Ew a Reporter? I have more respect for the burger flipper to be perfectly honest. And considering that they did a hotfix what...Friday? And then took a MUCH DESERVED weekend off, with Monday being a HOLIDAY in Canada, I'm not that worried. 98% of the guns/mods in the game are still working. Life goes on.
Doc, I'm not sure what your background is, but I'm a Network Architect and have been in the IT industry for almost 15 years. In all that time, I have NEVER seen something like this. By "this," I mean a software company releasing a product and then taking 3 days off. It just DOESN'T happen. Developers are typically working straight through at least a week after releasing a product, scrambling to get hotfixes together and push them out......holiday or no holiday, weekend or no weekend. To someone like me, this looks downright lazy. On-topic, thanks to the OP for posting this. I'll keep it in mind.
Happens all the time in the companies I have worked at, unless there is a showstopper. Multiple smaller bugs are not enough to warrent preventing our team recovering from a long crunch. If you drive your team on without a bit of RnR you end up with more bugs than you fixed. This is a great way to cascade a bad release into a total failure and it's a mistake we see a lot of American software companies making on the rare occasion we have partnered with them. Given that the lead producer is Scandinavian it doesn't surprise me that the company is using the worker-focused work pattern that Scandinavian software houses use to out-perform their American rivals. I haven't yet encountered any showstoppers, so I haven't seen anything that justifies dragging the dev's back. All the really bad stuff is macro-scale without any possible quick wins.
At this point they know it's not finished and they have months and months of work. Working 3 extra days isn't going to fix that. Might as well take some time off after a month of straight work then get back to it fresh.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I'm not saying that the Devs don't deserve a break, but my experience in the US has been that the crunch period is actually the same length, but planned to end shortly after release. Don't get me wrong here. I've also seen what you're speaking of happen first-hand at a couple of the companies that I've worked for and you're definitely right. Last company I worked at, the joke was that it was actually a slave ship and we were all chained to our oars, even me as the network/ADC guy who only did a little development. That mentality is one of the reasons I'm no longer with that company, but thankfully, I've been faintly lucky in the companies that I've chosen to work for (see what I just did there ).
