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Eidos-Montréal Offices shifting to the 4 day work week
- edzillion 5y agoIf Eidos Montreal is the same as the game companies I have worked for they'll all be doing a ton of unpaid overtime. Work hours as stated on the contract meant nothing
- TwinProduction 5y agoWill their salaries be lowered to match the new number of hours per week?
- tomstuart 5y agoNo: > In the next few weeks, the Montreal and Sherbrooke studios will be officially closed on Fridays, without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour.
- sdf131 5y agoThey’re likely earning ~40-70k so the shift isn’t very significant The real question is: are they changing the deadlines? Studio already suffer from crunch and all the meetings you had on Friday are now spread throughout the week
- Karawebnetwork 5y ago> They’re likely earning ~40-70k so the shift isn’t very significant Exactly. I don't work in the video-game industry, but the local (Québec) programmer scene is pretty small and information travels fast. I've been told by people that work there that the employer already pays the equivalent of a 4 day week and that many employees are quitting now that WFH has opened up the market. My personal understanding is that instead of increasing the pay, they are betting that by cutting a day, people will stay and keep the same level of crunch time.
- NortySpock 5y ago"Crunch, and also crunch on Friday, which you now 'have off' but since you are (by design, perpetually) behind, we're going to need you to come in."
- 908B64B197 5y ago> My personal understanding is that instead of increasing the pay, they are betting that by cutting a day, people will stay and keep the same level of crunch time. How's the option package? A credible company will have most employees in the core business getting the majority of their revenue from the stock performance. Switching to 4 days a week should lower the number of release they can have per year...
- sdf131 5y agoStock options aren’t a thing in the game industry
- 908B64B197 5y agoThat's a red flag.
- ornornor 5y agoThe whole video game industry is a red flag. It’s notorious for underpaying, demanding insanely long hours, and treating people like subhumans.
- Darmody 5y agoI'd say that happens for 2 reasons. 1. Video games are really hard and costly to make and unless you're a big known company, nothing assures you'll get your money back 2. It's a dream job for a lot of young programmers, so they'll accept anything.
- 5y ago
- 908B64B197 5y ago> They’re likely earning ~40-70k so the shift isn’t very significant On an annual basis some internships are better paid. Where do these folks hire?
- nick__m 5y agoIn Montreal I have no idea but in Sherbrooke the salaries are generally low, I make ~90k (plus a solid, well managed, pension plan) and work for one of the best employer in the city. I could look into remote work but I am quite confortable where I am. I love the 35 hours workweek, the 21 days of paid time off, the week and a half around Christmas, my private office with a marble window sills (that I will use only 2 days a week when the telework plan is finally officialized) , the 7 minutes commute, the low cost of life and my beer aficionado colleagues.
- sdf131 5y agoThere’s a huge gap between the game industry and the rest People do it out of passion, I guess. It’s funny too because the work is usually significantly harder than the much better paid start-up/SaaS jobs. Everyone has college degrees, there’s no C++ bootcamp grads I went to a school which was well-known for its game dev degree so I know dozens of people in the industry (mostly everyone works at Ubisoft) but opted out myself because the pay was way too low
- vvanders 5y agoYup, pretty much. When I left industry it was almost a 100% salary bump. I tossed 2 months of PTO(because the company wouldn't pay it out, per state law and I could never take it) and I made up the difference in the first few paychecks. Tons of fun problems and passionate people but the industry is an absolute meat grinder. Last I looked at the statistics median industry career length was ~3 years.
- djmips 5y agoThey live in Canada, their salaries are already lowered. This will help them from leaving for better $ elsewhere.
- slothtrop 5y agoIt's the game industry, these salaries aren't generally high in the U.S. either.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- akersten 5y agoIn the spirit of always starting your negotiation high and working toward a palatable middle, I'd like to propose a 2-day work week and 5 days off. You may think that sounds crazy, but how many hours of dedicated, actual work do you do in a week? If you work a "9-5" and are reading this comment at work right now, I can give you a hint: it's not 40 ;) I think we'd all be less distracted and more focused if we forced the "week's work" to happen in 2 , 8-hour days, and we could feel less guilty about not being perfectly-oiled constantly productive machines for the remaining 5/7 days of the week.
