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The Declining Work Ethic in Game Development (Jonathan Blow)

I see his point, but the reality is that companies fired the most productive people a long time ago, because they had the biggest salaries, and therefore, were the biggest cost. It's not journalists to blame or even covid. There's no point on becoming a productive programmer on a industry that values being cheaper to hire.

Also, his final rant there kinda contradicts him.
 
winjer said:
A guy that only made 2 games since 2008, complaining about other people having low productivity.
I mean, he is probably right. But he should look at himself in the mirror.
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I will always find him sitting in that chair in a dark room mentally broken because Soulja Boy was laughing at Braid one of the greatest moments in gaming. I'm being dead fucking serious too.
 
Sounds like Blow is encountering what happens to every industry on a long enough timeline once the business world sinks its teeth in: clockers. 9-to-5 folks looking for a pay cheque. Nothing more, nothing less. And there's really nothing wrong with being a clocker, but if you build your company out of clockers, you get clocker attitudes and outputs. The bare minimum, delivered mostly on time. Day in, day out.
"Back in the day", gaming was a borderline cottage industry, with dev teams a dozen strong making the biggest games in the world. These were the hardcore guys and girls; they conjured this entertainment medium out of the ether through sheer force of will. They lived and breathed this shit.
Then the suites arrived when the money started rolling. Contrary to popular rhetoric, most businesses don't optimise for efficiency - they optimise for manageability. The suites step in and create managerial structures, daily stand ups, team alignment meetings, and KPIs that, on paper, look like they should result in "everyone rowing in the same direction". But, what it actually does is bloat the organisation to dilute the resource pool. The suites hide in the bloat, soaking up money, all while their new reports and metrics show they're being very productive... but they themselves don't really do anything. They don't contribute to the process of making the game, they simply "run the business", and get paid more than everyone else for doing it.
Then they hire based on manageability with the aim of "running the business". Be on time, wear the uniform, clock in, clock out, submit your time sheets on time. That's what a good employee does, so that's what they hire. Not the long haired freaks with weird glasses and a strange speaking style. The ones who'd rock up six hours late, forget to clock in, and don't give a fuck about your "Socially Aware Knitting Classes". "Back in the day", these "freaks" didn't rock up time because they were up all night re-writing the core rendering function to deliver a miraculous increase in performance to make the game better. Now, they're all indie, because they don't survive the interview process or get reported to HR and fired for not attending their HR-mandated "Toxic Thought Paradigms rooted in Systemic Colonialism Seminar" because they were busy working.
And, once the suites have been around long enough, you're just left with a company of clockers. And when it all goes to shit, the clockers get fired, and the only ones left behind are the people doing the work... and the suites, still soaking up that money.
 
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JimmyRustler said:
Sure mate, I give you like 2 months tops with those until you're bored out of your mind.
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cmkablt910005o40gxvdktytb


Is living a regular life really that unbearable for the young lads nowadays?
 
An engineer on my team asked me to help her this week with a project she started on November 24 and was due December 9th.

It made me realize that if she's able to keep her job dumping hours into a basic project, why am I killing myself working nights and weekends to make due dates assigned by management? There's no recognition, there's no extra money that I can see. I imagine the same is going on in game dev. Managers have 15 direct reports and can't tell who is a liability or not.
 
Shifty1897 said:
An engineer on my team asked me to help her this week with a project she started on November 24 and was due December 9th.

It made me realize that if she's able to keep her job dumping hours into a basic project, why am I killing myself working nights and weekends to make due dates assigned by management? There's no recognition, there's no extra money that I can see. I imagine the same is going on in game dev. Managers have 15 direct reports and can't tell who is a liability or not.
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Her lead/PM/teammates had no questions for her in your daily standups about why she was not making any progress?

That, plus you having to work nights and weekends with no overtime pay to make deadlines tells me your team is mismanaged. Not saying it's your fault. It's clearly on your leads/managers.
 
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I have been working as gamedev for at least 15+ years , from indie to AAA, DLC to porting worldwide, virtually on all platform's.

I don't remember how many games was released (name in credits ) but one thing I have learned , never complain, if so, be prepare to do the other guy job as well 😂 , better and faster for the same salary or less.
 
As the industry moved from this highly specialized, "nerd" domain where small teams of extremely passionate people worked on labors of love to a highly bureaucratized corporate white collar industry full of people who only are there for the paycheck, it has shifted. Yes this makes intuitive sense. The COVID thign didn't help either, although it didn't help any industry, it feels like it hit gaming worse than others as game development seemed to largely cease for 2 years. The companies, probably afraid of their newly politicized (just post-GG) workforce, didn't really push or "crack the whip". Remember when the boss of Ubi said, more or less, "we need to work hard this year because the company's fortunes are riding on it" and it caused an uproar and "employee backlash"? That's kind of how it has been.
 
