[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[Amanda Walker]

On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 09:13  AM, Yannick Jean wrote:

> The main reasons why the gaming industry is such a mess when it
> comes to managing large project is that it's still employing
> mostly geeks, in both high or low positions. Geeks, great as they
> are for working days and night for your project, are notoriously
> atrocious at planning and keeping tight schedule.

Lack of sleep and downtime also impairs judgement.  After 6 hours
straight, even geeks make more mistakes than progress.  There comes
a time to go home and come back refreshed, rather than press on and
have to spend all of the next morning fixing what you did the
previous night.

Look, the market doesn't care how many late hours someone worked, or
how much Jolt they consumed.  Really.  Nobody cares how hard the
team worked--products are not graded on effort, only on results.
The marketplace is littered with the dessicated corpses of games
produced on crunch time.

Crunch time means two things: you're understaffed, or you don't
understand what you're trying to build well enough.  Generally both
in some combination.

> Give me a ruthless, cold-blooded, project manager and a full staff
> of "8 to 5" workers who got a life and a family at home and I'll
> give you MMORPG on time, on budget and with a stable codebase.

Indeed.

Give me a team of top performing mature engineers, a realistic
budget, and 8 hours a day, and we can build anything.  I've reached
the point where I'd rather hire a mech E or civil engineer who's
"picked up" programming over a career programmer.  The "coding
cowboy" mythos is responsible for much of the sorry state of the
software industry.

Amanda Walker
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