short crunches can work well, and can help cut-the-crap out of your game. The trouble is that some studios build crunch into their schedule as if it's a natural part of the dev cycle when it should only ever be used in an emergency, and never more than a few months. Despite what St John is saying about "sitting at a desk pushing mouse", the _work_ in done mostly in the brain, and the brain needs a chance to recover or else its functions degrade. That's just plain science.
...Also, if St John thinks that game development is just "sitting at a desk pushing a mouse" then I doubt he can remember anything about ground level game development: Memory loss being a classic symptom of sleep deprivation (most likely from excessive crunch).
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Robert Bantin on 18th April 2016 9:01pm
Possibly because a) other industries have unionized professions and b) there's more care-and-attention to creating "art"?
Considering it more, actually, I think the closest other artistic/entertainment industries get to crunch would be musicians or orchestras touring. A lot of high-profile orchestras have (or at least, had in the past) grueling tour schedules, for example. But then, comparing apples and oranges, there, maybe?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 18th April 2016 6:48pm
Certainly not in my working career.
If you don't make the right design decisions early on then you treble your work load further down the line, and people working with little sleep and constant high pressure don't make good decisions - they churn out code without thinking.
That goes a long way to explaining the early iterations of DirectX.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjJCdCXFslY
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Rafael Brown on 19th April 2016 8:42pm
The thing about defining games design or programming as an art... yes, practising an art is all well and good. Even between contracts I do a lot of writing, I analyse the writing of others to find out how they do the magic, I read about writing and game design, blah blah etc etc.
But the thing is, I am doing that in my own time, by my own choice, and I can stop whenever I want.
It's that last bit that's important.
If I'm exhausted and cranky and burning out on my current project, I can take a break. I can sleep on it. Get something to eat. Do something else for a while. Go look stuff up and proceed at my own pace. And then come back to things with a fresh mind.
A fresh mind is a valuable thing. When you've worked all your life in crappy conditions, for crappy managers, it's easy to forget that work doesn't have to be like that. Ever had a job where you bounce into the office in the morning because a) You're happy to be there and looking forward to playing with your work or talking to your co-workers and b) because you're allowed to wear comfortable shoes and bouncing is actually possible? It's on those days that you stop typing suddenly and say "Oh my god, I've just had the best idea!"
With a decent working environment, people are sick less because they are more rested and less stressed. They pull fake sickdays less because they're enjoying being at work, and they give less grief to their co-workers and receive less in return, causing less stress etc etc again. People who know they will get their time back, or get recompensed for it, are less reluctant to put in overtime when needed - all in all, it's a happy, bouncing sack of ferrets that produces better, fresher work and a much lower employee turnover.
Or you can have the grey office. You know the one. Big concrete towerblock, utterly sealed against daylight, slightly dodgy fluorescent lights that flicker just enough to make your eyelids twitch. Everyone just goes to their desk in the morning and sits with their head down because they are absolutely knackered, and the manager sits in an office overlooking the door in or out to monitor when everyone arrives, leaves or has a toilet break. Everyone's been working unpaid overtime for so long they've forgotten what it's like not to, everyone is stressed and irritable and everyone is scared of losing their job and looking for another one. The employee turnover is probably so high that if they stopped paying the recruitment consultants they probably could pay for all that overtime, and the only idea anyone has had this quarter is the idea to just say "F*** you" and walk out.
Quite simply, if your team is having to work 80 hours, or 120 hours or whatever... then you aren't employing enough staff. Whatever it is you're trying to do, you can't bloody afford it and should do what people do when they can't afford things:
Stop.
Stop stealing from your staff. Stop screwing up your own business. Sometimes no amount of wanting and shouting and motivational posters can make things happen faster - most things have a minimum amount of time in which they can be done. There is a hard limit, and no amount of "Working smarter" can make that happen.
Sure, there might be lots of improvements people can make to their processes, to their communication lines. Sure, even Utopia Inc. will have times when overtime is needed. Most places I have worked, I have leapt into overtime with glee. But management should always remember that unpaid overtime is the equivalent of taking £40 or more from their staff every night. It is not something you are entitled to demand from them in return for the privilege of having a job.
If you have people working 80 hour weeks and long, frequent crunches, you have, quite simply, calculated your budget and timescale incorrectly and it's time to start doing it to the spirit, as well as the letter of the law. And if your investors are the ones pushing for it, someone some time is going to have to stand up to them and say "Well, that's not how long it takes" or they are never going to learn,
And don't ask your staff to bring in their own pens. That's just cheap.
Oh, a sidenote unrelated to Morville's post: I did learn something last year that might be useful to any managers out there who have too much work and not enough staff or money to pay for more.
Secretaries can be enormously useful. Just a temp who can, for example, write up bug reports from your forums in the right format for you to just copy-paste them into the system, turn scribbled bullet points into a proper change log - in general someone to handle the bits of the job that don't need your employee's specialist expertise and experience. Your expert employees should be doing only stuff that needs that big shiny brain you are paying for. Simple clerical work can be shifted onto the shoulders of someone who costs less and is an expert in being organized and lightening the load.
