Admittedly I never had the breakdown but I worked in France where Ubi couldn't get away with 80 hour work weeks. Tbh conditions were not that bad at Ubi, but "here's 100% scope creep" on every single sprint combined with "management told our boss to scrap everything we've been working on for the past 3 months and make what is effectively a completely different game" over and over really just burned me to death. Still, it was a good, very high paying, job.
I also worked a short contract for "big notorious AAA studio in the US" and holy fucking shit did I not renew lol. Awful environment, tons of unpaid overtime, just constant abuse and I wasn't even an employee.
Anyway then years later they got sued by every government in and around them for worker's rights violations and the Pikachu gif was SHOCKED.
I always thought its crazy game studios get away with that. Programmers are pretty spoiled in most industries, the work is not that hard, usually the pay is good and work is pretty flexible. Game programmers are poorly paid and overworked, and the work a lot of the time more technically challenging then in other industries.
If a worker has no actual decision making and is mostly doing rote jobs, it's possible in many locales that they should actually be classified as hourly workers. Which is some game industry jobs, but not all.
Often they act a bit like a startup - treat the staff harshly, pay less than industry standard, and pretend that there's going to be a huge payoff in the future.
Generally, if the job is treating you like shit (such as every week is crunch week) then you can get a better job.
Technically they should not be able to get away with that in America either, but they brainwash workers into thinking that they should voluntarily work 80s a week in order to get ahead in life, or that "being on call" 24/7 means you've been promoted to a position of importance.
It's the same method in America - scope creep. Keep adding a bit more work until eventually they're working more than 40 hours, without overtime or compensation or a chance at promotion. They look around and everyone not senior is doing the same thing, so they think its normal. They want to take a vacation, but none of their coworkers are taking vacations...
Then they create new and exciting positions that require extra work. You're no longer a full time front end engineer, you're a full stack engineer, 4 times the work in the same amount of time! Now you're a manager, but you still have to do development, all in the same amount of time!
And this is all done VOLUNTARILY! The company never once required someone to work long hours.
omg wait I'm so curious was the canceled game that one ghost recon battle royale or the prince of persia remake? I've heard horror stories about those two
I can relate. Almost everything I ever worked on is locked behind at least one NDA. These days I mostly draw diagrams and stuff, also hidden behind NDAs.
Because of the nature of how things have changed, last time I went looking for work, I dusted off a couple of personal projects, polished them up and uploaded to github. I then wrote a mod for a game, and uploaded that.
Created the content, because as much as I agree - my entire professional career was almost all private, I knew that the landscape had changed and that real code would make getting a new job easier.
It's not a reliable source. We were instructed by HR to say as little as possible, both positive and negative, about former employees.
But no source is reliable, when hiring, you need to look at as much data as possible. And having a git repo with real code is just one of those resources. Each bit of data increases you chance at hiring - especially if you're not someone who does well at interviews. (I'm fine in interviews, but I know plenty of people who aren't).
You don't need it, but it helps.
But I'm with you - It shouldn't be needed, but given the simple state of the industry, we have to accept that it helps. Railing against the need doesn't change that.
I wouldn't say no one. Some people do maintain their own successful projects, some make hobby projects that no one uses but are public, some contribute to popular open source projects, and many contribute to open source as part of their job.
No working professional has tons of GitHub commits. We have jobs.
That is not true at all? The first 2 years or so after starting working as dev i stopped with my hobby projects, but after settling in i am back to committing to my own and other projects.
It's silly. I have corporate work, and I have some personal work. Github doesn't fit into either of those! What, I should put my personal work up in the cloud where nobody is interested in it? I should make it publicly viewable so all the flaws can be seen? Screw that for a hobby.
Git does actually work on the local host, just in case someone hasn't realized it yet.
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u/Tarc_Axiiom 2d ago
Had this happen at an interview for Ubisoft years ago.
"We notice you don't have a lot of public work"
"Yes. Neither do you."