News Gameloft accused of poor working conditions

Mobile games studio accused of overworking staff.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/07/19/gameloft-accused-of-poor-working-conditions/1

 

developers (not only game developers) are the slaves of the XXI century...

 

if you don't like it, you get out. He did, so what's the problem.

 

Not a helpful or worthwhile comment.

 

Spoken like an employer, without an ounce of humanity in you.

Good God, it's that sort of attitude that leads to child workers making clothes and trainers so big companies can make a few extra percent of profit.

 

Ok, you quit. Now comes the next one, with same conditions. If he likes it, he is insane (I'm quite sure he is not rewarded the same than a lawyer or surgeon). So he quits. But there are tons of people willing to work in games industry (vocation, you know). At the end of the day, you have a whole industry populated with slaves, do you think that's a fair scenario?

 

I've worked at two different studio's before starting a new career and I can say that I was never forced to work for longer than contracted. However in both companies most people would stay longer to get things finished or put in some weekend crunch time if deadlines were approaching for no extra pay. Yes some people did leave because it didnt suite them but you get that in most industries.

I cant help but think maybe these claims have been exagerated slightly, this is just my opinion based on working at two companies in the UK, I couldnt say what its like for the rest of the world.

 

Because it's illegal under NZ labour laws.
You can't just let companies off for breaking health and safety laws cause the employees want to work there.
I know of a meatworks where I live that houses a lot of the....well, bottom 10 percent of the bell curve of intelligence. they work there cause it pays as much as half the professions around here, but I doubt much of them would leave if the company decided "to hell with all the health and safety crap. If you dont like the conditions, then dont work here."

 

This isn't unheard of for New Zealanders working for development houses that are arms of overseas companies. One of the problems is that developers, for the most part, really like to write code... that leads them into a spiral of longer and longer hours to fix particular bugs that irk them, all voluntarily initially, which then generates an expectation that such effort will be maintained over long term periods.

And then the pressure comes down from above...

 

it seems like the game dev's haven't quite got the contact hours thing worked out. the whole "if you don't like it leave" thing isn't a great philosophy to maintain a talented workforce that makes good games. We aren't talking people not liking the work, we are talking not liking working 10+ hours a day when you are only contractally paid 8.

Which seems counter as everyone knows that a persons productivity and health suffers heavily if forced to work many hours. I understand the occasional crunch day, but working long hours is killer. I'm an engineer and left company's when there was an expectation to do unpaid overtime on weekends, instead of giving me the capital to fix machinery so the crunch time wasn't needed.

 

As a dev the longer hours you work the more tired you get and the worse the quality of your code becomes. Bad code breeds more bad code, and as quality goes down bugs go up, whole sections need re-writing and before you know it you just have a big mess of unworkable spaghetti. Hence it's actually not in the dev houses interest to work people too hard. Apart from all the good people leaving because they can get a better job it will end up taking longer, and is more likely to not work properly.