"CD Projekt Red Dev Defends Crunch, Suggests People Have An “Ideological Narrative” Against Them"

I'm glad someone finally had the courage of saying it. All these gaming developer rights journalists/influencers don't give a shit about developers but spreading left wing political propaganda and more clout for their agenda. They are only giving a voice to a small fraction of the industry while extorting the rest to be quiet under threat of cancelation.
 
Umbral said:
You don't get to control other people and their personalities. If Elon Musk wants to work 80 hours a week, not feel obligated to, but wants to. You don't get to tell him he can't and I would never dream of trying to restrain him or others like him. They move us further forward than most of humanity.

If you want to work 25-40 hours a week, fine. I'm not a super industrious person; I'm middling. I'm not gonna pull them down to my level so I can feel better. People are wired differently.
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These people don't work alone. They would, if they could, but they can't.
Once other people's lifes are in your hands, you can maybe have the clarity to hit the brakes and not drag your employees in your workaholic standard of life. Or you can't.

Considering a workaholic/crunching enviroment bad for human life is a good way to avoid overdoing it, both from an employer and employee perspective.

B-universe said:
If, for whatever reason, even against their own best judgement and interests, developers want to crunch they absolutely have the right to.
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I don't agree in the slightest. If you want to work long hours, you should be able to do it only up until a certain point every month, and past that it's ESSENTIAL to have laws that keep people from doing exactly that.
Past that point it becomes exploitation, regardless of the worker's feelings.

If your life is your work you have a problem, and you should solve it instead of making the work enviroment a miserable place for everyone else.
 
Umbral said:
If Elon Musk wants to work 80 hours a week, not feel obligated to, but wants to. You don't get to tell him he can't and I would never dream of trying to restrain him or others like him
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It's not that simple.
Going by your example, by doing so he'd move the market and society expectations with him. He'd also start expecting the same from his employees. That's why there are laws and regulations about it.
He doesn't act in a closed enviroment. Our actions have repercussions.
And we're already way too much slaves to an unhealthy system, let's not make things worse, ok?
 
Miles708 said:
These people don't work alone. They would, if they could, but they can't.
Once other people's lifes are in your hands, you can maybe have the clarity to hit the brakes and not drag your employees in your workaholic standard of life. Or you can't.

Considering a workaholic/crunching enviroment bad for human life is a good way to avoid overdoing it, both from an employer and employee perspective.


I don't agree in the slightest. If you want to work long hours, you should be able to do it only up until a certain point every month, and past that it's ESSENTIAL to have laws that keep people from doing exactly that.
Past that point it becomes exploitation, regardless of the worker's feelings.

If your life is your work you have a problem, and you should solve it instead of making the work enviroment a miserable place for everyone else.
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I would imagine Elon works with people who have a similar mindset. You know what you're getting into if you want to work with SpaceX or Tesla. They're trying to change the world in a lifetime. Time is of the essence. If it's not for you, great, move along. Nobody is being forced to to work. There are incentives to work and if those incentives are aligned with who you are, you'll work voluntarily.

I think this comes down to your desire to control others. What if I want to work past your "certain point" of hours? You don't get to tell me I can't.

There are certain things for which I would work 80 hours a week, other things I wouldn't. Stop trying to control other people. Get in where you fit in.
 
Fuz said:
It's not that simple.
Going by your example, by doing so he'd move the market and society expectations with him. He'd also start expecting the same from his employees. That's why there are laws and regulations about it.
He doesn't act in a closed enviroment. Our actions have repercussions.
And we're already way too much slaves to an unhealthy system, let's not make things worse, ok?
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It really is that simple.

You want to restrict one person so that societal expectations don't get raised to a point that others can't meet. His employees wouldn't likely be his employees if they couldn't keep up. Should we not expect more of people and of ourselves? We should be content with average?

Don't aim high kids, you might make others feel bad if you achieve it.
 
The people writing about crunch know nothing about hard work. Every job I've ever worked or seen sometimes works hours outside the normal 40hr work week.
 
Umbral said:
It really is that simple.

You want to restrict one person so that societal expectations don't get raised to a point that others can't meet. His employees wouldn't likely be his employees if they couldn't keep up. Should we not expect more of people and of ourselves? We should be content with average?

Don't aim high kids, you might make others feel bad if you achieve it.
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We're talking on more broad strokes than the CDProject news here, so I hope i't not OT.

What if you want to aim high and still have a family. Why is that even a choice.

I understand your "likely-minded" argument and you have a point there, but there's also a power imbalance at play, with economic ripercussions for all parties involved.
Ultimately, we're talking about money and status.