"The goal isn't just to ship a game—it's to make something meaningful and important."

Love seeing developers with this mentality. The Witness is without a doubt one of the best puzzle games ever made.
 
Its not really just game development.

Work ethic in general is in the toilet, sure most people feel like they getting paid peanuts so why try hard so shareholders make millions.

But there is also an element of modernism and modern "work ethic" which is this, "we need results now, doesn't matter if its good, just as long as its done".

This all came from the tech bro boom with google and facebook etc. But has inevitably turned into how fast a product can get out the door and how quickly do shareholders make money.

We get the bare minimum in most our products in our daily lives. I mean literal planes have doors falling off midflight from this sort of work ethic.
 
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StueyDuck said:
This all came from the tech bro boom with google and facebook, but has inevitably turned into how fast a product can get out the door and how quickly and shareholders make money.
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Every time new leadership joins and pulls out the bullshit "move fast break things" mantra, I automatically assume they've never built/shipped anything meaningful.
 
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Dynasty8 said:
"The goal isn't just to ship a game—it's to make something meaningful and important."

Love seeing developers with this mentality. The Witness is without a doubt one of the best puzzle games ever made.
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The witness, like the outer wilds

Is just one of those once in a lifetime experiences that cant be matched. These games offer something truly unique and they dont come by often in gaming.

Yes these are puzzle games, but another example for me is both ocarina of time and especially majoras mask, they are experiences that change your perspective on gaming
 
Loomy said:
Every time new leadership joins and pulls out the bullshit "move fast break things" mantra, I automatically assume they've never built/shipped anything meaningful.
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Sadly theres alot of those leaders.

Someone close to me works for a big 3 letter US tech company (tryna keep it vague and no its not like federal haha, although i do believe they have an armstech branch) had new leadership come in about 5-6 years ago, fired like 40% of the staff, decided to create their own "in house visual scripter" to "speed up production" took them 4 years to do and now they are like literal years behind their deadlines because the idiot didnt think about how all the staff would have to be trained on their own bespoke visual script as well as obviously not counting for bugs and exceptions.

Point of the story, theyre fucked and this person I know worries literally every day that they are losing their job because the team is just barely pushing out completed tasks.

And that is a huge corporation.
 
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RedC said:
Companies don't know how productive people should be—they calibrate expectations based on current staff.
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That point, current management in those companies probably doesn't have actual development background.

Or they're one of the slackers who got promoted out of the way, so that others can do their work.
 
He's not wrong, but again it's how he says it, and people will waste time with useless responses judging his output/personality instead of the points themselves. Blow's issues aren't hard work, but doing too much bespoke software + ambition + scope-creep.

You can see the overall decline in at least the US in terms of people cultivating discipline and time-management though. During college I worked at an Apple corporate building in Cupertino in the late 2000s, where engineers had sleeping bags at their office, while human resources staff dicked around chatting for an hour consistently after their lunch break was supposed to be over. The former was busy producing the value that made the company worth anything, while the latter I would overhear whining about wanting a 30 hour work week.

We also have infinite scrolling feeds, notifications, more media options than ever, etc. to offer more distractions than previous generations. People were promised great jobs after college, stalling the transition to being adults, and the great jobs never came...so people feel stuck with debt. You also have corporations who regularly won't recognize or reward the people putting in extra work, so you get the Office Space example where you train people to do the bare minimum not to get fired...that otherwise could've had motivation.

Concord was a game that got to take 8 years, do nothing innovative/exceptional, and the people in charge of the money thought it would be great the whole time. I think some of these people don't deserve their jobs.
 
Durin said:
During college I worked at an Apple corporate building in Cupertino in the late 2000s, where engineers had sleeping bags at their office, while human resources staff dicked around chatting for an hour consistently after their lunch break was supposed to be over. The former was busy producing the value that made the company worth anything, while the latter I would overhear whining about wanting a 30 hour work week.

We also have infinite scrolling feeds, notifications, more media options than ever, etc. to offer more distractions than previous generations.
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The reason we have all those distractions is because all those engineers spent their nights sleeping on cold floors in Apple HQ dreaming up and building ways to keep people addicted to their phones.

Maybe if they had worked 30 hour weeks, we wouldn't have infinite scroll today.
 
TBH i agree the peak of videogames kinda was 5-10 years ago. Granted theres still some impressive stuff coming out like Baldurs Gate 3. But when you think of the 2010s, it kind of where western AAA peaked and things have since gone downhill. Especially tech wise and in terms of ambitious production values.The new games coming out barely look any better and are cutting tons of corners.

The Last of Us Part 2, Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, Battlefield One, Metal Gear Solid V (japanese i know) are more impressive on a technical/ambition level than most of the stuff coming out 5-10 years later. Some current games from studios look WORSE than the work they were doing 10 years ago, like Rocksteady and NRS.

