Last month, a number of former Team Bondi employees lashed out anonymously in comments about the studio’s management practices. In a blog post on Gamasutra, L.A. Noire lead programmer David Hieronymous published a letter to the IGDA, accusing the former employees of wanting the studio “destroyed”.
“What is the motivation behind these attacks on Team Bondi? If the motivation were to see improvement in the working conditions at Team Bondi, then I'm all for it,” Hieronymous wrote in a preamble. “However, some of these comments in recent stories seem to go beyond that. Some ex-employees who left the company years ago want to see Team Bondi destroyed. They want to see 35 game developers out of a job.”
Hieronymous recounted his time at Team Bondi, starting as a junior programmer in 2004 and working his way up to his current position. He cites a normal work schedule early on, but explained that as things moved forward “we failed to make as much progress as we'd have liked and there was growing pressure to work longer hours.” Hieronymous puts his average work week at 65 hours for the latter part of development.
“Apart from a few isolated cases (various demo builds) this was the highest my regular hours ever got to, and at no time did I ever work 100 hours per week. If you think about it, that's 14 hours per day, 7 days per week, which is huge. I can't say that no-one ever worked 100 hours per week, but those sorts of hours were not encouraged. In fact, if someone on my team was working that hard I would have done my best to stop them,” he wrote.
He adds that management worked the same hours as everyone else on the project, but remains hopeful that Team Bondi can correct its development issues moving forward.
“The management team at Team Bondi was not ensconced in an Ivory Tower working normal hours while everyone else crunched. Brendan himself worked very long hours and few of us here in the studio are aware of how grueling the DA and motion capture shoot in LA was,” he said. “Saying all of this, no-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we're actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project.”
Is it all just a misunderstanding or is Team Bondi’s management unaware of previously existing working conditions?