Seriously, best thing I learned all year.
I'm an academic, and we have this too. The attitude is similar - we should all work ridiculous hours because:
- we're lucky to be doing something we love
- all the extra work looks good on the CV/will help get grants in future/etc
- there are lots of junior researchers who'd love to throw themselves at it
Thankfully my current Faculty has a more healthy attitude to things!
Related to my previous post, I completely agree with you. Part of the reason my current team's workload is healthier is because we have very good administrative support. It completely changes how we work.
And trying to in the US: https://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/about/
Someone, start a union.
I mean, to be so full of yourself you must have created Doom, or Starcraft or Shadow of the Colossus, something like that, no?
Because it was a useful piece of software, but I always felt the gameplay was a bit lacking in "DirectX".
/Kudos to Rami for his full answer.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Rafael Brown on 19th April 2016 8:59pm
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Heinz Schuller on 20th April 2016 4:15am
The problem is that truly creative work only a few is still reserved. There you really forget the time. But simply work through code and meet specifications is really nothing where you can bring really great.
It's people like him in position of authority, treating their staff like untrustworthy school kids that should be grateful to work themselves to death to line his pockets, that is usually the cause of the crunch and long hours working on a project that's over promised and under budget to begin with, and indirectly cause the closure of studios..
Sadly it its also people like him that walk away from these messes and get instantly put in that same position of power again, while the workforce has to scramble about and find new work.
There are situations that call for periods of long working hours, and if so it is reasonable to reward the workers rather than soak up the benefits of their hard labour. It's tempting to want to spend all day coding, especially when you are passionate about what you are creating, but as Jared points out, it's all about balance.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Keldon Alleyne on 20th April 2016 3:18pm
Compare the next job ad you respond to, to this, and it'll give you a good idea about whether the company has a top down culture or a more inclusive and open one.
http://www.mindvalley.com/careers
"Mindvalley, an education technology company specializing in innovation in education by introducing wellness, mindfulness and personal development into global education and lifelong learning."
As an engineer, what i see is that they seem to follow what they believe in, but their app is crashing frequently (based on appstore reviews). Great working culture for writers, perhaps, but not for the tech people. Which is typical for modern startups, in my experience.
As every person who has ever read your "article" has said before me, you stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the most untrusted and disgusting human beings in any and all workforces. Enjoy the ridicule.
Precisely. The culture they building is nice, but engineering needs a very different environment. It needs discipline, long-term planning, as frequent unexpected changes both reduce job satisfaction and increase stress.
Another aspect of a culture like that that engineering is not exactly at the top of priority list, and feelings and discussion is more important than facts. Which is toxic for engineering, where the best idea has to win.
John has a good point - management in the games industry is fairly unique. So is the army. But they train their leads.
This is what it feels like to be an expert in an artistic company:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Tom Keresztes on 22nd April 2016 5:17pm
Excellent article!
http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/16/game-developers-must-avoid-the-wage-slave-attitude/
"
Any time I hear this stuff, I tell these people; quit, go make great games on your own, pursue your passion, you’re better equipped to succeed than any of the dozens and dozens of amateur kids I’ve seen retire early while you were still “trapped” in a job you hated and trying to rationalize mailing in a 40-hour work week making video games. To my great shock and disappointment, they never respond to this feedback with any sort of enlightenment or gratitude for my generous attempt at setting them free — usually, I just get rage. Being a victim of their employers has somehow managed to become a deeply cherished part of their core identities and any suggestion that they are far better equipped to rekindle their sheer passion for making games, do a Kickstarter startup with their other talented friends and crank out an original hit game, than a bunch of amateur kids working in Flash, is greeted with a lot of anger. They rant about the value of “work-life-balance”, how hit games can be delivered on a schedule with “proper management” and how they can’t produce their best work when their creative energies are tapped after a long forty-hour work week … sitting … at a desk…. Apparently people can even “burn out” working too hard to make … video games…."
This stands out: I still think Jared nailed it when he said, "Long hours means an employee doesn't know how to find balance, if you can't find balance in one thing…can you find it in others?"
A clear, rested and well taken care of mind is much more effective. The state of flow is when the best code is written, and I guess some people are fooled into thinking they can force it by sitting at the desk for 16 hours a day. First day patches for your gold disk, sure I get that. It may be the case that periods of crunch are unavoidable.
Obviously, this need to be carefully managed, as letting people burning out is bad, and results in the same problem - a soulles LEMON product. Sensible managers ask for features done on time, not for long working hours. Constant crunch is a sign of problematic project or bad management.
I'm not pretending to be this uber disciplined monk of a programmer, I can clock out late, but I put it more down to a lack of self control than passion. Ascribing that behavior to passion rather than admitting a lack of discipline is much more pleasant on the ego, but I would much rather be honest with myself.
An unbalanced life that neglects the social, one's health and most valued relationships, unless it's a prudent sacrifice for the betterment of mankind seems a little unwise. An unbalanced population will topple under its own weight.
You can start with Evan Robinson's article about why crunch doesn't work. He cites several good references.
http://www.enginesofmischief.com/makers/evan/pubs/crunch.html