This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch
When people who work in the games industry say they crunch because they&#x27;re young men with poor boundaries who would do anything to make video games, and when industry veterans literally write PowerPoint decks about hiring suggesting targeting young men with poor boundaries because you can get them to crunch since they will do anything to write video games, I choose to believe their words.  This lines up with external evidence.<p>Scheduling software is hard: granted!  But do we see 90 hour crunch on <i>every single shipping product</i> in the US software industry?  No, that&#x27;s ludicrous.  Do we see 90 hour crunch on substantially every shipping software project in, I don&#x27;t know, the Japanese software industry?  Oh we do!  Curious!  Does that industry also write schedules which assume crunch?  I mean it sounds far fetched but no, literally in the design document written in the <i>first week of a three year project</i> there are exhortations about how understaffed we are (Why?) and how tight he schedule is (Why?) and how required heroic efforts are (Why?).  And does the Japanese software industry hire people with poor boundary control and ruthlessly inculcate lower boundaries?  Great Scott it does!<p>Crunch in the video game industry is not an accident.  It is a policy.  Do not work in video games.