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The Declining Work Ethic in Game Development (Jonathan Blow)

icecold1983 said:
WFH needs to be eliminated. People need to go back to the office where they can be better monitored. This was a failed experiment.
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lol if you think people are being monitored in most offices.

i worked 5 days a week in an office for like 10 years before covid hit. i probably put on average 2 good working hours in most days. the only difference now is I can use those other 6 hours to do productive stuff instead of just doomscrolling reddit and watching youtube.

in my experience most people who "work hard" just suck at their job so it takes them longer to do shit (the amount of boomers who can't even use a computer at a basic level is astonishing for example), or they have shitty managers who can't manage expectations (and they have no spine to call them out), or in some cases they just don't really have anything going for them other than work. then you have a small minority who are truly just really passionate about what they do, most of these people get exploited because of this.
 
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He's got a point. Productivity is much lower. I wonder how that suddenly happened ...

 
Garibaldi said:
Get fucked with that bollocks. I worked 70 hour weeks from home during the COVID year. Spent a fortune getting a home office set up. I don't have to deal with all the office cooler chat bollocks, I can just put music on and get what needs doing done.

Why travel to a hot desk shit office with terrible ergonomics to work on a shared connection that's inferior to the one I have at home, punting commits to a server located hundred of miles from the office to run on build servers hundreds of miles away?

The reality of big corpo style development is it's full of talking heads and red tape. It takes far too long to get anything finalised before it's handed off to dev and when it is, we have basically no time to do it properly. It's been slowly going this way for the last 20 years.

Most of the Devs I've worked with in fintech are talented, driven and will break their back to get the work done just as much as those not in dev work. It's the frankly useless twats sitting going on like a figma design is all you need to do and the rest should fall into place that's the problem.
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Yeah, people saying shit like that likely have never actually done any kind of remote work.

"Come into the office so we can be more collaborative!" Yeah right. Drive an hour to work, do a 15 minute stand up, everyone goes back to their desk and put their headphones on to work for the rest of the day, get in a slack huddle or a google meet for quick collaborations because half your team is in another office, and then drive an hour back home. I'd rather have the extra 2 hours to spend with my kid before school drop-off and after school pick up.
 
kruis said:
He's got a point. Productivity is much lower. I wonder how that suddenly happened ...

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Now show me the day at work videos for the other hundreds of thousands of people who work at Microsoft globally.
 
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Hookshot said:
This isn't new, 20 years ago offices were full of people who clock in, chat, get a coffee, read emails, chat, go for breakfast, eat the breakfast, go for a cig, then get another drink and maybe start working an hour or so after they should have.
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Yep, there's even a whole ass movie that made fun of it.

 
I have 1 RL friend who works at a video game studio and at times it sounds like they're doing everything else except developing games lol. I'm sure they have deadlines too, so maybe he likes to talk more about other stuff they do than the job itself.
I also have 2 software developer friends who work for 2 separate companies, they work on internal office software and they sound super stressed about their deadlines and managing to hit them.
Another friend works in switzerland at a very big brand which create everything from home appliances to software. We go to dinner maybe twice a year with him and his job sounds the craziest.
 
Translation:
WOKE culture killed Videogames.
If You Say So Shrug GIF
 
Tg89 said:
lol if you think people are being monitored in most offices.

i worked 5 days a week in an office for like 10 years before covid hit. i probably put on average 2 good working hours in most days. the only difference now is I can use those other 6 hours to do productive stuff instead of just doomscrolling reddit and watching youtube.

in my experience most people who "work hard" just suck at their job so it takes them longer to do shit (the amount of boomers who can't even use a computer at a basic level is astonishing for example), or they have shitty managers who can't manage expectations (and they have no spine to call them out), or in some cases they just don't really have anything going for them other than work. then you have a small minority who are truly just really passionate about what they do, most of these people get exploited because of this.
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You should have been fired. You being borderline useless doesnt negate my statement.
 
icecold1983 said:
You should have been fired. You being borderline useless doesnt negate my statement.
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im paid to be available 8 hours a day for when my skillset is required, like most white collar jobs.

very few office jobs are going to need you to be doing something every minute of every day (assuming you're good at it). that's just not how shit works.
 
