Rockstar Games, who very recently boasted of making its workers work
100 hour weeks to complete their upcoming cowboy game, told an employee in the past that
she was jeopardizing her career by encouraging her teammates to take a 30-minute break.
We were expected to work late & on weekends VERY regularly. In my own time I made cakes & it was something many looked forward to once a week for a short 30 minutes. It helped moral significantly. A mini non-scientific study I did showed more bugs were fixed on Cake Day!
After quite a few months of this, I got pulled aside by my boss. Apparently the higher ups thought our entire office slacked off ALL the time because we had cake once a week. I was told that I was jeopardising my career by continuing to make cakes for the office.
I was told that we could do cake day, but only during lunch hour - when people are eating lunch and don’t really need that essential afternoon tea break with lots of sugar. I tried to push back.
The day I was told not to do Cake Day I had already baked a cake. I was so scared I decided not to announce anything. I never ate that cake. It was a Portal cake. That’s what voluntary crunch pressure does: it scares people into believing there's no other choice.
At one point in my career, I did crunch. Back in the early 2000s, it was something expected of people in the broader software industry, not just games. I did not work 100-hour weeks; that's unfathomable. But I did work 70-hour weeks for months at a time, and that was crushing. I don't wish that on anyone.