Crunch. *Deep breath* Alright, buckle up, let's do this.

I want to tell a couple of stories.

Several years back, I was working on a game that had a random crash in some system I had written. I spent literally days trying to figure out what it was.(1/17)

I had been working probably 14 to 18-hour days for a few months by then, so I couldn't think straight and it was a very low repro rate. We ended up shipping with that bug and happened to get it past cert, either because of their lack of testing or our dumb luck. (2/17)

After ship, I took two weeks off and came back mostly refreshed and ready to try to solve this thing. The fix took me an hour. It was some stupid copy and paste error causing me to overwrite the incorrect pointer. The kind of dumb mistake you make at 2am with no sleep. (3/17)

I didn't even have to repro it, it was obvious just looking at the code.

Crunch is sort of like open office plans. People with very different jobs than mine think that open office plans are great and improve communication, but most studies I've read say the opposite. (4/17)

The same is true for crunch. There are those who feel that crunch allows us to get more done, and it sort of does for a short time, but you get diminishing returns very quickly. This isn't new, Henry Ford discovered this in the early 1900s. (5/17)

That having been said, I do think that there is something powerful about all of us coming together and going above and beyond to create something greater than what we could otherwise accomplish in the same timespan. Think of it like the sprint at the end of a marathon. (6/17)

BUT, I have a few caveats:
1) Every single person should be paid for overtime, which is almost unheard of in the industry.
2) There should be a hard limit. My casual research says this should be about 2 weeks.
3) There should be a purpose, and bad planning doesn't count. (7/17)

I'll give you another example, one which was a positive experience. During production of the Sims 4 I was not super happy with the direction of the AI, especially with how utility scores were calculated. I was the lead AI programmer so that was on me. (8/17)

I stayed late every night for about a week to try and experiment with fixing it. No one asked me to, no one even knew I was doing it, but I did. (To be fair, there were several edge case bugs that I knew this would fix, so I wasn't just going rogue.) (9/17)

Every week, the AI team would meet and observe/evaluate the AI. That week, I told the producer to switch to my branch and watch the game. Everyone loved the new behavior and it solved those edge cases. It's what we ended up shipping. (10/17)

Now it would have been nice to be paid for that of course, but I made my choice and sitting there at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. working on this change was exactly what I wanted to do with my Thursday night. I wouldn't have chosen to be anywhere else. (11/17)

This is not a speech about crunch being good. Crunch is absolutely not good. It's toxic and I have watched coworkers physically, mentally, and emotionally erode from endless death marches. But there's also something to be said about pushing yourself. (12/17)

There's a huge difference between those two stories and I think it's worth recognizing that. In the 1st, I worked late and failed to solve a bug that should never have been there at all. In the 2nd, I worked late to create one of the things I'm most proud of on the Sims. (13/17)

How can we allow for the 2nd scenario while never allowing the 1st? I have no idea because the current model is entirely exploitive. And maybe there is no model that is fair, or maybe it's as simple as paying people overtime and not requiring crunch ever. (14/17)

The real problem is that crunch is a culture. When I really think back about my career in AAA, it has been rare that anyone has directly asked me to stay late. It has certainly happened, but it's not as common as it just being expected. (15/17)

I hear developers compare crunch stories with pride. I see students who look up at me with awe when I tell them I have regularly worked over 100 hours a week at various companies. If you don't crunch, then you're weak and don't belong in this industry. Fuck that mentality.(16/17)

That's what needs to change. Because right now, the social stigma of not crunching is way more powerful than some producer putting a PNG of a crunch bar on a slide somewhere. (17/17)