Put is simply, you can "aim high" and somehow be prepared to give most of your life to your employer, and some people are cool with that, but it shouldn't be considered normal or acceptable, because this mentality trickle down and affect the lifes of a lot of people.
 
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Miles708 said:
(...)
I don't agree in the slightest.
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You're free to disagree.
Just don't use violence, or the threat of violence, to impose your opinions on others.

If you want to work long hours, you should be able to do it only up until a certain point every month, and past that it's ESSENTIAL to have laws that keep people from doing exactly that.
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You're an authoritarian. Colour me surprised. You have the best intentions. Colour me surprised as well. All authoritarians who have ever lived had the best intentions. All they ever wanted was to save people from themselves. Welcome to that highly dubious club.

In practical terms, you seem to think committed individuals would be dissuaded by whatever piece of authoritarian legislation you'd be able to pass, in a frontal attack against their freedom. That's naïve. People in the IT sector can now work from home like never before.

I think skinny jeans are an abomination that hamper proper blood flow and therefore I will be passing laws banning skinny jeans as of November. Plus, wearing skinny jeans is not only unhealthy for the individual. It puts peer pressure on others to wear the atrocity and destroys any chances of having an aesthetically-cohesive workforce.

Please bear in mind I have the best intentions. I only want what's best for you.
It just so happens that I know better than you do. So don't mind me and the feds while we storm your flat and rummage through your closet, in search of those skinny jeans I have so benevolently passed laws against.

Next on the chopping block: carrot jeans.

Past that point it becomes exploitation, regardless of the worker's feelings.
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It's exploitation for the worker to act according to his own free will?
The absurdity of this remark cannot go unnoticed.

Oh the pious boundless empathy of empathizing so so so so so very much with people that you'll happily rob them of the basic freedom to govern their own lives.

That doesn't sound like genuine empathy to me.

If your life is your work you have a problem, and you should solve it instead of making the work enviroment a miserable place for everyone else.
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I have already commented on the well-being aspect.
Only in a dystopia of hellish proportions would Dear Leader get to write the complete rulebook of other people's professional lives.
 
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ManaByte said:
H2UGEOUKNZCIBA7GPTHLBCFFZ4.jpg
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Looks like an actual mole person.
 
They're not wrong that there's an ideological narrative behind it, there's a lot of people in the industry that are pushing for unions at all cost and also do it primarily for ideological reasons.
The '' crunch '' wasn't even remotely as bad as Jason Schreier made it sound after you look into it.
 
The Fartist said:
The devs stand to make 50K bonuses on average, the average CDPR dev gets paid 70k per year, the average median household income in Poland is just over 5K. CDPR is a private, self funded company.

FUCK OFF JASON.
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where did you get these numbers from because they are very difficult to believe.
 
Miles708 said:
We're talking on more broad strokes than the CDProject news here, so I hope i't not OT.

What if you want to aim high and still have a family. Why is that even a choice.

I understand your "likely-minded" argument and you have a point there, but there's also a power imbalance at play, with economic ripercussions for all parties involved.
Ultimately, we're talking about money and status.

Put is simply, you can "aim high" and somehow be prepared to give most of your life to your employer, and some people are cool with that, but it shouldn't be considered normal or acceptable, because this mentality trickle down and affect the lifes of a lot of people.
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We are talking more broadly but the mentality behind the attacks on CDPR and other companies' labor practices is related.

You can aim high and have a family, but you may never reach the heights of those who choose to forgo that. We have to acknowledge the reality of trade-offs. You cannot have it all. Sacrifices must be made. I want a family and I'm not as industrious as the examples we've been using. That doesn't bother me and I don't expect to be compensated as if I were.

I'm for maximum freedom, but I'll leave it there so we don't get too far off track here. Thanks for being reasonable about our disagreement. Feel free to PM me if you want to talk any more about it.
 
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I will be working crunch this weekend; I wonder if anyone will write an article or complain for me?
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.
.
.
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I hope not? Why, because it is my own damn fault. I underestimated how long a feature would take to build, so now I am getting behind on the project. It is actually the beginning of the project, so it really does not impact it too much at this point, but I like to stay ahead of these things, so they don't snowball into a larger problem down the road. I will work through the weekend to get it done, so I can get the project back on target. I won't be paid extra, because I am salary, and only person who will even know that I am working on it will be the PM.