- ladyattis 5y agoI think over-asking for that sort of work week isn't productive to be honest. And I'm an anti-work kind of person. The real problem is that modern work doesn't reflect the actual labor involved. I don't know how many hours I've wasted on meetings where a simple email and a 15 minute follow-up for questions would've been sufficient to get any issues out of the way. I'll grant that some labor is just meetings to debate the course of a business but beyond that as a software developer my job really should be about what is getting priority and then doing that priority queue. The meeting schedule for me should be 1 or 2 meetings a week total (not exceeding 45 minutes total) to set the work queue for said products then the rest should be me doing the work with some time to get help from other developers who have expertise in something I'm unfamiliar with. The total hours for that? Probably 30-40 a week tops. Anything past 40 is just screaming for contractors.
- dont__panic 5y agoI wonder if the increasing shift toward remote work (often in disparate timezones) will end up pushing teams to eventually adopt 1-3 "core hours" 2-3 days per week with team meetings and collaboration sessions and a more laissez-faire attitude toward working the rest of the usual 9-5 day; I would love to just focus on getting my work done any time I feel like it, attend meetings during core hours, and have the ability to get out of the house and go do things during the normal workweek.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
- christkv 5y agoProbably 4 days of 20h instead of 5 at 16h if it’s anything like other triple A publishers.
- juice_bus 5y agoCome on man, its in the article: > without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour.
- christkv 5y agoSure but one thing is saying it and the other thing is living it. The hard deadlines of peak sales periods like Christmas seem like are still constant drivers of death marches in that industry. Sentiments seems good but I’m skeptical.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI wouldn’t be quite that cynical, but gaming is known for tons of extra hours. All companies I have known with bad hours have also officially had 40 hour weeks.
- Jare 5y agoI want to point my finger at you and accuse you of cynicism (sp?). But then I remember that colleague who was crunching as a part time employee, and yeah you have all the right in the world to be because gamedev has always been quite fucked up. I do believe (and hope to be correct) that many gamedev studios are getting much better, but there's plenty still to do.
- nohr 5y agoYou can't expect them to release how much they're actually working their employees. Games is a notoriously vicious cycle of work.
- nottorp 5y agoYeah right. More likely it's 32 hours/week unless it's less than 2 years before a deadline and then it's 80 hours/week.
- imtringued 5y agoInstead of mandating that everyone should work a fixed work week why not just let people decide how much they want to work? The 40 hour work week is just a "social construct". Let the unit of labor be half a work day (4 hours) instead of a whole person. If people want to work 24 or 32 or 44 hours let them. The labor market isn't much of a market if you can't even do something as basic as decide how much you want to work.
- dbbk 5y agoPeople still need to be able to collaborate.
- onion2k 5y agoWhy base it on time at all? If I can be as effective in 20 hours as my coworker is in 40 hours, why not just pay us the same salaries for the same value produced? The fact I get stuff done twice as quickly shouldn't be a factor unless I choose to work 40 hours and do twice as much as him. Then I should be paid more.
- bserge 5y agoThat's called being a freelancer.
- bosie 5y agoDo you work in a silo? never have any meetings, answer questions that might span over a 40 hour time frame? How do you figure out your value vs your co-workers value?
- 0des 5y agoYour value is the amount of currency you exchange for an acceptable amount of your free time.
- hyperhopper 5y agoThis is the opposite of what the comment chain you replied to is talking about: the thread is about output as a measure instead of time. The hard part is measuring output. The market is currently time based because time is easy.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoProgress! Bit by bit
- glonq 5y agoAge 49 here. I'm seriously considering that my next job should be 3 or 4 days per week, even if that means a somewhat proportionately reduced paycheck. Would fight for 4+ weeks vacation too. I need quality of life more than I need cash right now.
- lm28469 5y agoI'm in my mid 20s and I'll never go back to 5 days workweek, definitely go for it, it's a life changing move, no amount of money makes up for time lost
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- autarch 5y agoI'm 47 and I just left my last job. I'm going to take some time off, but I'm committed to only working 4 days per week or less when I look for my next position.
- luxurytent 5y agoDo it! I'm 36 and my current gig offers 5 weeks vacation, and I just came back from 3 months (topped up) parental leave. Life is too beautiful to work 5 days a week
- whichdan 5y agoOh I would easily take a 20% paycut to have Fridays off forever.
- philmcp 5y agoMe too - but there are now companies offering a 4 day week with 0% drop in salary https://4dayweek.io/ https://4dayweek.io/
- EduardoBautista 5y ago
- aswin_kumar_10 5y agosfd
- satvikpendem 5y agoRather than a 4 day work week, I always thought that a 4 hour work day was far superior (or at least, a 4 day work week of 5 hour work days; 20 hours a week total). You're not truly doing 8 hours of full work a week, so why not focus the time down to only productive hours? Here's an interesting article about it [0]. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/05/28/the-future-of-work-will-be------------five-hour-days-a-four-day-workweek-and-flexible-staggered-schedules/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/05/28/the-future...