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kruis said:
He's got a point. Productivity is much lower. I wonder how that suddenly happened ...

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If you really believe this is anything more than marketing you've got your head up your ass. Or her job isn't at all demanding. Likely a PM or some HR bullshit. Microsoft didn't become a 4 Trillion Dollar company with people taking 3 hour breaks a day.

On the other side of that coin - there needs to be a balance. All those bootlicking for toxic work culture where you work 12 hours a day with no breaks are fucking retarded. To the R.
 
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So a guy that works in a tiny indie company claims this is case across hundreds of companies that are spread across multiple continents, speak dozens of languages, and employ millions of employees? He would know this how exactly?

If he is complaining that a small section of a company are the most productive, then yeah, no shit, that's goes for basically everything. It's how our current labor market has worked for ages. Good luck firing over half of everyone employed on Earth though.
 
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iHaunter said:
On the other side of that coin - there needs to be a balance. All those bootlicking for toxic work culture where you work 12 hours a day with no breaks are fucking retarded. To the R.
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Also, imagine taking productivity advice from a millionaire content creator who's day is:
waking up, not changing his clothes, brushing old dirty dishes and empty soda cans off his chair and his desk, making sure he doesn't sit on his pet cockroach, and opening up youtube and twitch so he can 'react' and talk shit about other people actually going outside and living their lives.
 
Loomy said:
Also, imagine taking productivity advice from a millionaire content creator who's day is:
waking up, not changing his clothes, brushing old dirty dishes and empty soda cans off his chair and his desk, making sure he doesn't sit on his pet cockroach, and opening up youtube and twitch so he can 'react' and talk shit about other people actually going outside and living their lives.
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He's never had a real job for long. His degree is in some bullshit as well. He doesn't know anything about higher level corporate life.
 
semiconscious said:
5 years into this gen, & i'm still waiting to see this disproven...
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That will always be the case. No one's favourite game is in the future.

But in the last 5 or so years we've had Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Expedition 33. Indie games like Hades and Disco Elysium. And that's just the critically acclaimed ones. There's a lot of very very good games coming out every year. I honestly don't see that changing.
 
Loomy said:
That will always be the case. No one's favourite game is in the future.

But in the last 5 or so years we've had Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Expedition 33. Indie games like Hades and Disco Elysium. And that's just the critically acclaimed ones. There's a lot of very very good games coming out every year. I honestly don't see that changing.
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well, opinions differ, eh? enjoy...
 
It sounds like most of the younger engineers I have worked with over the last few years. Why waste time teaching them to do shit when I can do it myself? It's fucking frustrating.
 
Loomy said:
That will always be the case. No one's favourite game is in the future.

But in the last 5 or so years we've had Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Expedition 33. Indie games like Hades and Disco Elysium. And that's just the critically acclaimed ones. There's a lot of very very good games coming out every year. I honestly don't see that changing.
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Yeah people who complain about no more good games might simply not enjoy the hobby anymore. Tons of good games release every year.
 
When it takes up to or more than 10 or 20 years to release new games in really popular series, he does have a point, although the focus on MTX and the money made from them in the last decade is also a reason and factor as well in long dev times, they simply don't have to sell new games as often to make money so why bother making them as quick.
 
Puscifer said:
Not really, no.

People who are addicted to phones show themselves in work output and get handled accordingly.

Secondly the internet pre smartphones the internet increased productivity and it's not like we weren't playing solitaire and minesweeper back in the 90s.
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First, I think you and I are talking about different things. I don't talk about the phone as addiction device but as distraction. I'm not talking about you spending 5 hours a day on tiktok, I'm talking about the constant messaging, phoning and browsing. Can you imagine how much time is lost here? Are you kidding me? Last I heard median screen time these days is something around 4-6 hours. How is that not lost productivity time?