Hell Max Payne 3, which came out in what, 2011? Looks better than Control lol.

It feels like all the smartest people in the industry are either in the process of leaving it, or are too constrained now by the money men / budgets/rushed dev times.
 
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Loomy said:
The reason we have all those distractions is because all those engineers spent their nights sleeping on cold floors in Apple HQ dreaming up and building ways to keep people addicted to their phones.

Maybe if they had worked 30 hour weeks, we wouldn't have infinite scroll today.
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Most of the addiction/retention mechanisms I think come from designers and suits more than engineers, but I do think for the infinite scroll the first guy who made it (forget the name) regretted it. Definitely didn't help society.

I just wish more people would understand and remove those distractions, because I rarely see people even reduce notifications on their phones when it's not hard to do.
 
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You can tell this by the lack of great games today. The industry sucks right now. That's not to say there are no good games. There are. But It's lacking way behind, let's say, 15-20 years ago.

Speaking of which, this pop up on my youtube feed the other day. This was such an amazing time for games:

 
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RedC said:
  • A broader cultural issue: people no longer believe their work has meaning or purpose.
  • Without purpose, people disengage and just "pretend to work."
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Well, creating a game isn't as rewarding or purposeful as working on a real time system like traffic light signaling, deep sea image processing or similar. And once the initial "This is my dream" phase you pretty much realize it's just like any other job except that here 10-16yo boys criticize you for being so stupid. That kills any ego, and programmers do have a big ego, almost as big as chefs.
 
I'm in tech (not gaming though), and it's definitely not just game dev, it's also tech in general, and I'm almost certain it's completely across the board in all industries.
A lot of the dot points in the OP are spot on, in particular this one:
  • 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.
It just keeps getting worse.
Officially, I'm an analyst, but I'm also doing project management, solution design, environment provisioning. I'm cooked. Motivation does not exist.
 
There are people daft enough to believe this shit.

Major AAA releases keep getting released and somehow it supposed to be the work of a handful of devs who work cushy 4-5 hour jobs.

Never mind the fact that it's literally impossible for him to know the work culture across the mountain of game studios in the industry.
 
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TwiztidElf said:
I'm in tech (not gaming though), and it's definitely not just game dev, it's also tech in general, and I'm almost certain it's completely across the board in all industries.
A lot of the dot points in the OP are spot on, in particular this one:
  • 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.
It just keeps getting worse.
Officially, I'm an analyst, but I'm also doing project management, solution design, environment provisioning. I'm cooked. Motivation does not exist.
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Yes, I agree, I'm in tech and a small fraction do all the work. The problem right now is all these companies started getting really greedy, and to enhance their bottom line they decided to outsource workers and bring on H1-bs. These workers generally are subpar, which leads to a smaller fraction doing the actual work.

Plus workers in tech have figured out that no matter what they do, you're going to get a 3% raise while having a 1% to 3% raise in your benefits pricing, cancelling much of the raise. Best worker in the division? 3.5% raise. Worst? 2.5%. So what's the point?

The working public are sick of the fraud, the tax breaks for billionaires, tax breaks for lower income, etc, basically everyone but them.

Plus corporations have been abusing the exempt status of workers for decades by paying them for 40 but expecting them to work 60 to 70. But if the work ever falls before 40 hours, they expect you to still be at work 40 hours, which means the job really isn't exempt, it's hourly.
 
9 to 5ers are probably prioritizing happiness over being great. I'm sure it's something worse than that though.
 
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He is not wrong.
It's already bad as it is. With vibe coding it'll bee even worse.
A lot of people just copypaste stack exchange, do a sloppy job and browse internet. Now you can even ask chatGPT to compile stackexchange articles into tasks you need for you.
It lead to low understanding, low skills and general lack of motivation to see into details. And linear management who were promoted from the same staff think it's normal too.
A story of Deerseek kinda shows the disparity where on one hand a lot of "Pythin ML" guys brute-forcing everything with hardware, on other hand some smart guys those not avoid going deep into details/optimization (they are Hedge Funds guys, it's normal for those as it's their competitve advantage) to have x10 performance gain for the same hardware,

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.
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We had Covid statistics that on average drop in performance for WHM is 30%
Yes, some people, like 20-30% can work from home just fine and they should be given opportunity to do so. But the most have no willpower to properly work from home (and communications also worsens) and for them results are disastrous. Being in the office make people more vigilant as they are conscious that superiors might check on them.
 
Building a smaller team of highly productive and capable people takes time. It's usually done through people recommending other people they've worked with. If you're scaling up over time you can be selective. Could Blow recruit talent to the level he demands to deliver to the scale of a AAA studio? Of course not.

It's not a case that this level of talent doesn't exist today.

There's some incredible engineering going on today that l couldn't imagine possible 25 years ago.
 
