Jumwa said:
I for one believe the guy in management who no doubt received a pat on the back for this.
In all seriousness, I've never worked at a place before that didn't try to sleazily squeeze extra work hours out of employees, that didn't guilt trip, pressure and subtly imply repercussions if they didn't do x for y amount of hours more. And from my own personal experience I've always known people to make gutless employees who never speak out until they are pushed dramatically too far.
So I'm very doubtful it's as clear cut as it's being made out to be here, to put it lightly.
Look, I've been doing software for probably about 20 years now. I have never worked at a place where we did not have
crunch time. It's known. It's expected. Hell, some of us even sort of enjoy it (so long as it's not perpetual, there is a certain rush to going all balls out on something over a 24 hour period).
That being said, of course there is a line that you try not to cross. There is a difference between "Dammit, we're massively behind because we screwed up [fill in the blank]" and "I'm going to try to put a bunch of guys on salary to make them work 70 hour weeks forever."
And honestly, with the exception of new features for software, the biggest problem with development is usually the planning estimates. I let my developers score their own story points on features and yeah, sometimes they fuck it up and our SLA's go all to hell. As far as I'm concerned, if you screw up that badly, then you man up (er... or woman up, I actually do have some female developers) and fix your mess. The worst case scenario here is when you keep your head down and hide the fact that you're missing your targets, because almost always that forces the entire team to chip in and try to save your story.
Also, we don't really know what the work environment was like here. These people are Australians (I work and run my team in Australia actually...) and Australian developers are pretty fucking newb. Most of them (and their managers) don't understand how to use agile software methodologies to constrain risk on projects, or to keep work effort under control. Most of them also don't know what it's like to work on commercial products, since the vast majority of work in this country for developers is government contract work, which for a lack of better term, is cruisy as all hell. I wouldn't be surprised if the people complaining have very little industry experience and probably forced the work hours on themselves by being shitty at managing their workload. In fact, not only would that not surprise me, that would pretty much fall in line with every major software project that I've witnessed or heard about in the last 5 years of being down here.
I shit you not, I have "senior developers" in my team, good coders with lots of experience, who until recently didn't understand the value of relative weighting of user stories by story points vs. hour estimates. They didn't get concepts like "minimal marketable features" or have ever heard of lean manufacturing techniques for software engineering like Kanban (something which has been around for decades, and applied to software for at least the last 10 years or so). I have had to get consultants in from the UK and USA down here to do enough workshopping and training with my guys just so that they are up on techniques and methodologies that are easily a decade old in the rest of the world.
So, all that being said, when some anonymous game developer in one of the few commercial software shops in the entire bloody country, decides to prarie dog his head up and complain about his work environment, I'm going to take it with a truckload of salt. If they want to blame the company, or the ceo, or some upper management guy, then so be it, but maybe the thing they're really guilty of is hiring a bunch of fucktards that don't know how to develop software.
