Just got off work and this has been stewing in my head all day. Putting some thoughts out there.
Performance reviews as mentioned were really the worst. There was always a jokey culture around the department of people being fired for not doing overtime, but bosses would always try and frame it as a joke and not reality despite names cropping up of people who HAD been fired for it. I could even look up the previous bug numbers for this person and see that they were pulling just as much as anyone else during our normal contracted hours.
I always felt anxious about my job before a review, sweating like fuck in the review, and still feeling shook after the review. I didn't want to lose the job, I loved working it when things were normal hours (I started there after a big stretch had been finished, so things were normal hours while we awaited new content and basically goofed around to find bugs in old content), we got unprecedented freedom to explore documentation, projects going on around the place, work with dev tools from any department in spare time to make our own stuff and present it, but the insane hours left almost no time for this unless you never left the office.
I had to quit my regular exercise regimen outside of the office when expected overtime became a natural reality (maybe 3 or 4 weeks into the job) because I just didn't have the time, focus or energy for it. After that, we never had a quiet period again, and I never got back into it while there. Just zero time and energy. I'd get bad headaches and nosebleeds at the office quite a lot, probably from staring at the same 3 monitors all day. Just had to stuff my nose full of toilet paper and deal with it, working through it all. Also began cutting corners in my personal time due to needing to catch sleep, like showering at work instead of home, like many other staff. Lots of people in the studio caught veruccas due to some asshat having them and spreading them around. I've still got mine, and its been years now. Treatment hasn't helped there, but there's a funny little thing for you that also gets to me.
Overtime was paid for anyone on a temporary contract (me), time and a half, but anyone on a permanent contract got none as they were salaried, not much more than us either. That was about 2/3rd's of my test team. For us on the temps, our overtime pay was calculated out of kilter with our normal pay. We got paid on the 1st, but OT was calcalated 15th to the 15th, then added to the next pay on the 1st. You could hammer in shitloads of hours of OT in that period, get paid much more than normal, then it all gets taxed heavily, leaving you barely any better off for it. It was absolutely bloody senseless.
We'd get free dinners from a kitchen on overtime, which was very cool, with actual healthy options, but a lot of people decided to use the extra break to continue working at their desk. Despite the healthy options, a lot of the long term members were obese, riddled with physical problems that they'd whine about. At least we had really good chairs for your posture. Also a gym membership you could use at a local gym, but nobody had time for it anyway. A lot used it on their lunch break, but who wants to sacrifice relaxation and eating time to go and work out? Maybe for some its nice, but an actual break is useful as well. Plus it was far away enough that you were screaming there and back, hoping it wouldn't be busy and full of the locals.
Working the assload of extra hours, alongside the pressure, really destroyed my focus. I'd constantly be fidgeting, trying to distract myself during the small gaps (loading a new build, a quick automated test, waiting to get people ready for testing a specific mode in MP, etc), and I found it almost impossible to really relax. If I ever got an evening off, or even a day off, I'd be irritable. I'd snap at my girlfriend when she asked simple stuff, generally just having a rotten mood. I couldn't enjoy playing games anymore, most of my friends had distanced from me due to not being able to meet or even talk to them, and generally I became a recluse. I don't know if I even feel normal from that nowadays despite not working the same job for years. The months upon months I spent being hammered into an anxious fidgety mess is just not fucking worth it.
Long post, but I just want to rant about the fuckin' awful hours that game development studios encourage. Maybe these bosses are OK people outside of work, might be affable and likeable humans, but they should absolutely be crucified for the way they run things otherwise.
