An old timers view on crunch time.

It's been 20 years of working on video games.
20 years... two damn decades.

The only advice I have for a newbie to the games industry:

1. Value your life more than work...

Your life is yours, not the property of whatever company you work for, America is NOT a communist country so don't act like it is one.

Sure when you have a hard set deadline you should put in a bit of extra work toward your goal, but realistically here's what happens in a regular work day versus a crunch time work day has little effect on the aggregate total work -- if you crunch for more than a few weeks. After about three weeks of crunching productivity tends to bottom out, at worst you're losing the actual productivity you'd normally be able to put in.

You're groggy from staying at the office till 2 am. You're getting up later and getting to the office later. This means you're taking lunch later, and leaving later. Basically, all you've succeeded at doing is moving your working day to a different part of the clock.

This means you're missing out on what you used to do when you normally got home. Worst of all, you've lost motivation. The death march is the worst state for a game studio to be in. Everyone is on edge, creativity is gone, and hostility between co-workers rises; stop it.

The real reason for PC sales decline.

There's an idiotic blame game going on with the current "slump" in PC sales. The blame is being cast on either mobile devices or operating systems, but no body is pointing a finger at the folks ultimately responsible for making the hardware that is the PC.

There are some writers who have pointed out that their computer from a few years ago doesn't need upgrading. This is half of the truth. They feel that there's no reason for upgrading the hardware because it's still fine.

We were promised real time ray tracing in games in 2008, and now, 5 years later we're still seeing forward rendering or deferred rendering systems at best. We were promised 2560x1440 monitors would be the new standard in monitor resolution, but 1920x1080 is still the "high end" with 1366x768 still on the top of the heap as far as browsers seem to be concerned. I want a 4k monitor, like three years ago.

If i could get a trio of 27" 4k monitors for 700 a piece, sure I'd get that, but then I'd need a set of video cards that don't exist. I'd like to run them in 3d, with physics, and the real time ray tracing with sub-surface scattering, refractions, and all of the "film" like qualities that could be done, if CPUs and GPUs could handle it. But there's the problem. None of the hardware exists for doing these things, and your "just fine" computer has no chance in hell of being able to do even half of this.

Intel, AMD, nVidia, IBM, you guys have been slacking! You're the real bottle neck for the desktop advancement and the reason for the sales slump. Offer up a 10ghz 128core 16GB L3 cache running at 10 watts, I'd be there. Give me a trio of 24GB video cards with millions of cores I'd put them in. If i could get a 20TB SSD sure, I'd put that in my new system as well, but I can't it doesn't exist.

Between 1993 and 2003 CPUs were practically doubling in speed and power, then electrons started giving transistors problems. But we've discovered many different solutions, many different alternatives and new methods to overcome the limitations.

We've been promised graphene wafers, single atom thick germanium wafers to solve these problems, but so far nothing has hit the market. Every day I read about IBM making headway into quantum computers, but I can't buy anything from that research, so why should I care?

I've been reading about super cheap manufacturing methods for making gigantic high res OLED screens, so why aren't there any 300.00 2560x1440 monitors out there?

Common, folks, PCs aren't getting better, that's why no one is buying them. Your old pc sucks, it seriously does. It's just even more unfortunate that nothing better has come out.

Standing Desks

Okay, so on the first week of a standing desk at the office.
Distinct advantages have come to light, the first one is to visit someone at their desk.
When more than one or two people are visiting your workstation at a sitting desk you have to find a lot of chairs. Then the chairs need to roll around and re position for someone to face your computer and do something on your keyboard. This is almost always a slow process involving a lot of awkward chair rolling, and in the rare case, a chair might get stuck and fall spilling a programmer to the floor.
With standing desks you're all standing. Moving around for someone to use your computer is fast, easy and rarely ever involves any effort. Stepping to the side to let someone access your computer is easy. This ease of access is more likely to lead to more people using your computer. It's great!

Aside from being on my feet all day this standing desk thing is great. I feel better, and I think my legs are happier for it. Aside from the usual health benefits, the standing desk is great for your work environment and task sharing. As an engineer it's great for someone to come by, show me where i broke something and fix it, or at the very least point to a line of errant code that I need to fix.

Here's another vote for you getting a standing desk. I'm glad I did.