And on your second point... I'd argue it's not the internet per se that increased the productivity but computers. Internet eased and expanded trade.
 
StereoVsn said:
Go outside, study for work or take a college course, read books, hang out with friends, work on my hobbies, play board games, play video games (don't need internet for that), Watch TV, finally learn to properly cook and much more?

Internet and doom scrolling didn't suddenly make people feel not bored. They did kill a lot of attention span, productivity and social activities.
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Sure mate, I give you like 2 months tops with those until you're bored out of your mind.
 
Modern society has generated incredibly individualistic people that think that they deserve everything and have little skill. They come from an environment where they have been constantly congratulated over doing basically nothing in order to build their self-confidence. And we now have to deal with people like these searching for work after they graduated.

The situation is that you either work with these people, or you work with no one. Because experimented people don't appear magically. You have to work towards building these profiles, but this means accepting the beginners and their skill level, and trying to do get something out of them. The task is tremendous, but this is still the only way forward.
 
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JimmyRustler said:
First, I think you and I are talking about different things. I don't talk about the phone as addiction device but as distraction. I'm not talking about you spending 5 hours a day on tiktok, I'm talking about the constant messaging, phoning and browsing. Can you imagine how much time is lost here? Are you kidding me? Last I heard median screen time these days is something around 4-6 hours. How is that not lost productivity time?

And on your second point... I'd argue it's not the internet per se that increased the productivity but computers. Internet eased and expanded trade.
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I think it's 2-fold

Jobs expect you to be constantly connected on some level, they played into it by wanting to have devices with work e-mail, teams, professional communication available all the time. Hell, a lot of communication goes through my company iPhone vs the computer or email because they want you reachable all the time. I wonder what it would look like if we went back to a "work stays at work, personal life outside of lunch/break time" if it would be an issue, still.


Also; I remember writing this a year ago when Tim Cain talked about it.

CLW said:
get even more woke and pathetic
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There's a lot of truth to this. Tim Cain has a video on YouTube where he talked about young coders needing a literal month to implement code that would've taken him 4 hours to implement and test.

Talking about bug testing really says a lot about the state so many games launch in today as well.

EDIT: I will say that no doubt, many industries do need to lighten up the work load and treat employees better but this is a situation where were watching the death of a particular work ethic go out of the window in multiple industries. I'm sure as hell guilty of it, but I acknowledge that I'm not exactly saving lives in my position

 
JimmyRustler said:
Last I heard median screen time these days is something around 4-6 hours. How is that not lost productivity time?
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A third of that is probably spent on transit to and from work/school. Plus an hour before bed doomscrolling.

That Timothy Cain video has been posted and discussed here a few times.

Point 1: His white board was before Jira. We have Jira now. Just get a big screen in the office and have it showing tickets in the current sprint. Why add a white board when you already have a source of truth that is updated automatically for everyone? No one's scared of having a white board with tasks and their names on it. Their name is already on their tickets for everyone to see. Gitlab/Github already show commit contributions/frequency. You can't hide.

Point 2: He codes it himself, it would have to be reviewed, tested, and merged by someone else. The reason the other people quote him more than an afternoon is because they have other things to work on that is probably a higher priority. Things need to be pointed, sorted, and assigned correctly - AKA managed. You can be loosy goosy when you're 10 people. When you're 150-200 people, you need to be organized. The lead coming back saying 2 weeks likely means we'll put it in the next sprint and someone will pick it up when they're done what they're working on. Something else was likely going to be bumped out of the sprint to build his combat AI.

Point 3: Don't have screaming matches where your employees can hear. No one wants that. Go into a meeting room and close the door.
 
Eh, I can easily believe most of what he's saying, except maybe for that gratuitous self-congratulatory bullshit about "Not making just games but something meaningful and important".
 
