Of course, the argument, in blindly presenting only one side of the situation, discusses only why it might be worse but fails to mention why employers of programmers might use crunch anyway.

Which is simple: because of Brooks' Law.

If you have a target date, and you don't think your current staff levels and current work per staff member per unit wall-clock time is going to get things done by that date, there are two variables you can manipulate. Assuming Brooks' Law is true to a first approximation, increasing staff levels isn't going to improve the situation; you'll get more man hours in before the date, but the communication overheads and etc. won't result in more work getting done before the date. However, increasing the number of hours each staff member works per week does not increase communication overhead, and so if there is any extra work getting done by increasing those hours

And that's my response to Lesson Three is this: five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century. What makes us think that our industry is somehow exempt from this rule? Because in programming, you can't trade men for months like you can for factory workers (which make up all three of the examples from that section).

I don't know how these two competing issues balance out, but the fact that it's not even mentioned or acknowledged in that "whitepaper" is a good example of why I'm not a member of the IGDA.

-- nothings

The IGDA paper seems definitely written from one particular position in the debate. At the same time I think it has good points about the overall effects of overwork, and that bit I find really interesting is about the history of the 40-hour work week. (I failed to make that clear enough in the entry.)

Before I read things like this I had the vague impression that the 40 hour week was more or less arbitrary and created by union pressure (thank god for the unions, honestly). I didn't know that there seems to be good efficiency arguments for something like it and that wise employers were going that way anyways, without outside pressure.

the original article was moved to https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-work-six-lessons-2005/