I don't see how "crunch" culture would ever be ended voluntarily by a company. Most CEOs love it - they get more worker productivity, they meet deadlines more reliably (because they can just scale up hours at a whim) - and at least in the US, (predominantly male) workers are willing to do it.
And as long as you keep the crunch culture, the core development departments will remain predominantly male. The pressure to hire for diversity will mean that other departments where there isn't as much crunch (like HR, billing, etc.) will become female. It's not going to be truly diverse, it'll be segregated.
There is a photo timeline of a cdpr lead dev witcher 1 - 3 where he goes visibly zombie mode due to crunch. Straight quit after witcher 3 but in the meantime they got excellent value. Thats the price - they lost core people due to crunch and the result was cyberpunk. Its a pump&dump strategy for shortterm profits. Longterm its killing the golden goose.
As someone who has taught computer science, grades are unlikely to ever matter because it's really, really hard to assess students in computer science. When you have to grade dozens of different original programs at the same time, it becomes obvious that you're not going to be able to assess them well. So you end up defining a rubric that some students optimize around and do really well, while others don't bother because following a rubric is annoying and boring. So grades reflect your ability and desire to meet objectives defined in a rubric, not how good a programmer you are.
I don't agree that it hurts them long term, because the benefits of being able to make everyone work like crazy are huge. Game development is such a nonlinear process that it's hard to schedule and line up assets exactly where you need them unless you have some flexibility and can make certain groups work longer when they are blocking the critical path. So if you can get away with it, it's worth it to hire smart young 20 somethings and work them until they burn out, instead of carefully managing their schedule to cultivate them over the long term. Your leadership team usually needs to have experience, but they usually make enough money and/or they can manage their hours a bit better than the scrubs at the bottom that you're not going to have an issue with that.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA lets get more diversity hires in, that'll fix the game...
Can't wait for 10.0 to remove any attractive females or suggestive armour from the game.
Computer sciences graduates are mostly males, so going out of your way to disproportionately women or people with mental disorders is a sure-fire way to dilute what little talent there was left developing the game
You get what you fucking deserve
They didnt do that. As said they got their lead core members to quit. It happened even mid development. The replacement was naturally incapable to substitute that loss. They are literally sqeezing as much as they can out now at the cost of higher longterm earnings by keeping the people working at max performance. Crunch is a crutch.
So I guess this means that any man who wants to develop for Blizzard or enter into a senior role needs to move to a country with lower salaries and housing/personal security? Their US workforce can't grow forever, so the only way I see them making this shift in demographics is by firing men over nothing at all, killing employees somehow, huge layoff waves, or shipping off several employees to another global arm of their company where they can make the numbers in the US look the way they promised to.
Yeah this is the deathblow. Any hope for salvage is gone.2. We will increase the percentage of women and non-binary people in our workforce by 50% and will invest $250 million to accelerate opportunities for diverse talent –Today, approximately 23% of our global employee population identifies as women or non-binary. Building on the success that King and other business units have achieved, we will seek to increase our percentage of women and non-binary professionals by approximately 50% – to more than one-third across the entire company – within the next five years and hopefully faster. Each franchise team, business unit, and functional area will be expected to have plans to help fulfill this ambition.
https://www.linkedin.com/business/ta...by-166-percent
https://www.pcgamer.com/how-blizzard...n-just-3-years
Many more articles like this. It's amazing how this push and decline timeline lines up so perfectly. Clearly coincidence.
Oh I agree that it can backfire, and it sounds like you've identified a case where that happened, but I don't think that's the norm. There are a lot of Blizz employees who lasted there a long time (20 years or so), and they certainly worked through a huge number of serious crunches. I think that on the whole, crunch culture increases performance and profits.
Incidentally, I think it leads to a male dominated work culture, and also to some of the craziness we see at these companies (when you're working at a place 70 hours minimum per week, things can get a bit weird in the office).
Between the high turnover rates in the games industry (as is currently being discussed ITT), Blizzard's pushing of more Diverse™ talent, and (mostly-white male) industry vets eventually reaching retirement age, the shift seems like it will likely occur with minimal, if any, deliberate firings. Just may take them longer than they'd want.
Sooo how does this work, talented candidates that are a great fit in a role will have their applications declined if they're male?
Am I missing something or is this just pure idiocy?
Last edited by kranur; 2021-10-28 at 10:32 PM.
Not really. The core areas, responsible for developing the games the drive profit, will most likely continue to be male. What will happen is that supporting departments (in my old company, it was finance and hr), where work schedules are more regular, will become female dominated in order to balance it out. They'll figure out ways to make it look like everything is diverse in the numbers they report (maybe integrate finance and hr people into the development department, for example) but it won't be truly diverse.
Uhm, no? There is like 0% bias in there....
This would be much more harmful for the people like racism and bias all together. Removing our "natural" part is VERY dangerous. Big no no...
It has nothing to do with society and history. It is natural for boys to be interested in games or programming much more than girls, for example. It is natural that a girl focuses on her appearance and clothes much more than boys. Can a boy focus on his appearance and clothes? Of course. Can a girl love games or programming? Of course. But it will be NEVER equal, never. And it's okay, so nature works, you know.
The problem is that you confuse the term "bias". We are not robots, or androids. We have feelings. There are jobs that girls prefer. There are jobs that boys prefer. That is how it works.
The sad thing is that this advocacy has led to a vast majority of negative change. Equality have never been achieved, but quite the opposite. The effort to combat bias achieved nothing but created another (even bigger) bias by force and deepened even more inequality. it's all violent, unnatural.
No, boys are just more in to it, you know... And it has nothing to do with bias. You're looking for problems somewhere where they don't exist
TLDR: The fact that women and men prefer a different kind of work is not bias, but nature. Just trying to do the opposite means bias. 50% equality is utopia, and harms people.
Last edited by Ajko; 2021-10-28 at 11:00 PM.
Just a side note, Dave Kosak is no longer on the Deviation Games website, apart from in a huge wideshot of the entire team.
His profile picture from the team is gone.
Last edited by DingDongKing; 2021-10-28 at 11:10 PM.