- IshKebab 5y agoYou're assuming that by working fewer hours you'd magically eliminate only the unproductive hours. That seems extremely unlikely. I read an article years ago from someone that tried it, expecting exactly what you're expecting, but they found that proportional of their working time that was productive was about the same.
- breuleux 5y agoIt might depend on how you organize your time. I could see how working for 4 consecutive hours might have proportionally the same amount of unproductivity, but maybe splitting it in two blocks of two hours with a two hour pause in-between would work better?
- satvikpendem 5y agoI have not found that to be the case, referring to your 2nd paragraph. In fact most of the evidence I've seen wrt <8 hour work days have been that people get as much or even more done than they thought [0]. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3063262/what-happened-when-i-moved-my-company-to-a-5-hour-workday https://www.fastcompany.com/3063262/what-happened-when-i-mov...
- kevingadd 5y agoThat's not much of an improvement for people who have a long commute - eliminating a work day eliminates 2 commute stretches (plus the cost of the commute).
- throwawaysea 5y agoThere is probably an inflection point we've silently passed, where increased consolidation, high standards of living, and diminishing value in additional productivity mean that we can reduce the amount of work we need to do. However defending it will also require bold coalition building and trade policy. Countries that want to give their citizens a better life through shorter work weeks cannot do so if they're competing against other countries where workers are willing or forced to commit to 996 hours. Defending a better work week means enacting tariffs or other controls against trade partners that don't share the same policy, just as we should with offshored environmental violations.
- ekianjo 5y agoIf they really believe in this they should stop half ass it and work only one day a week for optimal productivity.
- 999900000999 5y agoI’d prefer we completely get rid of work hours. Just tell me what we need to get done, I’ll do it, remotely of course. I’ve had various companies expect me to work extra hours for no additional pay , while never offering an extra day off. Hell , I’d be down to do a 80 hour week if I know my average week is only 20 hours
- marcodiego 5y agoLooks like, at least on IT, the world is starting to slowly change or experiment with 4 work days a week. I wonder how it will be influenced by job automation that is happening in parallel.
- daxfohl 5y agoI'd really like a 4/2 week. It's just annoying to have an odd number of days. You can't maintain a schedule of something every other day.
- didibus 5y ago> without changing the working conditions currently in place nor the salaries of employees, thus switching from the 40-hour week to 32-hour Yes please!!
- m0zg 5y agoEven as a conservative, I strongly support the normalization of 4 day work weeks, if for no other reason than to create more competition for domestic lower skill labor (which will over time result in rising wages). A job is the best social program. This will create more jobs while at the same time allowing people to live better lives. 40 hour work weeks have outlived their usefulness long time ago. It's ridiculous that people have to neglect their kids to make someone else rich.
- hypeatei 5y agoYep, although I'm living in a very conservative state and workplace, many people are questioning the 40 hour work week. Hopefully this becomes a reality in the next 5 to 10 years or so.
- maroonblazer 5y agoMy hypothesis is that most people doing knowledge work already work 4 days/week, if not less. Call it "the shadow hours". It's not possible or practical for managers to monitor how much their reports spend time thinking. Also, most managers understand how much secondary work takes up people's time and gets in the way of the primary work. I.e. Managers aren't really in a position to question how much time it takes someone to complete their work. Shifting to a 4 day work week is simply codifying a practice that has been routine for some time now.
- ygjb 5y agoCompetent managers in technical companies managing highly skilled professionals do. The rapidly growing corporate surveillance market says that incompetent managers and companies that grind people until they burn out are still a a major force out there.
- someonehere 5y agoI wish my office would switch the four days. Nobody really works on Fridays anyway. I’ll look at calendars and meetings with other employees where I’m at. People have maybe one meeting for the whole day.
- falcor84 5y agoJust to clarify - you're implying that the amount of work getting done in a day is _positively_ correlated with the amount of meetings that day?
- someonehere 5y agoYes. My role in the company is dealing with employees directly. It’s really slow for my team and I on Fridays. I’m almost at the point where I’ll give them alternating Friday’s off individually. One person will get a Friday off, then the next Friday the other employee, etc etc. It’s slow for us.
- pferde 5y agoIf your office switched to four days, nobody would really work on Thursdays instead.
- someonehere 5y agoCorrect. It’s a cycle I know they will adjust to if that happened. I don’t make the rules there.
- NetOpWibby 5y agoOne of my favorite game studios on HN? I assumed a new Deus Ex was announced. Glad they’re making this change, looking forward to reading an update next year.