Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make? »
This article pretty sums up the reasons why I left the games industry not too long ago to see what other similar industries are like. It sounded like Team Bondi went into Death March early in the project and rather then try to fix the problem, management perpetuated it and made it worse.
All fingers seem to point at Brendan McNamara’s mismanagement.
L.A. Noire: The Team Bondi Emails - Article »
More ex-employees from Team Bondi pitch in with copies of internal emails that support information from the original article.
Lead Programmer's defense of Team Bondi »
This is an open letter defending the work and decisions made during the development of Team Bondi’s latest title, LA Noire.
WTF? Unpaid crunch deserves no sympathy - Pachter
I came across the article earlier today regarding Pachter saying that unpaid overtime should be the norm and besides the fact he is an analyst and not a software developer, he is missing the point.
Dr. Mike Reddy comments on the article and raises the fact that research has shown money isn’t much of an incentive for people to do more work. Dan Pink’s Science of Motivation at a TED conference explains this further by showing people are more motivated when they feel like they matter and more importantly, trusted to do the work they have themselves set out to do.
As mentioned in an earlier post on Why I left my Games Job, I left primarily because the company made decisions that would force the developers on the team needed to work a massive amount of overtime in order to meet the deadline, not because the overtime was unpaid.
It made me feel like I didn’t matter and was just a company resource to be used. By doing so, this is a surefire way to have staff starting to look elsewhere. Compare this to companies like Fog Creak and 37signals where is clear that they treat their employees with a large amount of respect and trust (which is shown by their high staff retention), it is comparing night with day.
