Timothy Lochner

Here's a big problem with crunch. Whoever is looking at the schedule says "Oh no, we have 6 work-weeks of work and only 5 work-weeks left." The answer? Work 6 days a week instead of 5. That's crunch. The problem with it is not all days are the same.

To a scheduling program, 1 day is 1 day. 8 hours. You can complete TaskA in 8 hours, so Saturday vs next Monday is irreverent, right? Wrong. TaskA takes 8 hours because a person is well rested and not overworked. You want it on Saturday? That'll be 12 hours.

12 hours. Either that's another 4 hours on Sunday, working long on Saturday, or just wrapping it up Monday a mere 4 hours ahead of schedule. But now the next task, which would have taken 8 hours on Tuesday will be 12 hours starting halfway through Monday.

Why? Because the employee was overworked through the weekend. It's now Wednesday morning, you've deprived your employee of their weekend and you're at the same place in your schedule if you had given them the weekend.

I don't have studies on hand to back it up (though I am sure they are out there), but my experience is that crunch generally degenerates productivity more than gained productivity from more hours worked, especially if carried on long enough.

Defenders of crunch will say that crunch is necessary to make release dates, ensure quality. It's pro consumer. Also wrong. In the long game, it's anti-consumer. Crunch drives workers away from the industry, reducing innovation and overall makes games worse.

When experienced workers leave, new blood fills the void. New blood are bloodlet and don't innovate because they are still learning, ramping up. By the time they are experienced and ready to make big innovations, they are crunched out of the industry like their predecessors.