The internet is ablaze this afternoon due to reports from a blogger over the weekend who claims he worked for Rockstar Games. These sorts of blogs tend to make great reading for a scandal-hungry audience, and this one, which is disclaimed at the top with “the following is most likely a complete fabrication – unless it’s all true” – is naturally no different. He starts by talking about a job offer he had at Vigil to work on Darksiders, but soon gets around to Rockstar.
“I immediately sensed something was ‘off’ on my first day when they failed to give me a tour of the facilities or really explain anything,” he alleges. “I mean, was the food in the kitchen for employees? How does the coffee machine work? Where are the supplies? When did people take lunch? And so on… It’s customary for someone to watch out for new employees to make sure they’re comfortable and that they have a clue what’s going on.”
“While Rockstar was gracious enough to hire me to learn Maya on the job – this was the only non-3DS Max Rockstar studio at the time… they provided absolutely no reference materials that helped me to do so – no manuals, no tutorials, no videos, no reference – and this seemed strangely odd & inefficient,” he claims. “My boss told me that ‘Maya is basically the same as Max’.”
“So disjointed were the teams at Rockstar that no one seemed particularly interested in anyone else.”
“It was around month 7 or 8 when I finally realized that all I’d really been doing since I started was ‘cleaning up’ or completely re-doing the work of another employee (who was still working there) because it didn’t meet the standards for quality we were shooting for,” says the blogger. “This person was producing work in such a way that it was actually a full-time job for me for almost a year to go in behind him and ‘fix’ it.”
“Basically, the guy was a ‘hack worker’ – someone who, at a casual glance, appears to be producing work on par with everyone – but at a deeper level is doing his job in a way that creates more work for others later on.”
It doesn’t make pleasant reading. “Hours increased from 8 to 12 – and days increased for [sic] 5 to 6. Anyone on a salary was not compensated for the additional hours – as far as our paychecks were concerned, we were still only putting in 40 hours per week… Morale continued to deteriorate as the lies increased. And everyone was on edge. And we were being spoken to in meetings like incompetent 10 year olds.”
There’s allegations of email monitoring and mention of being stripped of responsibilities for the game (which appears to be Red Dead Redemption) slipping. The blog’s currently down, but is available via Google’s Cache.
Kovacs
“Anyone on a salary was not compensated for the additional hours.” This is common practice in the IT industry. It may not be “fair” but if you want to be paid for every minute you work, join the civil service. Stay away from any computing profession.
kjkg
Not just computing! Sometimes you just have to take those “hits” to try further yourself in a job.
As for the blog, bit strange. If it is fake, why choose a company like R* who have been pretty damn succesfull. You would think if it was a hoax, they would have chosen somebody like Activision, put the cat among the thousands of pigeons already flying around (I quite like that analogy).
Foxhound_Solid
I am on a salary working in Logistics and EPOS Installations. I m contracted to do 40 hrs per week. I never do less than 60. Its just the way of the world at the moment, conditions should be humane granted but everyone wants as much as they can out of each other…..
Kovacs
Foxhound_Solid, this is your boss at Logistics and EPOS Installations. Get back to work.
Boss
DR-DAVROS
LOL 40hrs work – 20hrs TSA
solidsteven
Kovacs Get back to work.
Boss
Foxhound_Solid
@kovacs
Ok boss
**struts off like ace ventura**
djhsecondnature
‘Maya is basically the same as Max’.
Like hell it is!
Kovacs
I did have a chuckle at that.
:)
djhsecondnature
It’s like saying, oh well French is basically the same as Japanese, because you know, they’re both languages.
citizeninsane45
“Basically, the guy was a ‘hack worker’ – someone who, at a casual glance, appears to be producing work on par with everyone – but at a deeper level is doing his job in a way that creates more work for others later on.”
There are people like that in 95% of workplaces (N.B. statitstic may not be factually correct)
Kovacs
Indeed. There is always a percentage of people in any workplace who are there to make up the numbers. And there are always disgruntled people who feels hard done by because they have to fix another person’s work.
We’ve also been hearing about RDR development issues for some time now. Sounds like it’s just another pissed off employee moaning. I’m not saying s/he doesn’t have a right to moan. I just don’t think he or she is a special case just because they work in the gaming industry.
Get in line, pilgrim. Your gripes are common across multiple industries.
JoshHood
This isn’t the first we’ve heard about mismanagement and mistreatment at the Red Dead studio, either. There were reports a few months back that working there was unbearable, with the team permanently in crunch mode, and New York constantly swooping in and demanding changes at short notice.
pitchforkdisney
still… game of the year, so the slave drivers are vindicated. next time you kill a grizzly just imagine it’s sam houser?
TSBonyman
There doesn’t seem much to this – except the guy couldn’t hack it working there..
BIGAL-1992
This story to me just sounds like a pissed off employee, who probably didn’t get the fat paycheck they were looking for. The whole things sounds fake to me.
Vaile23
why would it be fake? you scrolled to the bottom and checked his linkedin?
lets be fair, he painted an awful picture of R* there. wouldn’t want to work for a company like that no matter what the name!
ARUMIR
I wouldn’t like to work for such a company like that it must be so sad… and much like endless suffering