"The industry is trending away from crunch": Ubisoft, Naughty Dog and Remedy devs discuss the origins of overwork
LinkedIn today is a terrible den of web3+ grifters, obsolete CVs, frog-boiling pressure to buy a subscription, and scurrilous journalists hunting for leaks in job listings. But every now and then it comes good. For example, there’s a discussion underway between various senior developers, including current and former staff of Remedy, Ubisoft and Naughty Dog, about the causes of crunch, aka ruinous overwork.
There’s a pervading atmosphere of former triple-A blokes warming up their soapboxes for a GDC talk down the line, and a certain amount of insider jargon about “pipelines” and so forth – somebody should probably do a piece on the etymology of “pipelines” in software development. But it’s otherwise a useful chat. There is minimal indulgence of the old saw about crunch being unavoidable because ‘passionate’ creative people are inherently prone to burning themselves out. The emphasis is on crunch as a structural phenomenon.