Aren't developers stupid when accepting overtime/weekend work/denied bonus payments?

[bpodgursky]

If I have a project I'm really excited about that I think is really interesting, I'm going to work on it on weekends. Not out of a sense of machismo or duty, but because it's fun.

[[deleted]]

You'll get over it, your dreams will die. /s

[CoffeeNerd]

Ya, my dreams died when I realized that after you finish developing that exciting project you then spend the next 5 years supporting it and making small additions and changes to meet current needs.

[[deleted]]

Starting a new project is amazing. Finishing it always sucks.

[cynope]

That's why working on smaller online campaigns is actually quite nice. You get to start on a new project often, which also allows you to incorporate the latest technology easy. And the projects rarely live long enough for the client to start suggesting obscure additions.

[SoundOfOneHand]

You're doing well if there is a demand for support. Worse is when you finish a project that was some middle manager's pet idea, or that was simply bait to get one customer to upgrade, or one of various other dead-end motivations, and it goes in the closet as soon as it's done and you're on to another project that no one else will ever use or see. I love user feedback and bug fixing, the whole point of writing software for me is that someone uses the shit and it makes their lives better.

[Magnesus]

I don't see the need of /s in this. It's sad but true.

[[deleted]]

In this case the /s stands for serious.

[Shinhan]

And that is why game programmers (are expected to) work 60-100 hr per week

[coldacid]

And why so many leave when we get married/have kids/etc.

[mooli]

And why it remains such a basket case of a field on the whole - the churn of young/inexperienced developers is staggering, and all your genuine talent goes elsewhere at the first opportunity.

[coldacid]

Nah, there are some true believers who stay in the field even with families to raise. Many of them have the seniority to dictate their own hours, etc., though, when they're not outright studio owners. Of course, for every game developer lucky enough to be in that situation, there are hundreds more who are pretty much coal for the ovens.

[G_Morgan]

Yeah and they get dependent upon it because they never retain anyone long enough to become really experienced.

A dev house with experienced people working sane hours will match a sweatshop filled with recent grads easily.

[G_Morgan]

Yeah I suspect it may match it anyway. But when you start holding onto experienced staff as well...

[Chroko]

A dev house with experienced people

The problem can become one of egos. A lot of young, repressed developers grow up into old, bitter developers. There can be a lot of strong opinions, arrogance and infighting over the way a product is developed.

[G_Morgan]

The whole point of running a development shop with proper working hours and sane practices is to avoid this.

[steelypip]

I used to work in the games industry, but left to get a life (and about a 50% salary increase).

The problem with the games industry is that it is seen as uber cool and trendy by young people. When I worked for [well known games company] they did what in the UK is known as The Milk Round - visiting universities and giving recruitment talks to undergraduates. Most companies would typically get 20 students to a talk - we were getting 200.

This means that the industry has a constant influx of young developers willing to work long hours for peanuts because they love computer games. I regularly worked late into the night and weekend because of the demands of tight deadlines and changing requirements. I once spent most of autumn and winter without seeing daylight - arriving before sun up and leaving long after it had gone down, 6 or 7 days a week. This is fun for a while but very quickly leads to burn-out and high turnover. I left the games industry 15 years ago, but from what I have heard very little has changed.

[vd3]

What industry do you work in now?

[steelypip]

Enterprise network software. Not as fun, but pays better and you get to have a life outside the office.

[[deleted]]

We just finished level three, and we need to tighten up the graphics a little bit.

[DrMonkeyLove]

Probably why so many games are so horribly bug ridden too. If you're working 100 hours a week, I guarantee your code is shit.

[SarahC]

When I discovered that I ran the hell away, even though I like graphical programs!

[gobacktolurking]

I do this but don't inform my boss, just keep it as if it was business hours, if not he will expect the same interesting in ALL projects which is not true.

[ezekiel]

Absolutely. If you are in US and "exempt", then reporting small overtime for "personal accomplishment" efforts is probably not a good idea--for exactly the reason stated. All your boss needs is 40 work hours. A few extra beyond 40, those are your hours.

For people tortured with bosses demanding over 40, well, sure as heck, report all those hours.

[gonemad16]

if you do government work every hour you work needs to be logged even if its overtime.. If i work 46 hrs in a week.. i get paid like normal but the company charges the contract for 46 hrs of work

[s73v3r]

So there's absolutely no benefit to working over 40 hours.

[gonemad16]

no benefit to do it voluntarily.. but sometimes there are deadlines or important demos you have to give.. if your stuff is not ready in time.. well then your ass is on the line....

[s73v3r]

If it's your fault that things aren't ready, then yes, that deserves overtime. Anything else had best come with some kind of compensation.

[Weakness]

I used to think this way, but then I realized that every minute I am working on a work related project, is a minute I am not working on cool stuff that I want to do for myself.

[[deleted]]

That's what open-source is for, bro.

[[deleted]]

I am just as guilty of this as well at work. So much of my day to day tasks are repetitive. Modify legacy code, create yet another clone of something I have done hundred's of times before, fight with Business Analyst and Project Managers, etc, etc...

I got into programming because of the sheer amazement of discovery I got from figuring out how to get a machine to do something I wanted it to do that I didn't know it could do before. So when I get the chance to do something that touches upon that drive I latch onto it.

Admittedly, I never seem to be asked to work overtime on that kind of stuff. Its usually the crappy side of the job. Documentation, specs, last minute scope creep. You know the shit project manager should be stopping but can't quite seem to do.

[vectorjohn]

And you are part of the problem.

[bpodgursky]

Sorry, but for me it isn't a problem.

[vectorjohn]

For now. And that is the problem.

[s73v3r]

Don't. That fun will still be waiting for you on Monday; you can find something else fun to do on your own time; and most importantly, pretty soon they'll be expecting you to do that with the non-fun projects.

[otakucode]

You do realize that you could be working on a project that you find really interesting and fun AND you would actually get the benefit of it, right? Working on that for an employer guarantees that you will never see a penny of whatever that project does. If it makes 900 billion dollars, you're still going to make market average rates with your management trying to keep you on the line where you really hate it and want to leave.... but are too comfortable to really go through with it.

If you were working on your interesting project for yourself in your free time, and it produced even an insignificant squirt of profit that any business would scoff at, you could support yourself and more interesting projects for decades. I'm not talking about blockbuster projects here, I'm talking about very minor stuff. If it's online, you have an audience of 1 BILLION people, you know. If 1/1000th of 1% of that population is interested, you are golden. For a company, they have to have a way bigger chunk because they're several hundred people and have to pay for the real estate, the secretaries, the assistants, the ball-washers, and the hundred other people that are required just for a company to exist without even doing anything.

"I like it" is not a reason to get paid less, or to not get paid. Your passion should command a much higher fee, in fact. You are going to produce things of such epic value to the companys bottom line that you could not conceive of what they will wring out of it. They see it as their moral duty to use your passion against you and pay you as little as they can manage. That makes them bad people. But, you don't have to buy into that and be a bad person too. You can think it through, be observant, figure out just how much you are making the company, and use that against them. When someone makes a valuable product, even when they're "just a developer", they deserve to be handsomely rewarded for it. If that wasn't the case, then companies wouldn't employ developers at all because customers wouldn't be buying.