Crunch comes in all kinds of flavors when it comes to development (or any time managed projects, really). As long as the workers are okay with it, feel they are still being paid fairly, their overall work-life balance is not tilted towards work unfairly, then we can stop with all the articles about it. Crunch is not necessarily a bad thing, it is part of the process. It can indeed be bad: constant unrealistic expectations and timelines, no recognition from management, having to work overnight/sleep in office for months on end, and more. But it really seems like this has become a large topic due to the studios who were abusing their employees so it now generates clicks anytime "crunch" is in a headline. It looks like many studios have made a conscious effort to eliminate as much crunch as possible (and I would say the initial articles about did help bring about change, along with the class action law suit that was brought up against EA about it). However, it now sounds like anytime extra work is required to get the product across the finish line, the websites want those clicks about crunch.

I'll admit, I could be greatly mistaken about this, and this is still a larger issue than I am assuming.
 
I haven't seen articles in the internet complaining about colleges that make kids crunch days and nights on assignments, projects, and exams.

Crunch happens everywhere. There are months in the year where I have to crunch and work weekends in my job. It's normal life.
 
The same mentality in this thread is the reason developers are overworked and discarded. Disappointing and shows that people don't really know what's going on within the industry.
 
There's a vast grey area between what is commonly called "crunch" and ideal work. Roughly 6 weeks of mandatory Saturdays towards the end of an extremely ambitious >7 year project is not at all in line with some of the horror stories we see elsewhere. I'd call this an inconvenient, shitty bit of extra time at worst or devs gladly putting in the work to finish an ambitious piece of work at best. Either way they're receiving the appropriate overtime pay given Polish law (something in direct contention with some of Schrier's other implications), plus a share of company profits.

Just shouting "CRUNCH!" at every bit of extra work is counter-intuitive. It devalues actual severe, crunch which does need to be called out..

Is it far from ideal and could it be better managed? Sure! But to conflate one thing with another as if there's no degree of severity in between only seems to serve clickbait.

Though I'd be more inclined to give them some benefit of the doubt relative to a lot of other companies, I'm not defending this because its CDPR, I'm defending them because as it stands, the evidence presented isn't anywhere near damning. Also, it's strawmanning to say defending one distinct instance of "crunch" is somehow defending some or all other instances.
 
Eh. They deserved the minuscule flack they got for publicly grandstanding how they'll make sure they won't have their team doing crunch.
 
Going to have to disagree with this. No one forced them to fucking make those statements about crunch trying to fucking virtue signal. So clearly this about face, 180 and them clearly doing crunch when they stated otherwise more so has to do with their comments prior to this.

Thats what happens when you go out of your way to pretend to be godly and can do no wrong. They should have just left it alone and stopped making those dumbass statements. That MTX story only went as far as it did because they are the fucking ones talking about no MTX and "we leave greed to others" etc and then like "also btw we do partake in da MTX, let us explain".

Who put a gun to their head from the media and told them to make these statements that clearly contradict each other?
 
I mean I have experience in financial services where we have busy seasons.

I've worked weekends and 12 hour weekdays on lead up to project delivery. I wouldn't want anyone to feel bad for me since we get remuneration for those hours. What an asinine hill to die on for the journalists.

This is so much more common in every industry than these tools can imagine.
 
I don't see a problem. CD Projekt Red only stated that they work to minimize the amount of time in crunch, not to eliminate it. So as long as it's not superfluous and is measurably shorter than their prior crunch times (for similar work), they will have at least kept their word.
 
Kokoloko85 said:
Well theres been some bad stories about them a few years ago from employees
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Yes but in Poland there is law. Every hour over 40 is paid 50% more and on weekends 100% more.
And you must have 12 hours of time before another day. So if you start 8am, you can work max to 10pm.
It's just good money
 
PresetError said:
I'm glad someone finally had the courage of saying it. All these gaming developer rights journalists/influencers don't give a shit about developers but spreading left wing political propaganda and more clout for their agenda. They are only giving a voice to a small fraction of the industry while extorting the rest to be quiet under threat of cancelation.
Click to expand...

We live in a capitalist society. If the West doesn't want to crunch India or China will. :messenger_face_steam:
 
Oh, beam me up, Scotty.

CDPR getting all defensive about bad pr. LOL. Like that wasn't expected.

Also, the 10% bonus - all 'developers' get a 10% bonus of the profits? Gross profits? Net profits? What constitutes a 'developer'? - all one thousand employees are developers? Nah, this wouldn't be CDPR pulling yet another pr move on us? LOL.
 
Compsiox said:
The same mentality in this thread is the reason developers are overworked and discarded. Disappointing and shows that people don't really know what's going on within the industry.
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This doesn't really make sense. If devs were discardable then it would mean the skillset is cheap commodity. It definitely isn't. The higher you go in proficiency or expertise the less people who are on the same level. If devs were discardable you'd see them brought in as contractors mainly, like artists. That's why art is easy to outsource and devs aren't. It would be easier and cheaper to bring in 4 extra developers for 3 months than have a 'crunch' period. The problem is they can't. That's true in every job - the more important and critical you are to one particular area, the more you will be depended on. These guys have vacation entitlement, days for illness, personal days, compassionate leave, paternity leave etc.

