I agree that all workers need holidays and breaks and that overworking staff can lead to reduced productivity however i feel you are mostly out of line here.
Do you have any specific knowledge of employee contracts at gas powered games? Are you aware of any employee discontent or exploitation? Or are you just assuming this from an outsiders perspective.
No, I am stating this from the perspective of having been a programmer in 2 different game companies. As mentioned in the OP, there were times where for months on end I would be working weekends with no overtime pay. Now you could attempt to argue that I happened to join the wrong game companies or that my experience was specific to myself only; how would you explain then that all of the poeple I have talked to or read about online who worked in other game companies had the same experience? As for demi, when I see the instability of the game, it is clear that the coders are not being given enough time or simply are burned out from working on this project. Alternatively it could be down to improper testing procedures which I think is the case here.
So who is to blame? Surely there must be a scapegoat? Yes, my friends, its not the coders - its the managers who are to blame. They are the ones who should decide on ensuring proper OPEN BETA testing procedures and allocating an appropriate timeline for such testing to help weed out bugs BEFORE a release. They failed to do so in this game - it was a closed beta. Still wanna blame the programmers / devs?
Sureley if the workers are unhappy with thier working conditions they will purse the matter with thier employers or possibly goverment authorities.
lol? the gov authorities don't give 3 shits about programmers. IT in general is the most abusive industry I have ever heard about, because its too new and people in high positions such as government do not understand it. There are no labor unions to protect IT workers or coders as such.
With software or hardware, things can go wrong anytime and randomly and people expect an "on the spot" fix. That means that IT people can be called up in the middle of the night or, becuase of some unseen LAST MINUTE problem that causes delays of a particular delivery, programmers / IT workers have to do massive overtime (often all nighters) to resolve a problem that they are not even sure how long it will take for them to fix in the first place simply becuse they often do not even know the cause of the problem. Being a good software engineer is not just about knowing programming - its about having top of the line analytical and problem solving skills and about being able to manage frustration because often times people are facing giant jigsaw puzzles when they are clueless about the cause of a problem.
That is two weeks they could be fixing stuff.
Two weeks of nothing would not increase productivity.
You are partially correct, it would not increase productivity in the short run. But it WOULD in the long run. You see, ironically the best programming you can do is when you are AWAY from the computer. Becuase when you sit in front of it too long, your mind gets so entrenched in a problem that you are unable to come up with an out of the box solution. Your thoughts become cluttered and no longer clear. So often times its useful if you disconenct yourself from the problem completely and come back to it with a fresh mind.
I'll give you an example - 3 years ago while in my gaming coy I spent an hour or two trying to resolve a memory allocation problem for a nintendo DS game we were working on. I could not solve the unexplained crashes. I got pissed and took a break by playing street fighter alpha 2 on PC emulator (believe it or not I can still pull off combo's on a keyboard, I am that kind of nerd). I knocked the crap out of the "expert" AI on it, felt good about it and my game was over in 15-20 min. I came back to my memory allocation problem and solved it in less the 30 seconds. This was because I had disconnected myself from the problem completely and came back to it with a fresh perspective which allowed me to come up with a solution that I had not thought of during the 2 hours that I worked on it.
