News Free Radical now paying overtime

[CardJoe]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/10...ing_overtime/1

Free Radical Design, developer of TimeSplitters and Haze, has announced that it is now paying overtime in an effort to update how developers in the industry are treated.



Let us know where you work below!

[HugoB]

Clearly all of us will have to chip in with "Bit HQ" and berate our respective overloards for more dosh!

[naokaji]

paid overtime? damn... i got the wrong job...

[Leitchy]

I work as a Media Developer for my company and do not earn overtime. The way I see it, as we are such a small team, the harder I work out of hours the sooner the rewards come to me (Pay rise, overtime etc). If it was a larger company then I'd have to consider another job possibly, but I think the reason most people still do the after-hour-slog is to show there superiors that they can work hard and do the job (especially important if your new to the job and want to work your way up).

But yes, overtime would be nice!

[sandys]

Paid overtime would be cool, I am a Design Engineer and the amount of effort you put in come tapeout especially when working on high profile consumer kit like CPU/GPU is unreal and once you finish one you're moved right onto the next so it rarely lets up, there is the odd lull but I got hacked off with it after a while and moved into the Analog/RF field a much steadier pace and with better dosh

[CardJoe]

To be honest, here at bit-tech I work later because I want to and because I love my job. I ussually do my late night work from home or get started on news early in the morning at about 6:50, so its not a matter of trying to impress anyone. I just love doing this for a living and overtime wouldn't honestly bother me. I'd probably find it more of a hassle - money isn't something I value that much anyway. I need it, but I don't value it.

[HugoB]

Gotta agree with Joe, we got back from the Omega Sektor event at about 1am - technically we didn't get paid for the extra time, but on the other hand we got a free day out at a damn cool LAN centre with stretch humvees and champagne. Although unlike Joe I do value money and much prefer the old bed-of money than a traditional mattress

[sandys]

Scouring the Kotaku for news playing games or knocking up the odd article is hardly a proper job though eh , you'd probably be doing most of it anyway, its like getting paid for your hobby.

[CardJoe]

lol, it's a little harder than that and Kotaku often get the press releases after us, it's just that they tend to be awake because of the time differences :P

[chrisb2e9]

I get paid a salary. no overtime for me. Of course my job isn't even that hard, I usually just surf the net all day.

[Hells_Bliss]

i get overtime, but i hardly ever use it. Only reason i would need to stay late is if the servers die or some such

[mclean007]

no overtime for us lawyers, and we work some pretty insane hours sometimes. 48 hours straight? - I laugh in the fact of such trivial periods of time!

[Woodstock]

so they should

[metarinka]

I get Overtime, skilled trades (welding) and unions are good for something. This is usually a question of salaried vs hourly workers. The problem with game developers is that they require more work than a salaried worker can provide in a normal work week.

[evilgreenie]

Yeah the Games Industry is/was a bit of a slave market. According to EA Games employees a few years ago:-

"The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm--seven days a week--with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm)," read the post, which went on to claim that EA employees receive no overtime, "comp" time, or additional vacation for their efforts.

edit: original link - good read if you want to work in the games industry

EA games got hit with a class action suit from their designers/programmers for unpaid overtime and now everyone's on an hourly rate.

Its not just designers, a relative of mine worked in the UK GAME store & found the pay crap, hours long and demands high, even for a retail job. Staff turnover was really high, but people think its a cool job, so the company had no problem recruiting.

[Anakha]

I've worked in a few places, and the differences in working environments was night and day.

The first place didn't pay too good (£17,500/year base), but did pay overtime, didn't have big deadlines (The whole team would get together to break down a problem and each person took a part. Sure, you were asked how long you expected it to take, and there were "soft" deadlines, but the office atmosphere was always "We'll release it when it's done, and not before"), and had an amazing work atmosphere.

The second place was a lot worse, pay-wise (£1,000/month + profit-sharing (Which ended up being £0)), had amazingly bad working conditions (Staff turnover was 3 full teams of staff in 10 months, and I was "locked in" the office (As the only employee at the time) with the boss for 36 hours for a rush-job to finish a product (After which I was expected to head out to the client site to install the thing during office hours). Also, as the owner couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag, that company (Which, unsurprisingly, went bust) STILL owes me £10,000 in wages, + 3 years interest.

The third place I was contracting for. Pay was very nice indeed (£80,000/year), but deadlines were harsh, and the task was virtually impossible to do. "Create a CMS that works entirely client-side with local files, XML storage and AJAX, for deployment to remote sites over modem for offline use, with multiple levels of security and managability, full logging and accountability, with the capability for any piece of information to be edited by any skill-level of user in-browser, and written with Notepad. Your only other team member is a former COBOL developer who hasn't touched a PC in 5 years. You have 3 months, we will expect written progress reports hourly, as well as full management oversight on every level. Oh yes, and you can't install anything to any machine, don't have any network rights, and we want a demo in a week". We actually got the thing working (Believe it or not) on the local network machines, and worked with a base spec of IE5.5. It's only when we got one of the "Remote" machines to test the deployment scenario that we discovered all the remote machines were running Win 95 with IE4. Which killed the whole project dead. I took the money and ran, hard.

That's been my experience(s), anyways.

[SanguineRaven]

I've worked as a software developer for a UK government department, mostly working with web applications and Oracle databases in a relatively small (10 or so) team. I had a salary, generous for my age/experience with no formal overtime unless agreed with line managers prior to the work (and it was never approved).

It was usually a flexitime system where, as long as you did the work then it didn't matter what time you came in and what time you left, but the guideline was generally 35-40 hours a week. Unless you were slacking during normal work hours there was rarely any pressure to do unpaid overtime and it was not expected of you. I however enjoyed my job and like putting a lot into it, so I often working a little extra (30-60mins) a day if I felt I would get a good enough output of it.

I think in some way, this showed I was willing to do overtime, just not regularly and it resulted in me getting some side projects to do as overtime which I got paid very well for.

Although game development has always been an interest of mine, I think I made a good choice with sticking to the business side of software development. The job offers I had from games companies were for significantly less money and benefits and though they tried to gloss over it in presentations and interviews they never denied their stance on crunch time and unpaid overtime. It really is an issue that needs to be addressed since, having suffered it befor, burnout can really destroy you and your motivation.