We need to stop making out that these guys are in mineshafts for 14 hours a day.
 
I guess crunch is only bad when EA or Ubisoft does it. /s

Eventually they gotta push it out to release. So any passionate developer will be painstakingly trying to put the finishing touches on it before it goes out to all their fans.

I think the problem lies if they do it for months or years.
 
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I strongly disapprove of crunch, and certainly hope studios would do away with it as much as possible. So no, I'm not really going to defend their decision to crunch.

At the same time, given how commonplace crunch (unfortunately) still is, and how disproportionate the reaction to CD Projekt's relatively limited crunch is - There's no doubt at all many people are dogpiling onto CD Projekt in particular for their little political crusade.
 
"Everything is fine and people are just making us look bad" - Person who doesn't want to look bad

Been a dev for over a decade. You want an honest opinion on crunch? You don't ask management. You don't ask team leaders. You ask the guy on the ground, and you ask him in private. Everything else is bullshit and company lies.
 
PresetError said:
I'm glad someone finally had the courage of saying it. All these gaming developer rights journalists/influencers don't give a shit about developers but spreading left wing political propaganda and more clout for their agenda. They are only giving a voice to a small fraction of the industry while extorting the rest to be quiet under threat of cancelation.
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most game journos i know in person ( and i know a lot) dont give a fuck about devs,they rip apart games making fun of the hard work of people for years,but now this "crunch" its on the new because its the fashionable thing on the virtua signalers ranking ,et voila

been a dev for 25 years myself and there is a lot of grey areas on crunch,its not black and white,if you want excellence you will have crunch on all the facets of life,working,doing exercise,bodybuilding if you want to be a mediocre loser like these journos of course you want to do the minimun
 
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I appreciate all the hard work they are pouring in. Cyberpunk 2077 will be the first game I've bought at full price in quite a long time.
 
Siri said:
Oh, beam me up, Scotty.

CDPR getting all defensive about bad pr. LOL. Like that wasn't expected.

Also, the 10% bonus - all 'developers' get a 10% bonus of the profits? Gross profits? Net profits? What constitutes a 'developer'? - all one thousand employees are developers? Nah, this wouldn't be CDPR pulling yet another pr move on us? LOL.
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You were asked to quote people blaming Crunch on developers, one of your allegations. When you finally did, it turns out you were wrong.
I suppose this is going to be a theme with you.

Two CDPR devs have now publicly expressed their opinions on crunch. They disagree with you. Evidently, you're free to frame it and dismiss it as them bootlicking.

Because you're not going to present evidence in support of your allegation, know that when others possibly frame and dismiss your statements as those of a "CDPR hater", the two of you will be on equal footing.

As for the bonuses, as the term implies it's an extra. it's their money, their decision. They an give it to the cleaning lady, or smoke it like marijuana. 10% is probably an average, but I wouldn't know. It might not be fair to reward high-level developers and administrative juniors the exact same way.

Compsiox said:
The same mentality in this thread is the reason developers are overworked and discarded. Disappointing and shows that people don't really know what's going on within the industry.
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The problem is your opinion doesn't seem to square with the opinions of at least two CDPR developers. What substantiates your opinion? What's the reason these opinions should be dismissed in favour of yours?

What's your experience as a game developer been like?

CuNi said:
People defending crunch... that's a bike yikes.
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People defending crunch have for the most part at least presented an argument or two.
The best you could manage was a "bikes yikes".
You're not terribly compelling.
 
cormack12 said:
This doesn't really make sense. If devs were discardable then it would mean the skillset is cheap commodity. It definitely isn't. The higher you go in proficiency or expertise the less people who are on the same level. If devs were discardable you'd see them brought in as contractors mainly, like artists. That's why art is easy to outsource and devs aren't. It would be easier and cheaper to bring in 4 extra developers for 3 months than have a 'crunch' period. The problem is they can't. That's true in every job - the more important and critical you are to one particular area, the more you will be depended on. These guys have vacation entitlement, days for illness, personal days, compassionate leave, paternity leave etc.

We need to stop making out that these guys are in mineshafts for 14 hours a day.
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It's harder to find people to take up senior positions at big studios because their practices chase away that talent. Also the most popular studios like Blizzard definitely have access to a huge pool of people willing to work for the studio and some definitely take advantage of this.

It's a passion industry at the end of the day. Some will fuck with people who are passionate.
 
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