I wish people would stop glorifying how many hours they work and how little sleep they get, "You need to live without sleep (4 hours a night every day for years baby!)." Sounds juvenile to me.
It's likely bravado from college days. I remember overhearing many conversations at school where students would brag about pulling their second all-nighter in a particular week. I could only think that they were doing something wrong. If your work load is requiring you to stay up for more than 16-18 hours a day, then you're either doing too much or you're really inefficient.
A metric of success, to me, is being able to make money while you're asleep. You'll never escape the chains of the cubicle if you don't work smart.
It's the lead position. My lead at work (MS) works more hours than me, too; and, so far as I know, knows what all of us are working on at a pretty considerable level. He does testing for some of the things that we can't, or that need to be done immediately if we're doing higher priority things, and so on.
I'd like to think he still gets at least 6 hours of sleep a night, but I wouldn't know. The synopsis of the lead, I read, was reasonable, especially remembering what sort of lives the people that worked for EA had.
In short, I don't think this was trying to glorify the hours worked, and instead alerting would-be leads to understand what they're committing to.
Read the last sentence before taking quotes out of context - "being a lead is all about responsibility".
If you're the lead and things start going south on your project then you'd better be prepared to start leading and taking on whatever is needed to get your game shipped.
I know it's cool to preach about working smarter instead of harder, but getting a game out of the door and into a box usually requires large doses of both.
The game industry puts this type of workload on more than just leads and managers - the rank and file toil for long hours with miserable pay (compared to the rest of the industry). There are a few exceptions to the rule - studios where life resembles something like normal, and crunch time is an anomaly, not year-round.
They are few and far between though. I grew up in Vancouver where EA has its largest studio presence, and the number of burned out game devs I've met is a little scary.
Video games is like Hollywood - it's glamorous, and has the tendency to suck in some great talent, chew them up, and spit them by the curb 2-4 years down the road. And this will not change so long as there's a lineup of talented artists and developers out the door and around the block waiting for their crack at what may just be the worst working environment known to software-dom in this country.
I agree somewhat. Yes, a lead has more responsibility, and will work as hard as the other team members. Sometimes they may have to push to get the product shipped.
That is a completely different thing than four hours of sleep a night for years.
It's all of the above. As lead you have to fill in, to do what no one else wants to do, to keep try of all the things that need to be done in the say 48 hours to the next deadline and sort them by priority. But you often have to work just as long as the longest worker on the team if only out of solidarity. It's important that no one can ever say to you: "You took it easy, while I did the work."
This principle is why Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon were all beloved by their men. They dug in there with everyone else. Slept on the ground. Rode first into battle. All that. It seems silly, but don't underrate it. I can't tell you how many times someone would come to me at 4 in the morning before a deadline and say how much they appreciated that I was there. No one wants to feel used.
I think foregoing producers definitely makes this very difficult. We had some wonderful producers at Blizzard (web team) that came on and turned the team around from hours of OT every night to projects being done on time without OT except in rare cases. Leads don't have (quite) as much on their plate, devs don't get burnt out, and things just run so much better.
