I considered working at Pixar at one point, and spoke to their hiring department.
Curiously, they considered the salary they were offering you to be for 50 hours per week. This wasn't an upper limit; no, you were expected to do occasional overtime past 50. But 50 was the baseline.
I didn't follow through with the interview process. Screw that.
50 hours seems to be normal in some effects houses, which are increasingly operating like sweat shops. Weta Digital is also the same. And they strictly expect minimum 50 hours there.
Yup. Movies (and games) often have very hard deadlines and missing the release window can mean losing a fuck-ton of money. I remember working on a TV Christmas special once, and let's just say that letting the release slip to early January was Not An Option.
Companies have deadlines, sure, but that doesn't mean they need to routinely require overtime.
I mean, if all my recent projects required 10% overtime, I've got a bunch of options for my next project:
a. Hire 10% more staff
b. Increase my existing staff's efficiency by 10%
c. Reduce scheduling and rework inefficiencies by 10%
d. Quote 10% longer delivery times to customers
e. Promise customers 10% less
f. Start work 10% earlier.
g. Plan to make my employees work 10% overtime.
If my company was choosing option g every time, I'd expect my employees to quit for better jobs because planned overtime is a pretty big 'fuck you' from your employer.
Why employees in the games industry put up with this sort of thing is frankly beyond me.
> Why employees in the games industry put up with this sort of thing is frankly beyond me.
They typically don't, forever.
But there's an unending stream of fresh meat entering the game industry who will put up with anything to achieve their dreams of working on video games.
I've been lucky, in that I've done a lot of games, but haven't worked anywhere that routinely required overtime of me. The occasional project here or there would go south, or there would be a bad manager, but other than the last week or two of crunch to get a project finished, I've not done too badly.
So what you're saying is that despite Christmas coming on the same day every year for the last few hundred years, management still can't plan their way out of a wet paper bag. Yeah, not my problem, nor am I paid to make it my problem.