Sentenza said:
Eh, I can easily believe most of what he's saying, except maybe for that gratuitous self-congratulatory bullshit about "Not making just games but something meaningful and important".
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When I hear someone talk about the "problem of consciousness" or "meaning crisis" I can pretty much tell they have been mainlining pseudo intellectual podcasts day and night. Its what people do instead of being a militant atheist these days.
 
Seems to be right what he says. Just look how long this games are in dev nowadays.
And no that isnt always the booboo Management.
If you are slow ass and without much experience, shit will take long.
There was a Obsidian Dev who basicly said the same that simple code change would took weeks instead of a few days.

Edit: Ah that Tim Cain Interview was posted
 
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II_JumPeR_I said:
Seems to be right what he says. Just look how long this games are in dev nowadays.
And no that isnt always the booboo Management.
If you are slow ass and without much experience, shit will take long.
There was a Obsidian Dev who basicly said the same that simple code change would took weeks instead of a few days.

Edit: Ah that Tim Cain Interview was posted
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It it's even the first time this stuff is talked about, but of course it's a very unpopular topic among a lot of modern developers and in the usual circles (i.e. anti-cruch Era).

Daniel Vavra years ago said something very similar in a blog when the first KCD was still in early development.
How he would talk to developers who worked years on massive triple A projects with 400+ employees and by their own account their entire contribution to the project was "I modeled and textured Weapon X on the third level" or similar shit.
 
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RedC said:


Key Points Summary:
  • Hiring in the modern games industry has become increasingly difficult due to widespread low productivity.
  • Many candidates from major studios look good on paper but, in practice, haven't accomplished much over multi-year periods.
  • This problem has become especially noticeable post-2020.
  • A small fraction of workers (often the square root of total staff) still does most of the actual work—but this imbalance is worse than ever.
  • Many developers believe they're working hard, but by older industry standards, they're not contributing nearly enough.
  • Studios massively overcorrected after crunch controversies in the 2010s, leading to overly cushy work environments.
  • This overcorrection worked during boom times—but collapses when money dries up.
  • The industry entered hard times in late 2023, triggering mass layoffs.
  • Decisions made in easy times are now crippling studios in hard times.
  • Institutional knowledge and real production skills are being lost.
  • If this trend continues, the best games of the industry may already be behind us.
  • This isn't about demanding >8-hour days—most people don't even seem to be doing 4–5 hours of real work.
  • Productivity is low due to both reduced working time and inefficiency.
  • Companies don't know how productive people should be—they calibrate expectations based on current staff.
  • If productivity declines, expectations also decline, leading to slow organizational collapse.
  • Many managers and employees have no incentive to diagnose this problem honestly.
  • A broader cultural issue: people no longer believe their work has meaning or purpose.
  • Without purpose, people disengage and just "pretend to work."
  • Good developers still exist—but they're increasingly rare.
  • The speaker's team is small, highly productive, and considered "insane" by industry standards.
  • They're building:
    • One of the largest puzzle games ever made
    • In a custom engine
    • With a custom programming language
    • With a compiler built alongside it
    • Shipping on multiple platforms
  • Google would probably assign hundreds or thousands of engineers to this.
  • Their team has three programmers (and that includes the CEO).
  • Past hires were cut because unproductive members became a liability during hard times.
  • The company nearly collapsed because of this.
  • Standards are high because survival depends on real contribution.
  • The goal isn't just to ship a game—it's to make something meaningful and important.
  • The CEO is still debugging rocks falling in-game 30 years into his career due to lack of manpower.
  • This is not how it should be—but it's the current reality.
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Motherfucker, you pissed in a jar so you wouldnt have to leave your pc.
Shut the fuck up.
 
I'm guessing that the "core" vets are doing more work than ever carry the rest of the tards in the studio on their backs. Kind of a moot discussion since AI should eliminate those jobs naturally.
 
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