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Felessan said:
He is not wrong.
It's already bad as it is. With vibe coding it'll bee even worse.
A lot of people just copypaste stack exchange, do a sloppy job and browse internet. Now you can even ask chatGPT to compile stackexchange articles into tasks you need for you.
It lead to low understanding, low skills and general lack of motivation to see into details. And linear management who were promoted from the same staff think it's normal too.
A story of Deerseek kinda shows the disparity where on one hand a lot of "Pythin ML" guys brute-forcing everything with hardware, on other hand some smart guys those not avoid going deep into details/optimization (they are Hedge Funds guys, it's normal for those as it's their competitve advantage) to have x10 performance gain for the same hardware,


We had Covid statistics that on average drop in performance for WHM is 30%
Yes, some people, like 20-30% can work from home just fine and they should be given opportunity to do so. But the most have no willpower to properly work from home (and communications also worsens) and for them results are disastrous. Being in the office make people more vigilant as they are conscious that superiors might check on them.
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I think people sometimes work even longer hours / are more available WFH as they spend the commute time working, not all, but not nobody either.

I think worse communication (it is very difficult for people to work well as a team already, getting aligned, visualising and keeping the workflow / pipeline, in terms of people and processes, going smoothly and solving stalls, etc…) and the way meetings multiply and there is a lot more frantic decisions making per day attempted, etc… that made things worse for some in more WFH culture.
 
I think he made some very good points

Working from home is a load of woke crap that's hurt not just the gaming industry, but so many others. Trying to speak to someone on the phone (never mind face to face) is getting impossible these days
 
Pains me to say that this narcissist is right and i keep saying that for a while.

Just look at sequels like Ghost of Yotei, or Spiderman 2, although good it is the type of iterative sequel that would have taken 2 years max to release in the early 2000, but nowdays it takes 6 years and 300M budget for some reason...
 
Panajev2001a said:
I think people sometimes work even longer hours / are more available WFH as they spend the commute time working, not all, but not nobody either.
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Yeah, it require quite some self-discipline and different perception than most have. Such people work from home as if it's work from office (no distraction, no entice to do something else after minimal norm of work is done etc) and as one colleague of mine said - you don't have certain end of normal work day deadline (due to having to commute to work), so you start as you normally leave for work and end somewhere after normally come back from work, leading to quite some increase in working hours.
 
Felessan said:
Yeah, it require quite some self-discipline and different perception than most have. Such people work from home as if it's work from office (no distraction, no entice to do something else after minimal norm of work is done etc) and as one colleague of mine said - you don't have certain end of normal work day deadline (due to having to commute to work), so you start as you normally leave for work and end somewhere after normally come back from work, leading to quite some increase in working hours.
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To be fair, I am wondering about always on a call patterns when WFH. In some cases, even in the office, the idea of isolating oneself in perpetual "focus" mode leads to a lot of work thrown away or missing the mark and having to be redone… teams falling apart too. Not everyone is working on super mega hard need to focus on problems, a lot of times the most important thing is moving in the right direction as a group and these patterns of isolated island only using the "agile ceremonies" to sync up and realign is far more difficult and much more likely not to go anywhere than people collaborating directly and planning a bit more before doing and/or checking with each other and discussing more.
 
Completely agree with him and seems to be a western thing. We have a name for people like that of which there are 100s in the company i work for, they are called "stamp lickers" and Id be suprised they could even do that job right
 
He is probably a bad choice to talk about this, but he is right, and I can confirm this as basically the whole I.T. industry

I work with infrastructure, and I'm usually a third party contract. A lot of times the second party screws up. A recent example: company A signs with company B, and company B can't do the job, so they hire me. Company A has some standards, with a type of cable, how many meters to backup, devices... Company B passes to me saying that needs to put two new Access Points to work, and the devices to work with them. I say that I can buy everything and will pass the bill, but they say they will buy the whole shebang... and they send lacking stuff, except the rack, switch and the Access Points... I ask when they will send, and they ask me to do the infrastructure anyways because when I'm about to finish, it will arrive. I finish and the thing didn't arrive, and they don't know when it will. Passes two weeks, I didn't receive a single buck, and they still don't know shit. Eventually the rack and switch came, and needs to be installed ASAP, so I'll go and do it, but where are the APs? A guy says that it needs to be taken from another store [that is way too big and doesn't need to have anymore], and for some reason I'm the person that needs to take those and install on the new store. It was closed because of the time, so only next day I could take them. The real problem? Both of those Access Points are made to work in outside areas, so they are big, and doesn't look good, so I say that to them, they still say to install, I install them, and they decided that I need to buy and they will pay anyways. What the actual fuck?

I could do everything in like three days if I they allowed, but they didn't and everything almost took a month. I charged basically double, and actually it was a benefit for me, but everything could be easier if they had a better planing
 
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